Two Women and Some Books
In the end
There was nothing to say
No words came
Though I stared for a day
Crumpled paper
Kicked towards the bin
A crumpled love
Grown tawdry now and thin
In the end
There was nothing to say
Though my heart soared
As your heart walked away
Prunella teaches you how to cook like a toff!
Yes. I know. Unlikely. However, sometimes one needs to make the effort. Men can be very simple beings, treat them kindly and they will do what you require. Hence…
To succeed you really do need to move your mind away from salmon en croute with baby vegetables. And why is this, so I hear you cry? Remove your nose from whatever luridly illustrated cookery book you are currently espousing and consider the creature to whom you are wed.
If, like the Hon. Rodney and most of his chums, your husband is the product of nanny, minor public school, and the armed forces, he has much less refined appetites than he would like to admit to. Chateauneuf-du-Pape is wasted on him: give him own-label red from one of the German supermarkets in a big glass, or a pint of old stumpblaster, and he’s a happy man. Similarly with food. Do not waste your time and effort on some delicate, complicated, small thing on a pretty plate. He. Will. Not. Appreciate. It.
No. The way to his heart is beef stew. With dumplings. Followed by jam roly-poly.
Now you’re stumped aren’t you? Your cordon bleu classes didn’t prepare you for that one.
Very well. In the spirit of female solidarity. I shall divulge.
The stew.
In a very large saucepan place the following. Diced beef (skirt for preference, or rump). Chopped onion. Diced carrot. Three or four potatoes cut small these will cook down and thicken the gravy. Cover with stock (cube stuff is perfectly fine). Do not be tempted to add herbs, spices or seasoning. This thing needs to be bland. Place on the range and bring to a simmer. Cook very gently for at least two hours. After which add more potatoes, peeled and chunked. Add more stock to cover potatoes. Cook gently for as long as it takes to cook potatoes until they are good and soggy.
In the meantime prepare dumplings and roly-poly.
You need 2lb self-raising flour, 1lb shredded suet (from a box, do not be bothering to shred your own). Add two beaten eggs and enough water to make a softish dough. Halve the dough.
Make half into balls about testicle size.
Roll the other half into a rectangle about a nine by six inches. It should be quite thick. Spread thinly with strawberry jam and roll up. Liberally butter a bit of tin foil large enough to enclose and seal your jam roll. Dump the roll on the foil and seal carefully.
When the potatoes in the stew are satisfactorily soggy, bring the pot up to a gentle boil and lob in your dumplings. Lid on and they will be done in about half an hour.
And now to boil the roly-poly. Here is where grandmother’s fish kettle comes in very handy shove about three inches of water in that blasted thing and when it comes to a rolling boil throw in the foil-wrapped delicacy. Do not let the water come off the boil and don’t let it boil dry. Otherwise it can be safely left to its own devices.
Call your spouse to the table and dish him up a large bowl of stew. Once he is outside that carefully get the roly-poly out of the boiling water and unroll it from its foil coffin. Serve a thick slice accompanied by a jug of custard. From a can if you like, although the most brownie points can be accumulated by making very thick custard (no, not the eggy sort, the yellow cornflour sort) and allowing a skin to form.
Normally one would offer an alternative menu, but in this case there is none. All that remains to be done at this point is to either confess to the dent in the Range Rover, or mention the bracelet you have seen in a certain jewellery emporium.
Either way I have provided you with the tools to ensure your ‘lord and master’ is but putty in your hands.
Look out for more tips on how to cook like a toff next week!
The mermaid leaned her elbows on the deck of the dive boat.
“It’s there all right. That’s not the argument.”
The pirate snarled. “What is the ‘argument’?”
“It’s the guardians.”
“Guardians? Nobody said anything about guardians!”
“Did you think the Queen would play fair with you?”
“No. No more than I played fair with her.” He grinned reminiscently.
The pirate cut the silver chain that bound the mermaid to him and she slipped gratefully into the waves.
