Walter Satterthwait
Escapade
The magician is an actor playing the part of a magician.
Sex is worth dying for.
Part one
The Morning Post
12 Yeoman’s Row, Knightsbridge
August 15,1921
Dear Evangeline,
No catty complaints from me today. Today I have some good news, really quite splendid news, in fact. Tomorrow morning, the Allardyce and her paid spinster companion are romping off to Devon for a seance.
Yes, you poor envious wretch, a seance. In Devon. In a haunted manor house, no less. Clanking chains and spectral voices and dripping ectoplasm and one of those overweight mediums with cryptic messages from dear departed Aunt Delilah. And a train ride through the West Country! The wild moor, the open countryside: an escape from the grime of grim grey London! I’m really quite witless with excitement!
The Allardyce has spent the last two days crowing about her aristocratic connections. She’s a cousin-no doubt distant (meow)-of Alice, Viscountess Purleigh, whose husband, Robert, the Viscount, is the son of the Earl of Axminster. The seance will be held at Maplewhite, the Earl’s estate. So, Evy, as of tomorrow, I’ll be mingling with the peerage. But you needn’t worry-I’ll never forget the simple honest folk, like yourself, who were so terribly kind to me before I rose to greatness.
I’m packing the luggage (hers and mine), so I haven’t time, just now, to scrawl more than a few lines. But I did want to tell you that I’ve begun to read the book you sent to me, Mrs Stopes’s ‘Married Love’. It’s curious and rather delicious to see all those body parts swaggering so boldly across the printed page, cool Latin names draped like togas over their smooth warm shoulders. I’ll be ferrying the book to Devon, but discreetly of course.
Should the Allardyce ever suspect what it is I’m reading with such zeal she would become quite puce with shock. I’ve very cleverly stripped away its original cover and replaced it with the cover to ‘Mansfield Park’. I suspect that this would delight Miss Austen nearly as much as it would dismay Mrs Stopes.
How is that charming brother of yours? How is Mary?
I must go. I shall write to you when I arrive at the haunted mansion and I shall let you know everything.
All my love,
Jane
Chapter One
The Great Man was skating the big Lancia around blind turns on the slick road as though he had received a personal telegram from God that guaranteed his immortality.
“You’re driving too fast, Harry,” I said. I had said it before and it hadn’t accomplished anything. I didn’t really expect it to accomplish anything now. But occasionally you want to put these things on the record.
The Great Man smiled at me. He had a wide, wild, charming smile. It made you believe that he felt extremely lucky to be in your company, and usually it made you believe that you were extremely lucky to have your company to offer. It hadn’t been working so well since he got behind the wheel.
“Phil, Phil,” he said. “You worry too much altogether. I have spent countless years honing my reflexes. As you know. With a lesser man, yes, for certain, you would be in jeopardy. But with me, you are as safe as a little tiny baby in its cradle.”
That was the way he talked.
“Don’t look at me,” I said. “Look at the road.”
“Peripheral vision,” he said, and he smiled again without taking his eyes off me as he coasted around another turn. His teeth were white. His eyes were grayish blue and shiny and the smile deepened the lines that angled from their corners. “That, too,” he said. “With practice, with work, it can be brought to a level of achievement most men would never believe possible.”
“Harry,” I said. “Look. At. The. Road.”
He laughed. But he turned to face the road, showing me his profile. Curly black hair, a bit unruly and a bit gray at the temples. A strong nose, a wide mouth, a strong chin. Not a handsome face, in fact almost an ugly face. But a dynamic face, as forceful as the blade of an axe.
I squinted through the smeared windshield. The wipers squeaked back and forth, slapping water around the glass without ever getting rid of it.
We had left Dartmoor behind us, the cold gray mist and the endless rollers of bald gray hill. It had been grim and empty, but at least you could see the cars that were coming your way. It had been better than this.
This was gray rain ahead and tall black hedgerows looming up on either side, and endless possibilities of collision. Sometimes there were trees just behind the hedgerows, left and right, and their black branches and black leaves arched over the road and formed a long dark tunnel. The headlights were on but they weren’t working any better than the wipers.
I sat back and sighed.
Usually I was the driver. It was part of the job I had been hired to do. Usually, the Great Man and his wife sat in the back seat. But the Great Man’s wife had been too ill to leave Paris and we had gone to Amsterdam and then to London without her. The Great Man hadn’t cared for that.
He had sulked until Lord Endover offered him the Lancia- “Keep her as long as you like, old boy.” The Great Man had glanced out the window of Lord Endover’s Belgravia town house at the Lancia parked at the curb, its long white body as sleek and as promising and as dangerous as a banker’s second wife. A gleam had come into his eye and at that moment I knew I would probably never get behind the wheel of the beast.
The rain sizzled along the hood of the car, splattered along the glass. The wipers chirped.
In England, you’re supposed to drive on the left. But on this road there wasn’t much difference between left and right. If I stuck my arm out the passenger window, I could have touched the hedgerows. Except they weren’t really hedgerows. Hedgerows were plants and they gave way when you hit them. These were stone walls thinly screened with ferns and bushes and they would have snapped my arm in two.
Once again now, he went racing through a left-hand turn. But this time the Lancia’s rear wheels slid away beneath us and the car lurched toward that towering wall on the right. I stopped breathing and I braced myself.
As though being braced would make a difference when a ton of speeding metal met a hundred tons of rooted rock.
The Great Man eased up on the gas pedal, steered ever so slightly into the skid as the Lancia swept within inches of the wall. Black branches snatched at the bodywork, scrabbled at my window. Then, in the last possible
