Chapter 5
Melissa’s swollen face, from where the crop had hit her, soon became more than a bag of ice from the cavernous freezer could cope with.
Ross didn’t seem to know what to do, so Elena decided to just be tactlessly American and bang on the door and make loud demands until a sour-faced Uncle Jas turned up with painkillers.
After that, they sat in silence, and eventually everyone got some sort of sleep, taking turns on the pile of coats they’d made on the floor.
Melissa didn’t have much to say, between the swelling and the post-rage exhaustion.
While she dozed, though, Elena tried to draw Ross out a little. He seemed in shock.
“I mean, I knew,” he said after a while, and then, hurriedly, “Not anything about this! But that some of the family weren’t… the nicest people. But you expect that. Like in any family. Your cousin Carlos.”
Elena nodded philosophically. Carlos the Black Sheep, shame of the family, only out of the big house a year after a spectacularly ill-judged attempt to rob a gas station.
She didn’t think that quite stacked up against whatever the hell was going on at Enderby but she allowed Ross the point.
Mostly because he wasn’t trying to score points.
He was trying to recontextualise a large part of his entire world.
“I mean, if you kept your ears open, you worked out that a lot of how we stayed on top involved… well, you can imagine. Insider trading, brokering influence, dealing with some… pretty ropy people. When bad things happen in the world, the family fortunes spike, right? Arms industry, energy industry, that kind of thing. And you wonder, sometimes, whether there isn’t a finger on the scales sometimes, to make sure that the next profitably bad thing happens on time.
I remember seeing a picture. It was after a coup, some place, Central America.
There was Great-Uncle Godfrey, just in the background with a bunch of European diplomatic staff.
And you won’t ever see an Enderbough in parliament, but you can catch us slipping into Number Ten.
Wherever a good face-to-face chat behind closed doors can change the world, you know. But that’s not…”
Evil. It was the word that came to her. She’d bet it was the word that came to Ross, too, though he didn’t say it.
Melissa had moaned and mumbled, turned over, subsided back into whatever sleep could be had.
“It’s… diffuse,” he said at last. “It’s not like clubbing baby seals or tying women to train tracks.
No moustaches were twirled in the making of this family.
” A hollow laugh. “But you know—unless you’re totally oblivious—that bad things were done.
And you either tell yourself you have the right, rich and influential as you are, to profit from these things.
Or that these things are for some nebulous trickle-down good which time will bring out, even if right now it looks like only you are the beneficiary.
Or you try to put distance between you and it, while you get your head straight. ”
“Like you did,” Elena prompted.
“Have I, though?” Ross asked, sounding surprised by his own clarity.
“Have I ever? I mean, who was paying tuition at Johns Hopkins, exactly? While I played the dilettante and told myself I was boldly making my own way in the world. It’s like those stories about the ‘self-made’ millionaires where you find that they had a great big handout from the folks to start it all.
And then the family say, ‘Come to this special party,’ and…
this. This utterly F’d up thing that’s happening here. Whatever the F it even is.”
Elena wanted to say a lot of things, then.
At least partly, she wanted to shake him and demand to know exactly how he thought any of this had worked.
Except she knew Ross, and one of the things that contributed to his endearing amiability was his ability to be completely oblivious to a great deal of what was going on.
And now they were here, in the middle of this fucked-up thing, and he couldn’t ignore it.
Even though they didn’t actually know what it was.
In the morning, Will came to let them out.
They expected Jeffrey or Uncle Jas or severe old Great-Uncle Godfrey.
And indeed Godfrey was standing in the background, his lined, hard face unreadable.
He was another example of elder Enderbough manhood, broad-chested still, heavy-shouldered.
His eyes never seemed to fully open, so that he glowered at them through slits.
He said nothing, only watched Will as the youth hauled open the heavy door.
Melissa, awake now, lunged to hug him, then drew back.
“I thought they’d…” she started, trailed off as though not sure what she’d thought they’d do, or not sure they hadn’t done it.
“I’m fine,” Will said. “Everything’s fine.”
“How,” said Ross, “is everything fine?”