Back home, he sold his treasure map for enough money to set him up for life, though he ‘forgot’ to mention the guardians.
The name’s Nero, Sam Nero. Private eye and augmented android. Me and my holographic sidekick, Sugar, operate out of an office on the fifty-fifth level of The Last City. We do okay. But some days are a bit bumpier than others…
I turned and closed the office door. I spoke softly.
“Okay Mister O’Halleran, what gives?”
A panel behind the desk opened and the big shark himself stepped out. He was a little dusty, but unharmed, and he held a blaster in one big fist. Seeing it was me, and I was alone, he pocketed the weapon. His flat, killer’s eyes regarded me unblinkingly for a second.
“You have just presented me with a problem, Nero.”
“How so?” I leaned one shoulder against a bit of door that wasn’t smeared with rat blood and lifted a brow at the hulking killer.
“I got information that you had taken money to kill me. And that Katie Scarlett was in on the deal.”
“So you decided to disappear?”
“I did. And I heard my little girl screaming. And now you come in here quiet, with your hands empty. And I don’t know what to think.”
I shrugged.
“Try thinking that you’ve been had.”
He regarded me for a long moment.
“Maybe I have. But what to do about it.”
I examined my fingernails for a long minute before giving him my blandest stare.
“Go back in that cubbyhole and await developments. Or…”
“Or what?”
“Or find out who set this up.”
“And how do you suggest I go about that?”
“Think for a start. Think about who would benefit if you thought Katie Scarlett had betrayed you.”
O’Halleran stared at me. His eyes were lightless and unreadable. Then he nodded.
“I’ve thought. And now we have to catch the bastard.”
“You narrowed it down to one?”
He shook his big head ruefully.
“Not that simple. Gotta be family. Nobody else benefits. Nearest is my sister and her slimy bastard of a husband. But it don’t quite fit.”
I waited as something came across his countenance, something he didn’t like too much by the looks of him. When he said nothing I pulled my brave together and spoke up.
“Okay, Mister Aitch, what does fit?”
He looked at me with something akin to loathing, but I gave him back stare for stare and in the end he dropped his eyes.
“I got a cousin, his mammy died when he was just a button and my ma and pa brung him up as their own. We was like brothers. He has a son, a smooth handsome son…”
He stopped speaking, and I kept my mouth shut too, knowing that this glimpse of O’Halleran’s humanity was a dangerous thing to have seen. He was quiet for a while, but when he did speak his voice was as coldly unemotional as it always was unless he was talking to Katie Scarlett.
“All right, Nero. You are supposed to be the best. Catch the bastard for me. I’ll pay whatever.”
“I’m working for Katie Scarlett right now.”
His face worked for a moment.
“I suppose you are. So now what?”
“That depends on you. Can you get out of here unseen?”
“I can.”
“Once you are out, where can you get to?”
“My private apartment, upstairs. You will need a key card to get in,”
“Doesn’t Katie Scarlett have one?”
“No. She has her own apartment and I don’t have a key to that.”
I thought he probably did have a key, but deemed it prudent not to voice that thought. He handed me a card and turned to go back through the panel.
“One hour,” I said to his retreating back, and he nodded.
Once the panel had shut gently behind him I opened the office door. I gave Katie Scarlett just the merest suspicion of a wink before coming out and carefully closing up behind me. I looked at the two big droids.
“Nobody goes in there without my say-so. That’s nobody.”
They looked to Katie for approval and she nodded.
The bigger of the two spoke.
“That means not even Miss O’Halleran?”
She nodded again.
“Sam will have his reasons.”
“I do have. For now you need to speak to all the staff Katie Scarlett, assure them that everything is being taken care of.”
“I can do that. And you will be?”
I waved my fingers and she swallowed.
“Hacking, huh?”
“I prefer to call it exploration.”
She managed a wan little smile, and turned away with a deliberate swing of her hips.
