Free The Sibyl in Her Grave by Sarah Caudwell

him to feel he couldn’t come round and see me just because I’d been a bit cross with him. On the other hand, not being sure exactly what terms he’d been on with her, I couldn’t very well offer anything like formal condolences.
    He came round bringing a bottle of Sancerre, and we sat out in the garden drinking it. I still didn’t quite know what to say about Isabella. In the end, I thought that the best thing was simply to begin by talking about the funeral arrangements, and leave it to him to say how sad he was she was dead, or whatever he wanted to say. Instead of that, he suddenly interrupted me, and said, “Reg—about those shares you thought I told her about.”
    Of course I told him not to be silly—it was all water under the bridge and there was no need to mention it.
    “No,” he said. “No, I want to explain—I didn’t tell Isabella about those shares.”
    “Now really, Ricky,” I said, almost beginning to feel a bit impatient, because after all no one else could have done.
    “I didn’t tell her about them,” said Ricky. “She told me.”
    Not long after she moved here, and she and Ricky renewed their acquaintance, she’d said that she’d like to give him a present—he was a friend, and she liked to give presents to her friends. The present was simply a free prediction—theshareholders in a particular company were going to have something to celebrate within the next month—he could make as much or as little of it as he liked.
    Well, Ricky couldn’t see any reason for the shares to go up, but so that she wouldn’t be offended he bought a few. A couple of weeks later there was a takeover bid, and they doubled in value almost overnight. By the time Maurice and Griselda and I asked him for his advice, this had happened three or four times and he thought that the best thing he could do for us was to give us the benefit of Isabella’s predictions.
    “But look here,” I said. “You don’t actually believe that Isabella could foretell the future?” From the way he’d told me the story, it seemed to be the only explanation.
    “Oh,” said Ricky, “anyone can foretell the future, if their information’s good enough.”
    According to Ricky, Isabella hadn’t always been a fortune-teller. In her younger days, she was a hostess at a London nightclub which was popular at that time with businessmen and stockbrokers and so on. In the course of her conversations with customers—well yes, Julia, I think that probably is a slightly expurgated version—she learnt a great deal about what was going on in financial circles, including a lot of things that no one was supposed to know were going on and some things that weren’t supposed to be going on at all. That, in Ricky’s view, was the basis of her success as a fortuneteller.
    I was surprised, if her information was as reliable as that, that she hadn’t simply used it to make money on the stock market, instead ofbothering with the fortune-telling business. But she seems to have had some kind of superstition about that—she thought it would be unlucky for her to invest in shares herself, and she never did.
    “But Ricky,” I said, “all this must have been at least twenty or thirty years ago. How could she still go on getting information?”
    “Information’s like money,” said Ricky. “Once you’ve got it, you can use it to get more. You can buy one secret by keeping another. ‘I’m keeping your secret because you’re my friend—prove you’re my friend by telling me—’ Well, whatever it is you want.”
    I thought this was all beginning to sound rather unpleasant—almost as if Isabella had been a professional blackmailer.
    “Yes,” said Ricky. “That’s right. That’s what she was. There must be quite a number of people who aren’t sorry she’s dead—as a matter of fact, I’m one of them. I’ve had a pretty rotten two years of it, Reg.”
    I didn’t really feel, after this, that I could ask him to deliver the