Chapter 1 #2
“Not in their faces here and now, I know,” she said. “Honestly, you can actually take me places. I won’t jump up on a table and start singing the hits from Hamilton or something. Not unless George the Third is there in person.”
At last he turned the engine off, which had the drawback of leaving them in darkness.
It was still a long moment before he opened his door.
And then they had to use the pen torch she kept on her keyring to actually find that Dread Portal again, because the house was so big, and the gravel space in front of it seemed endless, like a chill, fog-shrouded desert of chipped stones.
And she fought very hard to make sure the beam of her torch didn’t start creeping upwards.
The thing over the doorway could remain in darkness, and if it had in fact flitted away to gibber and haunt amongst the trees instead of remaining properly fixed in place, then that was between it and her nightmares.
There was a white push-button in a brass setting, rather than a frayed bellpull beside the door, but the sound they heard from inside was an actual bona fide bell, or at least a very good facsimile thereof.
The bronze tone seemed to resound through incalculable spaces, like the bells of sea-drowned cathedrals with a storm coming on.
The relatively pokey porch-looking place revealed when the door opened was something of an anticlimax. Elena had to adjust her mental image of how big the rooms in Enderby were going to be, because the walls were ridiculously thick.
A young Asian man in a tuxedo bowed slightly and consulted a tablet. The grey-blue glow reflecting off his face was jarringly modern, as though he’d stepped in from some other genre of film entirely, not a bit of the Gothic about him.
“Mr Ross?” the man said. “And…?”
“Elena,” Ross prompted.
The man in the tuxedo scrolled up and down his screen, frowning. “I beg your pardon, sir. Elena…?”
“My plus one,” Ross said, and then a large man shouldered into the porch, practically bouncing the youth out of the door with his gut.
“Ah, Ross. About bloody time,” he spat.
Ross seemed to wilt. “Hello, Uncle Jas.”
Uncle Jas was a barrel on legs, aquiline nose, greying. His mouth didn’t seem to have the muscles to smile. It only curved downwards. Small dark eyes flicked to Elena. “Who in buggery’s this?”
“Uncle Jas, this is Elena Mendes.”
Something died in the porch. Some fragile flame of familial cheer.
Uncle Jas didn’t say anything of the immense offence and affront that abruptly filled him to bursting.
He didn’t articulate the instant and utter loathing that he felt towards Elena, or just how much Ross had screwed up by bringing her.
He didn’t have to. His face said it all.
“Gil!” he barked, without taking his coal-chip eyes off her. “Someone’s brought some baggage back from the Colonies.”
They weren’t exactly frog-marched into the grand hall, but perhaps only because even Uncle Jas’s wide mouth and protuberant eyes weren’t quite frog enough to handle both of them at once.
And it was a grand hall. It was full-on Ren Faire bullshit, absent only the banners and the trumpeters—and Elena wasn’t entirely convinced there weren’t trumpets waiting in the wings, honestly.
There was a real fire in what was probably a hearth rather than anything so prosaic as a fireplace, and there was a wall of actual swords and breastplates and the long things that start off as spears but then decide they’re going to be axes at the business end.
There was a tiger skin rug in front of the fire, and the wall across from the medieval armoury had a rather disappointed-looking rhino, or at least the head of one.
Its expression suggested it knew exactly what percentage of its species it had represented when some pith-helmeted Enderbough scion had shot it.
Overhead the ceiling was a lattice of massive black wood beams beneath soot-grimed plaster.
Ross had kept his head high and his back straight all the way from the entrance to the stifling heat of this room, but now he slumped, as abruptly as if he’d been shot, eyes fixed on the man the fire illuminated.
“Hi, Dad,” he mumbled.
Ross Enderbough was tall, athletic without being bulky.
A long face and a shock of fair and slightly curled hair.
Bit of a lantern jaw, bit of a pointy nose.
Good-looking, but not in that smoothed-over, paid-for way that you got used to from a lot of actors and a lot of CEOs’ kids.
Characterful in a good way. And Gilchrist Enderbough—‘Dad’—was basically all of that but three decades older, and if there was any grey in him then the ash-blondness hid it artfully.
