The Uninvited Guests (28 page)

‘Aren’t you forgetting the little matter of the wall between the houses?’ said Clovis.

‘We can break it down,’ said Emerald, on her mettle.

‘My bedroom wall?’ said Smudge eagerly.

‘Break it down?’ Charlotte was shocked.

‘Oh Mother, it’s only a wall! The men can do it. Can’t you?’

‘If you wish it,’ said Ernest, struck by her beauty.

‘You’re as mad as old Smudge,’ said Clovis cheerfully. ‘Let’s try it.’

‘We can cover the steps with mud and stones. It will be just like the ground outside – we can’t possibly do that in this house. She’ll go down like a lamb.’ Emerald was carried away with her idea and impatient to execute it. ‘And if she slithers – then, she slithers! We can bandage her legs up.’

The pony and child were sent to Clovis’s bedroom, where Smudge fell asleep on the bed, and Lady looked out of the window, stupidly.

‘Come!’ cried Florence Trieves. ‘Wheelbarrows!’ And all seven of them raced from the front of the house into the wild and billowing night.

There was barely a light to be seen. They were engulfed, instantly.

Clovis ran back to fetch lamps, Ernest and Emerald went to the outbuildings and found shovels and picks, hoes – anything that they could use to bring the outside into the house and save the accursed pony.

Charlotte threw open the wide, main door of the Old House. It was thick and softened by lack of use. The travellers turned aghast from the fire to stare as Clovis wedged it open to the air, holding a lamp high and shouting, ‘Bring the barrows in!’

‘What now?’ they murmured, and, ‘Confound the Railway: hang them.’

The fine rain had become finer still. The breeze had softened from stiff to spring-like. The tattered clouds rolled and shredded above, revealing the patterns of the stars, late in their nighttime arc, laced above the house like dewy spider’s web.

The heaving of wet earth began. Ernest, Florence, Charlotte – with sudden wild enthusiasm for toil – Emerald, Clovis, Patience, all took up tools and worked.

Mud clung to their legs. It sucked their shoes almost from their feet. In places they stood ankle deep in it, then slid, like skaters, across flags coated with water and slime, trip over brick paths and stumble headlong into shrubs and tangling roses.

From dark night to dim house they journeyed, and slapped shovelfuls of soil onto the steps of the great stair. There was a curious satisfaction in it.

Clovis was speedy with his task to illuminate, and soon lamps stood about the place, lighting the kitchen garden door here, the verges there; a pool of brightness by the beds where Emerald had gardened that morning, a watery beam to point out a wall or small tree, and all serving only to exaggerate the vast unfathomable night around them. John and Florence, sworn off one another for ever, so that he might seek a more appropriate mate, took the opportunity to kiss violently under cover of the night and rain.

The mud slathered them all. The women’s ruined hems dragged as they heaved the soil into the wheelbarrows and pushed them, two together to the door of the Old House.

‘I’ll fetch sacks to hold it to the stairs,’ said Clovis, rivulets streaming down his face and into his mouth.

‘Yes, for gripping!’ shouted Patience across the gravelled paths.

John, Clovis and Patience had set up a loose chain to the house, and were carrying the earth inside. The barrows rattled and jumped over the cobbles and ploughed through sodden earth.

The soothing rain poured down; the leaden, sucking earth ensnared them. They were washed into the seething night, like ragged night-birds, like fallen leaves; like spirits.

‘Ooh,’ and ‘See?’ moaned the travellers as they watched the household go in and out of the Old House, and in and out again; flinging shovelfuls of mud onto the stairs of the great hall.

In the border, Ernest and Emerald toiled together, clothes sticking to them, he breaking the compacted earth, she heaving it up.

‘This is madness!’ she cried, blood pounding around her body, palms wet and slippery on the handle of the shovel, and hair blown into her face as she worked.

And he, bringing the pick down, working its point into the soil so that she might take it up, glanced up at her and replied, ‘Yes, it’s marvellous. Magnificent.’

And in the churning mud of the border, Emerald slipped and tottered and fell into the ooze. Her hand smacked down onto it, and deeply into it, almost to the elbow.

‘Here.’ Ernest’s hand came out to save her and, as she hauled at his arm, he too reeled and fell into the mud with a smack – at least the side of him, and all of one leg. Mud slapped and slopped about them. She began to laugh, as for brief moments it was as if the bed would swallow them, as if they would never raise themselves from its rich earth, buried like bodies in a graveyard, for ever.

