will also talk what he knoweth not.

from "Of Simulation and Dissimulation"

~ The Essays of Francis Bacon.

May.

1.

The gentleman holding the post of Her Majesty's Master of the Household had, as just one of his myriad responsibilities, the task of writing up the "Court Circular" column which was, in turn, reprinted in the Times and the Daily Telegraph under the royal coat-of-arms. It catalogued the daily whereabouts of specific Royals in descending order of importance. As such, it functioned as an open beckoning gesture to any moron with the proper networking connections who could thusly obtain the appropriate invitation card. It also set the Royal Family up as sitting ducks, at least for the duration of the event, for any and all gawkers who were in possession of the metaphorical price of admission.

On an otherwise brilliantly fine Friday, smack in the middle of the often dicey month of May, the following item appeared in the column: "... and, also to be noted, this evening there is rumored to be a positively stupendous soiree that is to take place at the Pakistani Embassy. HRH, The Prince of Wales, will undoubtedly be in attendance."

Daisy Silverman had taken up residence in the British Library during most of her waking hours, when she wasn't out jogging or eating. And the single thing that drew her to the interior of the structure, like a giant magnet operating on a paper clip, was-of course-the Reading Room. The rules stated that you could not gain admittance to the august enclosure unless you were at least twenty-one years of age and your research there had been recommended by a sponsor-preferably a renowned scholar. Otherwise, the best you could hope for was a micro-brief look-see with one of the warders as escort. Frustrating.

But rules, thank God, had often been made just for Daisy to break them. And when Bonita, who was fast becoming a source of constant surprise, had learned of the dilemma, she had merely shrugged the problem off. Grateful, and positively reeling from the giddiness brought about by such a voluminous windfall, the naturally inquisitive Daisy had neglected to press for details concerning the origin of Bonita's scholarly underground connections, when the former convenience store clerk had claimed to "know somebody."

Now situated on a regular basis where she had so badly wanted to be, Daisy didn't care if other people found her behavior a tad bit touristy. She loved standing in the circular room, the 106-foot high, pale blue dome soaring comfortingly like a second heaven over her head; loved looking at the spines of the books, the autumnal hues of their bound leather causing her to think curiously of Halloween; loved imagining all of the great minds that had ever done their thinking here: Dickens, Gandhi, Shaw, Thackeray, Yeats. So what if back when they were around it had all been part of the British Museum over on Russell Square, and had since been moved to Euston Street, lock, stock, and carrel? It was still the Reading Room in the British Library.

Most of all, though, Daisy loved-no matter how trite-to fantasize about Karl Marx, sitting in his favorite seat, toiling away on Das Kapital.

As she took in the arched windows rising up the sides of the dome, took in the real scholars poring over their tomes at the leather-topped tables, the sight of just a mere fraction of the Library's reputed eighteen million holdings-shelved on three floors and all in one place-was enough to knock Daisy on her literary ass.

Why, then, this special place-the Library, itself-that was always so good at elevating her spirits whenever she got feeling blue (for, in spite of her instantaneous love of the city and that enjoyment that she derived from the quirky companionship of Bonita, she still got a little homesick upon occasion) should let her down, she had no idea. But let her down it did, and badly at that. And quite suddenly, on that same day that the item-which she had not read-had appeared in the daily newspapers, she found herself running from her haven, face streaming with tears.

Her sneakers carried her out of the library, and she collapsed in a heap on the stone steps, the column that supported her back dwarfing her despondent form. So atypical was her total self-absorption on that day that she hadn't noticed that there had been another person contemplating Marx's chair in the Reading Room. Or that the individual had pursued her in flight, scurrying along in his own cross-trainers and straining to keep pace with her surprisingly brisk stride.

"Please. May I please be of some assistance to you, Miss?"

Startled, Daisy glanced up, seeking the source of the Indo-Iranian-based accent. As she raised her head from its dispirited resting place in her hands, her nose wrinkled unconsciously. Whole cashews? And was that, possibly, garlic-steamed artichokes? How could she possibly remain depressed now?

Her uplifted gaze took in the sight of a man about her own age, skin the color of filberts. He had close-cropped, wavy black hair, and a matching pencil-thin mustache that twitched under an inoffensive nose whenever he spoke or smiled. His body had the pear-shaped quality of a drop of water being slowly squeezed from the faucet and, amazingly enough, it did not look as though he would turn out to be any taller than she.

