The Uninvited Guests (25 page)

‘Stop!’ he cried. ‘These aren’t the rules!’

They did not stop. They continued, all seven of them – Emerald, Clovis, Charlotte, John, Ernest, Patience and Florence – all in a pack, barking themselves into a frenzy as they drove him towards the window. Charlotte gave full cry to her howling, snapping like a wolf at a damp little lamb – if she was to be a dog, she’d be a wild one.

Backing away, Traversham-Beechers shrank, crying, ‘Stop! Stop!’

Vengefully, they barked their hatred, yapped their displeasure and their mockery, forcing the cowardly, set-upon, weakened villain back towards the large bay window, whose floor-to-ceiling sash gave on to the bowed balcony twenty feet above the drive.

They growled, they howled, they snapped their jaws, and he, holding the sagging fingers of his partly gloved hands in front of him, staggered backwards against the glass. The panes were large, but not large enough to break as he blundered towards them, and so he turned, scrabbling, as, under the increased volume of the maddened hounds, he bent and, with a final effort, hooking his fingers in the fixings, he heaved the sash up and opened the window wide. Pushing it high above his head, he stumbled, not into the empty air, but with a tangled, tripping, collision, straight into the terrified figure of Smudge, who was at that moment lowering herself from the guttered roof above.

The barking ceased abruptly. Only Smudge’s squeaked alarm broke the sudden quiet.

Disastrously, having once made a grab at her inadvertently, for balance, immediately afterwards, the villain took quick advantage of his luck, and held the child fast, and very near to the low and feeble balustrade. It was not meant for leaning.

‘Leave off this instant!’ he screamed, but there was no need to say anything. At the sight of Smudge, they had of course ceased all attack, concerned only with her welfare.

Traversham-Beechers had not been a violent man in life; nevertheless, the abandon of eternity yawned before him. His humiliation and rage ran uncontrolled as he hovered between the bounds of humanity and the unfettered impulse to flip the little girl off the balcony to her certain death.

‘Mother!’ screamed Smudge, in mortal extremis forgetting all bonds but the essential.

Charlotte, coolly, and with none of the terror so plainly exhibited by every other person there, stepped forward.

‘What do you propose to do, Charlie,’ she said, with utter composure, ‘murder your own daughter?’

The villain had his hand at the child’s neck, and the other braced behind her legs, as if to tip her neatly over. At the sharp intake of breath that followed this stunning question, he allowed his hands to drop, and Smudge, twisting away, freed herself, and ran to her mother’s side.

Traversham-Beechers recovered.

‘What can you mean?’ he asked, aghast, then, shudderingly, ‘
Whiteleys?
’

‘All of you, leave us, please,’ said Charlotte sharply, without taking her eyes from him.

Although they would have been very glad to, Florence voiced all their feelings when she said, ‘He’s not safe.’

‘I must be alone with him.’

‘I’ll stay,’ said Florence Trieves grimly.

‘But, Mother!’ said Clovis.

‘You can’t!’ said Emerald.

‘Emerald,’ Charlotte was steely, ‘
children
, do as I say. Out.’

In the face of both her resolve and the prospect of her already tattered character being further despoiled in their eyes, they all turned and obediently left the room.

As they closed the door, Charlotte was preparing to speak and Florence had taken up the poker.

On the landing, Emerald clutched Smudge gratefully, as Patience, Ernest, Clovis and John stood grouped in silent reaction to the scene in which they had taken part, and frank dread at what might be unfolding behind the closed door. They were worn out with barking. Nobody spoke for some moments.

The songs from below had entirely ceased. A strange quiet settled about them.

One or two clocks struck different hours.

The low murmur of voices could be heard within.

‘Let’s step away a little further,’ whispered Patience.

They withdrew to the top of the stairs.

The rain had stopped. The drumming of it was finally absent, and now there was only the creaking house about them, and the dripping on the sills.

‘God!’ burst out Clovis.

It was Patience – his sister being occupied with Smudge – who took his hand.

After the longest, cruellest wait, they heard the door open and first Florence and then Charlotte emerged from the bedroom.

Silent, breathless; not one of them knew what to say. The two women reached them.

‘Well,’ said Charlotte with a little toss of her head, her look challenging them brightly, ‘shall we all go down?’

Emerald gestured, wordlessly, to the bedroom door.

