by Laura Powell
And soon, thought Cat, as she began the chilly trudge back to the flat, Flora would go home to where her parents were waiting. It would be a big old house, most likely, where light glowed from behind velvet curtains and the streets were quiet all night long. The blond woman from the church would open the door and hold out her arms. “Thank goodness you’re home,” she’d say. “Everything all right, sweetheart?” the kind-faced man would ask.
“I’m fine, thanks, Daddy,” Cat whispered into the darkness of the city. “Everything’s fine.”
THE NEXT MORNING, MONDAY, Cat had three or four calls from Toby. She ignored them, just as she ignored Bel’s anxious looks over the breakfast table. More fool him if he imagined yesterday had been the beginning of mutual magical escapades. Even so, she was—on balance—grateful to the guy. Flora too. For all its craziness, last night had been very instructive, she reminded herself as she flicked through the Yellow Pages. Moira’s Bar, Morden House, Morelli’s …
It turned out to be a coffee shop just off the King’s Road. Flora and her friends had taken over most of the ground floor, sprawled elegantly on the oversized sofa or perched on the chairs. The girls’ lattes were skinny to match their jeans, their lips as glossy as their hair. There were a couple of floppy-haired, drawling boys dotted among them.
Flora, sipping daintily from a glass of water, didn’t seem any the worse for wear from the night before. Her skin was peachy-smooth, her eyes clear blue. She was wearing a cream cashmere sweater, and a tiny gold cross glinted around her neck.
“Hello, Flora. Got a minute?”
Conversation halted and glances were exchanged. “Do you know this girl, Flo?” frowned the fair-haired boy sitting next to her.
Flora gave a sweet, helpless shrug. “Well … we do seem to keep on bumping into each other.” She blinked up at Cat with the polite bafflement she did so well. “You know, I’m afraid this isn’t a good time.”
“But the future of the world is at stake!” Cat turned to the others and grinned broadly. “See, we’re both members of the Lord of the Rings Role-Playing Society. Flora here is one of our most adventurous gamers. But now we’re coming up to a critical strategic point.…”
Flora’s eyes flashed. Two of the girls were spluttering into their lattes; the rest of the crowd looked torn between confusion and hostility. Cat pressed on remorselessly. “Orcs against Elves: the final showdown. So, Flo, are you coming? Or maybe I should just pull up a chair and—”
“No need,” said Flora smoothly. The boy next to her caught at her hand. “It’s fine, Charlie. Honestly. I just need to sort out this … mix-up. I won’t be long.”
She followed Cat out of the coffee shop, limping slightly, and over to a bench across the street. They both sat down warily, not quite looking at each other.
“I really don’t appreciate being put on the spot like that,” Flora began. “How did you find me, anyway?”
“Your phone call in the cab. How’s the ankle?”
“It’s not too bad, thank you.”
“Could’ve been worse. You could be picking werewolf teeth out of it.”
Flora wrinkled her pretty little nose, as if to say she found the remark in bad taste. “I don’t mean to sound rude, but what do I have to do to get you to leave me alone?”
“Talk to me. About last night … among other things.”
“Last night? Really? I wouldn’t have thought there’s much to be said.”
“It was lucky for you we came along, though, wasn’t it? Else I’m not sure you could’ve got up that fire escape. Dodgy ankle aside, you were so smashed you could barely walk straight, let alone outrun the beasties.” Flora’s breath hissed but Cat just smiled blandly at her. Two could play at that game. “Is that what the Arcanum is to you?” she continued, still in a conversational tone. “Party central? A place to get off your face where Mummy and Daddy need never know?”
If Cat was hoping to get a rise out of the other girl, she was unsuccessful.
“I wouldn’t have lasted very long if that were true,” Flora replied tightly. She began fiddling with the tassels of her scarf. “Not that it’s any of your business but … yesterday was a bad day, that’s all.”