What a wonderful world it's been lately, she thought, obscurely. All of a sudden, it's as though everything were just my size. She could have sworn that she smelled just a tiny whiff of a decorated gingerbread-man cookie, too. Yummy.

She wiped at her eyes with the cuffs of her sweatshirt. "Excuse me?"

"You began to cry back there," he said, indicating the Library with his hand. "When you were looking at Marx's chair. I thought that maybe I could be of some help to you. Perhaps you were lamenting the lot of the masses?"

"Oh, that," Daisy replied, feeling just a trifle embarrassed at the prospect of having to speak about the idiosyncratic nature of her personality out loud. "No. I mean, that could have done it, maybe on another day. And today, it did actually start with Marx's chair. And then, of course, I got thinking about Das Kapital-I mean, who doesn't when they go in there? And then," and here she sighed, "I got to thinking about how I had never even read Das Kapital-never mind having actually written anything like it. And then," she wound up, "I got to thinking about all of the books in there and all of the books in the world-history, anatomy, tai chi, even things that I'm not remotely interested in-and I thought how it's just not possible: I'll never live long enough to read everything that I want to read. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind facing the thought of my own death at all. It's just that I absolutely hate the idea that I won't get the chance to read everything first. In fact," she shrugged, "it's the only thought that ever makes me feel like just throwing in the towel."

During the entirety of Daisy's speech, the little man had been struggling to maintain an appropriately solemn air of sympathy. But the constant twitching of the mustache betrayed him, and his true feelings finally won out, as a burst of magnificent pearly sunshine forced its way between the curtains of his previously pursed lips. Daisy was unnerved by the impression that the man was laughing out loud at her.

"But," he cried with delight, "that is the most wonderfully delightful and magically delicious thing that I have ever heard! Please to tell me your name, so that in the future I will know how to properly address such a delectable creature."

"It's Daisy," she hesitated, still not completely certain that she wasn't being mocked.

"Well, Daisy," he said, wiping at his own mirthful tears, "you must permit me to introduce myself. My name is Pacqui-never to be confused with Packey or Paki."

Daisy's vacant expression revealed her confusion. It all sounded like paeki to her.

His hands moved constantly as he spoke, the conductor of some silent symphony that perhaps only he could hear. "It's spelled with a c-q sequence, rather than a c-k or a lonely k. The Londoners nicknamed me that in order to distinguish me from the other two that they have nicknamed at the Embassy."

Daisy gave a tentative smile of understanding. She thought that, just maybe, she had caught the glimpse of a linguistic point in there somewhere.

"Please, Daisy. You must let me show my gratitude to you for providing me with such a moment of incomparable joy. You must permit me to escort you to the embassy party this evening," he pronounced, his hands describing a final flourishing crescendo.

"But I wasn't invited to any party this evening!" she protested.

"That is of no matter. I was." He paused for just a second, beaming. "Wait 'til they get a load of you."

2.

"Tasteful brown skirt and businesslike blouse? What do you think you're going to here-a job interview?" had been Bonita's skeptical reaction upon being shown Daisy's choice of eveningwear. She wrinkled her nose. "Don't think so, dear."

They were seated on the delft-and-white covering on the bed in Bonita's cozy single in the Hotel Russell.

Daisy, not normally given to caring two shakes about what she wore, experienced a peculiar moment of fashion distress at Bonita's critical tone, as she rose and crossed through the connecting door to her own double beyond. "But what am I going to do?" she shouted back, desperately rifling the few items that actually required hangers. A note of agitation crept into her usually more placid voice. "I don't have the kind of wardrobe that gets asked to Embassy soirees."

"Hmm." Bonita consulted the timepiece ticking away on a chain around her neck. It was three twenty-four and the party wasn't due to start until eight. "Might be just enough time." A thoughtful finger stroked the walnut face. "Might know just the right place."

3.

If there was any truth to the Harrods motto of Omnia, Omnibus, Ubique-"all things, for all people, everywhere"-then what was now being required of that venerable shopping institution was that it cough up the perfect dress to transform a Danbury toilet bowl cleaner into a princess for the evening. And if the jaded shop clerk, whose attentions they had commandeered for their purposes, thought-wrongly-that she had seen other women like Daisy before, it soon became obvious that she had never encountered anybody quite like Bonita.

