Wexcombe is not a real place, which is a great pity, because I should dearly love to take the waters there. But it is stitched together from real ones, chiefly from Bath, and if you ever walk that golden city you will recognize my town at every turn. Come along, and mind the cobbles.
The Pump Room
Everyone begins here. You take a glass of the warm spa water, which is medicinal, allegedly, and punishing, certainly, you nod to three people you would rather not have seen, and you learn everything worth knowing before noon. Bath's own Pump Room gave me the bones of it. But in Wexcombe the Pump Room is where the real business gets done: marriages quietly arranged, reputations weighed and found wanting, and now and again a murder set softly in motion between one glass of water and the next.
The Upper Rooms
The assembly rooms, for balls and card-parties and the genuinely serious work of matchmaking. Picture Bath's Assembly Rooms, all height and candlelight, with a card-room off to one side where the husbands hide. This is Hetty's true battlefield. A thousand small signals pass over the tops of a thousand fans, and she reads every one of them, which is a useful talent in a matchmaker and an even more useful one in a sleuth.
No. 4 Cleeve Terrace
Hetty's own front door, on a genteel and very slightly faded terrace. I gave her one of those great curved Bath crescents to live on, scaled down to a respectable address for a woman of good name and modest means. Behind that handsome Georgian face is a quiet parlor where a Restoration gentleman has been complaining about the decor for one hundred and forty years. We do not advertise this to prospective dinner guests.
St Aldhelm's
The parish church, for weddings and funerals and a churchyard full of exactly the sort of old county names that have a habit of turning up later in a story. Think of Bath Abbey shrunk to parish size, and then of every quiet country churchyard you have ever lingered in longer than you meant to. Wexcombe keeps a good deal of its history under those flat green stones.
The Gardens, the Shops, the Library
The Spa Gardens are for promenades, public breakfasts, and grand illuminations after dark, the way Bath has its Sydney Gardens. Cross Street is for the shops: the modiste, the milliner, the confectioner, and the apothecary, whose wares are of keen professional interest to a writer of poisonings. And tucked among them is Mowbray's Circulating Library, for books, subscription lists, and the very finest gossip in town. I will confess that if I lived in Wexcombe, this is where you would most often find me.
The Angel
The coaching inn at the edge of town, where everyone arrives, and where, on occasion, a guilty party tries very hard to leave. A coaching timetable, I have learned, is a wonderful thing for an alibi, and an even better thing for breaking one.
That is Wexcombe, more or less: a beautiful, mannerly town with secrets in its cellars and the dead in its drawing rooms. If you would like to meet the people who live there, the Wexcombe page will make the introductions. Bring a parasol. And do keep your wits about you at the Pump Room. One never knows.