An anniversary, Cat remembered her saying. She pushed the thought to one side. “You’re right: it’s not my business. Fact is, I couldn’t care less about what you get up to in there. I’m just here for your expertise.”
“Your sidekick seems well informed.”
“Toby? He’s an amateur. Not like you.”
Flora didn’t say anything for a while, staring out at the street with unseeing eyes. Then she sighed. “What do you want to know?”
Cat took a deep breath.
“The first time I went into the Arcanum, the Six of Cups was in play. But when I went back to find it again, the threshold had gone. I want you to tell me how I can get back into the card.”
“It is a dangerous card.”
“I thought it was one of the better ones.”
Flora made a small, impatient gesture. “Every card has its tricks. People can disappear in that one, wandering endlessly around in the past until they forget their present selves. After all,” she said quietly, “there are few things more seductive than lost happiness.”
For a moment, Cat caught the sound of distant laughter, the scent of flowers and sunbaked earth drifting in the air. Once upon a time, there had been a family: Caroline, Adam and Kitty Harper. But their happiness hadn’t been lost—it had been stolen.
She clenched her jaw. “I don’t want to go there so I can be a rose-tinted kid again. I want to go back because I saw something there that I don’t understand. Something important. Unless … unless it’s just a trick?”
“The Six of Cups only shows the truth.” The other girl’s face was blank. Cat wondered if Flora, too, had walked across that velvet lawn, into the maze of memories beyond.
“So how do I get the threshold back?”
“You can’t—a threshold disappears once a move is finished and the players have left. Then another one appears somewhere else, for another knight. What lies on the other side will depend on the card dealt to the knight in play.”
“Well, once I’ve gotten into the Arcanum, can’t I go from one card to another?”
“No. Each move is played within its own self-contained space. Like the squares on a chessboard. If you kept on walking, before long you’d find you were hitting dead end after dead end.”
“But the Six of Cups is my only chance—”
“Then you have two options,” Flora replied evenly. “Either you keep going into the Arcanum, time after time, threshold after threshold, in the hope that you stumble on what you’re looking for, perhaps in the Six of Cups, perhaps in some other card. Or …”
“Or?”
“You walk away. Forget any of this ever happened, ignore the prickling on your palm, shut your eyes to the signs on the thresholds. Look for your answers in the real world.”
“I can’t do that.”
“No.” Flora gave a half smile. “None of us can. It’s ironic, really. A chancer can’t play for a triumph. We’re part of a game we’re not allowed to win. And yet the temptation’s the same.”
“What temptation?”
“Of finding your heart’s desire, of course.” She spoke with bitterness.
There was a burst of laughter from across the street: Flora’s friends had come out of the coffee shop and were taking up the pavement in a lively gaggle. She got to her feet and straightened her clothes. “It’s time I got back.”
“OK then. Thanks and … uh, see you around sometime.”
Flora gave another of her polite, bland smiles. “Maybe.”
Cat watched as she walked back to her friends, who pulled her in, laughing, exclaiming, shaking out their glossy hair. The boy called Charlie slung a careless arm around her shoulder. The group moved on.
When Cat got back to the flat that afternoon, she realized she was too exhausted to think,
even to feel. After everything that had happened, the numbness came as a relief.
She spent the next couple of days holed up in her bedroom with The Wondrous World of Tarot and an ordinary Tarot deck, trying to familiarize herself with the cards so that she could recognize their Game of Triumphs equivalents. The illustrations were reasonably similar and so were their meanings, as far as she could tell. But it was impossible to guess what kind of strange life the Arcanum might give them.
Some cards were easier to remember than others. The Fool was the chancers’ card; Fortune, the one that called a Lottery. Four aces, one for each of the four elements. The Greater Arcana’s triumphs and the Lesser Arcana’s court cards … Cat presumed that the court cards showing groups of people in various activities, often involving combat, were the moves where knaves were likely to be involved.
There was one triumph that she kept coming back to, which was illustrated by a stern-faced woman holding a sword and scales. Justice. With Justice on her side, Cat would be able to find her parents’ murderer, and make him pay. But she was a chancer, and this was a power she couldn’t win.
