FOXES, page 11
He was Abbot Ridley.
It took me a split second to recognise him because he wasn’t wearing his abbot’s robes. But Nel was way ahead of me. She screamed out, ‘Nathaniel!’
I’m ninety-nine per cent sure he saw us because I am sure there was the briefest of pauses before he jogged down the steps and away down the street, shrugging himself down into his scarf as he went. Of course we followed him. But he’d vanished into this Dickensian-looking street in a swirl of snow – almost as if he was the Ghost of Christmas Present. Nel and I stopped, breathing hard, and looked at each other. The snowflakes had settled on her lashes and lips, her blue eyes blazed. Oh God, I thought. She really loves him. ‘Now what?’
‘He must not have seen me,’ she wailed. ‘I know he’d have stopped if he had.’
‘Nel,’ I warned, ‘you’ve got to admit that thinking you guys have a future together is pretty crazy.’
‘Crazier than thinking that Henry is alive somewhere, hanging out with Elvis and Tupac?’
She had me there.
‘I just wish I had his number is all,’ she lamented.
‘If he’s a proper Medieval, he won’t have one,’ I said. ‘I wonder what the hell he’s doing here.’
‘It’s not that weird, is it? I mean, he used to be at Christ Church. Maybe he’s still got buddies living here. Or maybe he came to visit her, you know, Whatsherface.’
‘Professor Nashe. Yes. Yes, I suppose teachers have to go somewhere in the holidays.’ I remember, when I was little, seeing one of my primary-school teachers in Sainsbury’s and being properly freaked out and hiding behind my dad. Back then I still thought on some level that teachers just got packed away in a box outside of school hours. It was certainly strange seeing the Abbot out of context like that. ‘I suppose it was him, wasn’t it?’
‘Definitely,’ she said. ‘I’d know him anywhere. I just wish we knew where he was going.’
She sounded very downcast, and I was sorry – she’d done me a real solid driving me here for my interview, and I’d wanted her to enjoy our day in Oxford. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘we don’t know where he’s going, but we do know where he’s been.’
She looked up.
‘The museum, remember? We might as well have a look.’ I suddenly had a burning desire to know what the Abbot had been looking at, and I knew how to sell it to Nel. ‘Then you guys can chat about it when we get back to school.’
That seemed to lift her spirits. ‘True.’
We drifted back to the museum, past the metal dogs and into the atrium. Swerving, as I always did, the ‘Suggested Donation of £5’ boxes, we found a floor map. ‘Where would the Abbot have gone?’ I asked, trying to cheer her up. ‘You know him best.’
She looked at the dates on the floorplan. ‘Easy,’ she said. ‘Got to be Tudor and Stuart. Downstairs.’
‘And look,’ I said, ‘there’s even a guy pointing the way.’ It was true. In the atrium stood a marble statue, holding his arm out as if indicating the right direction, urging us with the blank gaze of his white eyes. We followed the arm into a basement gallery.
And that’s when it got weird.
There was this little gallery off to the right, full of the usual standard-issue museum glass cases. But over the entrance of the gallery itself, in a case of its own, was a huge set of stag’s antlers.
I suddenly went cold. Somewhere in this gallery, the one marked by the antlers just like our school, was something we were meant to see.
We walked under the antlers, and for the second time that day I was reminded of first walking into STAGS. My flesh tingled. The room was reasonably quiet, with only a few knots of tourists milling around, using those muted library voices that also seem to double up for museums. We glanced at the cases – there was one called ‘Rarities of the University’, collected by one Elias Ashmole, who I supposed had given his name to the museum. There was the usual collection of swords and pots and jewellery and little explanatory signs.
‘Yes,’ said Nel fondly. I don’t think she’d noticed the antlers. ‘This looks like his kind of thing.’
My skin was still prickling. I was convinced the Abbot had been here for a reason. Something was here, some clue. But how could we possibly know what?
And that’s when I saw it.
A thumbprint, planted squarely on the glass, so clear that the CSI whorls were clearly visible. A thumbprint on a glass case was not so unusual, but this one had something particular about it that turned my blood to ice.
