Free Murder at Teatime by Stefanie Matteson Page B

to find Daria descending one of the twin staircases that flanked the front door. They exchanged greetings, and Daria escorted her upstairs to the bindery, which had been set up in a sunny, spacious bedroom at the back of the house. In the center stood a long counter, at which John sat on a stool, hunched over a book. He was wearing a black turtleneck that made him look like a bohemian poet. The strong odor of his French cigarette filled the air. As they entered, Charlotte noticed him eyeing Daria admiringly. She was dressed in blue jeans and a V-neck sweater that showed off her perfect figure.
    “Welcome to the Ledge House bindery,” said Daria. “You remember John.”
    Charlotte said hello, and took a seat opposite him at the counter.
    “I’ve been trying to remember the title of one of your pictures,” he said. “You played a vamp who lures a rich man away from his wife.”
    “ The Bitter Wife ,” said Charlotte. It was one picture in which she thought she got what she deserved at the end. In a sense, she had. She had married her leading man, which had been punishment enough indeed.
    “It’s one of my favorites,” John continued. “You were the epitome of the scheming gold digger. Why is it that we always remember the heroes, and never the villains? It seems to me that the villains are short-changed.”
    “Because the Hollywood villains aren’t memorable. Hollywood would never take the risk of offering the public a villain whose motives stemmed from anything more complicated than material gain; it would be bad for the box office.”
    The thinking was that villains with grandeur and imagination like Lady Macbeth or Iago were too complex for the movie-going public to understand. Which was one reason Charlotte preferred the stage.
    “I guess you’re right,” said John. “But you didn’t come here to discuss films,” he added. “I’ll shut up so that Daria can talk to you about bookbinding.” With that, he picked up his book and began to read.
    Charlotte looked around the room. “I feel like I’m in a medieval torture chamber,” she said. The large presses with iron-toothed wheels looked more like devices for stretching limbs on a rack than devices for restoring old books.
    Daria smiled, her brown eyes flecked with specks of gold. “They’re medieval instruments, but only for torturing bindings into shape. The tools we use today are almost identical to the tools used five centuries ago.”
    Leading Charlotte around the room, she explained the function of each of the tools: a frame for stitching the bindings; a miniature oven for heating the stamping tools; a paper cutter for cutting the boards, or covers. The earliest books, she explained, were luxury items, affordable only to the very rich. Unlike modern books, they were purchased unbound and unillustrated. The binding and illustration often took a year or more and cost more than the book itself.
    Charlotte was impressed by her professionalism. She was only in her twenties, but she was already running her own business. She had never been led to assume, as had so many women of Charlotte’s generation, that someone else would be responsible for her economic security. It was an assumption that often failed, and when it did, its victims played a game of self-deceit that Charlotte thought of as Until: they would work until they got married, until the baby came, until they had saved enough for the down payment on a house, until the kids got through college. Until the untils had added up to a lifetime of temporary work with nothing to show for it.
    “How did you get into this business?” asked Charlotte as they resumed their seats. “Does one aspire to become a bookbinder?”
    “No. I think it’s something most people get into by accident. Suffice it to say that once I got into it, I was hooked.”
    She had learned her trade from a New York bookbinder named Carolyn Freeman who had since retired, designating Daria the unofficial heir to her business,