The Hellfire Club Read Online Free

York City. It was time to be a nurse again.
    Or if not that, she immediately thought, something else. Nora’s last experiences of nursing were a radioactive substance too hot to touch. Until the final month, the radioactivity had expressed itself privately, in nightmares, stomach problems, sudden explosions of temper, depressions. The gleeful demons had put in occasional appearances. Neither Nora nor Davey had connected this stream of disorder to her work at Norwalk Hospital until her last month, when Nora herself had become radioactive. An improperly considered but nonetheless necessary action had for a time brought her into the orbit of the police. Of course she had not committed a crime. She had behaved morally, not immorally, but recklessly. After she had agreed, naturally to the regret of all, to “take a sabbatical,” she had signed half a dozen papers and left the hospital too unhappy to pick up her final paycheck.
    Nora’s reckless but moral action had at first resembled kidnapping. The year-old son of a prominent man had been brought in with a broken leg and bruising around the chest. A fall downstairs, the mother said. She had not seen it, but her husband had. Sure did, said the husband, a sleek item in a Wall Street suit. His skin had an oily shine, and his smile was amazingly white. Took my eye off the kid for a second, and when I looked back, bam, almost had a heart attack. Half an hour after the child was admitted, both parents left. Three hours later, stuffed bunny under his pin-striped arm, back came smiling Dad. Into the private room he went, came out fifteen minutes later, even oilier, smiling hard. Nora checked on the child and found him all but unconscious.
    When she reported what she had seen, she was told that the father could not be responsible for any injuries to the child. The father was a wizard, a financial genius, too noble to beat his own child. The next day Mom and Dad came in at eight. Dad left after half an hour, Mom went home at noon. At six, just as Nora was leaving, Dad returned alone. When Nora checked in on the child the next day, she learned that he had suffered a mysterious “failure” the previous evening but was now recovering. Once again she reported her suspicions to her superiors, once again she was rebuked. By this time, two or three other nurses silently agreed with her. The parents had been in again at eight, and these nurses had observed that the wizard seemed to be merely
acting
the role of a worried parent.
    When the father returned that evening, Nora, after an hour railing in vain at administrators, planted herself in the child’s room until Dad asked to be left alone with his baby, at which point she left long enough to make three telephone calls—one to an acquaintance who ran the Jack and Jill Nursery School on the South Post Road in Westerholm, another to the chief of pediatrics, the third to Leo Morris, her lawyer. She said,
I am saving this child’s life.
Then she reported back to the room. The irritated wizard said that he was going to file a complaint and bustled out. Nora wrapped up the child and walked out of the hospital. She drove to the Jack and Jill Nursery, delivered the child into her friend’s care, and returned to face the storm she had created. Four months after the turmoil had subsided, the wizard’s wife issued a statement to the press saying that she was seeking a divorce on the grounds that her husband regularly beat both herself and their son.
    “At least they got one thing right,” Davey said. “The Green Knight really
does
look like a grown-up Pippin. But you can’t tell that
Pippin
realizes it.”
    On the screen, electronic manipulation was transforming the bearded man’s face, stripping away years by smoothing wrinkles, shortening his hair, drawing in the planes of his cheeks, leaving the beard as only a penumbra around a face almost identical to the boy’s.
    “You need the words.
His own salvation lay within himself. Pippin had