The Uninvited Guests (26 page)

Emerald gathered the spaniel Nell in her arms, who had trotted in, wet-pawed from the scullery.

‘Look,’ she said to John, who stood just outside the fire’s warmth, and she held up the pretty dog for admiration. But John Buchanan, proud, preferred to keep to himself.

The fire maintained its pull, and from all parts of the house the other animals came: Lucy, to join Nell; Lloyd, recalcitrant, from some high and watchful place; even the pony Lady, in Smudge’s room, let out a whinny, unheard by anyone but Smudge, that tried to tell of her loneliness.

‘Shh,’ said Smudge drowsily.

Mice and dogs and fetid passengers, all took warmth, bewitched, as their hosts stood by, and caught their breath, and felt the tugging of unseen hands upon their thoughts, coaxing them.

‘They need to sleep,’ announced Emerald, suddenly and with decision. All around her the passengers whispered and echoed.

It was becoming clear to her that the feeding of the passengers, the opening of the door, the lighting of the fire, the gathering of souls about it – all were steps along a path that must be trod to its conclusion.

‘We must make them beds,’ said Emerald firmly.

‘Sleep,’ they agreed.

‘Tired.’

‘We must lay them to rest,’ said Emerald with warm compulsion, gazing into the fire, ‘and we must make them
comfortable.
’

‘
Comfortable
,’ came a murmured agreement from the passengers. ‘Oh, quite comfortable.’ And they took up singing again, quietly, one voice joining another.

A mother was bathing her baby one night

The youngest of ten, and a tiny young mite

‘Let’s fetch linen,’ said Patience.

The mother was poor and the baby was thin

Only a skellington covered with skin…

‘And blankets,’ said Ernest, his spectacles reflecting flames, his face, like the others, turned to the fire, his mind possessed by the need to aid the passengers to their rest.

All but Florence and John nodded in agreement – Florence, because she was separated from the others by the shame of Traversham-Beechers’ revelations, and John because he was separated by having heard them. The crisis had been averted, he did not care to help his besmirched hosts any longer.

‘Not I,’ said John, stepping away, averting his face. ‘You can all do as you will.’

‘John?’ murmured Emerald, turning to him (all the others, animal and two-legged, absorbed in contemplating the moving fire, as the sing-song voices softly crooned).

She grasped his hand and whispered boldly, ‘John? Do you loathe me now?’

‘Loathe you?’ In the deep night, while all the house was dim with enchantment, the innocent, daylight conversation in the drawing room – only that afternoon – when he had given her the cameo was of another time and place entirely. She still wore his present, he saw, about her tainted neck.

‘Won’t you at least help us? Please.’

And grudgingly he relented.

Clovis, Ernest, Charlotte and Patience extracted themselves from the hot circle of firelight to join them.

‘We will put their beds on the gallery,’ declared Clovis determinedly, looking up the wide black stair to the tilting rail, barely gleaming above him.

‘But what will they be?’

‘We’ll find something. Ernest?’

‘Surely.’

He and Clovis set off into the gloom, resolute.

Emerald looked around for Florence. ‘Where’s Mrs Trieves?’ she asked, but nobody had seen her go.

‘Patience, come with me, John – would you mind? They must have beds.’

All the figures by the fire turned to her as one, their faces, with the light behind them, black silhouettes.

‘And what shall we sleep on?’ came their hollow voices.

‘Yes, where shall we sleep?’

The moans raised, wailingly; shouts multiplied.

‘See about my baby!’

‘My mother!’

‘She’s weak—’

‘She’s old—’

Emerald felt the urgency of their exhaustion, the fast pull of oblivion that had its hold on each of them.

‘Come along,’ she said, ‘quickly.’ And she, Patience, Charlotte and John left the Old House for the New, promising to return.

They went through the house at a run to raid the bedrooms, relieved to be out of the company of the passengers, with John trailing behind them resentfully.

Emerald threw open the bedroom doors.

‘All my linen!’ Charlotte cried, but she, too, was caught up with the need to help now, and her protests were feeble. ‘Strip all the beds,’ she commanded, steely.

