The Master of Misrule (32 page)

There was a fountain in the lobby, and Cat could still hear its gentle splashing behind the background noise. The collective glister of all the mirrors and gilding and cut glass reminded her of Temple House. She looked through a door and saw four people playing cards around a green baize table. There were two men, one of them black, a woman
dressed in white and a darker one in furs. But the woman in white turned to reveal a tanned, bony profile, and when the younger man laughed, Cat saw he was Chinese. None of them were people she knew.

The sweetness of lilies and murmur of water increased until she reached the stairs at the end of the hall. They led up to a private gaming salon that was closed for refurbishment. Paper had been stripped raggedly from the walls, and the floor was littered with builders’ and decorators’ tools. The only light came from a cheap desk lamp.

Bel was sitting on a chair by the fireplace, staring listlessly at something in her hand. She looked up as the door opened.

“Cat …?” Her aunt blinked at her, bewildered.

She should have been more than bewildered, of course. Tearing hair and spitting nails, in fact. It had only just dawned on Cat that she had been gone overnight, without a word. But Bel’s manner was like that of a sleepwalker who hasn’t quite woken up.

“I wasn’t feeling right so my manager sent me home,” she explained vaguely. “I had a funny turn, they said.”

“But we’re not at the flat. We’re at the casino.”

Bel looked around in bemusement. “Oh … I see. So we are. I could’ve sworn …”

Cat drew nearer to the chair. Bel was wearing her croupier’s uniform of tight black skirt and low-necked satin blouse, but she was in nearly as much disarray as her niece. Mascara had smudged down one side of her face, and there
was mud on her skirt. The same mud was on Cat’s jeans. Mud from the Eight of Cups.

Cat looked closer. Bel was holding something in her hands, stroking it over and over. It was a gilt-trimmed card, thick and richly colored. The Triumph of Eternity was pictured on the front.

“Where did you get that card?”

Bel didn’t answer.

“Do you know what it is?” Cat’s voice was harsh with fear. “Do you?”

But Bel shook her head and shivered and did not speak, her eyes glassy with unshed tears.

“
Where did you get that card
?”

“I dreamed it,” said Bel at last. “And when I woke up, it was in my hand. I dream of it all the time, Cat. Every night it goes dancing through my sleep, in a shower of dark coins. At least … it used to. Not so much anymore. I thought it was going to leave me be. I thought …”

And this time the tears did fall.

Shudders of dread were running up and down Cat’s spine. She was shaking so hard that she could barely speak. “In the swamp … you begged me for forgiveness. Why?”

“What?”

“You were in the swamp with me. You remember. I know you do.”

For just as the boundaries between moves in the Game were breaking down, so were the boundaries between the Arcanum and the ordinary world. Cat understood that now.

“I had … I had a funny turn.…”

Cat crouched by her feet. “Please, Bel,” she said softly, helplessly. “Tell me how you found the card.”

The invitation to the Arcanum turned this way and that, flashing through Bel’s quick croupier’s fingers.

“It’s not mine,” she whispered. “It never was. I stole it from him.”

After a long, echoing silence, Bel got up and stood by the window. Her shivers had stopped. When she began to talk again, her voice was tired but calm. There may even have been relief in it.

“I was eighteen. That’s not an excuse, course it’s not, because in lots of ways I was older than my years. Those ways were mostly the wrong ones, though.

“So I left for the city and didn’t look back. My mum had died the year before; my sister Caroline was twenty-six and had her own family. Age gaps don’t count for much when you’re adults, but growing up, it felt like a world apart. Dad scarpered when I was little and Mum and Caro had done their best with me, but I ran rings round them like it was an Olympic sport.

“When I got to London, I had enough confidence for ten people. I’d come to find my fortune, see. And I got a job pretty quick, cocktail-waitressing at a West End bar. They had these uniforms: silver lamé, the skirts split up the thigh.… I thought I was the bee’s knees.