Or he dyed his roots. Honestly, if she hadn’t known, she’d have said they were older and younger brother, maybe, not father and son.
And while Uncle Jas’s sporting exertions probably went no further than putting a hundred on a horse at Chepstow or cheering Oxford at the boat race, Gilchrist looked like he was a monster on the squash courts and carried his own golf clubs.
He also looked quite profoundly unamused by the presence, or perhaps even existence, of Elena Mendes.
“Um,” said Ross before that withering gaze. “Hi. Yes. Hi. Dad, this is… This is—”
Gilchrist’s eyes consented to the fact of her.
“Well, I assume that this is Miss Mendes, based on her likeness to that photograph of you and her at some manner of party.” Spoken in such a way as to indicate that what Gilchrist Enderbough would consider a ‘party’ was a world away from Ross, Elena and their friends cracking owl jokes at the Superbowl intermission. “What, might I ask, is she doing here?”
Just when she thought the entire business was going to be an absolute bust, a little rebellion flared in Ross’s eyes. “She’s here, Dad, because she’s my guest.”
“Ross, this is a family event.”
“Well, I wanted her to meet the family,” Ross said. She could hear him getting angry, under it all, but Ross got formal when he got angry. And that must be a family thing, because Enderbough senior had gone the same way.
“Ross, it is simply not appropriate. I’ll have one of the staff drive her to a hotel. Or the airport, if she would prefer. I assume a ticket to… What would it be? Baltimore International? I’ll have it arranged.”
“No,” said Ross. Elena looked from one to the other.
On the one hand, being argued over as though they were a pair of very polite wolves and she was a steak wasn’t exactly part of the emancipated agency she’d looked for in the twenty-first century.
On the other hand, she wasn’t under any circumstance going to say a damn thing because getting between father and son right now would be like stepping into an industrial laser.
“Ross,” Gil Enderbough said.
“She goes, I go,” Ross said. “I didn’t even want to come.”
Gil’s face was quite immobile, but Elena could almost hear the chess going on behind his pale grey eyes.
Playing through how this conversation would go, first one way and then the next, looking for the winning gambit that would see her gone and Ross still here.
Ross had his chin stuck out that way he did, and his hands curled lightly into not-quite-fists, the fingers twitching in sequence. His anger management bit.
He’d said, occasionally, that his family—sprawling and appallingly well-to-do as it was—had been a difficult thing to grow up in, and a harder thing to get clear of. He didn’t come back home much, after he’d escaped to Johns Hopkins and the States.
Something calculating and mechanical reached a conclusion within Gilchrist Enderbough.
“It’s late,” he said. “We’ll talk about it after breakfast. I’m glad you came, Ross.
You’ll be glad, too. You know we don’t do this often.
” His eyes flicked past them to Uncle Jas as though anticipating a challenge, but there was none.
Their bags were in the entrance hall, when they retreated. Outside, the car was gone. Ross must have passed the keys to the guy who answered the door. Or a wizard did it; after that great hall, Elena might just have believed the latter.
“I mean it,” Ross was saying, as they followed their bags upstairs to what was apparently ‘Uncle Henry’s Room.’ He was saying it to himself, as much as her. “You stay. Or I go. Honestly, either’s fine with me.”
The bags went through a heavy, low-lintelled door ahead, wood-panelled and brass-shod.
As did the staff carrying them. Quiet, efficient young men and women wearing the same grey waistcoats and neckties.
Elena tried to mark their faces and thank them, though she guessed tipping probably wasn’t the done thing.
At the same time, she was trying to get a toehold back into whatever the hell was actually going on here.
“Ross, I don’t want to be the thing that fucks things over between you and your family,” she pointed out.
“That ship has sailed, honestly.” He looked back, smoothing back his hair, an old nervous habit. It just sprang right back up again after.
“Okay, let me rephrase that,” she said. “I don’t want to be some kind of weaponised foreigner that you’re using to continue an ongoing feud with your family. I mean, you met my folks and Aunt Mari was super-rude to you when she didn’t know you had any Spanish, but this is a whole other level.”