But I wasn’t made for waiting. Some people can wait around forever in the face of bad news, putting off the inevitable, insisting on living in a world that doesn’t really exist, but I can’t. I stepped forward and yanked the thick brown parcel from the bottom of the stack, toppling the envelopes, and sure enough it was from New York, all right, from the headquarters of Metropolitan magazine on Madison Avenue, sent by airmail at considerable expense. Miss Brown—Lightfoot’s secretary—she always knotted that string but good. I carried the parcel into the office and found the scissors in the drawer. Snip, snip. The string fell away. I tore the paper to reveal the latest issue of Metropolitan—hot off the press, as they say, not even yet present on an actual newsstand—and flipped to the “Lady of Nassau” column on the inside back cover.

And it was no more than I expected, really. Because while my Remington and I had composed a brilliant column on the Burma Road riot last month, clickety-clack, had quoted from the duke’s radio address, had described the scene and snapped a photograph of the smoke and ruin the next morning, called it “Now Is the Summer of Our Discontent,” I had also taken the precaution of sending along an alternate column. An alternate June, in which Nancy Oakes’s elopement with Alfred de Marigny occupied every imagination, and that was all that mattered.

And thank goodness for this particular precaution. Thank goodness I had lain awake all night after writing the Burma Road column, heart smacking, and counted up how many dollars might remain in Lulu’s coffers if dear old Daddy decided not to run her column that month. Thank goodness I’d risen at dawn with the damned songbirds and rattled off the usual tittle-tattle, the awful scandal, the whispers, and sent it off to Madison Avenue for Lightfoot to weigh against the first. Thank goodness.

Because, according to her column in the upcoming issue of Metropolitan, it seemed the Lady of Nassau had never heard of Burma Road, had never wandered outside on a hot morning, the first of June, and discovered a riot. In the July 1942 issue of Metropolitan magazine, she had nothing to talk about but heiresses and playboys.

From between pages eighty-two and eighty-three a check fluttered to the floor, made out to Leonora Randolph in the amount of two hundred dollars. Thank goodness.