Chapter 4
She understood, in that moment, that she’d crossed a line.
She, the interloper, the outsider. She could see the future, and it involved Gil Enderbough telling Ross next morning how that Mendes girl had taken the offer of a car after all, left the house at midnight.
Doubtless waiting for him in a hotel, in their student apartment in Baltimore, with her family in Columbia, OR, anywhere but here.
And by the time Ross had the connectivity to try and get hold of her it would be too late.
It, whatever it was, would have happened here.
And any attempts to find her from outside would get lost in the abrasive storm of Enderbough money.
She drew back, finding that the body, even covered, exerted a hypnotic pull on her.
Jeffrey de la Pole was already lunging forwards, startlingly fast for a big, middle-aged man.
He had a lot of that Enderbough huskiness to him, that had given even the late Patrick such a powerful physical presence.
She had no illusions about being able to fight him off.
She stumbled back, bouncing off the wall. With a blur of motion, he had her sleeve.
And stopped.
His eyes were fixed over her shoulder. His face, previously as cold and composed as a cadaver’s, twisted with a hard fury.
Elena craned round. Melissa was there. Melissa, Jeffrey’s daughter.
She’d been dogging Elena’s footsteps all the way.
The ugly, angry expression on her face was perhaps the one thing she shared with her father, right then.
She’d seen it. No doubt about that. She’d seen the thing before the sheet came down.
The iron pincer of Jeffrey’s fingers unclamped, like an industrial process played in reverse.
“We will talk about this,” he said, leaden words escaping him like bullets, “in the morning.” He was only talking to Melissa. Elena, the foreigner, was beneath his notice.
Then there was another hand on her, infinitely more welcome: Melissa, drawing Elena away from Jeffrey’s hulking shadow, getting between them, looking with absolute loathing at her father.
“We will talk,” Jeffrey repeated, identical weaponised inflection, but Melissa was already drawing Elena away.
As they retreated, she thought she heard the singing again, high and piercing, enchanting in a way that had nothing to do with musicality. She stumbled, and Melissa did too, with identical timing, so she knew the other girl had heard it too.
They woke Will. Ross was still up, sitting on their bed fully dressed and fiddling with a pen that way he’d done ever since trying and then giving up smoking, that one time.
Elena let Melissa tell it. Her own account, in her Oregon accent, would not convince. Every word would just drive a wedge between her and the others. But Melissa was family.
“Uncle Patrick’s… dead?” Will seemed to be having a hard time getting his head around it.
“And he’s not the first,” Melissa insisted. “You heard what Elena said, about the night before. And it’s just… business as usual, to them. I saw them: Neera, Great-Uncle Godfrey; my dad, even.”
“I don’t get it. I mean… this gathering happens every generation,” Will said.
“That means that Uncle Patrick, Uncle Barty, all of them, they were here last time, forty years ago and change.” At their uncertain look he forged on.
“So they knew. If it’s business as usual, if it’s expected, then it happened last time, right?
So why the devil would you actually come here? ”
“Maybe it’s something new. Some big fight inside the family. That we never heard of,” Ross suggested uncertainly. “Like a coup?”
“I mean, why have us here, then? If something like that was on the agenda?” Will wanted to know.
“You’re missing the point,” Elena said quietly.
“So what’s the point?” Ross asked her.
“This wasn’t like…” Her eyes met Melissa’s. “The body. What had been done to it.”
“It wasn’t like the assassination of Caesar, is what she means.” Melissa came to her aid. “Something had butchered poor Uncle Patrick. It was like an animal. I mean, it would have had to be a lion, or something. Something that big.”
Elena thought queasily of the various trophies stuffed and mounted around the house.
Surely there was a lion amongst them. She thought about wolves, that Ross had said were being reintroduced to Britain.
She thought about the timeless strength of the Enderboughs, that seemed to endure like the trees of the woodland around them.
She wondered if it was a full moon.
She said none of these things.
“Something’s fucked up here,” Melissa said.
