STAGS 2, page 16
‘The priest? There’s probably a vicarage quite close to the church.’
‘Not the priest,’ said Ty. ‘Henry.’
Again, it was odd her saying his name aloud like that. ‘I don’t know.’ And a little, unwanted hope began to flame inside me like a candle. Might Henry step out of the deep-cut shadows of the nave?
Nel snuffed out my hope-flame almost at once. ‘There must be a simple explanation. Probably that tomb downstairs is just for memorial purposes, and the body was buried in the graveyard. Or maybe he was cremated. Maybe you’re not allowed to just bung bodies in stone sarcophagi any more.’
My heart started to slow down again. ‘Yes. Yes, of course. That’s the most logical explanation.’ I gave myself a little shake. ‘So much for what we didn’t find in the tomb. Let’s talk about what we did find.’ I looked at the pages in my hands. ‘It must be Act Five,’ I said. ‘There are thirteen pages. If it was a message, or a letter, it would just be one page. Thirteen pages is a whole act, I’m sure of it.’
‘What’s more suggestive to me is that the pages look genuinely period,’ said Shafeen, ever the scientist.
‘They are. They are exactly the same paper that the rest of the play is on. You can see the stationer’s mark, see?’ I pointed to a little rune embossed in the top corner of each. ‘And the writing is Ben Jonson’s. I’d know it anywhere by now.’
‘We need to take a proper look at it if we’re going to decode it. Back at the house.’
‘In the morning though, right?’ said Nel nervily.
‘Hell yes. I’ve had enough excitement for one night,’ I stated firmly, having no idea what was yet to come.
The twins didn’t come back for ages. We sort of noodled about the church looking for clues to help us decode the pages, but there wasn’t anything. No significant letters hidden in the frescoes, no convenient hymn numbers lined up on the board, no handy ciphers by Ben Jonson hidden in the family Bible. The Good Book lay innocently on a lectern that was shaped like a big brass eagle, open at Psalm 51, with nothing to tell us. I shut the great book with a dull thud. ‘It seems the trail’s gone cold.’
‘Well, that being the case, we can’t stay here all night,’ said Shafeen. ‘The twins are obviously not coming back.’
‘Where can they have got to?’ wondered Ty plaintively.
Shafeen shrugged. ‘Maybe they’ve had to see the coroner, or the police.’
The police? A jag of fear went through me. I’d been petrified of talking to the police last year. Talking to them, lying to them.
Just then the bells of Longcross church began to chime, sending my heart from nought to sixty again. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.
Midnight.
Shafeen stood up. ‘Let’s just go.’
‘Go where?’ I asked.
‘Back to the house.’
‘There’s no way I’m going back in that tunnel,’ said Nel, whitefaced.
‘No, silly,’ said Shafeen. ‘Overground.’
‘But we don’t know the way,’ I cautioned.
‘I do,’ he said. ‘I just came from there. You just walk through the woods. It’s easy.’
‘Through the woods?’
‘OK, Greer,’ he said, ‘here’s the choice. Would you rather spend the night in a creepy church, with a few dozen de Warlencourt skeletons downstairs, or take a short walk through an (admittedly) creepy wood to comfort and safety?’
I wouldn’t exactly describe Longcross as comfort and safety. It was kind of like heading back to the Overlook Hotel. But we didn’t have much of a choice. And that’s how Shafeen, Nel, Ty and I found ourselves in Longwood at midnight.
Scene ii
At first it was OK.
There was a bright full moon and we found the path pretty easily. ‘This is how I got here from Longcross,’ said Shafeen confidently. ‘Look. Through the clearing you can see the lights of the house. If we just keep making for the lights, we’ll be on the right track.’
But soon Longwood began to mess with our heads. If I wasn’t such a logical soul, I would say it was bewitched. Quite a few times, having sworn we’d carried on straight, we found ourselves walking back up the path to the church. It was like being in Inception, when the whole world folds up on itself and you don’t know what the hell is going on. Of course, this was the one time Nel didn’t have her phone, as she’d had no idea we would be leaving the house, so we had no torch, no GPS. Soon we lost the path altogether and could no longer see the lights of the house.
We saw other lights though. Beady, burning little lights in pairs, staring at us from the black silhouettes of trees. There were hundreds of them, sort of dotted around in the dark, at waist height.
Eyes.
‘Hang on,’ I said loudly. ‘This is some sort of prank.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Nel could hardly speak, she was so scared.
‘This looks exactly like the Underwood set for The Isle of Dogs – it must be a prank,’ I explained. ‘Very good, guys,’ I called out. ‘You can show yourselves now.’
There was no answer. No human answer, that is. Just a low, threatening growl.
And then another.
And another.
‘Dogs,’ whimpered Nel. ‘Run.’
I don’t know if you’ve ever tried running in heels. If you haven’t, don’t. What gave me Usain Bolt levels of speed was the baying, the horrible baying of the dogs. Of course, in our panic we all scattered. I could see Ty bounding through the undergrowth in her white fur coat. I’d had that glimpse of white fur once before and I remembered where: on the stag hunt a year ago, the snowy tail of the stag bouncing away from us as the dogs hunted him down. And in the dark I saw, or thought I saw, black shadows streaming after her – she definitely had the worst of it. I began to follow her, having totally lost sight of Shafeen and Nel. Then there was a volley of barking in the darkness ahead and I was forced to double back, and the white tail was gone. I began to shout – their names, other people’s names, even (and I’m not proud of this) for my dad. I ran desperately, jinking and checking, changing direction constantly like a frightened rabbit trying to shake the hounds. A hand came out of the dark and grabbed mine – I screamed, but it was Shafeen. ‘Stay together,’ he panted. ‘We have to get Ty.’
