Chapter 3 #2
“A doctor, I understand,” he said. “You are, I mean.”
“Studying,” she confirmed.
“And you have the stomach for that, do you?” he asked candidly.
“I mean, I’m not necessarily going to be a surgeon,” she said. “Actually I was thinking more the pharma industry.”
He coughed abruptly, covering it with a monogrammed handkerchief: P.E. and a stitched design that recalled all manner of little flourishes she’d seen about the house, in the woodwork and on stone. Like spread wings woven from Celtic knotwork.
Wings. And maybe she could have asked Patrick about the attack on Will, but that cough had shaken her. It had silenced the whole room, turned all eyes. A deep, resonant knock like a bass drum, all but rattling the window glass in the frames. Louder than even Patrick’s broad chest could account for.
“I was a surgeon,” he said, into the quiet that produced.
“I saw a great deal. Normandy, in particular. My commanding officer put me forward for a medal, for composure under extreme conditions. He didn’t understand that I’d already seen worse, before the war.
Because I’d already come to Enderby the once. ”
And, because of a bad night, and because that cough had rattled her, she seized on precisely the wrong part of what he’d said and blurted out, “You can’t have been, surely.
I mean you’d have been…” Looking at that lined face, the steady eyes, the full set of teeth when he grinned at her confusion.
His evident strength. An old man, yes, but a hale one, and she knew that money could buy a lot of health, and the Enderbough clan surely had an obscene amount of money, but even so…
“Ten…?” she hazarded. “Five?” Although honestly she’d have bet that he hadn’t even been born for that particular war.
Was there some other meaning to ‘Normandy’?
“Miss Mendes,” Patrick said, with a young man’s mischief lurking in his eyes, “I turned one hundred and eight last year. This is my third visit to Enderby, you see.” And again she missed the hook.
Later she’d think back on it and try to puzzle out the precise way he said it, but right then she was so stunned by the assertion of his age that it was all she could think about.
He coughed again, and she actually heard her cutlery rattle against the china. “If you change your mind,” he said, “come and find me and I’ll see about that car. It would be best, you see.” And still without actively recommending the course of action. Leaving her the option, no more than that.
With far more ease than any one-hundred-and-eight year-old man should have mustered, he levered himself out of the chair and made his way towards the senior’s table.
A couple of other elders—or possibly centenarians—glowered at her suspiciously, and at him, too. Quite the maverick, Patrick Enderbough.
So what the hell was that all about? she wondered, but there was nobody around to give her answers. The expression on the face of the ascetic girl was cold and said clearly, If I were you I’d take the car, Yank.
One of the rugby bros, Stewart—Tarquin?—made an appearance then, looking worse than Will had, though mostly through being hungover. Patrick Enderbough coughed again, like a cannon salute, and the greenish Stewart winced, looked bilious and rushed from the room.
“Bloody hell, Melissa, is that a shotgun?” Ross demanded.
Melissa looked unrepentant.
“I mean, d’you think Will was got by some sort of prehistoric grouse?” He glanced at Will, who was looking pale, still. Not at all ready to go rambling in the woods as far as Elena was concerned, but just as obviously not to be dissuaded.
“He was got by something,” she said. “And it’s very obviously something our seniors and betters are fully aware is out there, don’t you think?
Dad absolutely took me to task this morning.
Just like I was eight and I’d smashed the Chinese vase again.
Except he wouldn’t actually tell me what was going on, so it was basically just him spitting feathers and shouting at me. ”
Elena tried to remember which of the middle table had been Melissa’s father, coming up with a solid, heavyset man whose face took her jaw and brow and turned them into something ogrish.
From somewhere, her memory dredged up one more name.
Jeffrey? Jeffrey de la Pole. Often to be seen with Ross’s Uncle Jas, and cut from the same coarse and bullying cloth if she was any judge.
Probably not an easy man to have for a father.
“Anyway, I plan to bag the fucker and give it to the chef, whatever it is,” Melissa finished defiantly.
“See what Dad has to say to that.” That jaw was set, and the hands about the gun were only a little white at the knuckles.
And it was a proper Elmer Fudd piece, Elena saw.
Not what an Open Carry type would tout around back home, but double-barrelled and breech-loading.
