The Hellfire Club

by Peter Straub

  “Syrian.” Margaret gravely watched him eat. “We get it from a gourmet market, but Miss Weatherall ordered it from an importer in New York. Nothing was too good for her guests.”

  Dart waggled the bottle at her. “Yes, please.” He gave her half a glass and then filled Marian’s.

  A blast of wind like a giant’s hand struck the house. Lily crushed her napkin in her hands. “Lily, you’ve lived through thousands of our storms,” Margaret said. “It can’t be as bad as it sounds, anyhow, because the power’s still on.”

  At that moment the wall sconces died. The reflections of the candle flames wavered in the black windows, and again the wind battered the windows.

  “Spoke too soon,” Margaret said. “No matter. Lily, stop quivering. You know the lights will come on soon.”

  “I know.” Lily thrust her hands between her thighs and stared at her lap.

  “Eat.”

  Lily managed to get an olive to her mouth.

  “Marian, perhaps you’d better take a candle up to Agnes. She has eaten, hasn’t she?”

  “If you can call it eating,” Marian said. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. And I’ll bring back more candles, so we can see our plates.”

  “And will you check the phones?” She turned to Dart. “One of the few drawbacks of living in a place like this is that when the lights go out, fifty percent of the time the phones do, too. They’re too miserly to put in underground phone lines.”

  “Curse of democracy,” Dart said. “All the wrong people are in charge.”

  Margaret gave him a look of glittering indulgence. “That’s right, you share Georgina Weatherall’s taste for strong leaders, don’t you?”

  Lily looked up, for the moment distracted from her terror. “I’ve been thinking about that. It’s true, the mistress did say that powerful nations should be led by powerful men. That’s why she liked Mr. Chancel. He was a powerful man, she said, and someone like that should be running the country.”

  Dart beamed at her. “Good girl, Lily, you’ve rejoined the living. I agree with the mistress completely. Lincoln Chancel would have made a splendid president. We need a man who knows how to seize the reins. I could do a pretty good job myself, I venture to say.”

  “Is that right,” Margaret said.

  Dart took the last of the white wine. “Death penalty for any-one stupid enough to be caught committing a crime. Right there, give the gene pool a shot in the arm. Public executions, televised in front of a live audience. Televise trials, don’t we? Let’s show ’em what happens after the trial is over. Abolish income tax so that people with ability stop carrying the rabble on their backs. Put schools on a commercial basis. Instead of grades, give cash rewards funded by the corporate owners. So on and so forth. Now that the salad part of the meal has been taken care of, why don’t we dig into whatever’s under those lids?”

  Margaret said, “It occurs to me that a playful conversation like this, with wild flights of fancy, must be similar to those held here during Miss Weatherall’s life. Would you agree, Lily?”

  “Oh, yes,” Lily said. “To hear some of those people talk, you’d think they’d gone right out of their heads.”

  “One of the paintings in this room was actually here in those days. Along with the portrait of Miss Weatherall’s father on the staircase, it’s all that survives from her art collection. Can you tell which one it is?”

  “That one.” Nora pointed to a portrait of a woman whose familiar face looked out from beneath a red hat the size and shape of a prize-winning pumpkin.

  “Correct. Miss Weatherall, of course. I believe that portrait brings out all of her strength of character.” Marian came back into the room with a candlestick in each hand and two others clamped to her sides.

  “I think you might remove the hors d’oeuvres plates, Marian, and give me the others so that I can serve up the main course. How is poor Agnes?”

  “Overexcited, but I couldn’t say why.” Marian began collecting the plates. “The phones are out. I suppose they’ll be working again by morning.”

  “I’d love to see Agnes once more,” Nora said.

  Margaret lifted a silver cover off what appeared to be a large, round loaf of bread. Flecks of green dotted the crust. “Norma, I’m sure that Lily and I can be at least as helpful as Agnes Brotherhood. What is this project of yours? A book?”

  “Someday, maybe. I’m interested in a certain period of Shorelands life.”

  Margaret cut into the crust. With two deft motions of the knife, she ladled a small section of the dish onto the topmost plate. Thin brown slices of meat encased in a rich gravy slid out from beneath the thick crust. To this she added glistening snow peas from the other serving dish. “There are buttermilk biscuits in the basket. Norma, would you please pass this to Lily?”