‘Oh, heavens!’ cried Emerald, as they struggled together. ‘Help!’

They knelt, gripping hand to arm.

Clovis had left the lamp several feet away, and in its watery beam only their teeth and eyes gleamed; pale cheeks, mud-streaked; daubed hair, sleek. Emerald tasted the mineral grit of earth on her tongue; her hands gripped Ernest’s forearms as they fought for stability. She felt the heat of his body, close to her, inside his ruined clothes, and caught the faintest smell of lemon. She looked up at him; he down at her. They gripped one another firmly, knees sinking ever further into that primeval herbaceous border.

His glasses had fallen from his face. The lamp-light shone upon him. She had forgotten altogether about the colour of his eyes. She placed her mud-coated hand against his cheek, touched the edge of his ear, and felt all the wavering, fearful centre of herself rejoice.

‘You’re an angel,’ he said.

‘No—’ Thinking of her mother, suddenly, she said, chokingly, ‘none of us are that.’

‘You are
Emerald
, then,’ he said, and muddied his lips kissing the fingers of her chilled hands.

Emerald was drenched and dancing with delight, as the stars shone down, like showering sparks around them.

I cried in that flower-bed this morning, too
, she thought and laid her cheek against his bowed head.

The breeze had dropped to a whisper. The rain – oh miracle! – had utterly ceased. Emerald began to shiver.

‘Shall we send out a dove?’ said Ernest, then, ‘Ah, I’ve dropped my spectacles somewhere.’

Together they groped in the mud until they were found.

As Smudge slept on, the men, joined by an exultant Ernest, assaulted the wall from the great hall side, crowded onto the gallery and upper steps, with picks and the utmost violence.

Blackened like miners by the wet earth of Sterne, they set about destroying the plaster and lath and, dry as bone, it fragmented beneath their blows. Dust and paint chips flew up in clouds, with horse-hair, and soon, very soon, the queer sight of Smudge’s little bedroom, like Tinkerbell’s boudoir, only bare and shabby, came into view.

Below, the white hoards of travellers watched, silently and in awe, this violent life distracting them even if only briefly from their arrested journey.

The noise woke Smudge, who left the pony and came to her bedroom doorway to watch.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘there’s the Old House!’

From her side the view was even odder: through the hole the enormous old place opened up like the wide underwater world seen through the porthole of a ship from a snug cabin; the long gallery banister, the rows and rows of beds, the chalky passengers far below, staring up at her, the leaping shadows thrown up by the fire; this really was the most rare of adventures.

‘Hello!’ she called to them. ‘Hello! Hello!’

‘Here, clear that away,’ said Clovis, kicking the broken pieces away from the gap – now some six feet wide – so that the pony might step through.

Patience hovered behind the men on the gallery, squeaking and exclaiming concernedly. Florence and Charlotte were next to her, and Emerald was gazing on the miracle that was Ernest, as she relived their embrace in the flower-bed.

‘I think it’s time to give it a try, don’t you?’ said Clovis.

While Smudge and he went to fetch Lady, Emerald and Ernest ran to the stables to fetch Levi, who was to stand by the door as encouragement to the pony, and Patience, Charlotte and Florence placed themselves about as human barriers to prevent her rampaging over the gallery and laying waste to the rows of beds they had so painstakingly constructed there.

As Smudge brought Lady into her bedroom, and the pony saw there was a hole where once the wall had been, she stopped and stared.

‘Stupid animal,’ said Charlotte.

‘Ought not somebody else lead her down?’ queried Patience fearfully.

‘No!’ cried Smudge, appalled. ‘She’s mine!’

At the sight of Smudge’s stricken face, Charlotte murmured, ‘Imogen would like to do it,’ and slowly, she approached them. ‘Smudge?’ she said softly, holding out her hand.

‘I’m sorry, Mother,’ said Smudge.

‘It’s quite all right. These things happen.’

With that, she took a hold of the pony’s headcollar, while Smudge took up the rope, and they led her through the gap.

The child stared around her. The household, mud-coated, encouraged her, kindly; the great group of travellers stared up with hollow eyes, not breathing.

