Read Online Angel by Colleen McCullough - Free Book Online Page A

made me sit up straight! I scowled at her. “No, I am not!” I snapped.
    “I’m darned if I’ll keep on taking X-rays until I’m old enough to retire! Carry a lead apron
    on my shoulders for forty years and have blood tests once a month? Bugger that!”
    “There are careers and careers,” she smirked. “Venus is in the tenth house too, and your Moon’s in Cancer. Saturn’s on the cusp of the second and third houses, means you’ll always look after them what can’t look after themselves.”
    She sighed. “Oh, there’s lotsa stuff, but none of it’s worth a tuppenny bumper compared to your perfect quincunx between the Moon and Mercury!”
    “Quincunx?” It sounded absolutely obscene.
    “That’s the aspect will do for me,” she said, brushing her hands together in huge satisfaction. “You gotta look at everything in a chart before the quincunx makes sense, but the way your stars have progressed since you was born says the quincunx is it.” The X-ray vision eyed me again, then she got to her feet, went inside and opened the fridge. Back she came with a plate holding chunks of what looked like horizontal sections through a snake. “Here, have some, princess. Smoked eel. Very high brain food. Klaus’s mate Lerner Chusovich catches ‘em and smokes ‘em himself.”
    The smoked eel was delicious, so I tucked in.
    “You know a lot about astrology,” I said, chewing away.
    “I should bloody hope so! I’m a soothsayer,” she said. Suddenly I remembered the bluerinsed lady from the upper North Shore, the several others I had encountered in the front hall, and a lot of things fell into place.
    “Those prosperous-looking women are clients?” I asked.
    “Bullseye, ace!” She speared me on those icy searchlights yet again. “D’you believe in the hereafter?” I thought about that before I answered. “Only maybe. It’s a bit hard to believe in the reason and justice behind God’s immutable purpose when you work in a hospital.” “This ain’t about God, it’s about the hereafter.”
    I said I wasn’t sure about that either.
    “Well, I deal in the hereafter,” said Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. “I cast horoscopes, deal out the cards, scry into me Glass”-she said it with a capital letter”communicate with the dead.”
    “How?”
    “Haven’t got a clue, princess!” she said cheerfully. “Didn’t even know I could until I was past thirty.”
    Flo climbed onto her lap for some mother’s milk, and was put down gently but firmly. “Not now, angel puss, Harriet and I are talking.” She went to the little cupboard and brought out a very heavy object covered with dirty pink silk, put it on the table. Then she handed me the deck of cards. I turned them over expecting to see the usual hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades, but these were pictures. The one on the bottom showed a naked woman surrounded by a wreath, all of it brightly coloured.
    “That’s the World,” said Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. Underneath was a card showing a hand holding a chalice which poured out thin streams of liquid. A dove with a small circular object in its beak hovered upside down over the chalice, on which was written what looked like a W.
    “The Ace of Cups,” she said.
    I put the deck down very gingerly. “What are they?” “A tarot pack, princess.
    I can do all sorts of things with it. I can read your fortune if you like. Ask me a question about your future, and I’ll answer it. I can sit down all by meself and deal out a gypsy spread to get the feel of what’s happening in The House, to the people in my care. The cards have mouths. They speak.”
    “Rather you to hear them than me,” I said, shivering. She went on as if I hadn’t interrupted. “This is the Glass,” she said, whipping the dirty pink silk off the object she’d taken from the cupboard. Then she reached across the table to take my hand, and put it on the cool surface of that beautiful thing.
    Flo, standing watching, suddenly gasped and fled to