The Uninvited Guests (12 page)

Their new visitor furrowed his brow, elaborately.

‘The Railway?’ he asked, and as Emerald, wilting, nodded, he leaned a little towards her. ‘Yes, they’re the very devil to get hold of,’ he said, and winked.

Smudge was always nervous when visiting the stable-yard at night, hating the blindness after the shining windows of the house and before the glow from the stables.

Careful lamps stayed lit in the harness room and beneath the clock tower until after evening stable, when Robert, retreating to his home above the harness room, would extinguish them and all would be dark as pitch. (Smudge had seen hot pitch poured from a bucket and slapped oozingly into the cracks of wooden feed-bins and buckets and, true to its reputation, it was the very blackest, darkest thing she had ever come across; black, hot and bitter-smelling.)

A cold wind whipped her skirts about her legs as she entered the yard, the cobbles hugely bumpy under her thin-soled boots. She scampered quickly across the open yard and arrived – with a small trip, banging her knee – at the door to the stalls.

Immediately she was inside, the air was warmer and sweet with hay – life and sunshine fields of grass, now in nets from last year, and being eaten. She could hear the rhythmic grinding of the horses’ jaws working on it, the sharper crunch of stray oats, and the occasional clatter of a metal shoe on the herringbone floor. Her fear drained away. She reached confidently to the hook above her, where the halters hung; she didn’t even mind when a fat spider tumbled lightly onto the back of her hand. Brushing it off, she went down the stalls to the last and smallest, which was Lady’s.

The horses were curious, watching her. Upstairs, across the yard and above the harness room, she heard Robert laughing, and Stanley’s higher voice joining in.

She stopped, stock still and listened, noticing, too, all the other sounds outside: the rush of the wind in the trees like water, surging, and the cry of a small animal as it died.

‘Here, Lady, come along,’ she said to the pony as she slipped inside her stall. Lady shifted, leaning towards Smudge and sniffing up and down her clothes. ‘Good girl; you’re coming with me,’ said Smudge, trying to keep her voice quiet, but retain the ring of authority.

She led Lady down the line of stables. Levi was lying down, his black tail spread out over the straw, he lifted his nose from curled-up knees to watch her. Ferryman stuck his head out and tried to take a chunk out of Lady’s rump, with eye-rolling and faces, but Smudge pushed his head away with her elbow, avoiding the yellow teeth only narrowly.

‘Get back, you rude thing!’ she said.

Lady’s hooves were not too noisy inside, but agonisingly so out in the open yard. They crashed on the cobbles. (Smudge wondered if Mr Darwin had ever noted that his precious evolution had betrayed the horse rather meanly, in not allowing them to develop a tiptoe along with a walk, trot and canter. The cowardly grass-eating things might have been able to sneak past predators and not had to run away so much.) Smudge went on tiptoe herself but it was no use: a stripe of yellow light opened up above her and struck through the air like a broad-sword, as Robert threw the door wide and cried out, ‘Hey! Who’s there?’ in such a loud and accusing voice that Smudge fairly quaked. Pity the poor burglar that came across
him
at Sterne, she thought.

‘Just me: Smudge!’ she answered, mouse-like.

‘You – and
Lady!
What’s all this, Miss Imogen?’

Smudge ducked under Lady’s neck and looked up at Robert, silhouetted there above her. Stanley joined him and they both stared down. She had an impression she was floating in a black sea, and they had spotted her from the rail of a ship. She did not want saving.

‘Well?’

‘The guests wanted a pony,’ called Smudge, her voice ringing out confidently. She experienced the thrill of deceit.

‘Now? What for?’

‘They want to look at Lady, round at the front, because I told them all about her and they are …’ she faltered, but recovered, ‘all determined to indulge me.’

She was pompous, and delighted with herself at it. She could have danced a jig; who would not believe her now?

‘I see… And why didn’t they ask for me?’

‘They knew you’d be having your supper, and – I
asked
to do it.’

There was a pause in which Lady snorted, all unknowing.

‘Well. How long will you be, Miss?’

Smudge was airy. ‘Oh, until they’re bored; you know how grown-ups are.’

‘I do,’ he said shortly. ‘Well, mind your toes, you’re not in your proper boots. And if I don’t see you back here, I’ll come up to the house myself.’

‘All right, Robert; thank you, Robert!’

