The Uninvited Guests (23 page)

‘We need to find the others.’

‘Traverall-Beechers –’ began John, tentatively, ‘he gained order amongst them before. Though I don’t like to mention his name.’

‘Well, don’t then,’ said Ernest shortly. ‘We can certainly manage without
him.
’

They ran up the stairs, and on reaching Emerald’s door Ernest dispensed with convention and knocked loudly.

‘It’s Ernest. Are you in there, Miss Torrington?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ came her muted reply.

‘Is your door locked?’

John, with a gesture and a nod, set off down the corridor to fetch Clovis.

‘Why do you ask?’ said Emerald.

Ernest dropped his voice to a discreet level.

‘It would be best if you stayed in your room, I think,’ he said.

Curiosity evidently overcame her need to hide herself away, for in a moment he heard the key turn and Emerald peered out at him.

‘Why?’ she asked.

When his sister cried she became pinched and pale. Emerald’s face had gone the other way, towards swollen lids and lips, her cheeks were streaked, her hair rather wild. He forgot the passengers. She reminded him of a peony in a rainstorm, only less intensely coloured – perhaps a rose. He was distracted.

‘Why should I stay in my room?’ she asked again.

‘Oh, the passengers. They’re out and about. They’re rather jolly. We need to contain them, or control them.’

‘Well, I can’t contribute much from a locked bedroom, can I?’ she said, and sniffed. ‘Just a moment.’

‘I don’t think you should—’ he began, but it was no use. She shut the door on him and in a moment returned, having splashed her face with water and attempted to tame her hair.

‘Ernest,’ she said humbly, ‘I’m so sorry for – everything.’

‘Not at all,’ he responded, so stiffly that there was nothing more to be said. Despite her efforts, the comb that had decorated her hair was hanging lopsidedly from a tangled section behind her ear. Ernest extracted it and handed it to her.

‘Thanks,’ she said, and, dropping it on the desk near her door, followed him, a chorus of distant songs accompanying them.

They met Clovis and John coming the other way, her brother hanging a little behind. John had summoned him from his room as he might have summoned a dog, and Clovis felt the shame of his degraded position very keenly.

‘I can’t stay in my room,’ said Emerald, but John did not speak to her.

‘We’d better fetch Patience,’ said Clovis, abrupt and inhibited.

There was no need to fetch Patience, however, she had heard the commotion and appeared, having miraculously changed into a sensible serge dress, ready for action.

‘Oh, Patience, I’m so sorry!’ blurted Emerald, echoed by a rough but indistinct murmur of agreement from Clovis, to which Patience replied briskly, ‘Don’t mention it. That Trivering-Beeching is the dog, not you.’

A lusty voice behind them – a woman’s voice – sang out loudly:

Daisy! Daisy! Give me your answer do!

I’m half crazy!
—

But when they turned there was nobody there at all, just the empty corridor.

‘Goodness,’ said Patience. ‘Mrs Swift?’ And they went together to see about her.

Clovis, rallying, knocked. ‘Mother!’

Silence.

‘You ought to come out,’ Emerald said gently to the blank panelling in front of her. ‘The passengers are all over the house. We need to manage them. Do you know where…?’ She didn’t say Traversham-Beechers’ name, not just because she couldn’t remember it, but because the thought of him was so loathsome to her. ‘Do you know where the
other
guest has got to? Mother?’

There was no sound from behind the door.

‘Mrs Swift?’ asked Ernest.

‘Yes. Here. Not coming out,’ came their hostess’s firm reply.

‘I think you ought,’ said Emerald.

‘Well, I shan’t,’ responded her mother.

The others stood for a moment, each contemplating the scandalous history of the woman who was refusing to emerge, not to mention how dislikeable she could be.

‘None of us likes being here!’ burst out John at the stubborn door, unable to contain himself. ‘I know I don’t care to! I’ve a mind to leave the lot of you to your trouble; it seems to me you brought it on yourselves!’

‘For heaven’s sake, man!’ said Ernest.

‘Go away,’ said Charlotte, behind the door.

‘Lock your door, Mrs Swift!’ said Ernest urgently over his shoulder as they retreated.