  Dart watched the mixture ooze from beneath crust. “What is that stuff?”

  “Leek and rabbit pie, and snow peas tossed in butter. The rabbit is in a beurre manié sauce, and I’m pretty sure I got all the bay leaves out.”

  “We’re eating a rabbit?”

  “A good big one, too. We were lucky to find it.” She filled another plate. “In the old days, Monty Chandler caught three or four rabbits a month, isn’t that what you said, Lily?”

  “That’s right.” Lily leaned over and inhaled the aroma.

  “Marian, would you bring us the Talbot?” She arranged the remaining plates, and Marian poured four glasses of wine.

  As soon as she sat down, Dart dug into his pie and chewed suspiciously for a moment. “Pretty tasty for vermin.”

  Margaret turned to Nora. “Norma, I gather that the research you speak of concentrates on Hugo Driver.”

  Nora wished that she were able to enjoy one of the better meals of her life. “Yes, but I’m also interested in the other people who were here that summer. Merrick Favor, Creeley Monk, Bill Tidy, and Katherine Mannheim.”

  Lily Melville frowned at her plate.

  “Rather an obscure bunch. Lily, do you remember any of them?”

  “Do I ever,” Lily said. “Mr. Monk was an awful man. Mr. Favor was handsome as a movie star. Mr. Tidy felt like a fish out of water and kept to himself. He didn’t like the mistress, but at least he pretended he did. Unlike her. She couldn’t be bothered, sashaying all around the place.” She glared at Nora. “Fooled the mistress and fooled Agnes, but she didn’t fool me. Whatever happened to that one, it was better than she deserved.”

  The hatred in her voice, loyally preserved for decades, was Georgina’s. This too was the real Shorelands.

  Margaret had also heard it, but she had no knowledge of its background. “Lily, I’ve never heard you speak that way about anyone before. What did this person do?”

  “Insulted the mistress. Then she ran off, and she stole something, too.”

  A partial recognition shone in Margaret’s face. “Oh, this was the guest who staged a mysterious disappearance. Didn’t she steal a Rembrandt drawing?”

  “Redon,” Nora said.

  “Made you sick to look at. It was a woman with a bird’s head, all dark and dirty. It showed her private bits. Reminded me of her, and that’s the truth.”

  “Norma, perhaps we should forget this unfortunate person and concentrate on our Driver business. According to Marian, you feel that Shorelands may have inspired Night Journey. Could you help me to understand how?”

  Nora was grateful that she had just taken a mouthful of the rabbit pie, for it gave her a moment’s grace. She would have to invent something. Lord Night was a caricature of Monty Chandler? Gingerbread was the model for the Cup Bearer’s hovel?

  A gust of wind howled past the windows.

  Sometime earlier, following Lily on the tour, she had sensed . . . had half-sensed . . . had been reminded of . . .

  “We should visit the Song Pillars,” Marian said. “Can you imagine how they sound now?”

  Lily shuddered.

  A door opened in Nora’s mind, and she understood exac
tly what Paddi Mann had meant. “The Song Pillars are a good example of the way Driver used Shorelands,” she said.

  Dart put down his fork and grinned.

  “He borrowed certain locations on the estate for his book. The reason more people haven’t noticed is that most Driver fanatics live in a very insular world. On the other side, Driver has never attracted much academic attention, and the people who know Shorelands best, like yourselves, don’t spend a lot of time thinking about him.”

  “I never think about him,” Margaret said, “but I think I am about to make up for the lapse. What is it you say we haven’t noticed?”

  “The names,” Nora said. “Marian just mentioned the Song Pillars. Driver put them into Night Journey and called them the Stones of Toon. Toon, song? He changed the Mist Field into the Field of Steam. Mountain Glade is—”

  Margaret was staring at her. “Mountain Glade, Monty’s Glen. My Lord. It’s true. Why, this is wonderful. Think of all the people devoted to that book. Norman, help yourself to more of that wine. Your wife has earned it for you. Marian, get the bottle of Beaujolais you opened before dinner, and bring it up with the champagne in the refrigerator. We were going to have a Georgina Weatherall celebration, and by God, we shall.”

