STAGS 2, page 13
In fact, he spoke to the dog more than he spoke to Louis, calling it to heel in his broad Cumbrian accent. The dog, we quickly learned, was called Brutus. Every five seconds Perfect was calling his name, and the dog would reply with one of his Baskerville barks. Gamekeeper and dog started to sound the same. The exchange got right on my nerves, but that was an improvement. If I was irritated by Perfect that meant I wasn’t afraid of him any more, even though he had this kind of pack on his back, bristling with saws and axes, as if he were Braveheart.
The same couldn’t be said of Nel. Never a fan of dogs, she was properly freaked out by this one. She tried to keep away from him as much as she could, but of course, probably because he sensed her fear, she would be the one he would almost knock over as he scented a rabbit, or brushed past in a narrow cutting, making her squeal.
Despite this, we all walked along happily enough. The only time I’d been into Longwood was when I’d walked through a corner of it with Lara and Nel, on the way to the shooting lunch a year ago. But as it turned out, that was only a fraction of it. The forest was massive, with thousands and thousands of oak trees (even I knew they were oak trees, because they had those leaves with the wiggly edges). The oaks looked like they’d been there for centuries, which of course they had.
Before we’d gone very far, it started to snow, giving the wood a lovely Narnia vibe. Of course, that set us all off chattering about Christmas and sledging and snowballs and all that stuff, and it all got even more festive as we got to a clearing ringed by massive fir trees. ‘Jeeesus,’ murmured Ty, her breath smoking. ‘They’re as big as the ones in Trafalgar Square!’ She wasn’t wrong. They towered over us, already glittering with snow, holding out their skirts like the Bennett sisters in Pride and Prejudice, waiting for someone posh and rich to pick them for the next dance. We picked the tallest, prettiest one – the Rosamund Pike, I guess – and Perfect took all his arsenal off his back and started to arrange the saws and axes and ropes on the ground. He and Louis chose their weapons and began to attack the designated tree. They began with a double saw and, silently, in a very awks atmosphere of mutual dislike, began sawing in a to-me, to-you rhythm. There was a lovely Christmassy smell of pine sap, but I think that was making the saw sticky. Me, Nel, Ty and Cass watched the menfolk struggle.
It didn’t feel like stand-back-ladies-let-the-men-do-it; more like Perfect and Louis were Cass’s vassals. She stood apart like a queen, the snow on her eyelashes making her look like the White Witch from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, noble and separate and completely in control. I saw Ty watching her, the snowflakes in her afro hair like pearls, adjusting her own stance, raising her own chin, taking notes.
In the male camp, things weren’t quite as serene. Perfect and Louis had abandoned the saw and were hacking at different sides of the tree. It was warm work, so they had shed their jackets and their padded waistcoats, and even in shirtsleeves were red in the face. Louis, who’d been getting increasingly irritated, eventually snapped and shouted, ‘God damn it, Perfect, you’re doing it wrong. Cut out a wedge on one side and then we can knock the bloody thing over.’
Perfect drew himself up to his full (not inconsiderable) height. With one massive paw, he wiped his sweating forehead, pushing back his tweedy gamekeeper cap. He glared at Louis and said, ‘You’re not the mester here.’
The words, uttered quietly but clearly, seemed to drop to the ground with the snow. It was suddenly utterly, utterly silent, the flakes falling soundlessly, all of us watching, waiting, hardly drawing breath.
Louis straightened up too, axe in hand, and gave Perfect a look that turned me to ice. It was the same look Henry had given me in the fishing boat last year, when he’d discovered I was wearing a wetsuit. I called it the Ed-Norton-from-Primal-Fear look.
‘What did you say?’
Credit to Perfect, he didn’t flinch. He just repeated exactly what he’d said, in exactly the way he’d said it. ‘You’re not the mester here.’
Louis fixed his blue eyes on Perfect and spat a single word: ‘Yet.’ Axe in hand, he looked dangerous, reckless and unpredictable. ‘Walk round this tree right now, or by God I’ll see that you regret it by Christmas.’