Charlotte heard their departing steps. The door was already locked. They had interrupted her in pacing the floor, wringing her handkerchief and tossing her lace-edged garments about the room in an approximation of packing. There was a valise on the bed and an open trunk, dragged from her dressing room, on the floor. Both were full to overflowing. Her jewels were packed, too, what remained of them. She could hear the songs of the passengers, and their occasional shouts, but they barely bruised her self-absorption and she cared not a fig for them.
Let them rot
, she thought. By the stench creeping under her door, it smelled as if they already were.

She paused in her frenetic movement and went to the window, clutching the tasselled edge of the curtain.

She was ruined anyway, but she could still escape. She could slip out during the morning, before her husband’s return. At the thought of the stalwart, honourable Edward Swift, with his close-shaven sandy cheek and neatly pinned sleeve, she gave an involuntary yelp. Staring out, she could see only her own pale reflection. She willed Robert, Stanley and the cart to reappear.

‘Please come back,’ she whispered. ‘Please.’

‘They aren’t coming,’ said a cool male voice behind her.

Charlotte spun around to see before her disbelieving eyes Traversham-Beechers, standing in the middle of the room. He twisted the ends of his moustache between his thumb and forefinger – he twirled it – in amusement, contemplating her; it was a gesture she knew well.

It was not Traversham-Beechers, the instrument of her downfall himself, who so dismayed her – he had always been a bully and a pest. It was the manner of his arrival, the impossibility of it, through her locked bedroom door.

‘Good God!’ she uttered. ‘You—’ She had been going to say ‘must leave’, but found her breath failing her. There was no other way but that or the window into the room, and both were securely fastened.

‘Packing, Lottie?’ he asked lightly.

‘Yes,’ she said weakly. ‘You’ve done for me.’

‘For your reputation, at any rate.’

‘What else is there?’

‘Everything that you’ve made here …’ he mused.

‘Gone now.’

‘They won’t forgive you, then?’

‘My family? Would you?’

‘If my mother …? Good Lord, no,’ he laughed, ‘I should think not.’

‘Oh God, Charlie,’ she said, and she sat down tiredly on the cushioned stool by the dressing table. ‘Why did you do it?’

‘Smudge?’ whispered Emerald, knocking and trying the handle with the others standing quietly behind her.

‘Smudge?’ But there was no answer from inside. ‘She must be asleep,’ Emerald said, ‘and the door is locked, at least,’ and they withdrew to see about the singing throng below.

Smudge was not asleep. Only deep-rooted pride prevented her throwing open her door, revealing the pony and the extent of her own naughtiness. The child was exhausted. Her exhaustion was matched by her desperation to return the pony to the stables and be done with her. But Lady, disastrously, had lain down. No amount of cajoling, clapping or whistling would rouse her, she merely stared at Smudge, condescending in her superior bulk, and lounged on.

Smudge gave up for a while and rested against the pony’s stomach, listening to its gurgles and the distant songs of the passengers, but the warm, round swell was too comforting, the well-groomed coat too soft, and she felt the awful urge to sleep. She stumbled dazedly to her feet, near tears.

‘No, Lady! We are
not
sleeping!’ she stormed.

Lady merely looked at her, as if to say,
speak for yourself.

‘Very well, then, you may – just for a
short
while. And then we’re going down, do you understand?’

She went to the window and opened it. The cool fresh night air moved over her, and the fine rain soothed her face.

‘You have made a dreadful mess,’ she said to the pony. ‘I’ll be back directly.’

And she hoisted her bottom up onto the ledge. A quick foray over the roofs would smarten her up most effectively. She would deal with the rude horse on her return.

‘Goodbye,’ she said.

The wind had dropped and, wet though the slates were, Smudge knew the route well. Straddling the sill, she hitched her thick skirts up into Clovis’s scarf, knotted about her waist, and then, carefully, stood upright on the sill. She braced one hand flat against the inside wall, while reaching high above herself for the metal piece that attached the stout drainpipe to the house.

Mere yards away, at the other end of the corridor, Patience, Clovis, Ernest and Emerald were moving, somewhat tentatively, down the main stairs to the hall.

They entered a melee of carousing passengers, at least twenty in the hall itself and several more wandering about, singing and laughing.