“Anyway, there was a casino attached to the hotel next door, and sometimes the gamblers came round to us to toast
their success or drown their sorrows, as may be. I’d only been working there a couple of months when I met Alec. Alec Crawley. He came in with a gang of bankers one afternoon. And the next night he asked me over to the casino, to help him win.

“Alec was always very charming, with this stammer that made everything he said sound gentle, somehow. He used to call me Red. Although he wasn’t the obviously dashing sort, he had a way of looking at a girl like she’d melt quick as butter. He’d made his money in Russia, so the gossip went, and owned a club in Chelsea. The waiting list for membership was a mile long and it was only ever open three nights a week. The other nights he used it for business. I didn’t ask what this business was.

“I wasn’t his only girl, I knew that, but he saw more of me than the rest, and thought more of me, too, so I flattered myself.

“When Alec wasn’t at his club or the casino, he spent a fair amount of time in these crusty old antique shops and libraries. Treasure hunting, he said. Occasionally, he’d drop everything to follow a lead, and dash off for a day or so, though he always came back bad-tempered.

“The other thing he did was Tarot cards. Time and again, I’d find him spreading them out on his desk, poring over them like a treasure map. They gave me the shivers, to be honest. Once I told him that fortune-telling was for old women and little girls. Afterward, I was afraid. He looked at me so coldly I felt as if someone had shoved ice down my throat. Then he laughed, and he said he’d already made his
fortune, and was on the hunt for a new kind of gamble. The biggest wins were yet to come.

“I thought he meant poker. He took it seriously as any cardsharp.

“Anyhow, one night I was meant to be meeting him at his club, and he was late. When he finally arrived, he’d been out drinking with his buddies and had forgotten I was supposed to be there.

“However, he said he was celebrating because that day he’d found something he’d been searching for for a long time. He patted his coat pocket and smiled. It was a lucky day, he said. Then he gave me a kiss.
You’re the second of my treasures, Red
.

“He told me to stick around to mix the drinks and so on for their poker game. I wasn’t keen. I didn’t much care for his friends and there was one who really gave me the creeps: this big, swarthy chap with fat hands. I didn’t like the way he looked at me.

“So they drank and they smoked and they played their cards. Toward the end of one round, the swarthy man—Mathers, I think he was called—said he wanted to mix things up a little. Make the stakes more interesting, he said. ‘Fine,’ said Alec. ‘What do you want to play for?’ ‘The Queen of Hearts,’ Mathers said. And he leered toward me. ‘I’ll raise you my flashy new sports car. My car for your girl.’

“ ‘All right,’ said Alec. And off they went.

“I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. Nothing. I just waited, this silly smile stuck on my face like it’d been chiseled
there. I didn’t know who I was anymore. It was as if some other poor chump sat at the bar and the real Bel was watching her from far, far away.

“Alec won in the end. Mathers chucked over his car keys like it was one big joke, though everyone could see he was sore about it. There was a lot of laughter. Old Alec winked at me. Ha-ha, no hard feelings.… And then they started another hand.

“When I brought him his next drink, I made it a double. He’d been drinking for a while, and was far too pleased with his winnings to notice. And I brought him another couple after that. Then I said I was going to bed. Alec stayed in hotels mostly, but he had an apartment over the club, too. When I said good night, I even managed to smile.

“It was near daylight when he came up. He was drunker than I’d ever seen him. Hardly able to stumble into bed. And when I was sure he was out cold, I reached into his coat. Just to see. I don’t know what I was expecting: the key to a safe, a portrait of his dear dead mum.… God knows. What I found was a funny kind of card. There was a picture of a wheel on the front, and an invitation on the back. Something about a house and a temple, cards and coins. And I thought of Alec talking about his treasures, and how I was the second one, so I took the card, and left a poker chip instead. That’s what I was worth to him.

“Then I walked out of the club and all the way to the station, still in my party dress and my sparkly heels. And I left the city and I didn’t look back.”

