Free Bride of the Rat God by Barbara Hambly Page A

now.”
    Norah had visited Enterprise Studios and heard Herr Hertler, formerly a soloist for the Berlin Philharmonic. Only Christine, she thought resignedly, would speak of that elderly maestro as an “awful old German fiddler.” She walked out onto the porch, overcome once more by the sense of the utter alienness of this world. In fairly short order, she supposed, she’d be dragooned into a mah-jongg game.
    Like nursery cribbage.
    White-painted walls, shabby volumes of King Arthur and Robin Hood... her brother Sean and the Whittaker cousins, Clive and Edward. Another world. Eleven, Trenton Gardens, prior to 1914, the year she went up to Oxford. The year Clive died in Belgium. She wondered what Charles Sandringham had been playing in, in 1914. He’d been at the height of his powers, she calculated, traveling between London and the New York film studios; she remembered her mother going to see some costume epic because he was in it.
    The Fugitive King , that was it. A little short for Charles II, but that perfect profile amid raven lovelocks drove historical considerations from any sane woman’s mind.
    That was when they’d still had money. When they had still had servants. Before her mother had turned, almost overnight, it seemed, from an active, intellectual suffragist to an overworked, exhausted drudge, fighting desperately to keep a household together on less and less money, less and less food. Even before Sean had returned, or the little that was left of Sean.
    Norah closed her eyes, putting the past third of her life aside with the firmness of long and bitter practice. Like skipping chapters in a novel... If I don’t read past page ninety, it won’t have happened to them. Black Beauty will still live with all his friends at Birtwick Park... the knights will be able to go on having jolly adventures without Lancelot meeting Guinevere and bringing the whole Round Table crashing down into ruin on their heads. Sean and Mother and Papa will still be alive, and I’ll still be that tall skinny girl in the pink sash, practicing my piano and reading the socialist papers in the sunlight of the breakfast room. I won’t have to know what happened to them — what happened to us all.
    Behind her in the house she could hear Christine’s voice, breathy and sweet as a child’s. “...Ambrose Conklin, the most darling millionaire, and he followed me all around the party, getting me drinks and telling me how much he adored the film—not, between you and me, darling, that he could remember whether Charlie was supposed to be my husband or my father or what.”
    Norah almost laughed out loud, since Christine, even while Kiss of Darkness was being made, had had a good deal of difficulty remembering whether she was actually supposed to have married her final victim.
    “D’ja think that spiritualist’ll find out Ambrose Conklin and I were connected in a previous life?”
    In time Flindy dashed down the front steps and sprang into her red and silver Studebaker like Tom Mix leaping into the saddle, bound, Norah guessed, for Ah Lum’s down on Hollywood Boulevard for take-out. Chinese food, which she’d eaten for the first time upon their arrival in New York, had been a revelation to her after a lifetime of roast beef and puddings with jam; six weeks in and out of Colossus Studios had convinced her that half the film industry lived on egg foo yung.
    Curious, she thought, watching Flindy roar away with even less regard for the correct side of the pavement than Christine customarily demonstrated. In her little stateroom aboard the Ruritania, when she’d thought about the fact that she was actually going to Hollywood, she’d thought in terms of things she would see, not of new foods. Certainly not about the fact that she could sit on her sister-in-law’s porch on the first day of December without so much as a sweater on. That the grass by the pavement would be green. The air smelled like rain again, and wind was starting up, an angry