The Uninvited Guests Read Online Free PDF

lunch?’
    Florence wiped a tear from her eye. ‘It’ll be early, with all the hullaballoo today, and it’s what remains of the pie from dinner.’
    ‘Delicious!’ sang Charlotte and floated away.
    Smudge leaned from her window into the raw air. There had been a change in the weather and the bruised sky was threatening in all directions.
    ‘Where are my brother and sister?’ she breathed. Smudge was content with loneliness, but intermittently the fabric of her surroundings was unpredictable and she craved flesh-and-blood company beyond the spectres of her imagining. Answering her, the trees moved uneasily and she caught the almost un-hearable hoofbeats of the returning horses on the shifting breeze.
    The horses emerged from the tunnel of the yews as if they were stepping onto a dimly lit stage from the darkened wings. Clovis reached up to grab a black twig from the tattered tree above him.
    ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘home,’ then, ‘Oh!’ for an enormous shining car, glaring with chrome and glossy blue paintwork, was parked majestically, glamorously, alarmingly, dazzlingly in the middle of the drive.
    ‘Heavens!’ cried Emerald, as both horses started in fright. Levi jumped backwards, barging into Ferryman who, taking exception, plunged, dashing the gravel.
    ‘Silly,’ said Emerald, steadying him with barely a movement or gathering of reins. ‘It’s just a car, and you’ve seen plenty of those before.’
    Levi rolled his eyes dramatically, looking down his nose at the Rolls-Royce, which seemed to goggle back, the pointed silver lady poking up between its glass eyes like a small and vicious single antler.
    ‘Not any car, Em,’ said Clovis, who had exhorted Ferryman to stand square. ‘Doesn’t… John Buchanan drive just such an impressive machine?’
    ‘ Clovis ,’ Emerald warned.
    The horses, having had their fun, suffered themselves to be ridden away to the back of the house, brother and sister locked in silent communication.
    ‘Oh, get on with it!’ burst out Emerald finally, Clovis’s form of silent communication – insinuating glances and eyebrow raising – having proved too eloquent for her.
    ‘Come on, Emerald, the farmer John Buchanan is well-heeled.’
    They were riding close, knees bumping occasionally.
    ‘And what of it?’
    ‘It has come to my brotherly attention that – gobbling up Sterne acres notwithstanding – he holds you in high esteem.’
    She was withering. ‘Clovis, please, no match-making. I’d rather …’ she was at a loss to imagine a fate worse than marriage to John Buchanan ‘… sell my hair. So just cheese it, as you might say, you uncouth youth. I may as well ask you to marry Patience Sutton!’ she finished.
    ‘Pax! Pax! There’s no need for that sort of talk. We won’t mention it again,’ promised Clovis, then, ‘What-ho, Stanley!’ And he slid off Ferryman, long-legged, and began to lead him towards his stall. ‘“Uncouth youth”,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Wonderful!’
    Emerald dismounted, laid her cheek on Levi’s damp neck and kissed him. ‘Come on, you,’ she said. ‘John Buchanan will just have to wait for a moment.’ And she led him off to his stall.
    Some ten minutes later, Emerald, russet-cheeked, hair half-down and smelling delightfully of horse, hauled off her boots by the umbrellas. She considered tidying herself but rejected the notion as potentially misleading. She would gladly bear being seen in her eccentric riding garments if it kept her out of the romantic hot water with John Buchanan.
    She strode through the house to find him in the drawing room, opposite Charlotte, perched politely on the low settee. This item of furniture was best suited to polite perching as the seat was broken entirely; it was but an empty promise of a seat. Any person aiming for the cushioned centre found himself on the floor. John had remembered too late having been a casualty of this particular Torrington booby-trap, to everyone’s great mirth, once