Page 22 of Preaching to the Choir

“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.

Also, raging at him on that topic wouldn’t help, she understood. Rattling her chain and insisting on her independent personhood, as anything other than a minor NPC in the Enderbough story, would probably meet with blank incomprehension on his part. She was one of the poors. She was a Colonial upstart. She was a peccadillo, a bit of fun for the favoured son to have on his years abroad, and now she was some dirty laundry he’d mistakenly brought home instead of leaving across the Atlantic for someone else to clean up. And whilst she knew that wasn’t a fair finger to point at Ross, she also knew that was exactly what his family saw it as. And when she disappeared, anybody back home who tried to work out what had actually happened, beyond whatever cover story the minions of the Enderboughs would put around, would meet a wall of family money proof against any investigation or accusation. Because everyone who might want to know the truth was just Little People, to the Enderboughs. Little people underfoot and beneath notice.

“When I was his age,” Jas croaked, “I thought I was going to just… break away. When I found out. And I wasn’t supposed to find out early, just like you weren’t. Like Ross and…” Melissa, but he wouldn’t say the name.

Elena watched him warily. It wasn’t what she’d have expected of him. He’d been just another Jeffrey in her mind, and she reckoned that the only reason she was getting this now was that the walls of him were soluble with sufficient alcohol. And because she wasn’t of the blood. She was someone safe to vent to. Because it wasn’t as though she’d be around for long.

“I was going to do such things,” Jas said quietly. “Blow it all open. Tell… But who was there to tell, even? And I know I wasn’t the first. Every generation, probably, there’s someone who… wants to change things. Doesn’t want to accept it. I mean, it’s monstrous. Monstrous. What we are.”

“But then—” And she shouldn’t have spoken. His head snapped round to pin her with bleary, angry eyes. She thought she’d sent him back into the shell of familial duty, then, but apparently he was sufficiently afloat for the mood to survive the reminder of her presence.

“Why?” His tone was mocking, but she wasn’t sure who was being mocked. “Why go along? Because do you think it’s just us? Do you think there aren’t other families who’ve found what we’ve found?” A pitying look that enraged her, robbed her of all sympathy. “There are plenty over your side of the pond, don’t worry. The malaise was brought over with the pilgrims, you can be sure. Just as the Conqueror brought it here. It goes where the power is, because it is the power. And now it’s my turn.” He took another deep draught from the flask, shook it for a measure of how much was left, and found it almost emptied. “I’m the old guard now. I’m it. A custodian of the family honour.” Family secrets. “And next time I see this place I’ll… It’ll be my time to…” He made a sound, just a single noise. It took Elena a moment to identify it as a sob.

Patrick’s exploded corpse—not torn into but torn out of. Godfrey splitting open as the thing burrowed its way into the open air. And that was it, really. Not Melissa’s murder, not the vanished staff, not any of it. His own fate. That was what so consumed James Enderbough Esquire.

She wanted to shout at him. She wanted to scream, at the top of her voice, that he’d had so many opportunities to turn aside from this moment. But it wouldn’t have helped and, anyway, was she so very sure of that? He was in a cage, and maybe he’d built the bars himself or maybe he’d simply not balked enough at stepping inside. And it was such a cage, after all. The gilding was so fine, such craftsmanship, a real masterwork.

He sucked the last drops noisily from the flask and just sat there, consumed by his own drunken misery. After a while his chin sagged onto his broad chest and his breathing turned stentorian, like someone sawing wood.

Very quietly, wincing at every metal scrape, Elena examined the cuffs. A big, solid clasp of metal about her wrist, the same about the metal frame of the bed. No obvious weak points in the chain, even if she’d had a tool to give her sufficient leverage. Whoever had designed these restraints, back in the days of Charles Dickens, had meant business. Gritting her teeth, she tested the bed. It was just a light metal frame and, worst came to worst, she could probably drag or even carry it through the house, though that would likely sink any attempt at stealth even if she had a viable escape plan. It was strong, though. She pulled until her wrist bled and the metal didn’t bend.

She began to plan how to get the bed, the whole bed, six feet long and thirty inches wide, past the snoring Uncle Jas and out. Out into unknown rooms, in a wholly other part of this goddamn ridiculously convoluted house. Rooms that might well not be designed for a single person to hump a whole bed through. A bed that they were still chained to. Rooms that might be filled with breakables, or be occupied, or…

She actually physically kicked herself, wondering at the learned helplessness of the situation. Wondering at the Enderboughs’ own blind assumptions. They’d shackled her to the bed, of course they had. The bed, which was some war surplus thing, hence designed to be portable. But not portable as a single piece. It was made of tubular segments that twisted into each other. It was the work of a moment and some silent swearing to force two of them apart and just slip the cuffs out of the resultant gap. Now she still had the jingly bracelet, but it wasn’t restraining her anymore.