The Uninvited Guests (16 page)

In a startling moment of recognition, Patience thought it was
her
bonnet – it had the same shape, the same flowers on the brim, but this one was wrecked, not at all the immaculate object in which Patience had travelled. She realised she was staring dumbly at the woman, whose expression remained fixed, inquisitive and concerned.

‘Yes. Quite. Thank you,’ she said at last, eager to be gone. How could she have thought this small, blonde woman was wearing her bonnet? She was unlike Patience in every way. She must be dizzy from her fall.

‘Thank you,’ she repeated. ‘I’m quite all right.’

‘Will we be getting along soon?’ asked the woman. ‘We can’t wait.’

‘I hope so,’ said Patience, and she set off for the dining room, hearing the door click closed again behind her and not at all tempted to look back.

The scene she found when she returned to the party was a jolly one. There was as yet no supper to be had, but she was greeted with laughter and the sight of Smudge jumping up and down crying, ‘Hurrah! Hurrah!’ as Emerald held the tiniest of kittens on her palm and looked into its wild face.

The visitor, her brother, John and Clovis were all seated, and laughing – and drinking, she noted – while Charlotte stood at the far end of the room, framed by the curtains, with a beatific, if glassy smile. The visitor certainly didn’t
look
as if he had just now returned to the room having ogled her on the stair – he glanced up at Patience only briefly, absorbed in the presentation of the kitten.

‘Look! Look, Patience! It’s called Tenterhooks!’ said Smudge, and Patience clapped her hands together too.

‘Oh, the darling!’ she said.

‘Do you think it’s hungry?’ asked Emerald.

‘I should think we all are!’ declared the visitor, whose frankness, after the briefest of pauses, was greeted with general laughter.

‘What have you got there, Patience?’ asked Ernest. He knew of course exactly what she had, but was drawing attention so she might present it. Emerald gave the kitten to Smudge who clutched it to her neck.

‘Happy Birthday, Emerald,’ said Patience and handed over the box. ‘It’s from both of us – and Mother, of course.’

All eyes were on Emerald, smilingly tugging at the bow. ‘How beautifully you’ve wrapped it, Patience,’ she said.

‘She always had neat little fingers,’ said her mother archly.

The box was opened, and inside it there was another, polished walnut with a brass clasp. Emerald opened it hesitatingly, for she knew, suddenly, what she would find.

Several dozen glass slides were arranged in the black felt lining, each wrapped in crisp tissue.

‘Oh,’ said Emerald.

‘Well?’ said Patience, eager.

‘How generous. How kind,’ said Emerald, but she was unconvincing.

Patience’s face fell. ‘Aren’t you interested in your microscope any more, Em?’ she asked.

‘No. Of course. Of course I am,’ said Emerald.

‘Emerald hasn’t been near it in donkey’s years,’ said Clovis blithely.

‘Oh, I have!’ said Emerald, darting guilty glances at Patience.

‘All her notebooks and bits and pieces have been banished. She’s quite grown out of it, haven’t you?’ said Clovis.

‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ murmured Ernest, who remembered their heads touching as they bent together over jointed beetles’ legs.

‘It’s a superb present,’ said Emerald emphatically, but Patience was not fooled.

‘Well, never mind. What a silly. I ought to have kept to rose water.’ She spoke as lightly as she could muster but she did not convince, and her bottom was beginning to hurt most horribly from having fallen so hard onto it.

‘Patience—’

‘It’s the thought that counts,’ said Patience brightly.

John reached out a big hand. ‘May I?’ he asked, unwrapping a slide and holding it up to the light. ‘Well, you won’t go into
real
science, of course.’

‘Madame Curie might disagree,’ Emerald found herself replying quickly.

‘She’s a foreigner,’ said he, closing the argument.

He crushed the paper and let it fall. Emerald’s hand darted out, instinctively, to save the falling ball of tissue from the floor. She flattened it out on the table, remembering as sharply as if he had poked her in the side with a paper knife how, on discovering science had no answer for the question her father’s illness presented, she had put away childish things to follow the path of useful womanhood, and nurse him. It was not, as the hackneyed phrase would have it, ‘what he would have wanted’, no, it was very far from that: it was what he would have dreaded. But there it was. Her beloved father had been ill; her mother had been distraught; her brother arrested by shock; her sacrifice had been required. That had been the end to it. She could not have known that, like an enchanted princess, she would forget so easily everything she had been before. Duty had put a spell upon her heart.