Smudge yanked at the rope and went off into the dark. She was not at all scared now, with Robert’s authority behind her and Lady at her side, but she waited until he had safely closed his door, and counted to ten, before she took her across the lawn.

Lady was accustomed to going down the drive and took some persuading before she would plant her hooves on the grass, but once she did, she plunged her head down to eat it, blunt teeth tearing. Lawn grass, manicured and forbidden, was like a drug to the pony, and Smudge forced her to leave off feasting eventually only by smacking her sharply on the stomach.

‘Come on!’ said Smudge, and they went on together towards the house.

Reaching it, the pony and little girl stood under the magnolia waiting, the white candles of its buds cast no light.

Smudge felt the warm huffs of Lady’s breath on her palm as she peered in through the windows.

Nobody was in sight.

She waited until her hammering heart had slowed again. Then – and only when she was convinced she was unobserved – she approached the back door. Holding the end of the rope with one hand, she reached for the heavy ring with the other, turned it, and pushed. Lady startled slightly at the brightness. ‘No faint-heartedness, Lady,’ said Smudge and led her firmly forward.

The umbrella stand provided Lady with a moment of brief horror, but Smudge would brook no arguments now that they were so nearly at their goal.

The Great Undertaking was within her grasp. This May Day eve was the day that the pony Lady would be immortalised in charcoal. She had only to achieve the sitting of the pony, and it would be done. At the thought of Lady sitting, Smudge’s hand flew to her mouth to suppress a yelp. She meant sitting in the way an artist would, not literally; only circus ponies actually
sat
, on barrels and clowns and so forth, and Lady had too much dignity – and weight on her – for that.

‘Sh!’ she whispered. ‘Come along, Lady; in we go.’

The pony set her first hoof on the inside floor of Sterne.

These, then, were the inhabitants of the house, somewhere between seven and eight in the evening (discounting the majority of the animals who, unless otherwise noted, were either sleeping or surging about people’s feet): Robert and Stanley were setting about their supper of bread, cheese and pickles; the pony Lady and Smudge had entered the back hall; Florence Trieves was sweating and snapping at Myrtle in the kitchen; Emerald was in her room, calming herself after her unsettling encounter with the new visitor in the hall; Charlotte was moving about her room, powder-puff in hand, fretfully dusting her pale neck, unaware of the new guest but characteristically resenting the existing ones and ignoring the pitiful scratchings of the kitten Tenterhooks from his little prison beneath her bed. The group of survivors in the morning room were taking off their damp overcoats and waiting, ravenous, for what was to come.

Patience, coiffed and eager, skipped from her room to her brother’s and knocked.

‘Ernest?’

‘Are we to go down?’ He opened the door.

‘I should think so. Are you ready? Oh, I can see you aren’t. I can understand the tie foxing you, Ernest, but a comb? Everyone can manage a comb!’

‘I did –
don’t
—’

She had taken his hand and was pulling him over to the dressing-table glass. Ernest suffered himself to be pushed onto a chair while Patience retied his tie for him and dragged the comb through his thick hair, with added dressing to tame it, before she would allow him out of the room. Patience lived in fear of Ernest being ridiculed, although in truth he hadn’t faced teasing since his childhood. There was nothing she dreaded more than his humiliation; it was an unendurable pain to her. She had once given a boy a bloody nose for calling him Cock-eyes.

After a few more moments of tussling with tie and comb she released him and they left the room, most smartly and correctly turned out for an evening’s celebration. As they descended the stairs, arm in arm, Patience announced, ‘We are going to have a grand time, Ernest, aren’t we?’

But the voice that responded was not her brother’s, but one rather reedier and more strident than that. It was the moustachioed gentleman, the guest, the interloper, who, having heard their footfalls on the wooden treads, had leapt from his chair in the library and thrown open the door to cry, ‘A grand time indeed!’

The brother and sister paused and looked down upon him – the molishly black serge of his jacket, the snowy-white shirtfront, the shirt itself, shockingly open at the neck, and the cherry gleam of his waistcoat – in some astonishment.

Clovis reeled into the hall after him, laughing, leaving a cloud of cigar smoke behind.

‘Charlie Burbisham-Tr – this is Miss Patience Sutton and her brother Ernest. They’re—’

‘Delighted,’ said that gentleman, fixing Patience’s bluebell-coloured eyes with his own very black ones. ‘Delighted indeed.’

