"Charles the Second." He was smug. "He made his son by her a duke. His father, Charles the First, on a trip to Spain in his youth, had assumed the name of Mr. Brown. And of course Nell Gwynn was the mistress of Charles the Second."

"I prefer paramour. Okay, so you've read ten thousand books. What about this one--I think it was Number Nine:

"By the law himself had earlier made

I could not be his legal wife;

The law he properly obeyed

And loved me all my life."

I flipped a hand. "Name her."

"Archie." His head turned to me. "You have somewhere to go?"

"No, sir, not tonight. Lily Rowan has a table at the Flamingo Room and thought I might drop in for a dance, but I told her you might need me, and she knows how indispensable I--"

"Pfui." He started to glare and decided it wasn't worth the trouble. "You intended to go, and undertook to shift the responsibility for your absence by pestering me into suggesting it. You have succeeded. I suggest that you go somewhere at once."

There were three or four things I could have said, but he sighed and went back to the magazine, so I skipped it. As I headed for the hall his voice told my back, "You shaved and changed your clothes before dinner."

That's the trouble with working for and living with a really great detective.

Chapter 2

Since I got home late that night and there was nothing urgent on, it was after nine Wednesday morning before I got down to the kitchen for my snack of grapefruit, oatmeal, griddle cakes, bacon, blackberry jam, and coffee. Wolfe had of course breakfasted in his room as usual and gone up to the plant rooms on the roof for his morning session with the orchids.