Page 4 of Preaching to the Choir

Or she didn’t know that, but the lights were on down there, and she could see quite clearly. It had a sheet over it, but she was studying medicine at Johns Hopkins and she knew what a body under a sheet looked like. Unless Ross’s family were prone to med student-style pranks, that was what they had. And not a fun body. Not even the simplicity of ‘Great Uncle Mordecai’s old heart troubles finally got the better of him.’ The shape beneath the sheet was twisted at a painful angle, as though their last throes had almost snapped their back, and there was something dreadfully wrong about the way the sheet hung over the chest. The way it was pushed up by some angular shape, like splayed fingers.

Gil opened the big double doors, and freezing, fog-damp air rushed into the house like clammy Vikings. Some part of her expected the lights to gutter, except of course electricity didn’t do that. Up at the top of the stairs, shrouded in darkness, she just watched as the four of them manhandled the trolley outside and shut the door behind them.

The sole woman looked back, just before it closed. Looked almost into Elena’s eyes, if only she could have pierced the shadows. And Elena recognised her with a shock. Someone Ross had mentioned, one of the few times he’d been positive about his family. Someone Elena could have guessed would be here if she’d only thought. Someone she’d always wanted Ross to introduce her to.

Right now, seeing the woman go off with her fellow body-snatchers, Elena wasn’t sure she wanted to meet her anymore.

And then she turned and found Uncle Jas standing right there. Somehow silent and utterly unremarked in the shadows, despite the bulk of him. Seeing her. Seeing her see what she had seen.

No anger on his face, barely any expression at all. That was, perhaps, the most frightening thing about him.

“You appear to be lost,” he said, the very tonelessness of his voice imbuing the utterance with multiple meanings. “Why don’t I show you back to Henry’s room?”

2.

When she woke up, she’d forgotten all of it. Because Ross had been fast asleep after Uncle Jas had unerringly found their room for her. Because she hadn’t woken him, just sat there staring into the dark at the horrible hunchbacked carvings she couldn’t see. Because as soon as the adrenaline of shock had ebbed away she must have fallen asleep. And when she opened her eyes it was to the sounds of Ross clattering about, dropping his phone from his pocket as he hopped into his trousers. Pattering over with a cup of coffee because apparently the staff had already been and gone. Telling her everyone would be down for breakfast and she should get a move on. And she didn’t think twisted body or family conspiracy or even celebrity bioscientist. She just thought breakfast and British and coffee.

Until they descended the stairs, and then something twitched in her head because these weren’t the stairs they’d gone up, but they weren’t…

Some other stairs. That she had seen. In poor light. But right now the new-minted day was streaming in through a big rosette window set with a spiral of stained glass birds, and so probably that was why these didn’t look familiar. Didn’t look like…

Some other stairs. That she had seen.

Except that speedbump thought was rolled flat by the understanding that nothing looked familiar, no two rooms she had seen so far, and the big dining room they stepped into was entirely separate from the big room with the fireplace where Ross’s dad had been angry last night, and just how the hell big was Enderby anyway?

They must have been almost the last to arrive. There were three tables there, long, groaning with silver, busy with animated guests wearing informal clothes that somehow still looked starched and ironed and expensive. And Ross had made sure she had the right things to wear for each individual occasion—had sent it ahead because there was no way they’d be able to schlep that much wardrobe from the airport. Except having the things to wear, and knowing how to wear the things, felt like two very different cases. Imposter syndrome was looming large, if for no other reason than she was an actual imposter. The one person here aside from the staff who wasn’t family.

Ross sauntered over to what she could only think of as the kids’ table. There were nine sat there already, and only one unoccupied place set. Yet, even as they arrived, a couple of maids were briskly whisking more cutlery and placemats and all the rest of the palaver into place before stepping back into invisibility like the stage crew of a Japanese play. She thought one of them was the man who’d answered the door at first, tried to meet his eyes for a little fellow feeling. It was someone different, though—in fact, the servants, like the rooms, all seemed to be an entirely separate cast of characters from anyone from the previous night—and he kept his eyes demurely downcast.

The babble of talk around the table died away as they sat, and for a moment Elena thought nobody would ever speak again in the entire world throughout its whole future history, so awkward was that moment. Then a couple of jock-looking types at the far end just slammed back into their breakdown of a rugby game one of them had been involved in—the cause of the neck brace he was sporting—and the guffaw of the other’s laughter shattered the glass ceiling for her. The pale, blonde girl on Ross’s other side elbowed him, and the slender youth with at least two point five Mr Darcys of flowing dark hair nodded to Ross and said, “M’learnéd.”

“M’learnéd colleague,” Ross replied automatically, with a weird expression of constipated solemnity, and then they were smirking at each other from the privileged vantage of old shared jokes.

“You’ll have to forgive Ross,” the blonde girl said, leaning back alarmingly on two chair legs to address Elena behind his back. “He always was bollocks at introductions.” She had a sharp chin, elfin enough that Elena caught herself checking the ears for points.

“Elena,” she said.

“Whose are you?” one of the rugby lads asked, before the elfin girl could reciprocate. “Wait, are you Thom Prenderbilt’s spawn? He’s still over there, isn’t he? Californ-eye-ay?”

She had to run that past her Anglo-American translator twice before she actually understood the words through the plummy accent, in which time Ross explained, “She’s a friend from Uni.”

“Ross has got a girlfriend,” said the other rugby lad, but the first scrunched up his face and said, “Hold on, can we do that? Because I told Cynthia—”

“We can’t do that,” said the thin youth with all the romantic hair. “Ross, did you seriously—?”

“I don’t see why not,” Elf-girl put in decisively. “I’d have brought Norris only he turned out to be a twat.”

“I told you he was a twat,” said Romantic Poet. “The moment I laid eyes on him, I said—”

“Elena,” Ross said. “This is my cousin. These are my cousins.” And then set about naming people as Elena frantically tried to keep up. Elf-girl was Melissa and Romantic Poet was Will and the two rugby brothers were either Stewart and Tarquin or Tarquin and Stewart, and the washed-out, scowly girl down the table was probably Marianne or possibly Miriam.

“There are,” she said, a little breathlessly, “a lot of Enderboughs.”

“Oh, Lord, no,” Melissa said loudly. “Wouldn’t dream of it. I’m a de la Pole. Will’s a Fitzmaurice. On account of him being a right bastard.”

William Fitzmaurice executed a sitting bow, then straightened up so one of the servants could serve him some scrambled egg.

“But we’re all Enderboughs,” he put in. “I mean, Mama was, and Melissa’s mama, and so on and so on. I mean I wouldn’t have the old family firm’s name for a Bentley and that house in Crete. But we all got the ol’ genes, sure enough.” And, suddenly fixing Elena with a needlepoint stare: “And you do not.”