Smudge traced a finger along the exposed glass slide. ‘It looks like spun sugar. I want to crunch it up,’ she said, her mouth buried in kitten fur.

‘And have blood pour down your chin and die a gruesome death,’ said Clovis.

‘What could they be?’ asked Charlotte, looking away restlessly. She knew perfectly well, but frowned with irritation at Patience having run true to form and brought something dull to the party.

Ernest caught her spiteful look and glared. He rearranged his face immediately, of course, but Charlotte had seen him and was distracted from her introspection. There was manliness in his reserve, she mused, and his hair was not so much red any longer as… She sought the right word – something like the stem of a bramble. In the days before her present contentment she would have enjoyed finding the spell that would bind him.

Traversham-Beechers watched Charlotte like a stoat. He rose from his place and approached stealthily. She was breathless at his approach, lest someone should see them and intuit their connection, but standing together by the window, they were unobserved.

‘You’re unaltered, aren’t you?’ he whispered, without a glimmer.

‘Since last I saw and loathed
you
!’ she spat.

‘Oh, you weren’t so
very
unfriendly then,’ he mocked.

‘Sit down, get away!’ she hissed and so, smilingly, he withdrew.

No matter what the reason for that man appearing at Sterne, Florence Trieves knew that her priority lay with supper.

‘Now, Myrtle, are we ready?’ she panted, and led the way. She held the baize door open with her back.

‘Yes, ma’am, ready.’

‘Those blasted survivors safely out of the way?’

‘Still in the study, ma’am; not a peep.’

‘Well, let’s get on then!’

Bearing a platter each, they processed to the waiting diners.

‘Ah!’ cried the wine-fronted visitor with appreciation, as his nose was touched by butter and delicate fishy things. ‘Oh,
yes
!’

The others maintained their good manners, squaring to the table to receive, restrained and eager. Charlotte nestled herself into her seat.

Florence served, and the coral fronds and painted leaves of their small plates were soon obscured by parsley, smelts and soft, stewed eel. There were sauces. The ravenous guests availed themselves gratefully as Florence circled the table with the sherry decanter. Much shaken, passing by Traversham-Beechers’ chair, she widened her eyes in horror in his direction. Charlotte gave her an almost imperceptible wink; the bonds between them strengthened and tugged.

The spaniels Lucy and Nell had woken at the smell of kitten and fish, and were now leaping up and down, banging their heads against the furniture and barking. Emerald hauled the hysterical dogs out, as the kitten, as spiky as a horse-chestnut casing and almost the same size, spat viciously at them.

‘Here, hand it over,’ commanded Traversham-Beechers, and John plucked up the little cat and did as he was told.

The visitor took it, and the kitten clung weightlessly to his thick fingers. Suspended over the table, it stared blindly into the air around it.

‘Don’t; it’s close to the flame!’ cried Emerald as, having shut out the snapping dogs, she regained her place.

‘Do you think I would scorch a defenceless animal?’ said the visitor, but did not withdraw his hand, swinging the kitten ever so slightly above the stretching flames.

Gradually the guests ceased their feasting. Smelts were forgotten as every look was fixed on the fragile creature hanging above the candelabra, stretching its minute claws to full capacity. The gentleman dared them to interfere, planting in them the desire to be approved of. None there was so weak as Clovis, who began to giggle. Emerald was aghast.

‘Stop it!’ she said, and the man withdrew his hand slowly, and grinned slickly around them all.

‘Footle,’ he said, ‘nobody likes roast cat.’

He dropped the kitten onto Charlotte’s hand. The pads of its paws were hot on her skin.

There was a brief silence and then everybody began to speak, until the conversation, loosened by sherry, fish and relief, took a solid, self-propelled direction, pleasing everybody present – except perhaps the visitor, who mopped his plate with bread crusts and cast a baleful eye about the table.

Charlotte placed the kitten next to her cheek, enjoying their comparable beauty and the kindness she was demonstrating.

‘Poor creature,’ she purred and dipped her finger in the fishy wetness on her plate to delectate the animal’s rasping tongue.

‘I don’t know which of you has the prettier eyes,’ said Patience obediently, but, being of the wrong sex, was ignored. She shyly glanced at Clovis and, dazzled by him, attempted to cover her perturbation with conversation.