“Something’s profoundly fucked up with this family.
And that’s why we’re all here. And I think the idea is that by the time we leave this little get-together, we’re all initiated into the secret.
All part of the cult or whatever the bloody fuck is going on here.
I mean, didn’t you always think there was something? ”
Ross and Will both looked wide-eyed enough that presumably they hadn’t.
That whatever they’d seen or heard growing up had blended seamlessly with the eccentricities and excesses that wealth and class privilege permit.
But perhaps Jeff de la Pole hadn’t been quite as subtle at stretching a human face over whatever monstrousness was going on.
“I don’t understand what we’re supposed to do about it,” Will said in a quiet voice.
“I mean, I think we all know how good the family is at making problems go away. It’s happened in the past. I reckon I know three servants who found out stuff, and who we paid to keep schtum.
Or threatened. And I know about a dozen different lawsuits that just…
went away. And we have nothing. No proof—”
“You’re getting far too far ahead, Will,” Melissa said determinedly. “That’s all for another day entirely. What we do now is, we leave.”
“It’s still dark,” Ross pointed out.
“And?”
“Last time you jaunted about at night, Will got stabbed.”
“And this time there’ll be four of us and I’ll have a bloody shotgun. But we go now, because if we leave it then that window will be shut. And it’s a good night for it. It’s a—”
“Full moon,” Elena finished for her, feeling a weird sense of unreality about everything. Shock ringing about her mind and body and getting in the way of every thought.
And of course Melissa hadn’t meant it like that, had just been thinking about visibility and illumination, but Elena’s tone brought over exactly what she was thinking.
So that Will gave out a hollow, hopeless little laugh.
A laugh that said, No, but really… And then he met Elena’s eyes, and Melissa’s, the two who’d seen the corpse, and he swallowed and said nothing.
By the time Elena had shoved some essentials into a shoulder bag and put on an extra layer of clothes, Melissa was back with a grim expression.
“Gun’s gone,” she said shortly. “He knows we were out.” And there were a hundred clues, surely, that could have tipped off her father, from muddy shoes to one of the staff seeing them enter the woods. But the thought was still chilling.
“We get out now,” Melissa said, as much to herself as to Elena. As though she felt the enormous, centuries-long inheritance of the Enderboughs rearing up from the root-enmeshed earth of their ancestral home, reaching to snare her and drag her down.
Will turned up then, looking pale and frightened, all that Byronic poise gone.
A kid, Elena thought. For all that he was her age, studying law at Oxford with a career and a future all picked out for him.
Just a kid, at that moment. And then Ross was shrugging into his coat, pulling on the woolly hat with the bobble that she’d always made fun of.
The four of them exchanged looks. Elena could almost taste the pleading in the air.
To her, this felt almost inevitable. Nice American girl goes to creepy old British family pile, meets creepy old relatives.
Of course there’s a curse, there’s a cult, there’s something.
More than that: nice Latina girl living in Columbia, OR, studying in Baltimore, MD, she’d had her fair share of seeing the skin peeled back to expose the nastiness beneath.
Catching people unawares so that the racism showed like a shirt tail they thought they’d tucked neatly out of sight.
And this was more, and it was older, but it felt like it was all on the same continuum.
But for the other three, this was their family.
And while Melissa had plainly been fighting against the bonds of kinship for a while, Will and Ross had coasted through their childhoods with a minimum of friction.
Until now. They wanted someone to laugh and say it had all been a joke.
They wanted Uncle Jas or Gilchrist or Neera to leap out with a party hat on and say it was all an elaborate hoax the family always put on for the younger generation.
For Uncle Patrick to turn up, still alive and laughing at their confusion. They hadn’t seen the body.
And yet they were ready to go, despite that.
Melissa and Elena’s words, the clearing and the stakes, the bird-thing, the singing.
None of it added up to any coherent whole they could imagine, but there was some invisible secret all of these elements orbited about, detectable from its pull like a black hole.