Brutus started to growl, a low, grumbling threat. Perfect, for once, looked a little uncomfortable, and shifted his weight from one great boot to another. Unsure, he slid his piggy little eyes to Cass.
‘My lady?’
Cass gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod. And Perfect walked around the trunk, and began to chop again, furiously. His dumb hound began to bark in time to the strokes as the pale chunks of wood flew everywhere. Louis threw his axe away and stalked into the undergrowth. Ty looked at us, and then followed him.
In a very short time, aided by his own fury, Perfect was able to knock over the tree and it fell with a splintering crash. We left him neatening up the trunk, his oversized mutt dancing around him, barking excitedly at the felled giant. I knew better than to ask if we needed to help him carry it home. There were servants for that.
Scene iv
As we walked back to the house, I caught up with Cass as she was striding through the snow.
Louis and Ty were well ahead, talking intently, so I felt safe to ask. ‘What did Louis mean, that he wasn’t the master yet? What’s going on?’
Cass shoved her hands in her pockets. ‘Longcross estate is entailed in the male line. D’you know what that means?’
‘I think so. It’s like Tom Hollander.’
‘Who’s Tom Hollander? One of the Marlborough Hollanders?’
‘God, I don’t know about that. He’s in the Pride and Prejudice film, the Joe Wright one.’ She looked at me, puzzled. ‘I was just thinking about it,’ I explained. ‘The Bennett family have five daughters, but the estate is entailed so that when Donald Sutherland (Mr Bennett) dies, their dork of a cousin – Mr Collins, played by Tom Hollander – gets everything and Rosamund Pike and Keira Knightley and the rest of the daughters don’t get diddly squat. Have you seen it?’
‘No, but I hear it was a book first.’ She was mocking me gently, another new side to her, I realised. ‘And I’ve read that. So yes. Exactly like Mr Collins. That’s what Louis meant. He’s not the master yet. But he will be one day.’
I looked around me at the wild and snowy wood, the vast formal gardens beyond, and the grand house beyond that. I boggled at her. ‘Doesn’t that bother you?’
‘But I love him,’ she said simply. ‘Family is everything. Why should it bother me?’
‘Because …’ I thought of what Shafeen had said at Louis’s drinks party. ‘Because it’s a patriarchy – passing power from one male to another. It happens when he’s eighteen, right?’
She nodded. ‘Just before Christmas. My Uncle Rollo is the owner of Longcross, and Louis will now inherit.’ Cass didn’t need to elaborate on what that ‘now’ meant. It meant now that Henry was gone.
I swallowed down the thought. ‘So Louis becomes the heir to Longcross on his birthday?’
‘Before he’s even blown out the candles. All the documents are signed and sealed.’
What else would they be at Longcross? The phrase didn’t even sound old-fashioned here. I could almost see the de Warlencourt seal being pressed into blood-red wax. ‘It seems a shame.’
‘Why?’
I thought of Cass being queen-like in the woods. ‘Wouldn’t it be quite cool to have a matriarchy for a bit?’ I wasn’t even sure if this word existed, but it sounded likely.
‘Well, we will. We are. I mean, until then, I have seniority as the oldest twin. Plus, it might never happen.’ I glanced ahead of us, to where Louis was trudging, hangdog, through the snow, angrily kicking up snowballs with his Hunter wellies. He looked vulnerable, with the snow in his blond hair, like a little sulky boy.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Is something going to happen to him?’ Suddenly I flipped from being afraid of him to being afraid for him.
‘No,’ she said, shocked. ‘No. I just meant that a month is a long time.’
I didn’t say anything else, but I thought to myself that if Louis was going to be eighteen in just a month, there wasn’t much that was going to stop him getting the keys to the kingdom.
