So not Niven, then, but his mother. The infamous Nellie Coker wished to see her. To discuss something. What intrigue was this?
She delayed. Not so much from hesitation as not to seem to be at the Cokers’ beck and call. There was a telephone in the hallway of the Warrender, in a wooden cabinet, although Gwendolen doubted the cabinet’s walls were enough to protect her from Mrs. Bodley’s prying ears. After a decent interval and while Mrs. Bodley was supervising the Sunday lunch, Gwendolen took a seat in the booth and dialled the operator and asked for “Gerard 5875.” She was put through straight away as if Nellie Coker had been waiting for her call.
* * *
—
Nellie Coker was spreading fortune-telling cards out on one of the tables in the Crystal Cup. There was a pot of tea, too, one that Nellie had made herself as, it being Sunday, there was no one else here and the club was closed and shuttered against the holiness of the day outside. “Or would you prefer something stronger, Miss Kelling? I have some excellent plum brandy, a gift from the Polish ambassador.”
She was trying to impress, Gwendolen thought. It would take more than a diplomatic glass of brandy. “I’m not much of a drinker, I’m afraid,” she said.
“Nor me,” Nellie said. “You cannot profit from your own vices, only those of others.” Gwendolen thought Nellie Coker sounded like a street-corner evangelist.
“Your fortune awaits,” Nellie said. So perhaps more of a mountebank than a charlatan.
The cards were a mystery to Gwendolen. “Is this the Tarot?” she puzzled.
“No, Lenormand, I prefer it. I’m presuming you think such things are stuff and nonsense, Miss Kelling.” She seemed indifferent to Gwendolen’s opinion, her hands hovering over the cards as if absorbing their funny little pictures—a fox in the snow, a mountain, a snake, a little girl in a blue dress bowling a hoop along the road. A pair of mice. “It doesn’t matter what you think. You don’t have to believe for the cards to tell the truth. Do you go to church, Miss Kelling?”
“Church? No, not any more.”
“No, nor me. It is a great freedom to lose your religion.”
The feather-and-glitter costume of last night in the Amethyst had been replaced today by a sober, loose-fitting dress revealed when Nellie Coker removed the fur she was wearing, despite the warmer weather. Last night she had been the ringmaster, today she was surprisingly matronly.
Gwendolen sipped her tea and was struck by a sudden uncomfortable thought. What if the tea was drugged? What if she was about to be slipped off somewhere, never to surface again, like the girls Frobisher was worried about? What if Nellie Coker—and here was an unpleasant thought—what if Nellie somehow knew that Gwendolen was in cahoots with Frobisher?
“PG Tips,” Nellie reassured, as if she could read Gwendolen’s mind. (Could she? What a thought!)
“You summoned me,” Gwendolen reminded her.
“Requested your company. Spirits are summoned.”
“Why?”
“As I said, I have a proposition for you.”
* * *
—
“There, look at that,” Nellie said, moving her hands over the cards. “Your fortune, your destiny, laid out before you.” Nellie gave Gwendolen a calculating look over her spectacles. “You are going to love and be loved,” she said.
“A man?” Gwendolen said, as some response seemed to be expected of her, and yet she couldn’t keep the cynicism out of her voice.
“More than one.”
Good Lord—how many more?, Gwendolen wondered.
Nellie Coker frowned at the cards, no doubt for effect, Gwendolen thought. The woman was no different from any seaside charlatan. Or one of the many bogus spiritualists who had sprung up in the wake of the war, deluding the bereaved into thinking the dead were happy with their lot. Gwendolen’s mother for one, of course. “Harry says he likes it where he is,” she reported to Gwendolen after one of these seances, “and doesn’t want me to worry about him. Oh, and to watch out for scab on the apple trees.” Because, of course, the state of their orchard would have been on Harry’s mind in the afterlife.
Nellie’s brow furrowed, a genuine-looking frown this time. “You are going to be an instrument of something.”
“Of what?”
Nellie turned suddenly pale. Her gaze had shifted from the cards to the wall behind Gwendolen. She was staring fixedly at it as if an image had been projected onto it, as if she had indeed summoned a spirit. Gwendolen turned to look, but there was nothing there.
“Mrs. Coker?”
“Hm?” And then, with an abruptness that surprised Gwendolen, Nellie swept the cards into a pile. The clairvoyance was over, apparently. At that moment, the bells of St. James’s in Piccadilly began calling the faithful to Evensong.
“I must go,” Nellie said, heaving herself up from her chair with the help of her stick. “One of my children is not herself.”
“Oh, Lord, I am sorry to hear that, Mrs. Coker.” (Which child? Not Niven, surely? He had been very much himself last night.)
“One of my daughters.” (Again, the mind-reading.) “My car’s outside. If you’ll walk me to the door, I’ll pay for a cab for you.”
“That’s very kind, Mrs. Coker, but I prefer to walk back to the Warrender. It’s such a nice sunny afternoon.”
“Is it nice?” Nellie said. She seemed to be questioning the character of the sun rather than its presence in the London skies. She lived a subterranean life, like a mole, and Gwendolen thought that the weather probably meant little to Nellie Coker.
* * *
—
Nellie struggled into the car with the help of her chauffeur—Hawker, she called him. She seemed rather weak—was she ill? But then she had just served a prison sentence, it was unlikely that incarceration was good for your health. A nurse Gwendolen had served with at the Front had been imprisoned in the cause of women’s suffrage before the war. Despite the dreadful tales of prison life—she had been fed by tube and never really recovered—Gwendolen found herself envious of someone who had a passion strong enough to require sacrifice. Nellie Coker had offered herself up to imprisonment in the cause of a liquor licence. It hardly seemed worth it.
“Miss Kelling?” Nellie was leaning forward in her seat to speak to Gwendolen through the open car window.
“Yes, Mrs. Coker?”
“Do think about my offer, Miss Kelling. I hope your answer will be yes. If you could let me know as soon as possible. You have my card.”
The chauffeur was back in the driving seat and Nellie knocked on the roof of the car with her stick as if she were in an old-fashioned hansom cab.
Gwendolen stood on the pavement and watched the car driving away, still flabbergasted by Nellie Coker’s unexpected proposition. When she had agreed to meet her in the Crystal Cup, she had thought that, at best, Nellie wanted to thank her for her help after Aldo was shot or, at worst, wanted to try to secure her silence if he was dead. Had he died? Gwendolen reproached herself for not even enquiring about his welfare, but she had been so disconcerted by Nellie’s overtures.
* * *
—
“You had two gentlemen callers while you were out, Miss Kelling,” Mrs. Bodley announced when Gwendolen was barely through the door of the Warrender. Two? She was amused—were Nellie’s prophecies already coming to pass? And who could the two gentlemen be? Was one of them Niven? Had she missed him calling on her? Gwendolen felt the hunger of disappointment. She sensed a fuse had been lit. How would it end—with a bang or a whimper? (She had acquired Eliot for the Library.) She was reluctant to give Mrs. Bodley the satisfaction of asking.
“One of them was the gentleman—and I use the word loosely—who left a parcel for you the other day.” (Niven. Gwendolen’s heart gave a little bump. Annoying!) “Although neither of your callers gave their name. I think it very suspicious when a gentleman withholds his name.” Gwendolen burst out laughing. The woman was too much, she really was. A purse-lipped Mrs. Bodley said, “I’m thinking of your reputation, not mine, Miss Kelling.”