The shop clerk, whose own impeccable attire rivaled that of any model strutting her stuff on a Parisian runway, evoked an uncharacteristic frisson of fashion inferiority in Daisy, as she waited obediently in her underthings in the vast changing room. She was dead certain that she would never possess even half as much style as the sales clerk.

Bonita, casting an Ungaro eye on the proceedings, fast rejected everything black that the heretofore unruffled, but soon to be harried, clerk brought in as being "common as fish and chips-everyone who hasn't the imagination to come up with a real color always wears black"; white was for "babies, virgins, brides, and nuns in their coffins," in that exact order; and the one red number that the clerk had brought in, while it definitely passed muster on the "real color" test, was deemed deficient in that it "certainly does make a statement," but "... 'come up and see me sometime?' Mm... Think not."

And Daisy, changing garments with the speed of a photographer snapping away, rejected anything without at least a crew-necked collar. A slightly darker-hued miniature strawberry of skin had marked her collarbone since the time of her birth. And, in spite of a nature that was otherwise devoid of physical vanity, she had always been reticent about exposing this stain to the probing eyes of the world at large. In her own mind, she explained away this insecure behavior by telling herself that she wasn't exactly embarrassed by her birthmark, but rather that it just clashed with a lot of things.

"Refresh my memory," Daisy was heard to despair at one spiritual low point during her tenure in the changing room. "Just what am I doing here? And why is this so important?"

As the clerk, her French twist now completely uncoiled (it really was amazing how much damage two women from Danbury could cause in the space of one harmless hour) exited underneath the weight of yet another pile of rejected clothing, Bonita-using that rare and wonderful personal referent-declared it time to "do the job myself."

Back in a flash so quick that it seemed scarily inhuman, Bonita hung the lone garment from the hook on the wall, flashing her baby-teeth grin at Daisy. Accompanying the clerk out of the room, Bonita declared, "If this doesn't do the trick, then by all means, go with the dead-nun look."

Daisy found herself suddenly alone with The Dress.

She slipped the gossamer fabric over her head, and by performing just the minimum of contortionist acts, she was able to manage to zip the back all the way up her neck. Almost fearfully, she turned to confront her image in the looking glass.

The material wasn't a single color, and yet there was no discernible pattern to it. Rather, it was opalescent, as if the designer had managed to capture the interior of an abalone shell and had talked Rumpelstiltskin into magically spinning the hard substance into the sheerest of threads. At the neckline, the collar climbed further upwards, protectively embracing Daisy's neck. The entire top half of the dress hugged her form to the waist, but there were no sleeves to it, thus showcasing her athletic and shapely arms to full advantage. From the waist the skirt flared out, ending finally in a hemline that was designed like the layers of a handkerchief, with some of the points extending just below the knee, while others afforded a provocative glimpse of thigh now and again.

As Daisy took in the head-to-toe reflection, absentmindedly tucking the Star of David beneath the collar, it occurred to her that she wasn't in Kansas anymore.

Daisy no longer looked like a Silverman.

The duo from Danbury flew through the rest of Harrods, the sales clerk a permanent fixture in tow. "Might not think they're all your department, honey, but they will be now," Bonita advised.

Lingerie coughed up silken undergarments, a far cry from Daisy's usual torn and tattered invitations to ambulance embarrassment. Hosiery nobly lived up to its name. And in the shoe department, they managed to track down a lone pair of size fives, whose curved stiletto heels were architectural marvels, and whose color and form would enact a perfect union when paired with The Dress.

Sparing a fleeting thought for the very disheveled shop clerk, who was at that very moment gratefully consuming the dust churned up by the passing of their wake, as they hurried through Knightsbridge, wending their way back towards the hotel in Bloomsbury, Daisy basked in the warm afterglow of shopper's success. It now seemed to her that the initial frustrations of the search had all been part of someone else's bad dream; and the excavation of that most sought after item, that confection of perfection-The Dress-as easy as plucking an apple from a low-hanging branch.

4.

It hadn't taken long for Daisy to recover her inherent sense of the proper hierarchical structuring of priorities.

"Substance before style," she informed the protesting Bonita as she did up the neon pink laces on her sneakers. Neon pink meant that nobody could possibly miss you at night.

"But," Bonita objected, trying to interject her own brand of rationalism, "you only have two-and-a-half hours left, and you still need to shower and change and do your hair and-oh, who knows?-mentally prepare yourself or something of the sort."