The folks, amazed, all thought her crazed
,

All along the Strand, Oh
,

To hear a girl with sprats on her head –

‘We should have taken the scullery stairs!’ said Emerald, stopping in her tracks as a coated man brushed her bare arm with his damp shoulder.

Songs and cries, underpinned by babies’ wails and women, yelping and encouraging, as well as the shuffled stamping and cracking of knuckles as they began – with awkward abandon – to dance.

‘Oh Lord,’ said Ernest, ‘whatever shall we do with them?’

All at once some of the singing passengers caught sight of them and cried:

‘Join us!’

‘Here, dance!’

The passengers had formed into ragged lines in the hall and corridor and were executing an odd little morris dance.

‘There are so many of them!’ whispered Patience urgently.

‘
Come on!
’ shouted one of the throng to her, holding out a withered hand. ‘Dance for the May Day!’

‘No thank you,’ Patience said politely.

‘We don’t want them getting any wilder,’ said John, but even as he spoke, the songs were turning to shouts, the dancing ceased, or became stamping, and the voices rose in complaint and demand.

‘
What now?
’ they shouted. ‘
What now?
’

Ernest turned to Emerald to speak, but saw that she and Clovis had slipped away.

Smudge clung to the drainpipe. The straight, unbroken drop to the ground below fell sheer, clean and bracing behind her. This was always the tricky part, she thought, but her racing heart would keep her sharp. She took a good hold of the drainpipe, shuffled along the sill, let go of the wall inside and, like a lizard, shuffled along until she could lodge her toe between the pipe and wall. The worst was over now. Shinning a drainpipe was an adventure, but not so different from a low garden tree, and manageable in any weather. Her small hands grasped the bracings, her boots clung and strained. The climb up to the wide guttering of the roof had been done many times. There was a brief, breathless moment as she negotiated the overhang of the projecting parapet and, leaning backwards, felt the wet metal, unforgiving and slick beneath her straining fingertips, but even as her thin arms burned with effort, she gained the advantage, used all the strength in her legs for two big ladder-ish steps up, and soon was lodged, high, high above the gravel and stones, on the wide, flowing gutter, leaning, panting, against the cold water-running slates of the roof. She lay back exultantly. The scudding clouds were above her, occasionally lit by the watery moon. Her hair and skin were drenched and her heart sang with freedom and triumph, far from the cries of the passengers and the pony’s foul excretions. How comfortable it was to lie back against the roof, her arms thrown wide, and feel her feet braced, strongly in the gutter – the gutter along which icy water rushed, flooding her boots, freezing her toes, reminding her, at last, that she couldn’t stay there for ever. This was the easy part; now she would explore. Still leaning on the roof, she peered through the night to discover the pale stone balustrade of her mother’s balcony, some fifty feet along and ten beneath, and made for it.

Charlotte’s bed frothed like a rough sea with pantalettes, drawers and petticoats. Charlie Traversham-Beechers pushed them aside like a determined swimmer.

‘Come, Charlotte; come and sit with me.’

But Charlotte stayed where she was, on the stool. Her initial shock at his unnatural appearance in her room had subsided slightly, and she was remembering what a pest he was.

‘It is very late at night,’ he whispered. ‘We have hours and hours before morning.’

‘Someone will come—’

‘Your son? Do you think your son will come to fetch you, now he knows what you are?’

‘You’re cruel. What do you want from me?’

‘I haven’t very long. I rather thought I’d enjoy myself.’

And he lifted a garment from the bed (a lace-edged pair of bloomers) and began to tear it into strips.

‘Bully!’ she cried.

‘Not one of them cares for you any longer, Charlotte; not one of them will come,’ he said.

She was momentarily distracted by a scuffling sound on the roof above her.

‘I wish you’d leave,’ she said. ‘You’ve had your fun – you won’t get any more from me.’

The child suspended on the wet slates; the woman in the bedroom advanced upon; the dancing hoards in the hall, waving sticks and arms aloft, stamping their feet, juddered Sterne’s foundations as the building shouted, ‘
What now? What now?
’ at the small group clinging together on the stairs: Emerald, Patience, Clovis, John and Ernest; ladies’ hands seeking reassurance in the crooks of gentlemen’s arms.