The Hellfire Club

risking whatever he thought he would risk by looking at her. Behind Nora, the kettle began to sing, and she stood up to decant ground beans into the beaker and fill it with boiling water. Then she clamped on the top and carried the machine back to the table. Davey was leaning over the paper with a bagel in his hand. Nora put a forkful of scrambled egg in her mouth and found that she was not very hungry. She watched the liquid darken in the beaker as flecks of pulverized bean floated toward the bottom. After a while she tried the eggs again and was pleased to find that they were still warm.

Davey grunted at something he had read in the paper. 'Geez, they got a statement from that cynical old fart Saxc Coburg. He must be about a hundred years old by now. I asked him once if he had ever considered putting Night Journey in the syllabus, and he said, 'I can trust my students to read drivel in their spare time.' Can you believe that? Coburg wore the same tweed jacket every day, and bow ties, like Merle Marvell. He even looked a little bit like Merle Marvell.' Marvell, who had begun by editing the Blackbird Books, had been the most respected editor at Chancel House for a decade, and Nora knew that Davey's admiration of him was undermined by jealousy. From remarks he had let drop, she also knew that he feared that Marvell though little of his abilities. The few times they had met at publishing parties and dinners at the Poplars, she had found him invariably charming, though she had kept this opinion from Davey.

She touched his hand, and he tolerated the contact for a second before moving the hand away from hers.

'This must be very strange for you. A kid you knew in school committed all these murders.'

Davey pushed his plate away and pressed his hands to his face. When he lowered them, he stared across the room and sighed. 'You want to talk about what's upsetting me? Is that what you're trying to get at?'

'I thought we were getting at it,' she said.

'I could care less about Dick Dart.' He closed his eyes and screwed up his face. Then he put his hands on the edge of the table and interlaced his fingers and stared across the room again before turning back to her. The alarm in the center of her chest intensified. 'Nora, if you really want to know what I find upsetting, it's you. I don't know if this marriage is working. I don't even know if it can work. Something really bizarre is happening to you. I'm afraid you're going off the rails.'

'Going off the rails?' The thrilling of alarm within her had abruptly dropped into a coma.

'Like before,' he said. 'I can see it happening, all over again, and I don't think I can take it. I knew you had some problems when I married you, but I didn't think you were going to go crazy.'

'I didn't go crazy. I saved a little boy's life.'

'Sure, but the way you did it was crazy. You stole the kid out of the hospital and put us all through a nightmare. You had to quit your job. Do you remember any of this? For about a month, actually more like two months before you capped things off by abducting that kid instead of going through channels, you got into fights with the doctors, you almost never slept, you cried at nothing at all, and when you weren't crying you were in a rage. Do you remember smashing the television? Do you remember seeing ghosts? How about demons?'

Davey continued to evoke certain excesses committed during her period of radioactivity. She reminded him that she had gone into therapy, and they had both agreed it had worked.

'You saw Dr Julian twice a week for two months. That's sixteen times altogether. Maybe you should have kept going longer. All I know is, you're even worse now, and it's getting to be too much for me.'

Nora looked for signs that he was exaggerating or joking or doing anything at all but speaking what he imagined was the truth. No such signs revealed themselves. Davey was leaning forward with his hands on the table, his jaw set, his eyes determined and unafraid. He had finally come to the point of saying aloud everything he had been saying to himself while listening to Chopin in the family room.

'I wish you'd never been in Vietnam,' he said. 'Or that you could just have put all that behind you.'

'Swell. Now I'm talking to Alden Chancel. I thought you understood more than that. It's so dumb, the whole idea of putting things behind you.'

'Going nuts isn't too smart, either,' he said. 'Are you ready to listen to the truth?'

'I guess I can hardly wait,' she said.31

'Let's start with the small stuff,' he said. 'Are you aware of what you're like in the middle of the night?'

'How would you know what I'm like in the middle of the night? You're always downstairs drinking kummel.'

'Did you ever try to sleep next to someone who jerks around so much the whole bed moves? Sometimes you sweat so much the sheets get soaked.'

'You're talking about a couple of nights last week.'

This is what I mean,' he said. 'You don't have any idea of what you really do.'

She nodded. 'So I've been having more bad nights than I thought, and that's been disturbing for you. Okay, I get that, but I'll sleep better now that Dick Dart is behind bars.'

He bit his lower lip and leaned back in his chair. 'When you're having one of these bad nights, do you sometimes look around under the pillows for a gun?'

For a moment Nora was too startled to speak. 'Well, yes. Sometimes, after a really bad nightmare, I guess I do that.'

'You used to sleep with a gun under your pillow.'

'At the Evac Hospital. How did you ever figure out what I was looking for?'

'It came to me one night while you were sweating like crazy and rummaging under every pillow on the bed. You were hardly looking for a teddy bear. I'm just wondering, what would you do with a gun if you found one?'

'How should I know?' He was waiting for the rest of it. Go on, she told herself, give him the rest of it. 'One night two guys raped me, and a surgeon gave me a gun so I'd feel more protected.'

'You were raped and you never told me?'

'It was a long time ago. You never wanted to hear any more than about a tenth of what used to go on. Nobody does.' Feeling that she had explained either too little or too much, Nora assessed Davey's response and saw equal quantities of injury and shock.

'You didn't think that this was something I ought to know about?'

'For God's sake, I wasn't deliberately keeping a big, dark secret from you. You weren't exactly in a hurry to tell me all about Paddi Mann and the Hellfire Club either, were you?'

'That's different,' he said. 'Don't look at me that way, Nora, it just is different.' His eyes narrowed. 'I suppose some of these nightmares of yours are about the rape?'

'The bad ones.'

He shook his head, baffled. 'I can't believe you never told me.'

'Really, Davey, apart from not wanting to think about it all that much, I guess I didn't want to upset you.'

He looked up at the ceiling again, drew in a huge breath, and pushed it out of his lungs. 'Let's get to the next point.

'This Blackbird Books stuff is just a delusion. You had me going for a while, I'll grant you that, but the whole thing is ridiculous.'

It was as if he had slapped her. 'How can you say that? You can finally -'

'Stop right there. There's no way in the world my father would agree to it. If I went in there the way we planned, he'd bust me down to the mailroom. The whole thing was just a hysterical daydream. What got into me?' For a time he rubbed his forehead, eyes clamped shut. 'Next point. You are not -I repeat, not - under any circumstances, to badger my mother into giving you her so-called manuscript. That is out.'

'I already told you I wasn't,' she said. 'Why don't you move on to the next point, if there is one.'

'Oh, there are several. And we're still dealing with the little stuff, remember.'

She leaned back and looked at him, inwardly reeling from the irony of the situation. When he finally displayed the confidence she had been trying to encourage in him, he used it to complain about her.

'I want you to show my father the respect he deserves. I'm sick and tired of this constant rudeness.'

'You want me to keep quiet when he insults me.'

'If that's how you hear what I just said, yes. Now, about moving out of Westerholm. That's crazy. All you