Page 3 of Preaching to the Choir

“Um,” said Ross before that withering gaze. “Hi. Yes. Hi. Dad, this is… This is—”

Gilchrist’s eyes consented to the fact of her. “Well, I assume that this is Miss Mendes, based on her likeness to that photograph of you and her at some manner of party.” Spoken in such a way as to indicate that what Gilchrist Enderbough would consider a ‘party’ was a world away from Ross, Elena and their friends cracking owl jokes at the Superbowl intermission. “What, might I ask, is she doing here?”

Just when she thought the entire business was going to be an absolute bust, a little rebellion flared in Ross’s eyes. “She’s here, Dad, because she’s my guest.”

“Ross, this is a family event.”

“Well, I wanted her to meet the family,” Ross said. She could hear him getting angry, under it all, but Ross got formal when he got angry. And that must be a family thing, because Enderbough senior had gone the same way.

“Ross, it is simply not appropriate. I’ll have one of the staff drive her to a hotel. Or the airport, if she would prefer. I assume a ticket to… What would it be? Baltimore International? I’ll have it arranged.”

“No,” said Ross. Elena looked from one to the other. On the one hand, being argued over as though they were a pair of very polite wolves and she was a steak wasn’t exactly part of the emancipated agency she’d looked for in the twenty-first century. On the other hand, she wasn’t under any circumstance going to say a damn thing because getting between father and son right now would be like stepping into an industrial laser.

“Ross,” Gil Enderbough said.

“She goes, I go,” Ross said. “I didn’t even want to come.”

Gil’s face was quite immobile, but Elena could almost hear the chess going on behind his pale grey eyes. Playing through how this conversation would go, first one way and then the next, looking for the winning gambit that would see her gone and Ross still here. Ross had his chin stuck out that way he did, and his hands curled lightly into not-quite-fists, the fingers twitching in sequence. His anger management bit.

He’d said, occasionally, that his family—sprawling and appallingly well-to-do as it was—had been a difficult thing to grow up in, and a harder thing to get clear of. He didn’t come back home much, after he’d escaped to Johns Hopkins and the States.

Something calculating and mechanical reached a conclusion within Gilchrist Enderbough. “It’s late,” he said. “We’ll talk about it after breakfast. I’m glad you came, Ross. You’ll be glad, too. You know we don’t do this often.” His eyes flicked past them to Uncle Jas as though anticipating a challenge, but there was none.

Their bags were in the entrance hall, when they retreated. Outside, the car was gone. Ross must have passed the keys to the guy who answered the door. Or a wizard did it; after that great hall, Elena might just have believed the latter.

“I mean it,” Ross was saying, as they followed their bags upstairs to what was apparently ‘Uncle Henry’s Room.’ He was saying it to himself, as much as her. “You stay. Or I go. Honestly, either’s fine with me.”

The bags went through a heavy, low-lintelled door ahead, wood-panelled and brass-shod. As did the staff carrying them. Quiet, efficient young men and women wearing the same grey waistcoats and neckties. Elena tried to mark their faces and thank them, though she guessed tipping probably wasn’t the done thing. At the same time, she was trying to get a toehold back into whatever the hell was actually going on here.

“Ross, I don’t want to be the thing that fucks things over between you and your family,” she pointed out.

“That ship has sailed, honestly.” He looked back, smoothing back his hair, an old nervous habit. It just sprang right back up again after.

“Okay, let me rephrase that,” she said. “I don’t want to be some kind of weaponised foreigner that you’re using to continue an ongoing feud with your family. I mean, you met my folks and Aunt Mari was super-rude to you when she didn’t know you had any Spanish, but this is a whole other level.”

Then they were in Uncle Henry’s Room—oh, probably it was The Lavender Suite or something, but Uncle Henry had laid claim to it a century before and the name had stuck—and her words petered out. It was ridiculous. It was absurd. There were tapestries. There was a bed approximately the size of the M&T Bank stadium with actual posts at each corner and curtains you could draw around it so the servants couldn’t watch you sleep. There was also, rather blessedly, electric light happening when you pulled the string by the door. Except the light revealed what was at the far end of the wall. Which was an even better reason to sleep with the bed curtains closed.

Uncle Henry, Ross explained, had been some big explorer type back in Queen Victoria’s day. He’d gone to Africa back when taking other people’s stuff had been Britain’s chief stock in trade, and here was a lot of that stuff just gathering dust on a shelf, which those people’s descendants were probably agitating about getting back.

Uncle Henry’s tastes, it appeared, had run to the grotesque. The half-dozen statuettes he’d decided to decorate his room with were—probably the words were ‘highly stylised,’ though Elena would also have accepted ‘creepy as fuck.’ Long-legged, hunch-backed, the small head well below the great round curve of the shoulders. The V carved into the chest was a sharp nose, looking down, she realised. She almost joked that they had the Enderbough features down, but Ross was flushed and visibly angry, now his dad wasn’t around to see it, and she judged the time wasn’t right for ribbing him.

The figures’ arms were carved into the torso, too short, crooked, tucked in. She honestly couldn’t say what it was about them that pushed all the creepy buttons, just as she couldn’t say why the hell Uncle Henry had wanted to bring them back with him, but here they were.

And there was something more. She remembered the brief flash she’d had of that nasty wings-spread carving over the front door. The Enderby Angel. And these statuettes were absolutely different in every possible way from that image. Except some part of her mind that didn’t show its working was telling her they were the same.

They slept with the curtains drawn, and Elena turned every one of those statuettes to the wall beforehand, shuddering as she touched the dark, oiled wood.

Her bladder woke her some time much later, and needless to say nobody had thought about en-suite bathrooms back in umpteen hundred and three when the house was built. It took some courage to part the curtains. Everything was completely silent, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a hunched, beak-nosed shape waiting out there to scare the bejesus out of her.

She tried to remember where the john had been. Somewhere down the hall and then round a corner. Barefoot, a blanket clutched about her, she tottered out to find it.

And she couldn’t, of course, and she padded back and forth and up and down, only thankful it was too dark for all those portraits of Enderbough ancestors to properly glower at her. Until she tried a door that she was absolutely sure was going to be Uncle Jas’s bedroom or something, and instead there was a somewhat rusty but tolerably modern bathroom, brass fittings and all, and she was able to relieve the internal pressure without making some dreadful faux pas that would further dis-endear her to Ross’s family.

And then she couldn’t find her way back. Too many turns around dark corridors, too many pictures and vases and occasional tables that all looked the same in the nocturnal gloom. And she pattered about on increasingly chilly bare feet, snagging the blanket on things and wondering how this already big house had grown to around the size of a city block.

She came to a balustraded balcony at the head of a flight of stairs, and she almost cried because it wasn’t even the stairs she and Ross had come up. Down there was an entirely different entrance hall, a bigger one, with a stone floor spread with rugs. It was enough to make her think she’d gone back in time or something, like in those kids’ books she used to read.

She was about to do something—run off or beat her fists on the nearest door or shout for a butler or burst into tears—when there was movement from below. And then she was about to run down the stairs and gabble to whoever it was about being lost and where the hell was Uncle Henry’s fucking room when you needed it. And then she didn’t, because there were four people below, and they were wheeling some sort of large trolley between them. All normal so far, sure. Staff doing staff stuff, ready for the new day. Except they weren’t staff. She saw Gil Enderbough there, and there were two other men and a woman. They all wore coats over what looked like nightwear, if she was any judge. They all had grim, flat expressions. And on the trolley—the gurney, she now realised—was a body.