A letter M was missed out neatly from the middle.
I held onto Nel and pointed, because I couldn’t actually speak.
‘What?’ she asked, then clocked the print. ‘Well, it’s yours obviously.’ She peered in close. ‘The little M shows up perfectly, doesn’t it? Presumably your thumbprint will be different forever now. I guess that rules out a life of crime, unless you –’
‘No,’ I interrupted. ‘It’s not mine.’
‘Are you sure?’
Just for a nanosecond, my brain spun into a mess of time-slice conspiracies. Had I been here before, touched the glass and left my unique mark, just like I had done in the frosty car this morning? Had we come round this way once already and walked back on ourselves? Or had another version of me from another moment in time visited this place, Avengers: Endgame-style, and rested her thumb on the glass? But in the next moment my thoughts ordered themselves. That was all impossible. We’d just come down the stairs and this was the first gallery we’d visited. ‘I haven’t been near that case. I swear it.’
And that meant only one thing.
I bent and breathed on the glass so we could see the print even more clearly. Then I planted my own thumbprint right next to the other one. The Ms were the same but that was it. Even Dr Watson would have seen that the whorls were entirely different, and even if they weren’t, this was a much bigger print.
A man’s print.
‘It’s not mine,’ I said. ‘It’s his. The Abbot’s.’
Nel flushed, as she pretty much always did when anyone mentioned him. ‘I would have noticed if he had a brand.’
‘Would you?’
‘I know him pretty well, Greer. And we acted together a lot.’
‘Yes, but would you notice a brand on someone’s thumb? I never did. And when I first met him I looked at his hands a lot, believe me.’
‘Why were you looking at his hands?’ She sounded almost jealous.
‘C’mon, Nel, why d’you think? Because I was looking for a ring. Either a signet ring like the STAGS wear – Rollo’s got one, did you see? – or a kiss-my-hand ring like the Old Abbot had. But just because I didn’t notice a brand, doesn’t mean he doesn’t have one.’
Nel screwed up her eyes at all those negatives in one sentence.
I clarified. ‘I definitely think it’s his.’
We both stared at the print. ‘But why? Why would he have a brand like yours?’
‘There can only be one reason,’ I said. ‘He must have been tried like me. He must have caused the death of one of the STAGS. Why else would he be branded M for Manslayer?’
‘All right, then explain this. Why put a thumbprint here? It can’t be accidental. You don’t lean on the glass with your thumb. If you lean on glass, you use your whole hand.’ She demonstrated.
‘Unless you’re sending a message.’
‘Who to?’
‘Maybe to us.’
‘How could he possibly know we’d come here?’ she scoffed.
Then it dawned on me. ‘She told me to,’ I said slowly. ‘Professor Nashe. His old tutor.’ I looked around at the innocent-seeming tourists and drew Nel closer to me. ‘We’re being played. They want us to see something.’
‘See what, though?’
‘This, I guess.’ The dark shape of a single exhibit, squatting in the corner of the glass case as a silent witness to our conversation, aligned itself exactly behind the thumbprint.
We both shifted focus and stared, not at the glass now, but through it to the object it contained. It was about a foot high, dark, leathery and slightly forbidding.
‘Is it a helmet?’ asked Nel uncertainly.
‘Too narrow,’ I said. ‘You’d have to be a real pencil-head to fit that. What’s the number? There must be a card.’
Nel peered into the case. ‘Two.’
‘Two, two, two …’ I scanned the labels beneath the objects. ‘Here we go: Guy Fawkes’s Lantern. Presented by Robert Heywood to the University of Oxford in 1641. Around 1600.’
‘Really?’ said Nel in surprise. ‘Guy Fawkes? As in the Bonfire Night dude?’
Yes. I read aloud the museum text on the little card.
Guy Fawkes was reportedly carrying this lantern when he was captured on the night of 4–5th November 1605 in the cellar of the Palace of Westminster. The Gunpowder Plot aimed to blow up James I and the Members of Parliament and the House of Lords at the State Opening of Parliament the next day. Robert Heywood’s brother, Peter Heywood, was a magistrate in Westminster and one of the men who discovered the plotters in the cellar. Peter reportedly took the lantern from Guy Fawkes, and so prevented him from lighting the fuse.