“And Katie,” I spoke to her retreating back and she turned to look over her shoulder. “Don’t speak to any family members.”
She showed me her even, white teeth in a taut grin
“I won’t.”
From ‘Sam Nero and the Case of the Dutiful Daughter’ one of the stories in Sam Nero PI by Jane Jago
It was his grandmother’s final wish, formalised in her will:
And to Mungo I bequeath the contents of my safety deposit box, provided he keeps his word to me and marries within the year.
Mungo, the eldest son of a duke and in his thirties, hadn’t shown interest in marriage, although often seen with various celebrity women, but now speculation mounted.
A year after his grandmother’s funeral, at a private ceremony, Mungo married his secret commoner lover of many years. The ring, his grandmother’s, had been in the lockbox.
Mungo proudly introduced his new husband to the family soon after.
It had been rather earlier in the morning than Julia really wanted to be on the road, but a summons to a meeting with the Magistratus was more or less an imperial decree. Ientaculum meetings were apparently all the fashion in Rome right now, so Julia was dressed smartly and bowling along the imperial highway towards Viriconium before her eyes were truly open. Her Senior Investigator who also happened to be her husband’s vitricus, Gaius Brutus Gallus, cracked his jaw in an enormous yawn.
“The devil fly away with the woman,” he grumbled. “What maggot has got into her brain now?”
Edbert answered from the driving seat. “It’s her fancy imperial cousin who is staying with her. Keeps dropping the latest fashions in Rome into the conversation. Bedwyr thinks the woman is taking the mingo.”
Julia sighed. “Well I’m going to have a word. Agrippina may be my boss, but she has to realise she’s currently down a submagistratus.”
“And that means you don’t have the time to be popping along to Viriconium just to smooth her ego.” Edbert had the right of it, of course, but putting it that bluntly made Julia wince.
“Why does Bedwyr think the mingo is being extracted?”
“Because he can see the imperial cousin laughing behind her hand, and so can Domina Annia, but Domina Agrippina is in one of her moods.”
“Which one?”
“Overbearingly gracious.”
“Oh that one. We had some experience of that when she believed Bestia’s lies about Dai. Why is she like it now?”
“Bedwyr says she don’t much like her cousin. But feels obliged to offer sanctuary as the woman is disabled. Ski-ing accident apparently.”
Julia sighed. “This could be all sorts of awkward, then.”
“It could. If you let it. Time to poker up and do your best Domina Julia face.”
Julia made a very rude noise. “I suppose that explains why Viriconium, not Annia’s villa. Which is a site closer.”
“Indeed. But so much less formal.”
Gallus grunted. “I think I’d be better off going to the kitchen with Edbert.”
Julia showed him her teeth. “You don’t get away that lightly. If the Magistratus wants an ientaculum meeting that’s what she’s going to get. And if I’d any forethought I’d have brought Angie Ffrydd along too.”
There being not much more to say, the rest of the journey was completed in silence, with Gallus going so far as to close his eyes and pass the time dozing gently.
At the portico of the Magistratus’ official dwelling, a uniformed porter leapt forward to open the door of the all-wheel. Julia snarled at him and he refrained from attempting to help her out of the vehicle.
With Gallus at her shoulder she turned to look at Edbert. “I’ll buzz you when I’m ready to leave.”
“Yes Domina Julia.” His voice was the perfect blend of respect and polite blandness, but his eyes were alight with unholy amusement. Julia offered him the suspicion of a wink before following the porter into the building.
The Magistratus, her partner Annia, and a thin brown-skinned woman who leaned heavily on a single elbow crutch were just arriving in the atrium.
“Ah, Julia, on time as ever. And you have brought along your Senior Investigator…”
The Magistratus was obviously struggling over what to say next, and Julia let her fumble for a few seconds before speaking briskly.
“You said ‘meeting’. And SI Gallus always accompanies me to meetings.”
