Chapter 4 #4
It lit them up, the searing beam of a torch pinning them in place just as much as the dogs.
It stalked forwards on thin, deliberate limbs, and there was an almost audible click in Elena’s head as she recontextualised what she was seeing.
A man, on a horse. Just a man on a horse, and where it had stepped from must be the trail they’d never found.
Jeffrey de la Pole, on a horse, and behind him a couple of other riders.
Melissa lowered the bolt cutters and stood there as her father approached. She was shaking, and some of that might have been cold, but Elena was willing to bet it was mostly adrenaline and rage.
“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Jeffrey demanded. Squinting past the torch, Elena saw his face in the backwash of the light, pale and frog-eyed with fury.
“Whatever you’re doing here,” Melissa got out, “I want no part of it. None of us do. We’re leaving.”
“Nobody is leaving,” spat Jeffrey. “And you are a part of it. What you think, what you want, what your current fad of the bloody moment is, none of it matters in any possible way. You have spent your whole life thumbing your nose at your responsibilities, spiting your own flesh and blood, indulging one ridiculous whim after another. It stops here. This is what you were born to, Melissa Jane de la Pole. This is your bloody inheritance and you do not get to walk away. I won’t allow it.
” He was incandescent with fury, perhaps the single angriest human being Elena had ever seen, yet every word came out with the crisp, clear diction of a Shakespearean actor.
“You expect me to stay, after seeing what I saw?” Melissa demanded.
“After what you did to Uncle Patrick?” She shook the bolt cutters at him and the horse shied, dancing sideways a step.
Jeffrey dropped the torch and wrenched at the reins.
Then there was a blur and Melissa cried out and fell to one knee.
It was so sudden, so unseen in the instant it happened, that Elena actually looked up, listened for wings.
Only a moment later did she see the riding crop in Jeffrey’s black-gloved hand. Melissa was clutching her face.
“We are going back to the house,” Jeffrey declared. “All of you are going back to the house. This is your family. This is your duty. It’s time all three of you started living up to that. Or did you think that everything we’ve given you was free?”
Melissa lunged to her feet, and for a moment Elena thought she would go for the man, drag him from the saddle, take that final irrevocable step into open and violent rebellion. But he brandished the crop again and she flinched back.
And when they all started back for the house, chastened youth and stern age and the dogs, Elena was left with the bitter understanding that she had no family skin in this game, but she was absolutely not being allowed to leave.
They were locked in a pantry, initially.
Not exactly a purpose-built dungeon, and Elena was slightly surprised Enderby didn’t seem to have one.
The door was solid oak, though, metal-bound, and the lock wasn’t about to yield under what meagre battering they could give it.
And anyway, before they could work up some desperate escape plan using a leg of lamb and some tinned peaches, the middle generation were back.
Jeffrey entered in the lead, still in his heavy outdoors tweeds, and Gil and Uncle Jas and a couple of the Enderbough women, and a man Elena reckoned was Will’s father.
And Neera, the one person Elena had really wanted to meet and now the one she dreaded the most.
They regarded the four would-be escapees for a moment, and Elena braced herself for the mother of all family interventions, because everyone had a parent right there.
It would be unpleasant, but it was at least a familiar scenario amongst the crookedness of the night.
But instead of that, Jeffrey just said, “Well, it’s time. ”
An unspoken communion, and Will’s father said, “William, come here. Not the rest of you, just William.”
Will took a single step, then stopped and said, “Why? What’s—”
“Just do it.” And there was a dreadful flatness to the man’s face, ruthlessly repressing whatever he might be feeling. Elena was suddenly very aware of the sheer physicality of them all, men and women both. The solidity, the brute heaviness of them.
Will faltered, looked back, face twisted. His father barked his name once more, and he went.
The door closed behind them. The key turned in the lock.
It was in a glass-fronted case, resting on faded green velvet.
A piece of what she guessed was ivory or horn, yellowed with age, rounded by time.
The work was simultaneously far simpler than either of the other depictions, and yet more vital, more expressive.
The face, just great round eyes and a sharp V of a nose.
A double row of zigzag markings on each side of the notional torso to indicate arms folded inwards.
The hunch of its back, grotesque, worked deliberately from the natural curve of the medium.
And, faint at the lowest edge where wear had almost erased it, a stream of tiny stick figures dancing or running or…