Two women were standing before the table. They turned, saw Lord Bob, and they smiled. The older woman’s smile was friendly and open. The younger woman’s was thin and bored, and then it was gone.
“Look what I’ve bagged,” announced Lord Bob. “The famous Mr. Harry Houdini himself. And this is his assistant, Mr. Phil Beaumont, also from America. His first time in England. Gentleman, my wife, Alice, and my daughter, Cecily.”
They were obviously mother and daughter. They were the same height, about five feet six inches, and they had the same fine coloring and the same fine bones. In her fifties somewhere, the mother had aged nicely. Her hair was pale blond, shoulder length, its soft waves threaded with silver. She wore a pearl necklace and a black dress that would have been simple if it hadn’t been made of silk.
Unlike most of the aristocrats I’d met since we arrived in England, she actually looked like one. Regal without being cold, composed without being stiff. But according to the Great Man, she hadn’t been born one. She came from a family that had made its money, a lot of money, in publishing, here in England and on the Continent.
Her daughter looked aristocratic, too, but there was no silver in her blond hair. The hair was straight and neatly bobbed just below her ears, cut longer in front to emphasize her slender neck. The gauzy scarlet scarf loosely wrapped around her throat helped with this. So did the scooped neckline of her pale gray dress, also silk.
She was maybe a bit too aristocratic. She held a champagne glass in her left hand. Her right hand hovered just to the side of her face. Between her extended first and second fingers, she held a lighted cigarette. When she decided that she wanted a puff, all she had to do was swivel her head a few inches. You got the impression that even this would be a terrible chore.
“Hello,” she drawled at a space somewhere between the Great Man and me. She was maybe a year or two younger than Miss Turner.
“How do you do,” said Lady Alice. There was more life in her eyes than in her daughter’s entire body. “I’m so very pleased that the two of you could join us. I do hope you’ll enjoy yourselves while you’re here. If you need anything, you’ve only to ask.” Then she turned to her husband and put her hand along his tweeded arm. “I was just coming after you, darling. I’m afraid we have a small problem.”
“Eh?”
She glanced at us very briefly, looked back at her husband. “Upstairs,” she said, and her shoulders moved in a small quick elegant shrug.
Lord Bob’s bristling eyebrows dipped downward, two pale beetles struggling to embrace each other. “Carrying on again, is he?” Scowling, he stroked his white mustache. “The swine. Comes the revolution, we’ll string him up with the rest. He’ll be the first to go.” He punched his right fist into the palm of his left hand.
“I know, darling,” said Lady Alice, “but let’s deal with today first, shall we? I’ll go up there with you.”
He nodded. Her hand still held his arm, and now he put his own hand atop hers. “Thank you, my love.” He turned to his daughter. “Cecily, be the good little Girl Guide, would you, and introduce Mr. Houdini and Mr. Beaumont to the other guests?” He turned to us. “Sorry. Domestic problem. Back as soon as I can. Come along, my darling.”
Lady Alice said to us, “I’m so sorry. Please, do have something.” She smiled apologetically, and then she and Lord Bob went off, arm in arm.
The Great Man said to Cecily, “There is some trouble?” He was only making polite conversation. Other people and their troubles didn’t interest him much and didn’t trouble him at all.
“It’s such a bore,” she drawled, and swiveled her head to inhale on her cigarette. “My grandfather,” she said, exhaling smoke. “He has these fits.”
“Ah.” He nodded sympathetically. He had learned to do that somewhere. “Brain seizures. A great pity.”
“Temper tantrums, actually,” she said in her flat drawl. She tapped her cigarette against an ashtray on the trestle table, then raised her hand and put the cigarette back within reach. “You know, of course, that Daddy’s a Bolshevist.” With her cigarette hand she plucked a flake of tobacco from her lower lip.
We hadn’t known, or I hadn’t. If the Great Man had known, he had probably forgotten. It had nothing to do with him, so it was irrelevant.
“Daddy’s only waiting,” she said, “for Grandpere to die so he can give Maplewhite to the peasants and workers. And that makes Grandpere furious, of course. He’s bedridden, he’s been that way since the accident, years ago. So he can’t flog Daddy, which of course is what he’d like to do.” She swiveled her head, inhaled on the cigarette. “Once a week or so he starts screaming and throwing things about his room. It drives the poor servants mad.” She showed us her thin smile again. “What would you like to drink? Champagne? We’ve whiskey, as well, I should think.”
Houdini shook his head. “Thank you, no. I neither drink alcohol nor smoke tobacco products. I never have. They sap the strength and deplete the will. And without strength and will, I would never have become what I am.”
Her left eyebrow edged upward. She took a puff from her tobacco product. “Yes,” she said, and blew out some smoke. “Some sort of magician, I gather.”
A lesser man might have been derailed by this, which is maybe what she intended. The Great Man steamed ahead at full throttle.
“Not merely a magician,” he said, and smiled indulgently. “Anyone can become a magician. A few gimmicked props, some sleight of hand. Child’s play. Nothing. I, on the other hand, am an escape artist. A self-liberator. I was the very first self-liberator, anywhere. I have many imitators, in many countries, but it was I who invented the art. And, if I may say so, with no false modesty, Houdini is still the greatest of them all.” He turned to me. “Would you agree, Phil?”
“Sure,” I said. It was true, after all.
“Really,” she said, pronouncing every letter in the word. A faint light had begun to flicker behind her eyes, and a faint note of irony had slipped into her voice. “And just what is it you escape from, exactly?”
Irony, faint or otherwise, was wasted on the Great Man. He waved a hand. “Everything. Anything. In the beginning it was handcuffs and shackles. But anyone can escape from handcuffs and shackles. Always, you see, I try to go beyond what others can do, what even I can do, and that is the greatest challenge of all, naturally. Nowadays Houdini escapes from everything. Locked trunks. Coffins. From coffins under water, or buried in the earth. And naturally this requires enormous physical strength and stamina. Tremendous stamina. Would you like to hit me in the stomach?”
“I beg your pardon?” she said.
He opened up his suit coat. “Go ahead. Hit me. As hard as you like. Years of conditioning have turned Houdini’s muscles into steel.” He nodded toward his stomach. “Please. Feel free.”
“Ah,” she said. I saw that she was blushing. Quickly, she glanced around the room. She wasn’t as jaded as she pretended to be. She looked back at him and cleared her throat. “Thanks awfully, of course,” she said. “But perhaps some other time.”
Houdini flexed his arm and held his biceps out to her, like a proud butcher presenting a prime slab of porterhouse. “Here. Go ahead. Feel.”
She looked over to me, as though expecting a rescue. I didn’t have one. She hesitated. The Great Man still held out his arm.
She said, “Oh, well,” and she shrugged lightly, as though it didn’t really matter in the long run. And she reached out and touched it, tentatively, experimentally.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” he said. “Exactly like steel. Feel it.”
“Yes,” she said. She touched it some more. She blinked again as her fingers moved along the tight black fabric. “Yes, it’s really quite… firm, isn’t it?”
“Yes, naturally,” he nodded. He let his arm drop. “Conditioning, exercise,” he said, “years and years of it, every day without exception. Alcohol would ruin that in an instant. It destroys muscle tissue, you know. Eats it away, like sulfuric acid. A glass of plain water is what I would like, if I may.”
She was staring at him with her lips slightly parted. She blinked again, like someone waking from a daydream, and she closed her mouth. Blushing once more, she glanced around the room. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course.” There was a faint sheen of perspiration on her forehead.
I had seen it happen before. People were never prepared for the Great Man’s bald, boundless ego. Some people were repelled by it. But a lot of them were attracted.
