Page 12 of Preaching to the Choir

She drew back, finding that the body, even covered, exerted a hypnotic pull on her. Jeffrey de la Pole was already lunging forwards, startlingly fast for a big, middle-aged man. He had a lot of that Enderbough huskiness to him, that had given even the late Patrick such a powerful physical presence. She had no illusions about being able to fight him off.

She stumbled back, bouncing off the wall. With a blur of motion, he had her sleeve.

And stopped.

His eyes were fixed over her shoulder. His face, previously as cold and composed as a cadaver’s, twisted with a hard fury.

Elena craned round. Melissa was there. Melissa, Jeffrey’s daughter. She’d been dogging Elena’s footsteps all the way. The ugly, angry expression on her face was perhaps the one thing she shared with her father, right then. She’d seen it. No doubt about that. She’d seen the thing before the sheet came down.

The iron pincer of Jeffrey’s fingers unclamped, like an industrial process played in reverse.

“We will talk about this,” he said, leaden words escaping him like bullets, “in the morning.” He was only talking to Melissa. Elena, the foreigner, was beneath his notice.

Then there was another hand on her, infinitely more welcome: Melissa, drawing Elena away from Jeffrey’s hulking shadow, getting between them, looking with absolute loathing at her father.

“We will talk,” Jeffrey repeated, identical weaponised inflection, but Melissa was already drawing Elena away.

As they retreated, she thought she heard the singing again, high and piercing, enchanting in a way that had nothing to do with musicality. She stumbled, and Melissa did too, with identical timing, so she knew the other girl had heard it too.

They woke Will. Ross was still up, sitting on their bed fully dressed and fiddling with a pen that way he’d done ever since trying and then giving up smoking, that one time.

Elena let Melissa tell it. Her own account, in her Oregon accent, would not convince. Every word would just drive a wedge between her and the others. But Melissa was family.

“Uncle Patrick’s… dead?” Will seemed to be having a hard time getting his head around it.

“And he’s not the first,” Melissa insisted. “You heard what Elena said, about the night before. And it’s just… business as usual, to them. I saw them: Neera, Great-Uncle Godfrey; my dad, even.”

“I don’t get it. I mean… this gathering happens every generation,” Will said. “That means that Uncle Patrick, Uncle Barty, all of them, they were here last time, forty years ago and change.” At their uncertain look he forged on. “So they knew. If it’s business as usual, if it’s expected, then it happened last time, right? So why the devil would you actually come here?”

“Maybe it’s something new. Some big fight inside the family. That we never heard of,” Ross suggested uncertainly. “Like a coup?”

“I mean, why have us here, then? If something like that was on the agenda?” Will wanted to know.

“You’re missing the point,” Elena said quietly.

“So what’s the point?” Ross asked her.

“This wasn’t like…” Her eyes met Melissa’s. “The body. What had been done to it.”

“It wasn’t like the assassination of Caesar, is what she means.” Melissa came to her aid. “Something had butchered poor Uncle Patrick. It was like an animal. I mean, it would have had to be a lion, or something. Something that big.”

Elena thought queasily of the various trophies stuffed and mounted around the house. Surely there was a lion amongst them. She thought about wolves, that Ross had said were being reintroduced to Britain. She thought about the timeless strength of the Enderboughs, that seemed to endure like the trees of the woodland around them.

She wondered if it was a full moon.

She said none of these things.

“Something’s fucked up here,” Melissa said. “Something’s profoundly fucked up with this family. And that’s why we’re all here. And I think the idea is that by the time we leave this little get-together, we’re all initiated into the secret. All part of the cult or whatever the bloody fuck is going on here. I mean, didn’t you always think there was something?”

Ross and Will both looked wide-eyed enough that presumably they hadn’t. That whatever they’d seen or heard growing up had blended seamlessly with the eccentricities and excesses that wealth and class privilege permit. But perhaps Jeff de la Pole hadn’t been quite as subtle at stretching a human face over whatever monstrousness was going on.

“I don’t understand what we’re supposed to do about it,” Will said in a quiet voice. “I mean, I think we all know how good the family is at making problems go away. It’s happened in the past. I reckon I know three servants who found out stuff, and who we paid to keep schtum. Or threatened. And I know about a dozen different lawsuits that just… went away. And we have nothing. No proof—”

“You’re getting far too far ahead, Will,” Melissa said determinedly. “That’s all for another day entirely. What we do now is, we leave.”

“It’s still dark,” Ross pointed out.

“And?”