Please, her mother’s voice entreated in her head, there’s been some mistake. And the other voice, the third voice, the one that was just out of reach …
Out of reach in the ordinary world, yes, but in the Arcanum it was a different matter. There, where time and distance blurred, she might find all kinds of impossible things—forgotten voices, secret truths, her past happiness. She might even find the person who had taken it from her. In which case, Cat wouldn’t need any triumph. Cat would deal out justice herself.
She told Bel that she felt she might be coming down with something. Neither of them had yet made any direct reference to the revelations of Saturday night. It was as if they had suddenly become shy of each other, Bel especially, and Cat found Bel’s nervousness deeply unsettling. For the moment, Bel could understand that she was still coming to terms with the true circumstances of her parents’ death, but Cat knew that from here on, the enormous, impossible secret of the Arcanum would always be between them.
By Wednesday afternoon, however, Bel had decided enough was enough. When Cat slunk into the kitchen to get some toast, it was to find the place festooned with tropical-fruit fairy lights. Luridly glowing bananas, pineapples and bunches of grapes dripped from the walls; a fringe of red and green tinsel hung in the doorframe. Her aunt was sitting with her feet up on the table, wearing a paper crown from a Christmas cracker and eating brandy butter from a jar.
“God almighty,” she said, looking Cat up and down, “you look like crap.”
“Compliments of the season to you, too.”
“How d’you like the bling?”
“Tinsel-tastic … Can I have some of that?”
“Help yourself. It’s about time we had a bit of Christmas spirit round here. And speaking of spirit,” Bel continued sternly, jabbing her spoon for emphasis, “you, puss, are growing old before your time. Old and dull. And I’m no better. We need to get out of this hole of a flat and have some fun.”
Cat grinned through a mouthful of brandy butter, mostly from relief that things appeared to be back to normal between them. “What kind of fun?”
“The high-rolling kind.”
Bel explained, gleefully, that Greg had used his connections to wangle them tickets to a charity poker tournament being held in a Mayfair hotel that night. There would be bright lights and glamour. Free booze and designer canapés. Cat couldn’t think of anything worse.
“Sounds like a bit of a busman’s holiday,” she tried. “For you and Greg, I mean. And gambling’s for mugs—everyone knows that.”
It was true Bel thought of the Luxe’s clientele with a kind of genial contempt. “Poor old dopes,” she’d say, “down to their last chip, hoping their final throw’s going to save the mortgage or the marriage or whatever it is. And even if it does, the next round takes it off them all over again.” But she always added that pity was a waste of time, given the way gamblers got abusive when their numbers didn’t come up.
Now she waved off Cat’s remark. “Yeah, but this is different—a good cause and all that, for people who can afford it.”
“Sounds heartwarming.”
“ ’Sides, you and me are going for the social scene, not the bleeding poker.”
It occurred to Cat that maybe that was what the evening was about for Bel: a fantasy version of her job, where the champagne fizzed and the music played, where everyone was a winner and nothing important was at stake. Which made it all the more difficult for Cat to explain why she didn’t want to go. In spite of her fear and resentment of the Game, it was all she thought about. She just had to decide her next move.
Greg’s connections weren’t high enough to get them through the front of the Martingale Hotel; instead, they were sneaked through a service door at the back. Since the entrance fee for the event was three hundred pounds for players and two hundred for spectators, they could hardly complain, although Bel, who’d been hoping for marble and chandeliers, was a little disappointed by their surroundings. Everything was sleek and minimalist, luxuriously restrained.
As they entered the reception area, Cat found herself thinking back to Temple House. The party-going hum was the same, and the air tingled with the same sense of privilege and expectation. All around them, women were greeting each other with cooing air kisses, the men exchanging slaps on the back and barks of laughter.