Emerald, with the horse Levi, shiny and immaculate, appeared at the open door, but despite his love for Emerald, he gave a start at the sight of the crowd of pale watchers. He did not seem to like the look of them at all. She made do with just his head and shoulders and forelegs inside, and once he saw Lady, high above, on the gallery, he appeared to realise the situation, gave a low whinny of greeting to the pony, and stood solidly to wait for her.

Smudge stared down at them all bleakly.

‘I think she may be more willing if I ride,’ she said in a small voice.

‘You may be right,’ said Charlotte steadily, and she bent and hitched up her skirt, tying it firmly in a knot so as not to trip over it on the stairs. Lady stood stock still as Charlotte helped Smudge up. The stairs, hidden beneath wet mud, heaped with stones, sloped steeply down to the ground.

‘
Down you come
,’ said a soft, breathy voice from below.

It was an encouragement from among the grouped survivors.

Other souls took up the whisper. ‘Down you come, child. Down.’ And then subsided into silence.

‘Ready?’

Smudge nodded. Tremblingly, tentatively, she touched Lady with her bare heels. Lady took a step towards the top stair. She lifted one back leg high up and waved it, gropingly. The front legs wobbled. One front hoof stepped forward. The hind came down, a slither, a stumble – a gasp from everyone assembled – and then she steadied herself once more.

The first half-step was accomplished, but the hind legs were still on the gallery, and the front two were below, unevenly splayed.

‘Lean back,’ murmured Charlotte.

Smudge leaned.

‘Come on, Lady, good girl,’ said Charlotte. ‘Leg on, Smudge, pretend it’s a bank, out hunting.’

Smudge obediently squeezed with her legs – although her thighs were weak and shaking with fear.

All eyes on the gallery were fixed on the pony’s hind legs, holding their breath to see if, when they left the stability of the landing, they would lose their footing.

Tears started into Smudge’s eyes. She gritted her teeth.

The pony slipped down yet another step with a foreleg, trying to avoid the moment when all four were on the slope but, stretching too far, she was forced to catch up with her back legs. She slid her back feet forward in tiny, slithering, skating movements until, at the edge, she simply ran out of wood and a hoof dropped the inches into the built-up squelching slope below.

‘Walk on,’ said Charlotte, brightly.

Below them, Levi lifted his nose and huffed comfortingly. Emerald leaned against him, grasped Ernest’s hand in breathless anticipation.

Lady took another slow step. Her hooves found mud, rocks, steps themselves. With slithers and jolts, and legs bent at angles, she made her slow progress. Her hocks trembled. She threw up her nose, eye-whites showing. Smudge slipped a little on the smooth coat, leaning back further for balance, her small fingers twisting in the long mane, white-knuckled, her mother’s hand firmly holding her hip.

Finding hoof-holds in the mud, heaped sacks and stones, it seemed the pony had begun to seek purchase with equanimity and even, from what they could judge by the set of her ears, cheerfulness.

‘Good girl,’ said Charlotte.

They were more than halfway down the staircase.

They stumbled.

With a great scooping slide of a back leg, her weight toppled and Lady almost sat down on the stairs, as the child fell sideways and grabbed at her mother’s shoulder.

‘Oh!’ cried the watchers beneath them. ‘Oh!’ cried the watchers above, as the pony’s front legs, unbalanced by the weight of her back end, buckled.

Both knees crumpled, as if to somersault, and Charlotte, losing her footing, too, on the slithering mud, screamed. Her scream was not for the fall, though, but for a different reason.

As the pony began to tumble she caught sight – through locks of hair, half-hidden in the bleary soil-heaped lumps of the ground below – of the white face of Charlie Traversham-Beechers, buried in the mud. Its eyes were open, staring at her. Even as she screamed, the pony’s flailing metal hoof came down upon the face, flat. And gripped, halting. And stood – still. The fall was arrested. The pony threw up its head. The man’s face, pressed deeper into the mud, disappeared altogether.

The pony was secure, trembling but safe, and Charlotte, in horror and disbelief, found herself making weeping mews and gulps. All her limbs and fingers, her head, her innards, shook. She closed her mouth. She sought control.

‘All right? Smudge?’ she quavered.

Smudge, aboard the pony still, not having seen the apparition but alarmed enough by her own situation, could only nod.

‘Shall we go on?’

They continued.

The mud and stones beneath Charlotte’s spoiled shoes were mud and stones once more. There was no body underneath them. There was no corpse’s face to step upon, just the sliding makeshift slope of the stairs.