‘Wow.’ We both stared at the lantern. It looked different now. It was no longer a rather sad-looking leather cylinder. It was an instrument of terrorism, as surely as a suicide vest. I pictured Guy Fawkes, his fingers slippery with sweat, opening the little lantern door to expose the flame to the gunpowder. Then Peter Heywood snatching the thing from his hand. The flame kindling, instead of the gunpowder, the faces of the guards; their expressions telling Guy Fawkes that the game was up, and he was a dead man. ‘Imagine how many people would have died if he’d succeeded,’ I breathed. ‘Both houses of Parliament, and King James I.’ Suddenly I felt all goosebumpy. ‘Quite spooky to think that Guy Fawkes was trying to blow up the very institution we were sitting in yesterday.’
Nel shivered prettily. ‘Don’t.’
‘I mean,’ I said of the lantern, ‘it’s pretty cool once you know what it is. But I don’t know why the Abbot would have been looking at this exhibit particularly. Much less why he would have wanted us to see it.’
‘Maybe it’s less to do with who owned it and more about what it represents.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Well …’ she said, piecing the thought together. ‘Maybe the Abbot was trying to shed light on something? Like a lantern.’
‘Then why not just tell us?’
‘Got me.’
I looked back at the black lantern, squatting on its little white plinth. Suddenly it seemed malign, evil. I wanted to be away from it. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Don’t you want to see anything else?’
‘No, no.’ The thumbprint had thoroughly spooked me. ‘I think we should go.’
And when we returned to the car, I could see that my own M thumbprint, on the passenger-side window, was still there, a ghost of a smear on the cold glass.
21
Of course, on the way back to London the talk was all of Abbot Ridley and the thumbprint at Guy Fawkes’s lantern.
Some strange part of me felt almost comforted that there was someone else with the brand. I’d high-fived (or high-thumbed) the ghost of Ben Jonson in Westminster Abbey, because 400 years ago he’d got the Manslayer brand too.
But this was different.
This was someone alive.
I’d had my doubts about the Abbot in the past, especially when he’d been gaslighting me about that Esmé Stuart thing – I still swore he’d said he was a she – but I now thought that he might be a valuable ally. He’d cut me down from the noose, covered up for me with Professor Nashe and sent me flowers in hospital. If he had left that thumbprint, and he did have a brand, then he was a kindred spirit. Only he, possibly in all the world, knew what I’d been through. I really, badly wanted to talk to him, but unless I went through Professor Nashe, which I couldn’t picture myself doing, I would have to wait until the beginning of term.
So as Nel began to negotiate the roads into central London I mentally shelved the Abbot and my thoughts turned instead to the STAGS Club and what awaited us there. By the time we’d parked the car at Cumberland Place to head for the Tube it was nearly six o’clock, and Shafeen, so far as we knew, had been at the club all day. I wondered what he’d found out. We had so much to tell him; maybe he had something to tell us.
22
The STAGS Club, in London’s St James’s, was the second place that day where I felt I really didn’t belong.
Walking though unmarked grand doors, in an exclusive backstreet of Westminster, I felt even more awkward than I had that morning treading the hallowed quad of Christ Church. Of course, the first thing I saw was a massive pair of antlers over the inner door, and beyond that, a passageway bristling with ancient-looking guns hanging on the walls. The metaphor wasn’t lost on me. I was a huntin’ shootin’ fish out of water.
Luckily Nel had a bit more natural courage than me – presumably she’d grown up going through fancy doorways and being made just as welcome as her father’s wallet. She greeted the mountain of a man who was standing, hands clasped, in front of the door like a high-class bouncer. He didn’t speak (rude, I thought) but indicated down the passageway with one massive paw. We walked in the direction of the hand and the passageway turned into a grand, open space. If I’d expected a cosy couple of rooms with leather armchairs and a fireplace like in Around the World in Eighty Days, I was mistaken. This place was like a hidden palace.