They knew fresh spoils were to be had in the linen cupboard. They knew where the linen cupboard was – on the upper landing, kept locked by Mrs Trieves – they had walked past it, but its
contents
– the mysterious shelves, labelled in italics (and everything on them white!) – were a foreign land into which they might not go.

‘John, fetch Mrs Trieves,’ said Emerald. ‘We’ll see to the bedrooms.’

John was nonplussed. He did not want to speak to Mrs Trieves, whom he now despised utterly, but could not very well refuse. He lumbered down the stairs, unhappily, and paused at her door.

The smell of wood-smoke from the enormous fire in the great hall came to him down the passage. His white gloves were stuffed into his pockets, balled up and safe from the travails of the evening; engine oil and logs. He raised his aching, bare hand to knock.

(You are needed; the passengers must have bedding
, he rehearsed.)

He did not want to see her. He could not imagine how Mrs Trieves, the housekeeper, could possibly be the same creature so eloquently described by Charlie Traversham-Beechers, gallivanting blatantly about Bloomsbury. What bawdy secrets did she hide beneath the black dress? What delights of the flesh had she indulged, endured or initiated during her low and lusty past?

The survivors were singing again.

Their voices came to him from the great hall, raised in hope and excitement, in comfort and in fun –

What could be nicer than this?

A nice old cuddle and kiss
?

No, it was not very nice at all, the thing he was imagining. The thing that Florence had been, that all men wanted and some went so far as to purchase from women such as—

All beneath the pale moonlight
,

‘
Oh, what a luverly night tonight…

And certainly
not
‘luverly’. He knocked, and not waiting for an answer, opened the door. Florence gave a scream and faced him. She had been washing. Her hair was long – longer than that – very long, and lay in what could only be described as abundance across her white shoulders and narrow breast.

‘Ah!’ she cried.

She was wearing nothing at all but her black, tightly laced boots and holding her discarded dress up in front of her. She had just spun around from the wash-stand in the corner where she had been splashing herself with water and rubbing herself with a big bar of hard soap that now, in her shock, she dropped with a bang to the floor.

The house was filled with some strange magic and all around was chaos, while this … woman washed herself.

In that far wasteland of nighttime actions were adrift like seeds of a dandelion clock floating in remote space; did John leave the room immediately, with downcast eyes? He did not. He was, as they say, rooted to the spot, like a staring fir tree.

She recovered herself quicker than he and said, with something akin to outrage, ‘Oh what? Shocked are you?’

Startled at her effrontery, he replied, gruffly, ‘Shocked at
you.
’

‘For washing?’ She was bold, and met his eye defiantly, apparently unchastened by the fact the whole household now knew of her monstrous past.

‘Not that.’ John, too, had recovered and felt his own outrage returning. Why should he be the one wrong-footed? Was not she the one to be ashamed? ‘You – you – shouldn’t—’

‘Shouldn’t work in a house with decent people?’

(She was more articulate than he. Had she not seen more of life?) ‘Shouldn’t wash my own self in my own room?’

‘I—’

‘Yes? Out with it, cabbage.’

Cabbage
? This was the last straw.

‘I’ll not stand here and be insulted by a … by a woman of low morals. I came here, in all civility, to ask –’ (He was dashed if he could remember what it was he wanted to ask.) ‘… a thing of you, and you go off shouting like a – like a—’

All of this was unfamiliar to him. He knew he ought to have authority – a man, her superior – but he had never been faced with an angry, half-clothed woman before (outside his youth and his own family), and as he gathered his thoughts she threw at him, ‘Like a fishwife? A slut?’

Far from being silenced by him, she was – oh God – she was advancing.

Her white, bony shoulders, her narrow face, this was not the woman he had passed a thousand times without a second glance; this was not the housekeeper, the skivvy, the
thing
that was somehow past womanhood. She gleamed with the water from washing, she glowed with anger, her long dark hair swirled, like a furiously advancing mermaid, and all John could think of was that he must be in the grip of some dream that she, Mrs Trieves, in all her angular austerity, had been replaced by this harridan, this maenad, this naked abandonment to femininity.

