The Hellfire Club Read Online Free Page B

and even gratified by Nora’s words. Alden Chancel had grown into a handsome, unruffled old age by getting everything he had ever wanted, and while he had certainly wanted his son to get married, he had never imagined that Davey would marry someone like Nora Curlew.
    Nora quickly traversed the downstairs living room, came out into the marbled entrance, and turned to mount the wide staircase. On the landing she paused in front of the huge mirror. Instead of changing into her usual jeans and top after her morning run, Nora had dressed in white trousers and a loose, dark blue silk blouse. In the mirror these clothes looked nearly as appropriate for lunch on the Poplars’ terrace as they had at home.
    She pushed at her hair without significantly rearranging it and started up the remaining steps to the second floor. A door closed, and the Italian girl, Maria, the short gray-haired woman who decades ago had replaced the famous Helen Day, called the Cup Bearer, at other times referred to more mysteriously as O’Dotto, came out of Daisy’s studio carrying an empty tray. The Cup Bearer, whom Davey had loved, had made legendary desserts, seven-layer cake and floating island; Maria was serviceable, not legendary, and in Nora’s experience prepared excellent French and Italian meals.
    Maria smiled at her and gave the tray a short, emphatic slap against the air, as if to say,
So! Here we are!
    “Hello, Maria, how’s Mrs. Chancel today?”
    “Very fine, Mrs. Nora.”
    “How are you?”
    “Exactly the same.”
    “Would she mind company?”
    Maria shook her head, still smiling. Nora knocked twice, then pushed open the door.
    Seated at the far end of a long, cream-colored couch facing a glass coffee table and a brick fireplace, Daisy raised her head from the paperback in her hands and gave Nora a bright look of welcome. The white oak desk at her shoulder, placed at the top of the couch like the crossbar of a capital T, was bare except for an electric typewriter and a jar of yellow pencils” the glass table held a tall vase crowded with fleshy-looking, white Casablanca lilies, a pack of low-tar cigarettes, a gold lighter, a stone ashtray brimming with butts, books in stacks, and a tumbler filled with ice and pale red liquid. Mint green in their own shadows, white aluminum blinds were canted against the sun.
    “Nora, oh goody, what a treat, come in and join me, where’s your drink?”
    “I must have left it on the terrace.” Nora stepped into Daisy’s atmosphere of flowers and cigarette smoke.
    “Oh no, mustn’t do that, let’s have the Italian girl fetch it.” She slid a postcard into the book.
    “No, no, I don’t—”
    Daisy had already leaned forward and taken a little bell off the table. It uttered an absurdly soft, tinkling ring. “Maria,” she said in a conversational voice.
    As if summoned out of the air, Maria opened the door and stepped inside. “Mrs. Chancel?”
    “Will you be a sweetie and bring up Nora’s drink? It’s on the terrace.”
    Maria nodded and left, closing the door behind her.
    Daisy patted the creamy couch and set the paperback,
Journey into Light
, Hugo Driver’s second posthumous book, on the glass table.
    “I’m not interrupting anything?”
    In the mid-fifties, newly married, forty pounds lighter, Daisy Chancel had published two novels, not with Chancel House, and ever since she had supposedly been writing another.
    Nora had nearly, but not quite, ceased to believe in this book, of which she had never seen any evidence on her infrequent visits to the studio. Davey had long ago refused to talk about it, and Alden referred to it only euphemistically. Daisy’s manner at evening meals, rigid and vague, suggested that instead of working she had been drinking martinis supplied by the Italian girl. Yet once there must have been a book, and that Daisy maintained the pretense of work meant that it was still important to her.
    “Not at all,” Daisy said. “I thought I’d read Driver again.