Ines C Rothen

A Siliver of Silver Ines C Rothen

The story in this book is a sequel to my previous book THE WAYFARERS. It tells what has happened to the Notters after the success of The Beggars Opera in which they all had had active parts with the result that owing to that success all of them had been catapulted into the same society which had spurned them years before. While they had, as nobodies, given themselves illustrious names like Voltaire, Schubert, Bugs Bunny etc. they reverted to their original names again after society had accepted them again after all of them were beginning to accept that they were on life's scrap heap and had to stay there. The book is also about Max, the child of Myra and Puck who had both died of an overdose and Max as a baby was taken to Connecticut and fostered out to foster carers who were members of the Shawnee tribe. His foster carer tells him the ways of Shawnee, that White Man had come and taken their land. He gives Max a sliver of silver, a little snake snake with emerald green eyes because his father had been bitten by a green mamba, but he had not killed it but let it slither away. Then he scrabbled in the undergrowth and found some root which he applied to the bite and he had lived. He gives Max the snake and tells him to always remember him by. When Max is five his relatives take him to England and he grows up there. As a teenager he too dabbles in drugs and is soon snorting cocaine. Then he meets another druggie, Ysenda and together they snort coke but progress soon to heroin. Ysenda is American. Dexter Shelling from Texas is staying at the Dorchester. He is here to look for his missing daughter, Lala-June, but all efforts to trace her are futile. He enlists the help of Amethyst who he wants to marry and who he met by chance outside Lidgates in Holland Park. Amethyst in turn enlists her father because he knows everybody. He finds Lala-June, but it is too late for her to be reunited with her father as she has died alone in a bedsit of a heroin overdose. It turns out that Ysenda is the missing Lala-June, but her father can only see her body in the mortuary. Max decides to go to rehab and his father pays for him to go into a clinic to dry out. In the meantime Amethyst has discovered that her husband, Konrad, has been cheating on her with his secretary and she has decided to divorce him