Page 2 of Preaching to the Choir

“Are you embarrassed?” she asked, delighted. “Have I corrupted you with my modern ways and now we’ve gone back to the Old Country and they’re going to make you put on armour and joust for my honour or something?”

“Honestly, I was embarrassed about this S—this shit long before I met you. Even at bloody Eton, where everyone’s family has stuff like this, it felt… except my family paid for a whole new dorm fifty years ago, and we could buy and sell some of the others there, and so nobody really… half the masters hated me and the other half treated me like I was made of glass.”

He had not, she knew, enjoyed school much. And partly it was because of this family stuff, posh as posh, old as balls, weird as fuck. And partly it was because, as far as she could work out, a British ‘public school,’ which was to say the most exclusively private of private schools over this side of the pond, was like some kind of Stockholm syndrome experiment designed by horrible people to force small rich kids into exactly the same horrible mould. And thus preserve the Great British Aristocracy or some damn thing. Which was exactly the sort of comment she would not be passing in earshot of Ross’s family, obviously. Although she was glad that they’d never quite got Ross shoved into that mould. Ross had come out of the ordeal still Ross, somehow. Maybe it was the oldy-weirdiness of his family that had armoured him against it.

Mould. Armour. She could almost feel the ‘u’s dropping into place now she was in Olde Englande.

“Are we, you know, getting out of this car any time soon?” she asked.

He drummed a bit on the wheel, one of his little tells when he was unhappy. Another thing they probably hadn’t tolerated much, at Saint Snooty’s Posh School For Boys.

“Ross Enderbough Junior the Third,” she said, “you had damn well better not be embarrassed about me. Because the time to think about that was probably before you asked me to come with you here.” And he wasn’t a Junior or a Third, of course, and apparently that wasn’t much of a thing with the British rich. Just her way of needling him, and normally he’d laugh, but not this time.

“I mean, no,” he said, after a worrying pause. “I mean, not in that way. You’re… the world.”

“As in, ‘I mean the world to you’?” Dry, ha-ha-ha, but leaving him room to confirm it if he wanted. Because one thing about Ross was that he never actually said things like that. Good on romantic gestures, but terrible with words.

“The actual world. The rest of the world. And I hadn’t… thought… until we were almost here. Look, my family is really F-ing old and weird and it’s all going to look stupid and stuffy and we can laugh about it later, but—”

“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.