  Marian stood up. “You see what I mean about the Driver conference?”

  “I see more than that. I see a Driver week. I see Hugo Driver T-shirts flying out of the gift shop. What cottage did that noble man stay in when he was here?”

  “Rapunzel.”

  Lily mumbled something Nora could not catch.

  “Give me three weeks, and I can turn Rapunzel into a shrine to Hugo Driver. We’ll make Rapunzel the Driver center of the universe.”

  “He wasn’t noble,” Lily muttered.

  “He is now. Lily, this is a great opportunity. Here you are, one of the few people living actually to have known the great Hugo Driver. Every single thing you can remember about him is worth its weight in gold. Was he untidy? We can drop some socks and balled-up typing paper around the room. Did he drink too much? We put a bottle of bourbon on the desk.” Lily took a sullen gulp of wine. “Come on, tell me. What was wrong with him?”

  “Everything.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “You weren’t here.” She looked at Margaret with a touch of defiance. “He was sneaky. He was nasty to the staff, and he stole things.”

  Marian appeared, laden with bottles and a second ice bucket. “Who stole things?”

  “We may have to rehabilitate Mr. Driver a bit more than our usual luminaries,” Margaret said.

  “You knew he was a thief,” Nora said.

  “Of course I knew. Stole silver from this room. Stole a marble ashtray from the lounge. Stole two pillowcases and a pair of sheets from Rapunzel. Books from the library. Stole from the other guests, too. Mr. Favor lost a brand-new fountain pen. The man was a plague, that’s what he was.”

  The cork came out of the Veuve Clicquot with a soft, satisfying pop. “Maybe we should rethink our position on Mr. Driver,” Marian said.

  “Are you serious? We’re going to polish this fellow up until he shines like gold, and if you’re not willing to try, Lily, we’ll let Agnes do it.”

  “She won’t.” Lily drank the rest of her wine. “Agnes was the one who told me half of what I just said. I want some champagne, too, Marian.”

  “What else did he steal, Lily?” Nora asked.

  The old woman looked at a spot on the wall above Nora’s head, then pushed her champagne flute toward Marian.

  “He stole that drawing, didn’t he? The missing Redon. The one you never liked.”

  Lily glanced unhappily at Nora. “I didn’t tell you. I wasn’t supposed to, and I didn’t.”

  Margaret took a sip of champagne and looked back and forth from Nora to Lily in great perplexity. “Lily, two minutes ago you said that the Mannheim girl stole the drawing.”

  “That’s what I was supposed to say.”

  “Who told you to say that?”

  Lily swallowed more champagne and closed her mouth.

  “The mistress, of course,” said Nora.

  Dart chuckled happily and helped himself to rabbit pie.

  Lily was gazing almost fearfully at Nora.

  “She knew because she saw the drawing in Rapunzel the night Miss Mannheim disappeared,” Nora said.

  Lily nodded.

  “When did she tell you about this? And why? You must have asked the mistress if it was really Hugo Driver and not Miss Mannheim who had stolen the drawing,” Nora said.

  Lily nodded again. “It was when she was sick.”

  “When there were no more guests, and she almost never left her room. Agnes Brotherhood spent a lot of time with her.”

  “It was unfair,” Lily said. “Agnes never loved her the way I did. Agnes’s sister Emma used to be her maid, and then Emma died, and the mistress wanted Agnes next to her. She didn’t know the real Agnes, it was only that the sisters looked alike. I would have taken better care of her. I tried to watch out for her, but by that time it was Agnes, Agnes, Agnes.”

  “So it was Agnes who told you about the drawing first.”

  Margaret put her chin on her hand and followed the questions and answers like a spectator at a tennis match.

  “She came out of the mistress’s bedroom, and I looked at her face, and I said, ‘What’s wrong, Agnes?’ because anyone could see she was upset, and she told me to go away, but I asked was something wrong with the mistress, and Agnes said, ‘Nothing we can fix,’ and I kept after her and after her, and finally she put her hand over her eyes and she said, ‘I was right about Miss Mannheim. All this time, and I was right.’ That trampy little thing, I said, she made fun of the mistress, and besides she stole that picture. ‘No, she didn’t,’ Agnes says, ‘it was Mr. Hugo Driver who did that.’ She started laughing, but it wasn’t like real laughing, and she said I should go upstairs and ask the mistress if I didn’t believe her.”