"Not to worry," Daisy laughed, dismissing her concerns with a mildly insulting, patronizing pat on the topknot. "I'll be back from my run in plenty of time to attend to all of that fashion stuff."

5.

Daisy jogged south down Montague Street, heading in the general direction of the Thames. Making a few quick turns, she crossed New Oxford and veered onto Shraftesbury to the right. So far, so good.

She was thinking about how much nicer it was to run in London than it was back in the States. In spite of the city's much-maligned climate, hardly a day passed when it wasn't decent enough out to get in at least some form of workout. Here, men didn't react to her sprinting form with verbal assaults, assuming an exercising female must certainly be in want of sexual solicitation. And, best of all, she found that the idea of falling prey to a drive-by shooting never even crossed her mind.

Sometimes the sidewalks did get a little congested, but she did try to avert knocking other people over whenever possible, and they did seem to appreciate that. As she made her way through Piccadilly Circus, usually one of the most crowded pedestrian areas, a sprinkle began to fall from a suddenly notorious gray sky. In an attempt to avoid being blinded by brollies, she maneuvered her way through the mass of milling bodies and, exiting the other end, turned right onto Old Bond Street.

At this juncture, having passed the halfway point of what she considered to be her short route and thinking herself home free, Daisy let her guard down. Her mind began to wander, her thoughts the victim of random input, which-if you really gave it some serious consideration-some would argue could be far more dangerous than any drive-by shooter.

As Daisy propelled her body north by northwest (Hamlet, anyone?) along Old Bond Street, her consciousness began to clear itself of all unnecessary clutter. In fact, such was the vacancy of her meditations that any Zen master might have been proud of the mental vacuum that she had created.

She was ripe, then, as she crossed the line from Old Bond Street into New, for a single item of sensory input to invade her being, temporarily laying siege to the entirety of her existence.

Chocolate? She sniffed the aroma on the damp air. Violets? She experienced the bit tightening in her mouth. Chocolate and violets, both, at the very same time? was her final waking thought, as the reins yanked her back for a 180-degree turnaround, where she would have encountered possibly the finest chocolate shop of her life, had she not, in her haste to discover the source of the unprecedented aroma combo, bumped a brollie, tripped over a Chow, and been sent sprawling rump over teakettle, all before ending up smack on top of a damp sewage drain.

Which, when you really thought about it, wasn't all that far from where Miss Silverman had started.

6.

On the floor of the guest room in the Hotel Russell stood a silver champagne bucket, sans bottle and with an overabundance of chipped ice. Encased within the ice and, thankfully, protected from view by the surrounding linen towel, was one formerly delicate, but-for the time being-now hideously swollen left ankle. The form extending upward from the ankle in question belonged, of course, to Daisy, who was holding in her right hand the missing champagne bottle. This original administration of first aid, brought about with the enlisted help of one very startled room service waiter, had all been, of course, Bonita's doing.

As Bonita peeled back the linen to see how the patient was doing, it was revealed that the ice had not caused the swelling to go down one jot. But that didn't really matter much anymore, since the champagne bottle was more than holding up its share of the bargain, and Daisy was no longer feeling any pain.

"What am I going to do?" she asked hazily, bending over to study the ankle with a scientifically inquisitive smile. Daisy, the proud recipient of Rachel's DNA right down to the very last strand, had crossed over the border of tipsy and was fast approaching sloshed on the strength of little more than a single glass of the bubbly. "What will I do about those shoes?" she pressed, as if nothing else had ever mattered quite so much or quite so little to her before.

Bonita pried the champagne bottle away from Daisy, moving it safely out of reach, before crossing to the closet. Turning back again, she offered her idea of a sensible solution. In her left hand, she held The Dress. And from the curved joints of one extended forefinger, she dangled a single neon-pink-laced sneaker. "Just put a sock on the other and no one'll even notice the Elephant Man likeness," was the sage advice.

To which Daisy emitted a groan. It was impossible, really, to tell if it was a groan of dismay at her predicament and the idea of making a stylistic fool out of herself, or if it was a groan brought about by the giddy intoxication of relief; she would not be required to stumble around in public in the unaccustomed architectural marvels, thereby making a tottering fool out of herself.

In fact, all that you could really be certain of was the exact words expressed within the confines of the emitted moan: "Oh no."