The Uninvited Guests (29 page)

Above, the household craned and stared; around and below, the host of wan visitors watched in dread silence.

A few more steps – the pony could have jumped down now if she’d a mind to – and they had reached the ground.

All four pony legs and two human ones were planted level once more.

‘There,’ said Charlotte, and swallowed, and gave a laugh that was very like a sob.

The onlookers – even the drained travellers – could not resist a small, weak cheer.

Smudge beamed up at them. She slithered gratefully from Lady’s back and into her mother’s arms.

Charlotte kissed her head. Smudge thought that it was a good thing her mother’s dress was ruined already, so she couldn’t spoil it with her dirty embrace.

There was a breath of mildness in the air as Emerald and Ernest led Levi and the relieved pony back to the stables. The groom’s quarters were silent and empty still. The moment they released her into her stall, the pony turned away and began to tear hungrily at the hay in her manger, apparently suffering no ill effects at all from her adventure. Emerald kissed Levi on the nose and she and Ernest walked back hand in hand. The smell of the springtime in the dark, after the heavy rain, was like a spell upon them.

On their return to the Old House they entered by the main door and closed it behind themselves, engulfed by the smell of the travellers.

‘They must be ready for bed now,’ said Emerald, sliding the bolt home.

Above them, on the broad gallery, the others were busily making last-minute adjustments to the makeshift dormitory, but the passengers had – in characteristic precipitation – already started up the stairs, slow but eager.

‘Come up!’ cried Clovis from the gallery.

They left their belongings behind them as they went, and heaved their heavy feet from step up to step. The others whispered along behind. One by one they poured onto the leaning gallery above the great hall; their strange bedroom.

Emerald and Ernest pushed through the crowds as politely as they could. They had to hold their breaths against the stench and reached the top breathless.

‘Will it do?’ asked Clovis, casting an eye about the gallery.

The rows and rows of beds awaited their occupants. Made from sheep hurdles, boxes, planks, but laid over with layers and layers of Sterne’s softest bedding, they were padded here with a tapestry cushion, there with a muffler, and draped with shawls of Charlotte’s, rugs from the floors of the rooms.

‘They are the best we could do for them,’ said Patience.

‘Just a moment!’ cried Emerald, running to straighten a blanket.

‘There!’ cried Florence, as the last bed was finished. ‘I think that’s that!’

And the family guided each of the weary travellers towards a bed, taking arms, holding hands, overcoming their natural revulsion at the utterly spent, dirty persons trudging exhaustedly to their rest, limbs buckling, flesh sinking.

‘Thank you,’ they said.

‘Thank you for your kindness.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Oh, we weren’t kind,’ said Emerald, thinking of the household’s inconvenience and reluctant servitude.

‘You were; you were, in the end,’ they answered her.

One by one, and bit by bit, the torn and tarnished passengers found places and laid their heads down. Mothers clasped children to their breasts, husbands lay with wives. No more complaining, just a vast and encompassing relief, as each and all, with sighs of blissful calm, found that no feather bed, no prince’s couch, no ample mattress of any kind compared with these hard resting places, these coffin-shaped portals to their longer peace.

Laid out in rows, calmly stretching out their limbs – where they had them – all crossing their hands across their chests and breathing their last and pleasant breaths, they fell into deep, deep oblivion. And were released.

All was utter and human stillness in the Old House, among the living and the dead.

Charlotte, Emerald, Smudge, Patience, Florence, Ernest, Clovis and John stood in a row by the hole in the wall that opened into the little bedroom and watched the bodies laid out. The stench that had filled the house and clung all about them thinned, paled, lifted, and was, quite suddenly, absent. The air was alive and young. Their consciences, which had been leaden since the strange arrivals, lightened and were free. There was nothing more to do.

‘I think it’s time we rested, too,’ said Charlotte, and they all withdrew.

Excited, fevered, believing they would never sleep, each of them was met, one by one, by flat exhaustion – and perhaps the easing of some wakeful spell that had fired them – until, at last, like the sated passengers, they slumbered in oblivion.

