The feather-and-glitter costume of last night in the Amethyst had been replaced today by a sober, loose-fitting dress revealed when Nellie Coker removed the fur she was wearing, despite the warmer weather. Last night she had been the ringmaster, today she was surprisingly matronly.
Gwendolen sipped her tea and was struck by a sudden uncomfortable thought. What if the tea was drugged? What if she was about to be slipped off somewhere, never to surface again, like the girls Frobisher was worried about? What if Nellie Coker—and here was an unpleasant thought—what if Nellie somehow knew that Gwendolen was in cahoots with Frobisher?
“PG Tips,” Nellie reassured, as if she could read Gwendolen’s mind. （Could she? What a thought!）
“You summoned me,” Gwendolen reminded her.
“Requested your company. Spirits are summoned.”
“Why?”
“As I said, I have a proposition for you.”
* * *
—
“There, look at that,” Nellie said, moving her hands over the cards. “Your fortune, your destiny, laid out before you.” Nellie gave Gwendolen a calculating look over her spectacles. “You are going to love and be loved,” she said.
“A man?” Gwendolen said, as some response seemed to be expected of her, and yet she couldn’t keep the cynicism out of her voice.
“More than one.”
Good Lord—how many more?, Gwendolen wondered.
Nellie Coker frowned at the cards, no doubt for effect, Gwendolen thought. The woman was no different from any seaside charlatan. Or one of the many bogus spiritualists who had sprung up in the wake of the war, deluding the bereaved into thinking the dead were happy with their lot. Gwendolen’s mother for one, of course. “Harry says he likes it where he is,” she reported to Gwendolen after one of these seances, “and doesn’t want me to worry about him. Oh, and to watch out for scab on the apple trees.” Because, of course, the state of their orchard would have been on Harry’s mind in the afterlife.
Nellie’s brow furrowed, a genuine-looking frown this time. “You are going to be an instrument of something.”
“Of what?”
Nellie turned suddenly pale. Her gaze had shifted from the cards to the wall behind Gwendolen. She was staring fixedly at it as if an image had been projected onto it, as if she had indeed summoned a spirit. Gwendolen turned to look, but there was nothing there.
“Mrs. Coker?”
“Hm?” And then, with an abruptness that surprised Gwendolen, Nellie swept the cards into a pile. The clairvoyance was over, apparently. At that moment, the bells of St. James’s in Piccadilly began calling the faithful to Evensong.
“I must go,” Nellie said, heaving herself up from her chair with the help of her stick. “One of my children is not herself.”
“Oh, Lord, I am sorry to hear that, Mrs. Coker.” （Which child? Not Niven, surely? He had been very much himself last night.）
“One of my daughters.” （Again, the mind-reading.） “My car’s outside. If you’ll walk me to the door, I’ll pay for a cab for you.”
“That’s very kind, Mrs. Coker, but I prefer to walk back to the Warrender. It’s such a nice sunny afternoon.”
“Is it nice?” Nellie said. She seemed to be questioning the character of the sun rather than its presence in the London skies. She lived a subterranean life, like a mole, and Gwendolen thought that the weather probably meant little to Nellie Coker.
* * *
—
Nellie struggled into the car with the help of her chauffeur—Hawker, she called him. She seemed rather weak—was she ill? But then she had just served a prison sentence, it was unlikely that incarceration was good for your health. A nurse Gwendolen had served with at the Front had been imprisoned in the cause of women’s suffrage before the war. Despite the dreadful tales of prison life—she had been fed by tube and never really recovered—Gwendolen found herself envious of someone who had a passion strong enough to require sacrifice. Nellie Coker had offered herself up to imprisonment in the cause of a liquor licence. It hardly seemed worth it.
“Miss Kelling?” Nellie was leaning forward in her seat to speak to Gwendolen through the open car window.
“Yes, Mrs. Coker?”
“Do think about my offer, Miss Kelling. I hope your answer will be yes. If you could let me know as soon as possible. You have my card.”
The chauffeur was back in the driving seat and Nellie knocked on the roof of the car with her stick as if she were in an old-fashioned hansom cab.