The Favoured, The Fair and Ms. Vérité Claire

7 Fool For Love

Soon idealistic July made humble way for the magnanimous strut of fiery August, but there would be no such respectful arrangement between Vérité and Minx McCall. On the contrary, Vérité had recently triumphed over her arch-nemesis in a particularly ruthless fashion and it was a defeat Minx would never take lying down.

The battleground this time was an auction hall and the spoil of this specific clash, a painting, won by Vérité through sheer cunning and strategy. As victor, Vérité was more than proud. She was epically patriotic to the cult of her own cleverness. And on this day, like a temple priestess appearing out of mists of incense to a bowing acolyte, Vérité entered her boudoir where Julia was on hands and knees steaming her wardrobe, ready to spread the news. She held the won painting aloft and decreed something about artists never again going hungry while Bernard scratched wildly at his notepad trying to keep up. She blinked benevolently down at Julia who was wilting with the humidity.

"What is it?" asked Julia, unimpressed.

"It's a Pre-Passage Gregrum," Vérité said, then added in a mischievous silky tone, "Very tricky to come by."

"Pre-passage?" Julia wondered.

"The man had marbles for kidney stones which kept him up at night. His work lacked a certain delirium after treatment."

"Uh-huh. Well, in that case it looks surprisingly...cheerful." To Julia, it looked like the navigational map of an amusement park, but what did she know about art even yet?

Using Vérité as a shield from the steam, Bernard tutted, "This moisture isn't good for the paint."

"Too true!" Vérité exclaimed. "Everybody into my bedroom for gloating!"

"That's where I do most of mine," Bernard said.

"Like using 'Ode To Joy' to sell salad dressing, I'm sure," Julia said.

"What would you know about joy? Or salad?" Bernard sneered.

Lotte and Julia hung the painting twice before Vérité decided she liked it over her headboard. This meant that an enormous oil depiction of a nineteenth century Highland Games had to be taken down and put into storage. "I always felt as though I was tossing that caber," Vérité said, wistful, but ready to move on. She beheld her new prize admiringly. "Ahh, just look at it."

"And why are we gloating?" Julia asked.

"Bernard, please tell the girls how the bidding war for this painting will be described in my memoir? Gruesome? An escalating frenzy?"

"'A voracious mine-field of fly-traps, snapping at the slightest trigger, choking on their own bile!'" Bernard growled.

"They were a vicious lot, weren't they?" Vérité said with a chuckle.

"It was a melee! A sandpaper Gravitron for only the thickest of elite skins."

At this Vérité teared up with the shameful laugh of someone gone mad in church. "Skins! 'That's fifteen hundred dollars to the woman in need of exfoliation!'"

Bernard mimicked an auctioneer by air gavelling and saying, "'Paddling through the pain of arthritic knuckles, that's nineteen hundred to number 22.'"

Soon, the story became all too clear. Virginia Larkin's maid had told Lotte who'd told Vérité, "That Minx lady knows you wants that picture and she gonna steal it right under you nose." Vérité then had the ingenious idea to have Bernard bribe the auctioneer to punish Minx's every bid by drawing attention to some flaw.

"'Do I hear twenty-one hundred from the very thin lipped woman in last year's Kors?'"

Minx not only dropped out of the bidding, but left with her entourage in a silent fury. And even though Julia could not help but laugh at, "...to the woman in seats 9 and 10," she knew there would be a hefty price to pay and that somehow she'd be around when the bill came due.