This being inalienable, Agrippina led the way into the garden, where a simple buffet meal was laid out. Julia was glad to see chairs around a white-clothed table as the idea of sharing a lectus with any of the others was unappealing.
Annia caught her eye and made a deprecating face to which Julia replied with a grin.
They filled their plates and sat down to ‘enjoy’ what Julia thought was probably the most awkward meal it had ever been her misfortune to sit through. Pina was at her Imperial worst, Annia stared at her plate and refused to meet anybody’s eyes, Gallus ate in stoic silence, and the visitor, who was introduced as ‘Ancilla’, made small talk in a patrician drawl. It didn’t take long to hear the undertones of belittlement and not-so-subtle mockery of anything and anyone attached to the Magistratus. Julia gritted her teeth, and made a mental note to leave as soon as common civility permitted. She could, she thought, survive without blowing a steam valve if she just concentrated on her food and let the flood of petty malice flow over and around her without actually listening.
From Dying as a Spy by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook
Glossary of Latin and Other Terms
Please note these are not always accurate translations, they are how these terms are used in Dai and Julia’s world.
ientaculum – breakfast
lectus – dining couch
mingo – piss
vitricus – stepfather
If one more person tells me to ‘fly away home’, I won’t be responsible for the consequences.
I’d like nothing better than to fly home, except that home went up into the belly of some human’s leaf sucker so I’m rootless.
Which would be okay if it wasn’t for halfwitted folk quoting meaningless doggerel at me.
My house is not on fire, and I’m a childless spinster.
I’m currently shacking up with a renegade hornet and I’m seriously considering having him sting something. Anyway it’s nearly cold time, and we plan to sleep together.
Come spring we might even awake…
Imagine waking up one day unable to recall who you are or where you came from – only to find you are serving a sentence as a convict conscript for crimes you have no memory of ever committing…
“I will make it a priority to produce my formal recommendation as soon as possible,” he said, keeping his tone brisk but conciliatory. “I appreciate how important it is to your department, Var Tyran, to have a speedy resolution one way or the other, but I will not be able to give you the recommendation you seek. This man is a very high risk individual – even within my Legion he is regarded as being dangerous. You heard the Sergeant and I can assure you he will be speaking from a depth of experience of this soldier no neurocologist ever could possess. I will need more than the usual amount of convincing to let this one loose.”
The woman shrugged on a light jacket as she came back towards him.
“I quite understand Commodore, true integrity is a rare and valuable trait in an officer serving the Coalition. Rare enough so I did not expect to find it here. My mistake, judging the Special’s high command by their troops’ reputation.”
Vane’s goodwill evaporated a little.
“I think, Var Tyran, you should be more careful about making such assumptions. There is no corruption in the military. But perhaps your colleagues in the security forces have more flexible moralities.”
“Well, of course we do, Commodore, we have to – it’s part of the job description.” She smiled, her teeth pressing slightly into the softness of her lower lip. “But then morality is something that is not clear cut in this particular case.”
“There is so much that is ‘not clear cut’ about this case,” Vane said, giving voice to the doubts that had gnawed at him from the moment the interview began. “How can we even be sure the man has truly lost all his memories? He speaks as if highly educated and shows no remorse for his deeds. Sergeant Hynas offered a very good analysis, I feel.”
Var Tyran held out her hand to him, with its beautifully manicured nails. For a moment Vane thought she was attempting some kind of farewell gesture. Then he realised she wanted to show him the device linked on the inside of her wrist.
“Yes, your Sergeant was right in one thing Commodore, that man has been wired to the Lattice for over five years. He can’t have a thought or emotion without us being able to tell something of the nature of it. I can promise you he did not lie once in your presence, I would have known if he had.” The woman took a tiny step closer as she spoke and looked up, directly into his eyes as if willing him to understand the importance of what she said. Her own eyes were arresting – many shifting, subtle, shades of blue. “Apart from kinaesthetic skills, the language centres were the only memory related areas unaffected by the trauma. Believe me, my people wish it was not so. He could have given us so very much. When we first brought Revid in we took him to pieces neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse. So we know there is nothing there. We also know there is no evidence of any brain damage. It is as if something just wiped entire swathes of his memory clean – like resetting a data store.”