She was feet away from him now, grasping her black dress to her chest still, like a shed skin, eyes blazing, one hand at her throat – her white and slender throat –

‘Oh God,’ he said out loud.

She stopped. He stared at her, wild-eyed.

‘John Buchanan,’ she said, in a voice just above a whisper, and the tender softness of her tone both soothed and alarmed him. ‘John, you know
nothing
of me.’

He gazed into her eyes (blue!) as she continued, ‘Before I was like this… I was loved.’

Whatever shocking thing he had thought might issue from her, it was not this. And there was more.

‘My husband loved me,’ she said miserably.

Her husband? John examined this. Could it be she was not entirely described by her shameful past? That she had other concerns, more poignant? Before his eyes she had transmogrified, from reviled servant to witch to… He was bewildered, utterly. She came closer yet, her face dissolving in his vision into sweetness.

‘We should have liked a boy,’ she said, and kissed him.

From servant to witch to
girl
, then! And John kissed her back. Her face smelled of soap. He had interrupted her washing. It seemed an hour before.

She stopped kissing him, decisively, and looked at him.

‘Oh, good God,’ she said in shock.

And that would have been an end to it, except that John, as easily as if he had meant to do it all along, and not at all surprised at himself, pulled the black silk dress from her hand and tossed it like a dead thing to the ground.

Her bare flesh, the frail whiteness of her body, pressed against the wood-smoke smelling, coal-smeared shirt and trousers of him and before another word was uttered, before consent or discussion, and with a roughness that was not hateful, and yet had something of violence in it, he took her by the arms and turned her, crushed her, against the door – closing it.

‘Oh yes,’ she uttered exultantly, and tore at his shirt.

‘I’ve never done this,’ he blurted, and with thoughtless passion, he kissed her and grabbed whatever parts of her he could – her hair, waist, thighs – and gripped them, discovering them with hands so unused to discovering anybody and so grateful to be doing it now. Her skin was delightful. He couldn’t imagine what possible purpose his fingers had been put to before now that in any way justified their existence.

The door was hard and rattled noisily as they banged against it, but in the headlong rush to heated, gasping – oh wonderful – conclusion, neither thought to move away. And with no consideration of sense and dignity on his part, or any other feelings but wonder and glorious homecoming on hers, they met in deep abandon. They were suffused by intense and unparalleled heat, from core to crust, like the earth cracking and scorched with hot lava; blissful.

There had been a larder, fully stocked but not often cleared, and among the very many cluttered shelves there was one dusty jar, high up, well-sealed and never looked at, labelled
Florence Trieves, housekeeper, old.
(And that name, latterly, scrawled out and over-written: BAD.) Now she, jolted by the lightning bolts of judgement, and miraculously, had flung against that glass, and rocked and tipped her cramped and smeary jar from the shelf to crash, exploding, on the floor; she had sprung from all its shattered debris, full-blooded, vibrant and demanded to be eaten.

Seated now on the floor in chaotic splendour, the two of them – who might have cried, or blamed, or done any number of harmful cruel things to one another – laughed themselves light-headed.

At length, recovering, Florence caught her breath and said, ‘That’ll teach you to be so proud, Mr John Buchanan.’ To which he – thinking of Emerald as well as the damp and sated creature he had become – could only answer humbly, ‘Aye.’

A moment passed.

‘Did you mention linen?’

‘Yes, the passengers need some.’

Florence gave a sigh and looked about her little room.

‘I’m so very hungry,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember ever having been so hungry.’

‘Let’s see to it then,’ said John and helped her up. He saw himself – the self of only minutes before – a bitter, black crow, a hybrid of his father and the pastor at his church, and pitied himself, thinking:
Was that all it was that made me that? The lack of touching a woman? Just that
? He seemed to have a delighted new understanding of every living thing on earth, and be reunited with his childhood self that had rolled in grass and sniffed things fearlessly. That knowledge could restore innocence to him was a marvellous equation.