Will’s face was bland, blank. All the larking about, the humour, the character of him seemed to be utterly gone, like a snuffed candle.
“Ross, it’s… not mine to explain, but… It’ll be fine.
You’ll be told soon enough. And then it’ll make sense to you.
It’s… a shock. But it’s for the best, believe me.
Trust me, Ross. Melissa.” And Elena found herself nodding, without ever agreeing to it.
There was a solidity to Will, as though all the world was rocking on an unfelt tide but he was still.
He and Godfrey. Anchors, reliable, trustable.
She broke away from the feeling, because it had come from nowhere save the tone of Will’s voice.
There was a confidence to him, that was forever stripped of the self-effacing humour he had exhibited before.
“Will, I… He hit Melissa,” Ross got out.
“Jeffrey shouldn’t have done that,” Will allowed. “But it’s for the family, Ross.”
Closing her eyes, eclipsing that familiar face, Elena was left with no sense at all that she was in the presence of the same person that had been taken from the pantry the previous night.
“Vampires,” Melissa said. She was still mumbling a little, despite painkillers and anti-inflammatories.
They’d all been let out of the pantry, given the house again, instructed not to step out of doors.
Great-Uncle Godfrey had laid down the law himself, his voice gravelly and hollow like he was chewing rocks.
There was something about the way he spoke that thrilled fear through Elena when she thought about going against his dictates.
Even though he’d not been talking to her.
She could see that very clearly. He’d been concerned with Melissa and Ross, just as Will had been promising them that things would be for the best. She had been included in neither category.
She was entirely surplus to requirements.
“Changelings,” Melissa said. “Some-bloody-thing.”
“I mean…” Ross said awkwardly. “I can’t really… believe in that.”
“They’ve done something to him,” Melissa said. “That wasn’t… Will.”
“It was Will,” Ross insisted. “Except,” he admitted, “all right. Yes. But they told him something, or they threatened him with something, showed him something that whipped the poor sod into line. Maybe they said they’d…
do something to us if he didn’t agree to collaborate with whatever’s…
going on.” Hands fumbling with the air, trying to find the shape of what he was talking about.
“Ross, you notice that Great-Uncle Godfrey is the only one of the old folks still around?” Melissa demanded. “You see how depauperate the top table was?”
They’d been allowed breakfast. Godfrey had indeed been eating alone.
The middle table had been a hotbed of conspiracy.
Gilchrist and Jeffrey, Jas and Neera and the other parents and uncles and aunts, all talking finance and politics, but sneaking looks down the room at the bottom table.
And the bottom table, well… Ross and Melissa and Elena at one end, and one of the rugger bros—Stewart, she thought—and the pale, thin girl.
And the others, after a no-man’s-land a couple of chairs wide.
Will and the others, sitting, eating, pale and calm and weirdly centred.
So that Elena couldn’t help looking from Ross to Will and thinking before and after.
And they’d passed the time of day, sure.
And Will had even greeted Ross with a strained ‘M’learnéd,’ just as he always had.
But it wasn’t the same and he wasn’t the same person. She was absolutely sure of it.
“I don’t know if what’s going on is some bloody supernatural shit or if Auntie Neera really does have a mad science laboratory on the grounds,” Melissa insisted, “but the old folks are dying off, all of them, one after another, and us—we—we’re changing as they do. It’s like they’re…”
“No,” Ross said. “Come on, now.”
“How far back do we trace our family tree, Ross? We all get the whole tedious screed of it, I’m sure.
Queen Elizabeth, William the Conqueror, Charlemagne, Pope this, King that, never on the throne but always at the shoulder, right?
Always an Enderbough, or Endersby, or Eversey, or whatever the fashion was.
We had a book. Dad got it from his mother, Marianne de la Pole née Enderbough.
All the family notables. You know what was on the cover? ”
“I know,” Ross said heavily.
“That motto, Fidelity and Continuity. And a snake eating its own tail.”
“I know,” he repeated.
“They’re the snake,” Melissa told him. “We’re the tail. They’ll come for us.”
“Melissa, this is nonsense,” he said harshly. “Elena, back me up, here.”