We all sat around the roaring fire warming up, watching while Perfect and two stable guys in flat caps, who had appeared from nowhere, winched the tree into place with ropes attached to the balustrade. Even without decorations it looked fabulously Christmassy, glistening with melted snow and nearly reaching up to the cherubs in the dome above. There was a gramophone table, just like the one in Louis’s room at STAGS, and Louis dug out a pile of old records, and sorted through them happily for Christmassy music, the tensions of Longwood forgotten. Ty sat with him, their blond and black heads close together as they slid the shiny vinyl from the sleeves eagerly. Louis Medieval-DJed for the rest of the afternoon, sweetly showing Ty how to crank the handle of the gramophone, his hand on hers, true old-school romantic style. The Christmas carols they selected sounded, apart from the scratches and wheezes of the needle, like they could have been sung by the STAGS choir, the notes as clear and pure as icicles soaring up into the dome. Betty served tea, then brought out boxes and boxes of tree decorations – some of them, I was sure, dating from the first years of Christmas trees. The giveaway was these little candleholders that attached to the branches, a fire hazard if ever I saw one. We happily decorated the tree, unwrapping baubles and bells and even deer decorations from their tissue, climbing ladders to reach the highest branches, listening to the carols. Apart from one sour note, it had been a lovely day, even though we hadn’t done a scrap of rehearsal and I’d all but forgotten about the play. As we climbed the stairs, turning once to admire the glory of the tree below, I had to caution myself about how seductive Longcross was, how seductive this whole world was.
Scene v
I don’t know what Cass meant by cosy, but the Queen’s Dining Room wasn’t it.
Yes, it was smaller than the Great Hall, where we’d dined last year, but not by much. It had standard-issue, stately-home oak panels, which made the room kind of dark. Above our heads, though, was this lovely ceiling, painted a deep, vivid blue, with gold beams crossed like a net, the blue squares studded with golden stars. It looked sort of familiar.
And we didn’t shame the room. We’d done that thing I remembered from last year – ‘dressing for dinner’. This year I’d decided to start with my mum’s dress, the silver grey with the cluster of jet crystals down the front, like someone had spilled the night down me. As it was a lot colder than last year, I’d teamed it with a black jacket, and I was pleased with my overall look. This year I knew who I was; I was coming to Longcross as myself, not some doll they could dress up.
That honour had gone to Ty. They’d put her in a white satin dress, beautifully cut on 1920s lines, teamed with a white fur coat they’d given her to wear about her shoulders. The effect against her skin was beautiful, and the look was topped off with an Art Deco diamond comb in her afro. No wonder Louis was a smitten kitten. The only touch I was pretty sure was Ty’s own was a pair of box-fresh, white platform trainers. I guessed this was part of her funky street style, but when I complimented her on them I was wrongfooted.
‘Yeah, I wasn’t actually planning to wear these,’ she said a bit sharply. ‘I’m not Scary Spice. I brought posh heels from home. But they went missing. Or at least, one of them did.’
‘One of them?’
‘Yeah. Completely gone. So I had no choice but the creps.’
‘Well, it works,’ I said. It did.
Nel, who’d obviously decided to be herself too, had brought one of her own bodycon dresses in shocking pink, with a pink sequined jacket. Louis, in black tie, looked just like Henry.
It was Cassandra, though, who stole the show. She too had opted to wear black tie, with the full tuxedo and wing-collared shirt. Her hair was parted severely and combed back from her face, and, unusually, she wore a slash of bright-red lipstick. She was only missing a monocle for the full-on Bright Young Things effect. She looked fantastic.
The menu was just as grand as last year, and the table crowded with crystal and candles and big pyramids of fruit. Betty came round with some sort of white soup, ladling it into our bowls. But I hardly noticed what we ate. I had a burning question to ask Cass, a question that had occurred to me when I was poking round Henry’s room.
I didn’t even bother asking Louis. He had shut down since coming to Longcross, and diminished, had changed places with his sister, just as they’d done at the drinks party. Now I knew why – he was in waiting, just as the house had been.
‘Cass, where are Henry’s parents? Mum and Dad de Warlencourt? I mean, this was their home, wasn’t it? Until …’ Like everyone else, I couldn’t bring myself to mention the events of last year.
‘They’re at Cumberland Place. In London. They live there now.’
‘Ah. I suppose they wanted to go? I mean, I guess, the memories of … you know. After what happened and all.’
‘They didn’t really want to,’ she said bluntly. ‘I made them go.’
Now this was interesting. I opened my mouth to ask why, but Ty got in before me with a question of her own.
