Free Murdering Americans by Ruth Edwards

for Dutch courage?’
    Betsy’s brow furrowed. ‘Dutch courage? What’s that?’
    ‘Courage sought through alcohol. I’m amazed you don’t know that.’
    ‘Oh, yeah. I remember now. It’s on the banned list of racist terms.’
    ‘Oh, God. Well, anyway, do Barbies resort to it?’ Absently, she refilled her glass with Sancerre.
    Betsy chuckled. ‘Hey, you couldn’t drink before a game. You could kill yourself. Or someone else.’
    ‘Running around cheering?’
    ‘I guess you’ve never seen cheerleaders in action?’
    ‘No. We don’t do it in England as far as I know.’
    ‘It’s totally a sport here. I trained for like fifteen years.’
    ‘What! Trained at doing what?’
    ‘Gymnastics, mainly. Jumping and tumbling and twisting and lifting and so on and then you’ve got to learn to do everything in like close formation and develop squad stunts. Here at Freeman U we end our routine with a pyramid twenty feet high.’
    ‘How extraordinary.’
    Betsy jumped up, ran to the door, took aim and managed three backflips before she hit the opposite wall. ‘That’s like baby stuff, but you get the idea? And, of course, you have to be able to chant too.’
    The baroness was agog. ‘Chant? Chant? The only kind of chant I know about is Gregorian, but I expect what you do is different. Give me a sample.’
    ‘You have to have pom poms to do it properly.’ Betsy picked two small cushions off the sofa, jumped her legs wide apart, and leaped up and down as she moved the cushions in circles to the right and circles to the left and chanted:
    Buckle down,
    Buckle down,
    Do it, do it, do it!
    Buckle down,
    Buckle down,
    Do it, do it, do it!
    ‘Or,’ she added, ‘there’s “Go! Go! Go, Fight, Win, Freeman U!”, which we might chant a dozen times. Or—now you gotta imagine one of these poms poms is crimson and the other is blue, cos you shake them according to which colour you’re chanting about—we’d do:
    How about,
    How about,
    How about,
    How about a colour shout?
    Crimson, crimson,
    Blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue,
    Crimson, crimson,
    Blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue!
    She threw the cushions back on the sofa.
    ‘Thank you, Betsy,’ said the baroness, who had been watching transfixed. ‘I don’t think I’ll be taking it up. Why did you stop? Did you say you were fired?’
    ‘It’s complicated,’ said Betsy. ‘I’ll tell you sometime. Now, aren’t we supposed to be like going to your office?’
    ‘Good Lord, is that the time? Come on, Horace. Back in the cage. We’d better rush. I had a date to sort a few things out with Marjorie. Just drop me off there and don’t wait. I’ll walk back.’
    ‘Walk?’ said Betsy. ‘Nobody walks.’
    ‘I walk, Betsy. Otherwise I’d be as fat as an American.’
    ***
    ‘Are you going to dinner dressed like that, Lady Troutbeck?’
    ‘I hadn’t given it any thought, Marjorie. I don’t have to be there for another couple of hours.’
    ‘It’s a quarter after five now.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘Drinks begin at 6.00, you’ll be sittin’ by 6.30, when the speeches begin.’
    ‘Oh, hell.’
    ‘Would you mind not blaspheming, Lady Troutbeck? I’m a Christian. We don’t take the name of the Lord in vain.’
    ‘ Il ne manquait que ça, ’ * muttered the baroness, falling back for comfort on one of the few French phrases she knew. (‘It took me all my self-control,’ she told Mary Lou later, ‘but the biggest rule of survival in the academic jungle is to keep secretaries sweet.’) ‘I’ll try, Marjorie,’ she said, with as much humility as she could muster. ‘But if I fail, you will, I hope, forgive me. I come from a secular culture and I have a loose tongue.’
    Tall, elegant, stern Marjorie Heath Maloy visibly unbent. ‘Gotya, Lady Troutbeck. You’ll be pleased to know that even religious people say rude words in Texas. It just cussin’ we don’t like.’
    ‘I’m a bit fogged about the distinction, Marjorie, but it sounds like good