She strongly suspected they weren’t going to find anything, and that was probably just as well.
That made the gun a liability, and she’d like to have persuaded Melissa to leave it behind, but that obviously wasn’t going to happen.
At least the girl was carrying it pointed away from everyone and finger away from the trigger when they snuck out of the house by a side door Elena hadn’t even known existed.
Last night she had been absolutely convinced that there was some sort of bird monster at large on the Enderby estate.
In the light of morning, she wasn’t so sure.
The idea that Will had got himself impaled on a sharp stick, and maybe a disturbed bird had exploded off through the trees at the same time, seemed entirely persuasive.
And surely Neera would have been able to tell from the wound just what had gone in.
She’d have been washing out fragments of bark and wood and whatever…
Except Will and Melissa had gone all the way past ‘bird monster’ to ‘family conspiracy’ with a speed that said a lot about the collective childhood they shared with Ross.
“Aunt Neera has a lab in the house, you know?” Will said as they reached the edge of the trees. “An actual laboratory somewhere.”
“You’ve seen it?” Ross sounded doubtful.
“No, but I believe it. She’s here all the time, on and off.
Not just this stupid forty-year get-together thing.
” Will looked up at the skeletal interlacings of the canopy and visibly swallowed, then took a forceful step under the shadow of the branches.
He was pale and sweating, and Elena reckoned it wouldn’t be long before he’d need to go back, and then they all could, and this whole business could be put behind them.
“Which is for what?” she asked them. “Ross never said. Just that your family did it, and it was very important so we couldn’t possibly not be there. Or he couldn’t, I guess.”
“Well, it’s…” Will started.
“It’s tradition,” said Melissa. “It’s just, once every generation Ye Whole Familie must gather, you know.” She skidded a little in the mud, holding the shotgun barrel high and swearing.
“Forty years isn’t every generation,” Elena pointed out, and then reconsidered. “Your… great uncle? Patrick, he said he was a hundred and eight or something.”
Ross rubbed at his neck. “I suppose he is, actually. I think most of them are, at the high table.”
“A hundred and eight?” Elena looked from face to face, seeing none of the surprise she felt should be there. “I mean he’s not going limbo dancing any time soon, but that sure is one hale and hearty centenarian.”
“My dad always says, ‘good stock,’” Melissa put in. “Runs in the family. Enderboughs and all the little branches.”
“What did Uncle Patrick want, anyway?” Ross wanted to know.
“He cornered me at breakfast. He was trying to get me to leave. He even had a car ready, he said.”
Melissa stopped. “Dad said you couldn’t. He was righteously pissed off at Ross for bringing you, but said you were part of it now. He said…”
“I’d seen too much?”
They were all three of them looking at her now.
“Did you…” Ross lowered his voice to a whisper. The quiet beneath the trees was a hollow and hungry thing. “…see anything?”
So she told them about the body under the sheet, ornamenting every detail with disclaimers and expecting them to be as sceptical about it as she was about the killer grouse. When she’d done, though, they’d bought every word of it, were more convinced by the story than she herself was.
“I think I’ve always known,” said Will in a taut voice, “that there was something. I mean, it seemed too good to be true, so much of it.”
Melissa frowned. “You do know that’s how having a lot of money works, Will?”
“No, I mean, it’s as if…” And then he mumbled something, and shrugged, and then winced with pain, which got him out of repeating himself. Elena had been leaning close, though, and she thought she’d caught what he said.
It’s as if we made a deal.
She shivered. Melissa finished fussing over Will, and for a moment it looked like they were turning round and heading back. He wouldn’t have it, though, and they ended up forging on, and that was when they found the clearing.
It wasn’t so terrible. Not on the face of it.
Not if they were just making a catalogue of physical evidence.
Not in the light of day. Just a clearing in the woods, the only one they’d found.
Far off the track, and the only reason they found it was that Melissa had been leading, and what she’d thought was the track wasn’t.
And of course, Elena thought later, if they’d actually stayed on one of the uncertain little trails through the trees, they’d never have found anything, no birds, no clearing, no stakes, no blood.
It would have been safe and uneventful and they’d have returned before nightfall all buoyed up with their defiance of the older generation.
And perhaps that had been, at heart, what the others had wanted. Not what they actually found.