The atrium of the STAGS Club was hushed and dim, with marble pillars rising to the ceiling and a grand stairway curving out of sight. Underfoot was a black-and-white marble floor in the shape of a compass rose, as if indicating that the STAGS’ power reached to all points of the compass and to the ends of the earth. In the dead centre of the design was a mahogany writing desk, with a little man in white-tie and tails sitting at it.
Nel marched over to him and gave our names. This guy, unlike the bouncer, was uber-polite. ‘Ah, Miss Ashton, Miss MacDonald, guests of the Earl of Longcross. His lordship is expecting you.’ He wrote in a ledger with a fountain pen, then turned the book round to face us. ‘If you wouldn’t mind?’
We signed our names at the foot of a page entitled ‘Does’ (as in, a deer; a female deer), under some very grand female names. Like the guns on the walls, they were all double-barrelled. These were obviously the other honoured ladies who’d been admitted to the club for dinner. I made quite a mess with the ink pen, but the guy was far too well bred to burn me for it.
‘Lord Longcross is in the Crusader’s Library with Mr Jadeja. Jack will show you.’ He beckoned the giant from the door, who led us up the grand stair in absolute silence. I was getting some serious Perfect vibes – Jack obviously went to the same charm school as everybody’s favourite gamekeeper. It was a bit awks because you couldn’t even hear our footsteps. Just as in Cumberland Place, our feet made absolutely no sound on the thick carpets, which were the red of arterial blood. As we climbed I could hear a hubbub of talk – no raucous laughter or shouting, nothing so coarse; just the murmur of perhaps a hundred people chatting at low level in a big room. It made me nervous.
When we walked through the grand doors of the Crusader’s Library I spotted Shafeen at once. It was easy. He was the only person of colour in the room. He was standing talking happily to someone in a bow tie, as if he too was a member of the club and he’d been coming here all his life. Just for a moment, in that removed way I’d viewed Rollo the day before in the House of Lords, I saw Shafeen as other people must see him. Tall, handsome, urbane, wearing a grey suit over a white shirt open at his brown throat. I felt a jag of pride, of love – and of pity. If it weren’t for the colour of his skin, he’d fit right in in this room.
And the room itself was quite something. Above rows and rows of dark-wood bookshelves stuffed with ancient volumes, there were huge frescoes on the walls depicting various battles of the Crusades. There was no blood and guts, just these stagey, polite-looking scenes of Christian victory. I thought they were paintings, but as we advanced into the room I could see they were mosaics, artfully made up of a thousand tiny glass tiles. I imagined that each nugget of glass was less than worthless, but crafted together like this those panels would be priceless. From what (very little) I know of decorative art stuff, I would have said it was Victorian – all maidens with flowing hair and knights on white horses. The infidels, of course, had mean faces, swarthy skin and stylised turbans. Their mouths, like their swords, had a cruel downward curve to them. I was wrong; there were other people of colour in the room besides Shafeen. It’s just that they were on the walls, crudely represented and trapped in a perpetual losing battle.
I turned my attention to the victors in the room. I’m not kidding, but I recognised some of them from the TV. I’m not massively into politics but even I knew some of the characters that were huddled into the oak-panelled corners, parcelling up the world. There was that chubby blond one with the messy hair. There was that skinny dark one with the glasses. Finding Rollo in this room was a bit like Where’s Wally? However different their physical attributes, somehow everyone in the room looked like him. Eventually I saw him, accepting a glass of something from a tray. He had just taken a sip when he spotted us, and he did that gulp-and-beckon thing that people do when their mouth is full and they can’t speak.
We all converged by Shafeen and his new bow-tied buddy. The earl kissed me and Nel, with practised ease, on each cheek. Bow tie excused himself to Rollo in that bluff and friendly way that meant they were old pals. Because it seemed the right thing to do, Shafeen kissed us both too. But his lips lingered on my skin and his dark eye winked. He was happy. ‘Who was that bloke?’ I murmured as our cheeks met.
‘Head of the General Medical Council. He is being incredibly helpful.’ His whisper was warm in my ear.