Emerald, who was wrapped in a paisley shawl and other scraps, held Smudge in her arms. Their breath was sweet and measured, as all the breathing of the household was sweet and measured, for in the few hours before the dawn, they found the peace of a long night. None of them had the sheets or blankets belonging to their bedrooms – or any sheets or blankets at all. All of them slept haphazardly, in disorganised necessity. Ernest slumbered in his greatcoat, solemn; Clovis with his arm flung out, sprawled across his bed like a puppy, with the spaniels Nell and Lucy to make up the litter. Patience, tidy even in sleep, had tucked herself into her trunk, like a gold ring in a box. Florence – ah, Florence Trieves – she made a different shape that night. Where once she had slept alert, almost standing, like the animals in the fields, guarded against life, that night she was loose-limbed; deep, deep, deep in trusting, restorative sleep – with John Buchanan beside her, just for warmth.

And Charlotte slept on her window seat, heaped with her underthings and other garments as bedclothes, watching for her husband. The cat Lloyd slept, the horses Levi and Lady in their stalls, the lurcher Forth, the spaniels, Lucy and Nell, Tenterhooks, and even the mice, all, all, all slept.

8

EDWARD SWIFT RETURNS

Night drew back on a mild delightful day. All the elements that represent a spring morning were at their boldest: tumbling birdsong, mist rising from the wet ground; this was a May Day to celebrate.

Sun hurtled through the windows and bathed the extreme filth of the house in its beams. Mud glinted in the heavenly glow. Emerald danced through the debris.

‘Good morning, Myrtle! No Pearl Meadows again?’ she sang, and did not notice that Myrtle’s mood did not match her own. Myrtle was washing up, like a tortoise climbing a mountain.

‘Morning, Miss Em,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind my asking …’ And she gestured towards the door of the Old House, which stood wide open, revealing the mud-covered stairs and still smoking fire.

Emerald tripped gaily past Myrtle and stepped through. There was a woman in a blue dress, standing with her hands open to the sunlight, as if she were beneath a waterfall.

‘Florence?’ said Emerald. ‘Mrs Trieves?’ Florence turned. ‘Your dress …’ said Emerald weakly.

She found she was gawping and failed to rearrange her face.

‘Good morning, Miss Em,’ said Florence. ‘The passengers have all gone!’

‘Gone?’ Emerald picked up her skirt to climb the muddy stair. It was true. The beds were there but the passengers had quite disappeared. The air that floated through the front door was scented with hyacinths, narcissi and grass.

‘The Railway must have come for them,’ said Florence.

‘And about time, too,’ remarked Emerald.

She crossed to the nearest little nest, one into which she herself had lain a child, and picked up the pillow that lay upon it. The pillow was fresh and crisp, starchy and white as if it had just been taken from the cupboard. Holding it, she looked about. All around her the beds were made, with sheets and fresh cotton, untouched.

Gradually the household emerged, yawning and refreshed, oddly buoyant after their short, disarranged sleep. Walking about the house, converging in rooms that bore the marks of the night’s activities – dozens of cups strewn here and there, plates stacked by the fireguard in the morning room, cigars all over the floors – they took delight and pleasure in discovering the proof that what had taken place was real, as if conceivably they could have concocted such events from fantasy. The fact remained, though, that however many little proofs were found – the forty chairs crowded into two small rooms, Clovis’s missing collar and tie, every knife, spoon and fork in the house dirtied – it was not the material facts that eluded them, but the feeble imprint they made on their minds. They could not seem to make it stick.

Still, if anyone were to doubt the veracity of their hosting the hoards at Sterne, the harshest of undeniable truths was the mess. No birthday party any of them had known or dreamed of could have produced the like.

The gargantuan task of returning things to a semblance of order was undertaken in an atmosphere of cheerfulness by both family and guests. Mud was the main imposter, and grease the next. A number of scrubbing brushes were worn to the wood.

‘Perhaps we could leave the old stairs to grow grass?’ suggested Patience.