“But he … Alec … he came after you.”

“Yes.”

“He came after
us
. My mum and dad. He—”

“Yes.”

“He came after the card.”

Bel hung her head low. “Yes,” she said. “God forgive me, he did.”

“I turned up on your parents’ doorstep with no warning, no luggage, nothing. I said I’d split with my boyfriend and lost my job, and didn’t know where else to go. Straight off, Caro made a bed up for me on the sofa and told me not to worry, everything would work out for the best. Adam said their home was mine, for as long as I wanted.

“I told myself I’d put all the other crap behind me. I looked into taking some courses—maybe even going back to college—and helped Caro out with you, and around the house. I wanted to prove myself like I never had before.

“I kept finding different hiding places for Alec’s card. I couldn’t imagine why the invitation was valuable, and yet something kept drawing me to it. It was so beautiful, you know? It was in my pocket for a while, then tucked in my bedclothes, behind the fridge, under your parents’ bed.… I wanted to forget about it, but I couldn’t let it go. Finally, I tore it up.

“A couple of weeks went by. I had my birthday and we celebrated together, the four of us. A family. And the next Saturday, I offered to take you on a visit across town, to stay
overnight with an old friend of our mum’s. I thought it’d be nice for Caro and Adam to have the place to themselves for once. I thought it would be nice to give them a night off.

“And that was the night … that was the night … the night …”

Cat watched stonily as her aunt fought to compose herself. After a while, Bel was able to speak again.

“As soon as I came back the next morning and saw the police car in the street, I knew what must’ve happened. I knew that Alec had caught up with me, I knew what he’d done. What
I
had done.

“The house was trashed. Some druggie, the police thought, looking for a fix. A burglary gone wrong. I knew better, of course.

“I was the only person who could connect Alec Crawley to the crime. Maybe his revenge on me had only just started. So as soon as I could, I got some bits and pieces together, took you and began the first of our disappearing acts.

“From then on, it was just the two of us. I changed my name. I changed my hair. I changed as much about me as I could manage. Those first years, I moved us every couple of months, and never stopped looking over my shoulder.

“Then I started to put some feelers out. On the sly, and in secret, I took the risk of getting in touch with people who knew people who knew Alec. And I heard that only a couple of days after your parents died, the police came looking for Alec on account of something else entirely. He’d had to leave the country in a hurry. Rumor had it he’d gone to ground somewhere in the Far East.

“As time went by, I felt safer. We stayed put in places for longer. I didn’t start and quit quite so many jobs. I went back to being a redhead and a loudmouth. I started to relax.

“Then last year, I heard a whisper that Alec Crawley was dead. He’d got on the wrong side of some powerful people, and his crimes had caught up with him. We were safe, both of us. So I came back to London to start again.”

Bel’s voice had been steady enough, but now her face crumpled and she began to gasp and gulp dryly, like someone starved of air.

“You have to believe me, Cat. I knew Alec was dodgy, a bit of a crook perhaps, but I never dreamed … It’s not like I’d talked to him about my family, or where I came from, but if I’d known what he was, what he was capable of … God’s truth, I swear I’d never’ve—I swear—I—”

Cat swallowed. Her fists were clenched so hard that the whites of her knuckles poked through the skin. “OK. Your part in my parents’ deaths was an accident. You weren’t that much older than me and you’d stumbled into something you didn’t understand, not until it was too late. And I know … that is, I can see how one wrong turn can change your life.” She drew a wavering breath. “So, yeah, maybe I can understand how it happened. But not how you could lie to me about it. About
everything
.”

“I—I lied to protect you.”

“And yourself.”

“How could I face you with the truth? I couldn’t even face it myself.”

“But I found the truth out anyway. Or half of it: how there was no car crash, only murder. I confronted you, and you apologized and you cried. We both did. And then you
kept on lying
. And
lying
. It was Alec you were thinking of, not Mum, when you found my Tarot card book, wasn’t it?”