Free The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones Page B

lie to that rationale.
    History and the heart notwithstanding, the balance of power, Patience decided, remained firmly with her. After all, he couldn’t read her mind and wasn’t to know how arresting she found him to look at.
    She glanced away, saying warmly, ‘Oh, well done, Ernest.’ The fire was once more throwing dazzling flames into the wide chimney. Ernest sat down.
    ‘You should have seen to the fire, Clovis,’ Emerald said tightly. He was belligerent.
    ‘What on earth do we keep servants for?’
    Emerald resisted biting him hard on the nose. She had made a promise not to quarrel with her brother in front of the guests but he was so extremely vexing she wasn’t sure she could keep it.
    ‘It was awfully good of you,’ she said to Ernest sweetly.
    ‘Not at all,’ he answered, dusting off his knees. She noticed, sympathetically, that he was a little too large for the chair, which was a button-seated affair, with short mahogany legs like a Dachshund.
    Looking at him now, as she did, fleetingly, from beneath her lashes, she found that contrary to her earlier impression, she could easily recognise the boy she had known. The not-unpleasingly asymmetrical face, narrow in childhood, had grown into the aquiline nose and square jaw that in skinny youth had dominated it. The garish hair had darkened to a deep brownish-red, but the eyes, that had been, it’s true, before the enforced wearing of a patch, disconcertingly at odds with one another, were still – she risked another glance – frustratingly unknowable. Hidden behind glass, they had been a mystery to her as long as she’d known him; she had never wondered about them until now. Ernest himself affected not to notice her scrutiny but inwardly he smarted beneath her gaze, that, even tempered by soft lashes and quick looks, blazed. ‘Oh, lord,’ he thought; helplessly, ‘She’s laughing at me.’
    ‘There’s a hiding place in this room, isn’t there?’ said Patience suddenly.
    ‘You remember!’ Emerald smiled, the memory of childhood games of hide-and-seek easing the adult tensions now prevalent.
    ‘I remember there was one …’ Patience glanced about her at the walls and shelves.
    The library – panelled and polished – was the most pleasing room imaginable. When Charlotte and Horace had first come to Sterne (Charlotte hauling, wheeling or otherwise transporting the squally, lace-bound baby Emerald), the library had been used as a billiard room, and the shelves held a collection of vile majolica, or were otherwise desecrated. The Torringtons blamed the Victorians and set about fulfilling the room’s proper destiny, initially with a hundred-odd favourite books from their previous (suburban, undistinguished) house, and then with a trickle of honoured additions from thrilling visits to auction houses. In later, leaner years, equally satisfying forays into fluff-cornered antiquarian bookshops filled the gleaming room to the brim.
    ‘I think … it’s over here,’ said Patience, rising, and setting down her teacup (that now somebody would have to clean and dry and put away). She went over to the window, and the deep recess of its seat, knocking the panelling to the left of it experimentally.
    ‘Wrong!’ sang Smudge gleefully.
    ‘I remember hiding in it with you, Emerald – and you, Ernest!’
    Clovis turned onto his side so as not to face her and affected deep exhaustion.
    ‘I hid in it all afternoon once, and nobody found me at all,’ boasted Smudge, forgetting she hadn’t told anyone she was hiding and had not been missed. ‘I fell asleep!’ she crowed.
    Noticing Smudge, crouched barefoot on the floor in her filthy nightgown, all the things she must do before the evening might successfully begin rushed into Emerald’s mind, along with the chilling recollection that the morning room was stuffed with strange survivors, her mother was hiding, her brother was a solipsistic fiend, they were a woman down in the kitchen – and she had yet to