‘When Pearl Meadows does deign to honour us with her presence she can have sole charge of polishing them,’ Myrtle was heard to mutter. She had grumpily risen at dawn, determined to ignore any apology from Florence Trieves that might be forthcoming, following her harridan attack of the night before, but having found the woman in a cotton frock, singing as she went about the place, she had been partially disarmed immediately, and the rest of her defences were laid down when, on seeing her, Florence enveloped her in arms – warm! – and a smile – warmer! – and apologised, not perfunctorily, but generously, not just for having shouted the day before, but for any historical bad temper the girl could summon to memory. Who could bear a grudge then? Not Myrtle, certainly, although she gave Florence a wide berth anyway, in case her good humour was caused by some mental aberration of which violence was the next stage.

Glancing across the morning like a pebble on water, we see Smudge sleeping deeply, in Emerald’s bed, until rising, late but happy, to join in the activity; buckets of water heaved and sloshing; oddly chiming clocks marking differently occupied hours as the house emerges into clear day.

As the morning goes by, we see Emerald and Ernest, craving time together to bask in their similarities, excusing themselves for half an hour to find the dusty microscope in the attics.

The attics – ah, what stored dreams and pleasures were there among the stained curtains and wobbly tables, waiting to be mended? They stepped across the beams, through the shafts of sun carefully.

‘Do you remember where it is?’ asked Ernest.

‘Of course. It’s over there.’

They did not have to search.

Ernest knelt beside her as she took the heavy wooden box, like a little coffin, from its place.
Click. Click.
Click. She released the familiar brass clasps. He opened the box of slides, removed the card (
with love from your friend, Patience
) and handed her one to unwrap. She slipped it from its tissue paper and slid it beneath the lens, securing it with neat, remembering fingers. He began to rummage about the things nearest to them, looking for a suitable object for their scrutiny, she cleared a space and set the microscope square. They acted naturally, in unison, both conscious of the same practical fascination, the understood sympathy of the other.

‘Spider—’ he said.

‘Large?’

‘Not very.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Feather?’ Being with Ernest as they went about the jumbled attic it was as if, looking at the tapestry in the dining room for the millionth time, she had seen a new set of deer emerge from the trees, new trumpets, another scattering of embroidered flowers. She glanced up at him. The light shone on her face, but his was in shadow, looking down at her.

‘What colour are your eyes?’ she asked.

‘I haven’t the vaguest notion, why?’

Then they kissed.

They missed each other’s mouths at first as neither had ever done it before, but they made a good study of it and progressed marvellously quickly. They kissed until they were breathless, and feared forgetting themselves.

Drawing away, she said a little unsteadily, ‘We haven’t any butterfly wings or beetle’s legs. Here, give me a strand of your hair.’

Only Charlotte was exempt from the general cheeriness. Not because she did not want to help (although she didn’t), but rather because she was more cautious in the piecing together of events in her mind to a pleasing conclusion, and too occupied by questions to forget the discomfort and horror of the night.

When it was the turn of the dining room to be cleared, she went ahead, and stood, staring at the shattered glass and port stain on the damask that shouted out the game of Hinds and Hounds – the game that had undone her… And yet, she had emerged unscathed. Wonderingly she picked up a thin shard between her thumb and forefinger, and seemed to hear ‘
pass the glass, pass the glass
’ ring in the panelling around her. Charlie Traversham-Beechers had defied the natural rules of life and death to ruin her and yet – he loved her. She did not now doubt that she had seen his face beneath the pony’s foot upon the stair, she did not doubt he saved them. She shivered. The laughing sounds of her family were distant as a chill surrounded her. Where was he now? she wondered. And, when she banished him, where had he gone? She knew the innocent passengers were released to kind oblivion, but what would release a man like Charlie Traversham-Beechers from the eternal waiting?

As Emerald and Ernest desired time alone with one another, so Charlotte, bruised by her ordeal, needed solitude in which to regain her own equilibrium. She slipped out of the house and walked, as Emerald had done the day before, along the border, now decimated with holes and ground down by tramping feet, until she reached the gate to the yard behind the harness room and stables.

‘Good God!’ she said out loud, and suddenly, ‘Where on earth did Robert and Stanley get to!’