“I’m not sure how something like that could happen,” Vane said, frowning.
“You are not alone, Commodore. We still don’t know what caused it, only how little it left behind.”
“So what do we know?” he asked. The woman looked away, consulting a screen perhaps or just thinking, it was hard to be certain. She gave a sigh, her breasts lifting as she did so.
“Alright. What we know. Revid has a marked curiosity about what life is like outside the Special Legion. He accepts he is responsible for the crimes he committed but is confused around it. It is not real to him that he once had a wife and daughter, that he killed them or that he went around blowing up innocent people. His only experience of life has been in the Legion, and his only taste of something approaching a normal human relationship is through one friendship which he values above all else. Apart from that, he sees the Coalition as being the only thing that matters. When he speaks of wishing to serve, I can promise you he is not using a platitude.” She looked up into Vane’s eyes again and he could read her sincerity. “That is the man you saw standing before you – and that man is many things, but he is not the ruthless murderer we used to see in the news reports. In his own experience he has never been that ruthless murderer.”
Vane took a few moments to think. He would like to be able to find some common ground, some way he could bring this through that worked for them both. But he struggled hard to see how.
From Trust A Few – book one in Haruspex, the second Fortune’s Fools trilogy by E.M. Swift-Hook – which is only 0.99 to buy for a limited period.
Finally, the breakthrough she had dreamed of – sometimes literally.
Two decades Geraldine had worked, yet the last piece of the equation never came into focus.
It happened late at night. She’d been going over the figures one more time and suddenly some stood out as if highlighted. A frantic hour later, she was done.
She was about to phone the team when she looked again at the projected outcome.
A cold horror slipped through her veins.
Dawn broke as Geraldine scrabbled desperately to cover up what she had found so no one else in the team would ever discover it.
A Rose by Any Other Name is newly released contemporary romance from Alana Lorens
Up-and-coming mommyblogger and single mom Marisol Herrera Slade returns to her old hometown in western Pennsylvania for her 20th high school reunion in 2005, reluctant and yet compelled to see her high school sweetheart, Russell Asher, who dumped her for the homecoming queen.
Russell’s marriage to the golden girl, however, ended in a nasty divorce, and he has been systematically excluded from his sons’ lives. In his Internet wanderings, he’s found feminist blogger named Jerrika Jones, who glorifies single motherhood, essentially putting a stamp of approval on what’s happened to him. His group of single dad advocates have vowed to take this woman down.
What Russell doesn’t know, when he thinks to rekindle what he had with Marisol, is that Marisol and Jerrika are one and the same. When his group discovers the truth, will their drive for revenge derail any chance the couple have to reunite? Or will they find they have more in common than they ever expected?
Analisa took her into the cheery kitchen with its yellow gingham curtains and tablecloth. She let go, finally, to fill two tall glasses on the counter with tea from a crystal pitcher. Marisol glanced around. The appliances were all upscale, all with extras she longed for but couldn’t afford just yet. Everything in Analisa’s kitchen matched. The realization provoked a little sigh of envy.
“So tell me what you’ve been up to down in Florida. Sun and fun, right? It must be true, with that bikini body.” Analisa shared her own envious sigh, and Marisol felt somewhat better.
“Just work. And Mark. That takes all my time.” She sipped the tea, the bite of spice and sweet tang of citrus refreshing her, if not sparking her tongue to chat. Analisa, always the talkative one, hardly let Marisol get a word in, and that worked just fine. Her forte was the written word; even back home, she remained shy and soft-spoken.
What I need is a little Jerrika Jones in these face-to-face conversations.