‘He’s gone,’ said Florence with conviction. ‘We can both assure you all that he’s gone.’

‘Can it be?’ uttered Emerald.

‘Yes,’ said Charlotte. ‘He has quite
gone.
’

No further explanation was forthcoming.

‘Come along now,’ said Florence.

And so, unsatisfied but obedient, they all began to go down, when Charlotte, at the rear, cried, ‘Wait!’ and all turned to her.

She dropped to her knees, a vision, still, of loveliness in her jade muslin and misty silks. Level with Smudge’s gaze, beneath the thick roll of her fair hair, she looked into all their faces and whispered fiercely, ‘It wasn’t true what I told him! Do you hear me?
It wasn’t true!
’

Amid the clearing of throats and averted gazes, nobody but Smudge knew quite how to reply.

‘Of course it wasn’t, Mama,’ she said. ‘How could he be my father? I’ve never even met him before.’

6

THE RESTING PLACE

Charlotte, queenly, stood on the half landing and gazed down at the grim hoards. Holding Smudge’s hand, she was flanked by her bedraggled family, her housekeeper, and – slightly distant – the guests. (Most distant of all was John Buchanan, who, despite assisting in hounding out the cad Traversham-Beechers, felt himself too good for this polluted pack.)

The family gazed down on the wan faces beneath. The bedraggled travellers gazed back. It seemed the villain’s expulsion had sapped them further: their revels were at an end. Their songs were finished. Distant in their memory were the effects of Poulet à la Marengo and glistening tongue.

‘The Old House, then?’ Charlotte said. ‘Is that the answer to it?’

Emerald saw that her mother had at last reconciled herself to the presence of the travellers, and welcomed it.

‘Yes, Mother; they’ll be snug as bugs in there,’ said Clovis. ‘They’ll be able to rest. Isn’t that all they wanted?’

‘I suggest you go ahead, children, and make a start at warming the place up a little. John and Ernest, I wonder if you would,’ she searched for the phrase, ‘show our guests through to their new quarters?’

She looked down at her youngest daughter’s filthy face.

‘Smudge,’ she said, ‘bed.’

Like sausage meat into a raw casing too small for it, the passengers led by John and Ernest squeezed themselves through the green baize door. The crowd of bodies backed, turned and bustled into the passage, jostling and impatient.

The smell that rose from their garments was no better for not being their faults. The faded stuff of their leggings and mufflers, the skin and flesh of their bodies, had been wetted and dried again. Mixing together, they smelled like the vile depths of a rotting metal bin, neglected by dustmen, covered in the rank secretions that even ordinary rubbish, left long enough, emits. They smelled, in short, of death, poor things.

Clovis retrieved his stump of candle from where he had dropped it on the flags of the scullery, and he and Emerald stepped once more into the cavern of the Old House. Near them were a few crowded shelves – the overspill from the larder, recently plundered – but past that, nobody ever went, not for many years at least.

Their feet stepped over the cracked flagstones and all about them the cold air whispered. Was it the wind outside that made the chill seem so alive? The air writhed above their heads, unseen.

Clovis held his candle aloft and peered into the vast space above, the flame touching nothing but the void.

‘Lights!’ he shouted, over his shoulder. ‘Lights!’

The hoards flowed through into the kitchen. John glimpsed Florence Trieves’ snug office, in all its intimate squalor as a man, lantern jawed, pushing to the front, who had not spoken before, fixed him with a look and asked, ‘Where will we sleep? Behind the kitchens? Is that what you think of us?’

The breath seeping from his mouth was as sweet as a fermenting apple. John knew of no existing provision for them, and found he had no clear answer.

‘You never fetched the Railway!’ came a disembodied woman’s voice. And then another, ‘This is disgraceful!’

‘Yes, please, calmly and slowly,’ shouted John with manful authority, herding and chivvying like a stubborn collie.

‘On you go!’ cried Patience, with Charlotte at the rear, and cheerful.

‘What’s down here?’ shouted a tiny old man, thrusting his toothless face into John’s.

‘You’ll see soon enough.’

The man’s head was at a bizarre sideways angle (a childhood injury? A more recent one?) and his eyes blinked rapidly beneath wild grey brows.

‘Get on with it, young man; you don’t scare me,’ he said, saliva spattering his lips, one of his eyes refusing to catch up with the other as he attempted to stare John down.