She could see Bel sizing the place up with amusement. Bel’s flashy dress and brash brightness should have been incompatible with everything else about the evening, and yet the heads she turned were mostly admiring. The male ones, anyway; Cat was rather touched by the proprietary way in which Greg ushered her to a table in the bar. His dusty tux made him look more drooping than ever. Not that she could talk. In her plain black shift—one of Bel’s castoffs—she could almost have passed for one of the hotel staff.
Cat had known from the start that she was feeling too fidgety to sit down and too prickly for company. She told the other two that she was going to the main room to check out the tournament, but it didn’t take long for her to realize that as a spectator sport, poker came somewhere between bowling and watching paint dry. From there, she wandered into another lounge area, where a jazz band was in the process of setting up.
It was also the place where the few guests who were near her own age had assembled. The way they looked and talked reminded her of Flora’s friends. In fact, there was a blond girl in a lace cocktail dress who—
“Cat? I don’t believe it! You know, I’d been hoping I’d run into you again.”
Cat had seen Flora the ice maiden, Flora the wild child, but this was a different Flora again. Flora the friendly, all sparkle and charm.
“You have?”
“Oh yes. What luck you turning up tonight!” This made Cat uneasy. She didn’t trust luck, or coincidence. Not anymore. “Are you here with your parents, too? Daddy’s on the board of the trust. Last year they raised over a hundred thousand pounds, you know. Anyway …” Flora lowered her voice, though her expression remained brightly social. “I was thinking that we should meet up. Toby as well. There’s something I think you’ll be really interested in, to do with what we were talking about the other day. Something I’ve found.”
“To do with the, er, Game?”
Flora smiled. “What else? Listen, how are you fixed for tomorrow? I know everyone’s madly busy at this time of year.”
Ah yes. The giddy social whirl. “I’ll have to check my calendar.”
The other girl either ignored or didn’t pick up on her ironical tone. “Well, if you’re free, perhaps you and Toby should come round to mine. Say, six-ish?” Flora scribbled her address and phone number down on a piece of paper, and Cat found herself folding it away in her pocket. “Wonderful. If I don’t see you later, enjoy the rest of the evening!”
Cat was left frowning to herself. Part of her was tempted to tell Flora to shove it—why should Cat com
e running when she called? But underneath the charm, there had been something a little feverish in Flora’s manner, a kind of urgency, which was very intriguing. She’d been waiting for something like this. Her next cue …
Bel’s voice cut into her thoughts. “There you are! Who were you talking to back then?”
“Just this girl I kind of … bumped into, once.”
“Looks a right little princess,” Bel sniffed. “One of those trust-fund types.”
“Looks like it.”
“Listen, puss-cat, have you seen Greg anywhere?”
“The last I saw, he was getting cozy with you in the corner.”
“Yeah, but then he went off to have a word with his mate, the one who got us into this place. I don’t suppose you’d be a star and go look for him?”
“Why can’t you?”
Bel rolled her eyes humorously. “ ’Cause I’m busy networking, aren’t I?” She lowered her voice. “See him over there? Goatee, cigar? Well, he’s only the manager of that flash new casino off Trafalgar Square; Alliette’s, it’s called. This could be my big break.”
“I don’t see why you need Greg, then. Won’t he just cramp your style?”
“Greg might be my boss, but he knows I’m destined for better things than the Luxe. He’ll big me up just to keep me sweet. C’mon,” she wheedled, “he’ll not have gone far. Try the night porter’s room—we passed it on our way in.”
Cat decided that looking for Greg was marginally more interesting than watching poker. But retracing their back-door route to the party was trickier than she’d thought. Perhaps she should have gone right rather than left at the end of the hall, or maybe her first mistake was going past the last set of double doors. At any rate, before she knew it she was adrift in the back stairs and service corridors. She passed a laundry-sorting room, full of weary dark-faced women; glimpsed a cramped office lined with pigeonholes; heard clashes and roars from the kitchens. Eventually, she found her way to the delivery entrance at the back of the building. A couple of porters were on a break, smoking by the wall.
