Page 21 of Preaching to the Choir

Neera rolled her eyes apologetically, as though Elena was going to get cross by having her valuable prisoner time wasted by visitors. When the door was opened, she felt a leap of hope that crashed instantly into despair: Will. Her new friend Will, who was newly the stranger, Will. Or whoever or whatever he was.

And Ross, on his heels. And a frozen moment in which she waited for him not to know her, to cast her off, to have become like Will. The English upper-classness of him drawn about him like a cloak, the edges of which she could only pluck desperately at.

Then he almost shouldered Will out of the way and was at her bedside, hugging her fiercely.

“They wouldn’t tell me,” he said raggedly. “What they’d done with you. The bastards. They wouldn’t even say.”

“What did they do? I remember… I only remember Melissa…”

“Melissa,” Ross echoed. “The bastards. The F, the F… Fucking Jeffrey. F-fucking Uncle Jeff.” He cast a venomous look over at the others. Elena saw that a solid, heavyset woman had come in with them, and Uncle Jas as well, standing by the door like Russian heavies in a Bond film. They contrived not to hear what he said, but Will was looking over, and Elena could almost believe that she knew him again.

“Nobody wanted that,” he said. He had his shirt sleeve rolled up to the bicep, and Neera was rattling about amongst her implements, filling a big old syringe from a modern membrane-topped phial. “Jeffrey’s been… reprimanded. Everyone’s furious with him.”

“Furious,” Ross repeated. “Oh, well, in that case.”

“She was my cousin,” Will said. “She was my friend.”

“Was she?” Elena asked. “Yours? I mean, do you still… have his memories?”

Will looked blank for a second, then scowled. “I’m still me. I just… understand what’s going on here. And it didn’t need to be… We shouldn’t have tried to get out. Melissa shouldn’t have. It would all have been… all right.”

“So it’s her fault, is what you’re saying,” Ross said angrily.

“No, I… Ross, we’re all… You never thought you’d have to pay your dues to the family, eventually? I mean it’s not like you can’t go right back out there, to your studies, to your life, after. I will. And I’ll do well at it. I’ll be the youngest damn Kings Counsel anyone ever saw, Ross. I’ll be at the cutting edge of the legal profession. You’ll be a genius surgeon or researcher or… anything you want, Ross. The world is your oyster. You can do it all. Pick a direction, people will open every door between you and your destination.”

“For a price,” Ross noted.

“They’ll give you the talk,” Will said. “Soon. Today. And then you tell me it isn’t worth it.” He winced when the needle went in. Elena was vaguely surprised that what he had become could feel pain.

“We’re all very sorry about Melissa,” Will said. “It was a horrible mistake, a misunderstanding. Jeffrey being… Jeffrey. He was always… Jeffrey.”

He shrugged, winced a little, obviously wanted to say more, but before Ross’s stony and forbidding gaze he just looked away and left the room.

Neera left too, shortly after, and took her biology homework with her. For a short while it was just Ross and Elena, and a dour woman Ross identified as Aunt Helen, solid and square as a fridge. She sat on a stool in one corner like a hostile chaperone concerned with Elena’s chastity and glowered at them.

Ross sat on the bed and picked miserably at the chain of Elena’s cuffs. It wasn’t lost on either of them that nobody was shackling him to anything.

“I don’t know what to say,” he managed eventually. “It’s a horror show. I had no idea. Please believe me, I didn’t know any of this.”

“I believe you,” she assured him, but he just went on, the words tumbling out of him like he’d opened a vein.

“I mean, you hear things. Growing up. And you realise things are a bit… different. I have a lot of cousins, but they’re all within five years, maybe, of me. And all the uncles and the aunts are around Dad’s age.” And his mother was younger, of course. Kayleigh Enderbough née Fitzhugh was almost fifteen years Gilchrist’s junior. But she wasn’t of the blood, of course—wasn’t even invited to Enderby, just like all the other spouses who’d married into the family were excluded. Ross meant those born to the family, a rigid maintenance of generational division. “And the great-aunts, and great-uncles… Grandma Beatrice died. It was a car crash. I can just remember. I was five. Maybe if she’d been around I’d have understood more, worked out more. But it was just… I knew there were a load of crusty old aunts and uncles, but I never… I never thought about any of it.”

It was like the money, Elena thought a little bitterly. The fact that Ross would quite happily bumble along eating last night’s cold pizza for breakfast like any other student, but then suddenly he’d say something like ‘Let’s go to Monaco,’ and just be in a position to do it, like it was a special power he’d been born with. Which it was, if you counted generationally entrenched wealth as a power. And it was only after going overseas to study and meeting people who weren’t of his usual social circuit that he’d begun to realise things didn’t work that way for the majority of other people. And he’d never really got round to questioning the other peculiarities of his family, because he’d grown up with them and they were just the way things were.

It turned out that the way things were was grotesque and unnatural and they were both discovering that far too late.

“I won’t let anything happen to you,” he said determinedly, jaw jutting out. In that way he had, which had always seemed so reassuring against the rest of the world. Ross, who would just amble through life until something pushed him, whereupon he was iron. Dependable Ross. Except here he was at the font of all his power, his family, the one thing he was impotent against.

Still, they sat side by side, sliding the cuff awkwardly along the bed’s frame so they could hold hands properly. Aunt Helen glowered at them. Don’t get attached to your pet, her scowl seemed to say.

After a while, the door opened again. It was Gilchrist Enderbough, Ross’s father. “Ah,” he said. “There you are.” As though Ross had somehow escaped the notice of the family, pulled off some daring piece of espionage to reach Elena’s side. “It’s dinner,” he observed.

“I’m not hungry,” Ross said with dignity.

“It’s dinner,” Gilchrist repeated. “And there are things to discuss.”

“How about handing Jeffrey de la Pole over to the police?” Ross said darkly.