Chapter 7 #2
Will looked blank for a second, then scowled. “I’m still me. I just… understand what’s going on here. And it didn’t need to be… We shouldn’t have tried to get out. Melissa shouldn’t have. It would all have been… all right.”
“So it’s her fault, is what you’re saying,” Ross said angrily.
“No, I… Ross, we’re all… You never thought you’d have to pay your dues to the family, eventually?
I mean it’s not like you can’t go right back out there, to your studies, to your life, after.
I will. And I’ll do well at it. I’ll be the youngest damn Kings Counsel anyone ever saw, Ross.
I’ll be at the cutting edge of the legal profession.
You’ll be a genius surgeon or researcher or…
anything you want, Ross. The world is your oyster.
You can do it all. Pick a direction, people will open every door between you and your destination. ”
“For a price,” Ross noted.
“They’ll give you the talk,” Will said. “Soon. Today. And then you tell me it isn’t worth it.” He winced when the needle went in. Elena was vaguely surprised that what he had become could feel pain.
“We’re all very sorry about Melissa,” Will said. “It was a horrible mistake, a misunderstanding. Jeffrey being… Jeffrey. He was always… Jeffrey.”
He shrugged, winced a little, obviously wanted to say more, but before Ross’s stony and forbidding gaze he just looked away and left the room.
Neera left too, shortly after, and took her biology homework with her.
For a short while it was just Ross and Elena, and a dour woman Ross identified as Aunt Helen, solid and square as a fridge.
She sat on a stool in one corner like a hostile chaperone concerned with Elena’s chastity and glowered at them.
Ross sat on the bed and picked miserably at the chain of Elena’s cuffs. It wasn’t lost on either of them that nobody was shackling him to anything.
“I don’t know what to say,” he managed eventually. “It’s a horror show. I had no idea. Please believe me, I didn’t know any of this.”
“I believe you,” she assured him, but he just went on, the words tumbling out of him like he’d opened a vein.
“I mean, you hear things. Growing up. And you realise things are a bit… different. I have a lot of cousins, but they’re all within five years, maybe, of me.
And all the uncles and the aunts are around Dad’s age.
” And his mother was younger, of course.
Kayleigh Enderbough née Fitzhugh was almost fifteen years Gilchrist’s junior.
But she wasn’t of the blood, of course—wasn’t even invited to Enderby, just like all the other spouses who’d married into the family were excluded.
Ross meant those born to the family, a rigid maintenance of generational division.
“And the great-aunts, and great-uncles… Grandma Beatrice died. It was a car crash. I can just remember. I was five. Maybe if she’d been around I’d have understood more, worked out more.
But it was just… I knew there were a load of crusty old aunts and uncles, but I never… I never thought about any of it.”
It was like the money, Elena thought a little bitterly.
The fact that Ross would quite happily bumble along eating last night’s cold pizza for breakfast like any other student, but then suddenly he’d say something like ‘Let’s go to Monaco,’ and just be in a position to do it, like it was a special power he’d been born with.
Which it was, if you counted generationally entrenched wealth as a power.
And it was only after going overseas to study and meeting people who weren’t of his usual social circuit that he’d begun to realise things didn’t work that way for the majority of other people.
And he’d never really got round to questioning the other peculiarities of his family, because he’d grown up with them and they were just the way things were.
It turned out that the way things were was grotesque and unnatural and they were both discovering that far too late.
“I won’t let anything happen to you,” he said determinedly, jaw jutting out.
In that way he had, which had always seemed so reassuring against the rest of the world.
Ross, who would just amble through life until something pushed him, whereupon he was iron.
Dependable Ross. Except here he was at the font of all his power, his family, the one thing he was impotent against.
Still, they sat side by side, sliding the cuff awkwardly along the bed’s frame so they could hold hands properly. Aunt Helen glowered at them. Don’t get attached to your pet, her scowl seemed to say.
After a while, the door opened again. It was Gilchrist Enderbough, Ross’s father. “Ah,” he said. “There you are.” As though Ross had somehow escaped the notice of the family, pulled off some daring piece of espionage to reach Elena’s side. “It’s dinner,” he observed.