‘It’s such a shame we shan’t see anything of Mr Swift whilst we’re here,’ she offered.

Clovis was aware they were being observed by Traversham-Beechers, and his mood, as impressionable as soft clay, was influenced by the presence of the subversive stranger like a thumb pot. He felt a restlessness that stirred him, unsatisfied by the pert figure of Patience.

She awaited his response; her polite gaze bridging the gap between their chairs with convention. ‘He’s in Manchester,’ he allowed.

‘On business? There must be an awful lot of dissolution in Manchester for him to have to administer the law there on a Saturday!’

Clovis ignored this attempt at levity and continued to stare at her idly, but the visitor, across the table, laughed suddenly.

‘Pretty as a picture
and
a first-class wit!’ he pronounced.

Patience, remembering the way he had eyed her on the stairs (or she had imagined he had), blushed.

‘Perhaps… I can tempt you.’ Traversham-Beechers cast his eye about the table. His intimate tone ought to have been too quiet to reach Patience over the wide table, but she heard it as clearly as if he were whispering next to her small ears; everybody, in fact, heard him quite as if he had spoken into their ears.

‘Perhaps I can tempt you all.’

He had their full attention in an instant. The conversation spluttered and stalled.

All eyes were once again directed at Traversham-Beechers, who slowly reached into his breast pocket and took from it a silver cigarette box. He held the thing, gleaming, across to Patience, who looked at him askance.

Charlotte released Tenterhooks onto the tablecloth. She wore again something of the expression she had had on first seeing their visitor in the drawing room: wondering and alarmed. Clovis, oblivious, was simply bemused, as were the others.

‘Your cigarette case?’ said Patience. ‘Whatever would I want with that?’

‘Not a cigarette for sure, eh, Miss Sutton?’

‘Certainly not!’

‘No, no, smooth your little feathers; it is what it represents that may interest you – you and Miss Torrington.’

‘Me?’ Emerald was as perplexed as Patience.

‘Certainly, as young women on the brink of … so many things, it may interest you in your quest.’

‘And what quest might that be?’ asked Emerald drily. She did not see herself in a heroic context.

‘Why, the bagging of a mate.’

‘Oh. That.’

‘What else? If you aren’t taken with my young host’s fallow cheekiness, Miss Sutton, or you, Miss Torrington, with these two other callow creatures,’ he nodded towards John and Ernest, ‘then perhaps you’re looking for maturity? This case is a solid thirty-five years old. Or for elegance? The case is most slender, and fits invisibly into the most discreet silk-lined pocket, and bears a first-class maker’s mark. Or,’ he fixed his eyes on Emerald, ‘are you looking for wealth?’

The question hung on the air. Clovis had the feeling he was observing a master at work; John was, despite himself, impressed at the fellow’s insolence; only Ernest, with clenched jaw, kept his eyes directed at the table and refused to be drawn. He had a fanciful idea Traversham-Beechers’ charms were best resisted if one did not look at him. And Charlotte – well, nobody noticed her extreme pallor. Her heart was sinking into her sickened stomach. She had seen it all before.

‘If I were, as you say, “looking”,’ said Emerald shakily, ‘I wouldn’t, well, I certainly would
not
discuss anything of the sort with
you
– over smelts and trinkets,’ she finished emphatically.

‘Smelts and trinkets,’ he murmured sensuously. ‘Very nice, very nice.’ And he smiled.

To their horror, and despite themselves, Patience and Emerald together, like a pair of trained ponies, found that they smiled back at him. He glanced from one to the other, lapping up his triumph, as his fingers tapped the small, domed, hard buttons on the front of his waistcoat, lightly. Emerald crossed her legs. Patience shifted in her seat.

Clovis felt the uneasy attraction between them, and was himself discomfited. He had hoped to see Patience embarrassed, but not like this. At the same time, though, he was stirred with the thrill of the chase and could not deny it, even as he disliked the feeling in himself.

‘Then see here,’ said the stranger quickly, and, with an imperceptible movement, the silver case disappeared completely.

‘Where did it
go!
’ shouted Smudge, forgetting herself and leaping up, before plumping back down into her seat and snatching up the kitten, and crushing him to her chest as if to stop herself speaking without being spoken to at the table again.