The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones

but when she needed to, she enlisted Myrtle.
    ‘It’s five. Where could they be?’
    Myrtle had finished buttoning. ‘Unless there’s anything else, Miss Em?’
    ‘No, of course. Thank you, off you go.’
    Myrtle left her and she stood biting her nails and staring towards the gate. Her room occupied the corner, and not much that happened at Sterne escaped the view from its windows, but the avenue was too dark and there were only the thickening shadows to interpret.
    Viewed from the outside, Emerald reflected, she would have made a romantic picture: the young, well-proportioned woman, in the tall window of her old, well-proportioned house, nervously waiting for her guests to arrive as the afternoon sun, having made a fleeting return, glinted on the glass. Looking at the picture one wouldn’t imagine the young lady was only waiting for her sulky brother, a childhood friend, the friend’s mother and John Buchanan. Put that way it wasn’t very exciting at all.
    At the thought of John Buchanan, though, who was so very uninterested in her romantically, whose disinterested admiration had been sickeningly familial in its properness, she crossed back to the dressing table, opened a tiny pot, left there in hope by her shameless mother and dabbed her lips with a small amount of red stain. Her face was instantly lit and vital, not least because of the quick naughtiness in her eyes.
    ‘There, to you, stuck-up John Buchanan,’ she said, blowing rouged kisses and sticking out her tongue.
    Smudge appeared in the doorway.
    ‘Who are you talking to?’
    ‘Myself. I must break the habit.’ Emerald turned to her sister.
    ‘Oh, you look beautiful!’ breathed Smudge, alight. ‘Pity it’s only old Patience Sutton.’
    ‘My thoughts exactly, Smudge,’ said Emerald, not mentioning John.
    ‘You look better than a girl in a storybook.’
    ‘That’s the trouble with pretty clothes, they give you ideas that are certain to be disappointed.’
    ‘Don’t say that, Em!’ said Smudge, who rebelled against this cynicism. ‘You can’t know what will happen.’
    It was then, as if in response – as if the countless mismatched wheels of incident had suddenly, briefly, locked together in faultless mechanism – that they heard the brougham re-enter Sterne. Extraordinarily, Lady was at a very fast trot on gravel, the wheels and hooves were unmeasured and loud, and then there was the spat of running feet on the drive and a shout.
    Smudge was the first to get to the window.
    ‘Look at Clovis! He’s shouting!’
    Emerald picked up her skirt and ran too, and they both left the room, bumping into each other, and raced towards the stairs.
    They met their mother on the landing.
    ‘What’s happened?’ she asked, and all three rushed down together, entering the hall just as the front door flew open.
    Clovis, out of breath and very white in the face, with his arms flung wide, announced, ‘There’s been a dreadful accident!’
    The women surged to meet him as Smudge hung back, trembling.
    ‘God! Where?’ uttered Charlotte.
    ‘On a branch line!’ The answer was peculiar somehow; a branch line? Which one? And where?
    ‘ A branch line? ’ echoed Emerald.
    They could hear Robert shouting for Stanley, and the muffled frenzy of hooves and wheels on cobbles approaching from behind the house.
    ‘Yes,’ said Clovis, ‘a carriage came clean off the tracks—’
    ‘What about Patience?’ Emerald was horrified.
    ‘No, no, she’s here,’ Clovis said, and stepped aside.
    There, behind him, with a pinched, anxious face and a neat straw hat with flowers on the brim, was the meticulous Patience Sutton. Emerald was flooded with relief and the happiness of reunion, and embraced her.
    ‘Patience! Are you all right?’
    Patience looked very shaken. ‘Emerald!’ she said. ‘Yes … it wasn’t our train, you see, thankfully, but – poor things – it was one on a branch line.’ Again, this branch line.
    ‘But where was it?’ Emerald glimpsed