Ernest ran ahead to the scullery, and set about getting oil-lamps from the highest shelves.

‘Here, let me,’ said Florence, at his side, both of them standing in the draft from the Old House, pouring through the open door, like a river.

‘Thank you, Mrs Trieves,’ said Ernest, rummaging hurriedly for matches.

The crowed surged through the kitchen, through the scullery, blindly, and on, past Ernest and Florence, into the Old House – blundering into darkness.

They swivelled their heads about them.

‘It’s dark!’

‘It’s cold!’

‘I’ll not stay in here and you can say what you like – I’ll not!’ was shouted, and a great many other rising exclamations of rage and disappointment.

Oh, poor and desperate hoards! There would be no feather, no down, no clean cotton, their rest was to be as the stabling of animals.

‘NO!’

‘If you’ll be patient, just one more little while,’ cajoled Emerald in the dark, ‘we’ll have light for you,’ while Patience, nervously, trailed behind, emitting compassion like fairy dust among the shambling creatures of the group.

‘Are we really keeping them in here?’ whispered Charlotte to Clovis. ‘Is it remotely habitable?’ and the crowd, echoing this reluctance, craned their necks – those that were straight enough for craning – to see.

The woman who had asked Patience if she were hurt when she fell on the stair appeared now, out of the gloom, her face barely visible, and mournful.

‘We’re blameless! Why would we be punished like this?’

She began to cry – and Patience almost joined her. Anger and distress seethed about the vast building, finding their voice in tears and grumbling, stamping of feet and all manner of disturbing exclamations.

‘But when will we be taken?’

‘Why is it so dark?’

‘It’s very late now!’

‘So dark!’

‘Here!’ cried Ernest. He bore a heavy tray of blazing lamps before him, and pushed through the throng, lit up like a beacon. ‘Here!’ he cried. ‘Light!’

Around he went, placing the sloshing lamps, while Florence, with another tray, as yet unlit, went behind. Patience darted after her with lighted spills, picking up her skirts (trying not to think about rats), and plucking at the oily wicks.

‘You see!’ she said, as haloed lamps were laid and lit. ‘Everything will be all right, you’ll see.’

Soon there was a brown feathering of the air, and pools of amber and bright gold.

The spaces of the high roof reached above the passengers’ heads; the walls of granite blocks surrounded them, solid and tall. The drifting souls fell silent at last, wandering and watching the lighting of the lamps as their new quarters were gradually illuminated.

‘And now, a fire,’ said Clovis.

The three young men went about the frigid Old House, and out into the rain, too, to the stores, gathering fuel. In no time at all, a waist-high stack of kindling, logs, coal and paper, like a bonfire on Guy Fawkes night, stood ready, and, as Ernest set a match to it, the eager passengers edged closer.

‘It’s blocked with something.’

John handed him the poker and he jabbed upwards, waving it back and forth like an inept knight after a dragon. With a scraping, scuttling sound, a heap of dusty feathers and rotted birds tumbled out onto the unlit fire, and about his feet, loose heads falling, claws scattering.

‘
Ooh
,’ said the onlookers.

‘They’ll soon burn off,’ said John.

Small corpses singed as the fire took hold. In just a few moments, clean flames leapt high into the hollow dark of the chimney.

Ernest, John and Clovis, in smutty disarray, heaped the grate with fuel, and heaped and heaped again, until, like a beacon on a lonely cliff, the fire blazed, towering and roaring in the hearth.

Unheated for two hundred years, warmth seeped between the stones of the Old House like blood starting through veins; the snug stones swelled in the walls; the shell became a body. The passengers felt the warmth on the damp membranes of their fragile skins, the cold flesh beneath, almost as warm as life itself.

‘Oh heat!’

‘Heat!’

‘Closer!’ they cried, and for a little while, the young men rested.

The passengers pressed on the fire with happy murmurings. They spread, they glowed and softened, their hard bodies warmed to pulpiness.

‘Oh, lovely,’ they said.

‘Good.’

The mice, too, a different colony to those that nestled and played in the velvets and tasselled corners of the New House, made forays from their catacombs and turned their twitching noses to the blaze. With wolfish cries, the lurcher Forth found his way inside from the deluge and lay suspiciously at the indistinct feet of the resting passengers. The very spiders warmed themselves.