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Everything he has is the result of marrying Marjorie’s sister. He’s as phony as his title. ‘Count?’? He’s a handsome, oily gigolo who scored.”
    Ona Ainsworth-Zara, the count’s wife and Marjorie’s sister, was, I judged, twelve to fifteen years younger than Marjorie. She was an attractive woman, regal in bearing, beautifully dressed, and adorned with an array of expensive jewelry. She’d kept to herself most of the day, probably because getting too close to her older and famous sister triggered razor-sharp barbs. I wondered at one point why Marjorie had bothered to invite her, and had my question answered when Bruce Herbert muttered, “The count and his lady have managed to infiltrate another party. Why Marjorie puts up with it is beyond me.”
    I’d never met Ona before, and Marjorie had had little to say about her during our brief previous encounters. Although she’d never said anything overtly negative about Ona, there was always an edge to her voice when she brought her up, and I gathered that if there was not an outright estrangement, they certainly weren’t loving siblings. Strange, I thought as I sat at the table, that Marjorie had never married. I knew of no romantic interest in her long life, although one had to assume there were some flirtations along the way. Few people, even those committed to avoiding intimacy, successfully avoid it over a lifetime.
    Marshall supervised the serving of dessert.
    “Can we trust this?” Bruce Herbert asked. Marjorie, who’d been dozing, jerked awake and said in a strong voice, “Trust it? What in heaven’s name do you mean by that?”
    Herbert laughed and said, “I’ve read at least a thousand murder mysteries, Marjorie, in which victims are poisoned by dishes that look like this.”
    There was laughter at the table. Strayhorn, the critic, said, “I’d debate you on that, Mr. Herbert. I’d say the whiskey decanter has done more people in than syllabub.”
    “Syllabub?” I said. “What’s that?”
    Mrs. Semple said with a giggle, “Our answer to zabaglione.”
    Her husband chimed in, “It goes back to Elizabethan times.”
    “What’s in it?” I asked.
    Mrs. Horton, who stood at the door to the kitchen, said, “Whipped cream, sherry, and lemon juice. They used to make it with warm cow’s milk.”
    I looked at my hostess and said lightly, “You haven’t decided to poison us all with your syllabub, have you, Marjorie?”
    She raised her head and moved her nose, as though a disagreeable odor had reached it. A tiny smile came to her lips as she said, “My dear Jessica, I must be slipping not to have thought of that. What a wonderful way to clear my decks before leaving.”
    Laughter quickly dissipated as her final words sunk in.
    “Whatever do you mean by saying ‘leaving’?” asked Archibald Semple.
    “You know only too well what I mean, Archie. I don’t expect this dicky body to support me much longer.”
    Clayton Perry laughed. “You’ll probably outlive us all,” he said.
    “I doubt that,” remarked Jane Portelaine, sounding as though she meant it. No one challenged her. By now we were all too used to her depressing comments.
    Bruce Herbert broke the tension by suggesting to Marjorie that it was time she did a cookbook. “Everyone else has,” he said. “There’s the Lord Peter Wimsey cookbook, and one of the best cookbooks I’ve ever seen—I use it all the time—is the Nero Wolfe cookbook.”
    “Food is of no interest to me,” Marjorie said.
    “It was to Agatha,” Strayhorn said. “Remember Funerals Are Fatal ?”
    That led into a new topic of discussion: food and the use of it as a vehicle to deliver lethal poisons. As the argument heated up, I looked down the table at the other guests. Looking every bit the contented land baron, was the producer of Who Killed Darby and Joan?, Sir James Ferguson. He was stocky, but not portly, and wore a beautiful tan tweed jacket, a maroon V-neck sweater, and a loosely woven brown tie.