“I’m not hungry,” Ross said with dignity.
“It’s dinner,” Gilchrist repeated. “And there are things to discuss.”
“How about handing Jeffrey de la Pole over to the police?” Ross said darkly.
“Censure of Jeffrey is on the agenda, as it happens,” Gilchrist said, utterly unflapped. “And I thought, as you were there, that you’d want to have your say. And you’ll understand that the police,” said with infinite distaste, “are not an option, but there are options nonetheless.”
“Oh, right. Confiscate some of his stock options. Fair reparations for murdering his own f-f-fucking daughter,” Ross snarled.
Gilchrist’s face was stony. “You will not,” he said, “use such language in my presence. Save it for the Colonies.”
Elena watched Ross’s face go through two or three separate convulsions, expletives roiling just beneath the skin and clawing to get out.
But there were two decades and change of parental authority holding them in, and in the end he couldn’t bring himself to free them. “Swear,” he said, “that Elena is safe.”
“Well, that’s another topic that I thought you’d want to weigh in on,” Gilchrist said casually.
“Or we could just debate the matter in your absence…?” When Ross just stared at him mulishly, he rolled his eyes.
“Ross, do you think the moment you turn your back she’ll just be spirited away through a secret passage or something? ”
“Yes.”
“Do grow up. Whatever’s decided, I’ll happily swear that she’ll still be here when you come back.” To say your goodbyes hung unspoken in the air. “Alive and unharmed, if you insist on being lawyerly.”
She didn’t want him to go. She didn’t trust Gilchrist either.
She didn’t trust the whole pack of them.
At the same time, she reckoned Gilchrist was deadly serious about the agenda items for the Enderbough AGM they were apparently having, and there was literally nobody but Ross who could speak for her.
Because given all that she’d seen and all that had happened, she was under no illusion whatsoever that she was under sentence of death right now.
The odds of that being commuted to anything else seemed slim, but without Ross as her advocate they would be nil.
Stay or go, the two emaciated wolves fighting within her, and she just squeezed his hand without direction, not knowing what she wanted him to do.
When he squeezed back and then stood, accepting Gilchrist’s charge, she was simultaneously terrified at being left, and relieved that he was going.
When Ross and his father left, Aunt Helen went with them, and in her place came the profoundly unwelcome figure of Uncle Jas.
Apparently he’d drawn the short straw and wouldn’t get either dinner or family round-table discussion.
Or else he’d volunteered because he could have some fun with a young woman chained to a bed who was going to be staked out for the not-fairies anyway.
Except he just slouched onto the stool that Helen had vacated and sat there.
He was dressed formally for dinner, but his outfit was already sprung at the seams, bow tie undone, shirt buttons popped.
As Elena watched, he fished a flask out of his pocket and took a swig before staring at her, red-eyed.
He’d obviously been steeping himself since lunchtime, at the very least.
“What?” he demanded of her, even though he was an equal partner in whatever staring was going on.
“I don’t suppose,” Elena managed with quavering dignity, “that there’s any of that for me.”
Jas’s eyes wandered from her to the little silver flask and back, and he shrugged. The receptacle he found to decant into was a little steel bowl left over from Neera’s dissection class, though thankfully not one that had seen use. The liquid turned out to be a rather good port.
“He’ll be all right.”
Elena glanced up from drinking, surprised. Jas wasn’t looking at her. He wasn’t really looking at anything in the room, staring into time, not space.
“Ross?” she clarified.
“He’ll be fine. It’s a phase. Young people, they see a little of the world, they start to think that it isn’t the way they were always told. Then they come home, they learn it is. The illusion is what’s out there, not what we have here. What we have here is all that endures in the world.”
He thought, she realized, that she was worried about Ross’s future prospects.
That she, as a good peon, was perfectly sanguine about being disposed of by a bunch of overmonied English aristos; but that poor Ross, the golden boy with the big future, might be damaged by his association with her?
Naturally that would be her principle concern.