  “So you did,” Nora said.

  Lily finished her glass and shuddered. “I went in and sat down beside her and touched her hair. ‘I suppose Agnes couldn’t keep quiet,’ she said, and it was like before she got sick, with her eyes alive. I said, ‘Agnes lied to me,’ and I told her what she said, and she calmed right down and said, ‘No, Agnes told you the truth. Mr. Driver took that picture,’ and she knew because she saw it in his room at Rapunzel. ‘Why would you go to his room?’ I asked, and she said, ‘I was being my father’s daughter. You could even say I was being Lincoln Chancel.’ So I said, ‘You shouldn’t have let him take it,’ and she told me, ‘Mr. Chancel paid for that ugly drawing a hundred times over. Send Agnes back to me.’ So I sent Agnes back to her room. The next day, the mistress told me that she couldn’t afford my wages anymore, and she would have to let me go, but I was never to tell anyone about who stole that picture, and I never did, not even now.”

  “You didn’t tell,” Nora said. “I guessed.”

  “My goodness,” said Margaret. “What a strange tale. But I don’t see anything that should trouble us, do you, Marian?”

  “Mr. Chancel bought the drawing,” Marian said. “Hugo Driver borrowed it before payment had been arranged, that’s all.”

  “Love it,” Dart said.

  “If we could arrange for the loan of the drawing from the Driver estate, we could hang it in Rapunzel and weave it into the whole Night Journey story.” Margaret sent a look of steely kindness toward Lily. “I know you didn’t like the man, Lily, but we’ve dealt with this problem before. Together, you, Marian, and I can work up any number of sympathetic stories about Mr. Driver. This is going to be a windfall for the Shorelands Trust. More champagne, Norman? And we do have, as a special treat, some petits vacherins. Delicious little meringues filled with ice cream and topped with fruit sauces. Mr. Baxter, our baker in Lenox, had some fresh meringue cases today, wonder of wonders, and Miss Weatherall loved vacherins.”

  “Count me in,” Dart said.

&
nbsp; “Marian, would you be so kind?”

  Marian once again left the room, this time patting Dart on the back as she went past him. As soon as she had closed the door, Lily said, “I don’t feel well.”

  “It’s been a long day,” Margaret said. “We’ll save you some dessert.”

  Lily got unsteadily to her feet, and Dart leaped out of his chair to open the door and kiss her cheek as she left the room. When he took his chair again, Margaret smiled at him. “Lily had some difficulties tonight, but she’ll do her usual splendid job during our Driver celebrations. I see no hindrances, do you?”

  “Only acts of God,” Dart said, and refilled his wineglass.

  Marian returned with a tray of petits vacherins and another bottle of champagne. “Despite Lily’s qualms, I thought we had something to celebrate, so I hope you don’t mind, Margaret.”

  “I won’t have any, but the rest of you help yourselves,” Margaret replied. Yet, when the desserts had been given out and Marian danced around the table pouring more champagne, she allowed her glass to be filled once more. “Mr. Desmond,” she said, “I’ve been wondering if you would be so kind as to recite one of your poems. It would be an honor to hear something you have written.”

  Dart gulped champagne, took a forkful of ice cream and meringue, another swallow of champagne, and jumped to his feet. “I composed this poem in the car on the way to this haven of the literary arts. I hope it will touch you all in some small way. It’s called ‘In Of.’ ”

  "Farewell, bliss—world is, are, lustful death them but none his can I, sick, must— Lord, mercy us!

  "Men, not wealth, cannot you physic, must all to are the full goes I sick must— Lord, mercy us!

  "Beauty but flower wrinkles devour falls the Queens died and dust closed eye” am I die? Have on!

  "Strength unto grave feed Hector swords, not with earth holds her Come! the do, I, sick, must— Lord, mercy us!”

  He surveyed the table. “What do you think?”

  “I’ve never heard anything quite like it,” Margaret said. “The syntax is garbled, but the meaning is perfectly clear. It’s a plea for mercy from a man who expects none. What I find really remarkable is that even though this is the first time I’ve heard the poem, it seems oddly familiar.”