The Clairvoyant Countess Read Online Free PDF

garden, upon which a great deal of time and money had been lavished. Two brownstone houses had been thrown together and remodeled with huge glass windows looking out upon the garden, which at this season was ablaze with colorful flowers and maze-like hedges. Small pink tents had been set up for refreshments and a yellow one for Madame Karitska; an orange marquee held a number of uniformed musicians who were to play chamber music, and small tables and gilt chairs had been placed among the shrubbery.
    Madame Karitska had brought with her a flowing robe, which, in the absence of a crystal ball, Mrs. Faber-Jones agreed would be appropriate for her to wear. It was a pity, however, about no crystal ball, she said: the other woman would have brought one, but she had apparently been arrested by the police.
    “There are many charlatans in the field,” said Madame Karitska calmly, and took her place underseveral hanging flower baskets. “I am
not
one, however.”
    From the very beginning she felt that she was being watched closely but it was not until she had given several readings that she identified her attentive observer. He was a small, plump, middle-aged man, impeccably dressed, with ruddy skin and a somewhat whimsical white mustache. He looked rather like a very successful stockbroker or financier, and when he at last approached her during a lull, this was precisely what he turned out to be. He was John Faber-Jones, the husband of her hostess.
    “I thought I’d ask a few questions,” he said, “about—uh—what it’s like to be a fortuneteller.”
    She would have thought this the last thing to interest him. “I’m not a fortuneteller, I’m a clairvoyant,” she told him patiently.
    “Ah, there’s a difference, is there? You look so—well, so damned respectable, frankly.”
    He had been standing all the while with the sun behind him so that she could not see his face. Now she looked up, suddenly interested, and suggested he sit down in front of her and have a reading.
    With an air of reluctance—almost of fear—he obeyed, and they faced each other, whereupon Madame Karitska began to smile. “I see,” she said with amusement. “You are one of us!”
    He looked startled and guilty. “It shows?”
    “I can assure you I am the only one who would notice,” she told him somewhat dryly.
    He began to speak in halting, desperate sentences. He said that until three months ago he had been totally normal—totally, he emphasized grimly—but in Februaryhe had slipped on a patch of ice in front of his brokerage firm and had fallen unconscious to the ground. He had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance, and he had been unconscious for nearly twelve hours.
    “That’s when it happened,” he said in a miserable voice.
    “What—exactly?” she prodded gently.
    “They had put me in a semiprivate room, opposite a hit-and-run victim,” he explained in a low voice. “Soon after I became conscious I could hear and see them taking down notes on the accident this fellow had survived. They asked if there was any chance he’d noticed the license plate of the car that hit him. I looked across the room at this chap—he was sitting up, you know, not too badly hurt. I’d never seen him before in my life, and I—” His voice broke.
    “Yes, do go on,” said Madame Karitska.
    “I made a damn fool of myself. I spoke up. I said the chap had been hit by a car with New York plates, license number YO 1836J1.” He looked at her. “You can imagine the furor this caused. But, you see, the license plate was suspended over his head in a sort of cloud.”
    Madame Karitska nodded. “It happens,” she said.
    “I hope it doesn’t happen often,” he told her with a shiver. “And why it should happen to me—I can only tell you it’s been absolute hell for me ever since. Oh, I can assure you I’ve not said a word about it, I’ve locked my lips. But since the accident—and that damn license number did turn out to belong to the