The thought reminded her of her resolve to reveal herself this weekend as the popular blogger. Analisa was asking her where she worked. Time to try out the truth. The words tripped over her lips, though, when she attempted to speak. “I… Well, you know, bloggers. I mean… Do you use the Internet?” She flushed red. “Stupid question. Of course you use the Internet. Who doesn’t?”
Analisa stared at her blankly. “Mira, I’ll show you.” Marisol pulled her laptop out of her bag and set it on the table. “Do you have wireless?”
Analisa cracked up. “Wait, wait, wait. Little Marisol Herrera, who sewed her own finger on the machine in Mrs. Martin’s home ec’ class? The girl who couldn’t figure out which end of a plug to put in the wall? You’re a computer whiz?”
Marisol rolled her eyes. “Please, querida. Just hook me up, and I’ll show you.” A few minutes later, she pulled up Jerrika’s bold page. Mothering Without a Man splashed in strong white letters across a dark red banner at the top of the screen. In the corner above the sidebar, posed the cartoonish drawing of Jerrika—a tall, thin, sharply-dressed woman with features reflecting Marisol’s own ethnic heritage. A friend of hers created the toon, drawing the image chic and sassy. Definitely all Jerrika Jones. She turned the small computer screen to Analisa.
Her friend’s eyes narrowed as she scanned the page. “Oh, yeah. I’ve heard about her. She was on the radio with Katy Blaine last summer. We were all listening on the floor in the nurses’ lounge. She was funny as heck, that Jerrika. Giving men in general what-for, ragging on deadbeat dads. She…”
Analisa trailed off as Marisol looked her steadily in the eye. “She… Dios mio, Mari. Are you telling me you’re…her?”
1. Do you believe in character autonomy, or are you very strict with your creations?
As I’ve matured as a writer, I’m trusting my instincts and characters more and more. I used to be much more “we must stick to the outline!” The last several books I’ve written, I didn’t even have a plan where I wanted to go with the story. I created the characters and gave them instructions, kind of like the improvs where Drew Carey throws a situation out on Whose Line is It Anyway? Then I followed them along their adventure.
2. Who are your literary heroes? How much do you think their writing has impacted on your own efforts?
I’ve always been a genre reader as well as writer. As a teen I read gothic romance and suspense from Victoria Holt, Barbara Michaels and the like. Those books taught me about how to make sure there is an interesting plot in addition to the romance, and also how NOT to make them all develop exactly the same, so your story would be predictable.
Then I found Dean Koontz and Stephen King, who instilled a deep love of exploring the unknown and unbelievable.
Science fiction and fantasy also were instructive, learning about how to catch a reader’s sympathy for an underdog who rises to success, like the characters in Anne McCaffrey’s dragon tales, and the way Tolkien separated his characters so that chapters would alternate among them, drawing out a whole well-rounded story.
I think we can learn from all of them.
3. In the box of chocolates that is life, what flavour will nobody in your house eat?
We’ve had a lot of flavors in our life, when we had three kids on the autism spectrum—some are sensitive to sound, others are unable to control themselves, some learned to speak super early and others not until they were four or five. In the last few years, my last daughter and I have been quite hermit-like, so I’m going to extrapolate that we are avoiding the flavor of people. Ha! Even without COVID, we were already cultivating a quiet, quiet life with little disturbance. And face it, people can be bloody annoying. 😊
Alana Lorens has been a published writer for more than forty years, after working as a pizza maker, a floral designer, a journalist and a family law attorney. Currently a resident of Asheville, North Carolina, the aging hippie loves her time in the smoky blue mountains. She writes romance and suspense as Alana Lorens, and sci-fi, fantasy and paranormal mystery as Lyndi Alexander. One of her novellas, THAT GIRL’S THE ONE I LOVE, is set in the city of Asheville during the old Bele Chere festival. She lives with her daughter on the autism spectrum, who is the youngest of her seven children, and she is ruled by three crotchety old cats, and six kittens of various ages. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Bookbub and her own website.