‘Look. What did happen last year?’ Ty spoke with the confidence that one glass of wine gives you if you’re not used to it, as we weren’t. ‘No, really. Everyone keeps dancing around it, but something huge happened here, right? This time last year? To your … cousin, was it? Henry?’
To hear his name, spoken like that, in this house, was like someone had dropped a massive rock into a glassily calm pond.
I held my breath, wondering how the twins would take this. Cass put her glass down, very, very carefully, as if she was afraid of breaking it. ‘He was here for the Justitium weekend, with a bunch of friends.’ It was her voice, not the glass, that cracked. ‘Huntin’ shootin’ fishin’.’ She said it exactly like Henry had, in that clipped, upper-class way that missed off the final ‘g’. ‘It was the fishing trip, on the last day. He never came home.’ She spoke of him so differently to the way she’d spoken of his parents, and I remembered the little girl from the photograph, in Henry’s arms although she was really too big to be there, holding her hands to his face as if he was the only person in the world.
You could see that Ty felt awful. ‘Oh my God.’ Her hands flew to her mouth. ‘I’m so sorry. That must have been awful. His poor parents.’
Then Louis spoke up, for the first time. ‘They weren’t actually here,’ he said harshly. ‘And nor were we. But Greer was. And Nel. Maybe you should ask them.’ It felt like a challenge.
I tried to remember the official line, the story we’d told the police. It was crucial, we’d agreed, that no one knew that we’d all been at the top of the waterfall when Henry fell. We’d always maintained that Shafeen and Nel hadn’t been anywhere near the fishing trip. It was particularly important that no one knew that they’d been on the packhorse bridge with Nel’s phone, waiting to catch Henry in the net of his own confession. So now I said, ‘Actually, it was just me there. Nel and Shafeen were back at the house the whole time.’
And Betty dropped the soup ladle with a crash.
It sounded like a thunderclap and we all jumped about a mile in the air. I hadn’t even known she was still in the room – she must have been hugging the shadows beyond the candlelight. I shot a look at her. Did she know I was lying? Had she seen Nel and Shafeen leave in the Land Rover to collect me, and seen us all return? She didn’t look at me, but mumbled an apology to Cass, who sent her scurrying to the kitchen for the next course with a look.
Of course, this unnerved me even more and I struggled to remember my story. ‘I’d got a bit of a ducking in Longmere – I was soaking wet – so I came back to the house to change. Shafeen and Nel were helping me dry out when the Medieva— … I mean, the others – came back and Henry wasn’t with them. They thought he was with us, we thought he was with them. Turns out he wasn’t with any of us. He had … drowned.’ I swallowed. The story was really hard to tell, even though most of it was a lie. ‘After we’d spoken to the police we went to our rooms. I’ll never forget the blue lights of the ambulance at the window,’ I said truthfully, the trauma of that night returning with full force.
‘So you actually saw the body?’ It was a really, really odd thing to ask, and Cass asked it with such urgency. I looked at her, and then at Louis. They both waited for the answer, their expressions oddly identical. They looked at me as if what I was going to say mattered more than anything in the world. I thought about the question. Had I? It was like the bit at the end of Seven, when everybody thinks they see a head in a box. But you never actually see anything. And nor had I. I hadn’t seen Henry’s body. None of us had. We’d seen a shape in a body bag on a stretcher, being slid into an ambulance. Having watched that scene again in my head, like some horrid DVD extra, I said, ‘No.’
The twins’ expressions divided dramatically. Cass looked comforted and Louis looked … devastated.
There was an awkward, charged silence. I looked to Nel desperately. We had to change the subject – the terrible, terrible subject. She took the hint.
‘Why’s this called the Queen’s Dining Room?’ she blurted out suddenly.
It worked. Cass turned her gaze from me to look at Nel. ‘Because of that,’ she said, nodding at the wall.
We all looked over and there was this giant portrait of Elizabeth I, hanging in pride of place.
I could see that Nel felt like a doofus, but she’d done her job. We were all now looking at the painting, the events of last year forgotten. It was a magnificent thing. The painting was massive, so big that the bottom of the queen’s skirts disappeared behind a big dark oak chest that stood in front of the portrait.