‘How d’you do?’ said Patience neatly, hiding her shock at both the appearance of this new arrival and Clovis’s somewhat wild demeanour, to say nothing of the scandalous clouds of cigar smoke issuing from the library behind them.

Ernest, similarly startled, similarly restrained, held out his hand. The other gentleman held out his, and the white gloves gripped one another firmly.

Patience, dwarfed by the men around her, opened her fan, smartly, and closed it again. All four stood for a moment, unaware that behind them a pony had entered the house by the back door. A clock somewhere was heard to chime.

‘Is that eight?’ enquired Patience. (It wasn’t.) ‘So soon?’

‘No idea,’ said Clovis. ‘Shall we go in?’ and he led the way.

No explanation of the new gentleman’s presence was forthcoming.

‘Who on earth is he?’ hissed Patience in her brother’s ear.

‘Friend of Clovis’s, looks like,’ answered Ernest from the corner of his mouth.

Patience rolled her eyes in an expression that meant,
Oh really? How extraordinary!
And was answered with a silent,
Bizarre!
, from her brother.

They approached the drawing room. Clovis threw open the door and the small group entered, all but the new guest, who darted soundlessly away down the corridor. Without breaking step, he opened the door of the morning room noiselessly and leaned deep inside, whispering, ‘Doing my best!’ He tapped the side of his nose, sharply, as he had done to Clovis earlier, before shutting the door once more and trotting along to rejoin the others.

No sounds of stilted gaiety reached Smudge, leading Lady up the stairs.

There had been a sticky moment when the pony first heard the hollow boom of her own hooves on the wood and had run backwards, but Smudge, hot with desperation, urged her on.

‘Come on!’ she said. ‘It’s not far at all!’ Lady had still been doubtful. ‘Now get along up the stairs, Lady, there’s a good girl.’

So Lady climbed the stairs. The wood wasn’t waxed and polished like that of the main stair. Her front hooves found the steps easily, her hindquarters took the rise with ease, but the booming sound was dreadful – still, nobody came.

The landing presented a new challenge. The door must be held open to allow the pony through and then they must go all down the length of the house, past room after room. If only the scullery stairs had been wide enough, they were much nearer her own bedroom. Smudge was giddy with excitement now. Weak fingered, her hand trembled near the doorknob for hateful, frightened seconds. She held it. Her palms were wet though her mouth was dry. She turned the knob with a monstrous click.

The corridor was warm, and the lamps were lit and glowing all down its length in the most inside, house-like way she had ever seen.

She was about to open the door wider when her mother’s – her mother’s! – door was heard to open, and she closed it again, hastily.

She heard Charlotte’s quick tread, another door – even closer – then, as unmistakable as horse’s hooves, came the sound of the lavatory flushing. Hysteria rose madly in Smudge’s chest, she would laugh, she would fall over laughing, she would die. But Lady, as if she, too, recognised the sound of a pulled chain, lifted her tail and deposited a wet heap of grassy, steaming droppings on the back landing, right at the top of the stairs.

‘Oh, Lady,’ breathed Smudge, giggles forgotten, ‘that wasn’t very nice.’

Lady, taking for granted her status as house-pony now, flicked her ears uninterestedly as Charlotte was heard returning to her room. All was quiet again.

Smudge opened the door wide.

‘Now or never,’ she whispered, and she led the pony out into the broad corridor.

She heard no sound from any of the rooms, no voices, nothing but the steady muted thud of Lady’s hooves planting on the floor. The sweet smell of dung clung to them only slightly as they went. She resisted the urge to trot, imagining a hoof poking through the ceiling below, showering enraged and frightened people with plaster. How cross they would all be; she imagined them looking up, aghast, and shaking their fists at her.

Lady’s neatly oiled hooves looked not quite as clean indoors as they did out, but she stepped over the carpets for all the world as if she were quite used to it. Smudge led her past the lamps, past the dull old paintings, the spare room, her mother’s room…
Leading her pony past her mother’s room –
the excitement hit her like a gust of wind, almost knocking her from her feet. She could have screamed with glee, run madly up and down the corridor, whooping, she could have wailed and turned cartwheels in her drawers until she fainted. Her mother’s dressing room, the Stripes, Clovis’s room… They had done it, they were at the corner and around it, her hand was on the door, it was open, her room – how very small it looked – was ahead of her, and then, then, the pony was inside.