He practically towed me along as we ran, and from her jagged breathing I could hear Nel on the other side of him. There were now dogs actually swirling around our feet – growling and snapping. In the blackness there was nothing to be seen but eyes and teeth, and the sounds, the terrible sounds, were all around us. Suddenly Ty’s white coat was just ahead of us, shining out of the dark. I grabbed at it and took hold of an arm in a furry sleeve. ‘Come on.’
On we ran, blundering through the dark undergrowth, the greedy branches snatching at our fancy dinner clothes. Until we saw a miracle.
It was a measure of just how frightened we were that the lights of Longcross – Longcross – seemed homey and welcoming. But seeing that big cruise liner of a house shining out of the dark almost made me sob with relief. We raced up the drive like we were in the Olympics, the pack of dogs scattering after us on the gravel. We wrenched open the great front doors and slammed them behind us. We ran to the diamond-paned windows to look back at the ravening, swirling pack that had chased us, no doubt now snapping and tearing at the doors, and saw … nothing.
Not a single dog was in the driveway.
‘What the actual …?’
‘Where did they go?’
‘Did we imagine it?’
‘No,’ said Ty. ‘Look.’ Her white platform trainer was torn at the heel, and I was sure you could see the marks of teeth.
‘Yes, they seemed to like you in particular,’ I said grimly. I remembered what the Medievals had said a year ago, that horrid little fact about hounds being attracted to menstrual blood. But I didn’t feel that I knew Ty well enough to ask her if she was on her period, especially not in front of a boy, so I didn’t say any more. We all looked at the trainer, in sick horror. Then Ty said, ‘Maybe they like the dark meat.’
At that, something peculiar happened: I started to smile.
For a second it was fifty-fifty whether I was going to laugh or sob. Then I began to laugh hysterically, and the others joined in, even Ty, until we were all crying with laughter like at the end of Sully. I guess we were releasing tension or something, but it was properly weird. My ribs were actually aching.
Then Betty came into the hall and we stopped as abruptly as if someone had pulled the plug on us. She was in this white nightgown with her greying hair in a plait, just like the off-duty maids you see in films like Sense and Sensibility when they are woken at night by a fast-rider with a letter.
She seemed surprised to see us there, as well she might be.
‘Betty,’ I said, gasping for breath, ‘get us something hot to drink, would you?’ I tried to sound like Cassandra.
She looked around for the twins, but as there was no one to outrank me, she said, ‘Very good, miss.’ She hesitated. ‘Might I suggest some mulled wine, miss? Won’t take a moment on the Aga.’
I was thinking more along the lines of hot chocolate, but actually mulled wine was exactly what I needed right then.
Scene iii
So within about ten minutes, we were all drinking mulled wine under the Christmas tree.
We must’ve looked like a Christmas card, all in our evening clothes round the dying fire, the tree lit up above us. But we were gulping the wine a little too quickly, anaesthetising the shock of what had happened to us. And in the warm glow of the fire and the alcohol, the fear of the dogs in the night gradually abated and we began to relax. And so, despite what Nel had said about waiting until morning, we all, of course, got stuck into some serious decoding of Act Five.
‘Let’s think logically,’ I said. ‘Each of these letters must correspond to the letters of the alphabet.’
Apparently all posh houses have notepaper in the bedrooms, and Nel fetched some from hers. We sat on the hearth rug under the tree and tried to figure out the code together.
‘All right,’ said Shafeen. ‘Suppose we take the words –’ he thought for a moment – ‘knowledge is power.’
He wrote them on the paper in clear capital letters.
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER
‘A substitution cipher would change one letter of the alphabet for another.’
‘That’s right,’ said Nel. ‘Friar Camden said cryptographers would sometimes slip the alphabet, so that A represents B and so on. That was the simplest form of cipher.’ She wrote:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A
‘That is really entry level,’ I said. ‘But let’s try it.’
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER
LOPXMFEHF JT QPXFS
‘Then what they’d do is divide up the words in random places, so you couldn’t even work out how many letters were in a word.’ Shafeen leaned over me and rewrote:
LOPX MF EHFJTQP XFS
‘The more layers in the code to confuse the reader, the better.’
‘You’re not kidding. The problem with a substitution cipher is that there is no way of knowing which letters have been changed for which,’ said Nel. ‘There must be thousands of combinations.’
‘But,’ I said, ‘surely you kind of have to make it a bit logical, for the person who needs to crack the code. I mean, they wouldn’t jumble all the letters up, for example – that would be way too hard to crack, even for the geniuses the Cecils had working for them. You’d have to give them the whole “new” alphabet, written down, and that could be intercepted. It’d be too dangerous.’
‘That’s right. Friar Camden said that in most instances the letters of the alphabet were kept in sequence, but there was some sort of keyword inserted into the cipher, easy to remember, but made known only to the agent, which would help him crack the code. It was passed on by word of mouth, remembered and never written down.’
‘But without the keyword we’re stuffed.’
‘Correct.’
‘OK.’ I sighed so gustily that the candle flames on the tree bent and flickered a little. ‘What else?’
‘Well, the other thing the Friar talked about was a frequency cipher, remember? You work out the frequency of the letters that occur in the code. You start from a known fact, such as that E is the most common letter in the English language, and then you look for the most common letter in the code, and assume that that one is E.’
‘All right. Let’s look at the real thing.’
The manuscript looked fiendishly complicated, not least because it was closely quill-written, not printed out in Shafeen’s neat round hand.
We took a page each and had a good look by the firelight. We were silent for a time, with just the pop and crackle of the logs in the grate to be heard. ‘I’ve got a lot of Rs,’ said Nel.
‘And I’ve got a lot of Cs,’ said Shafeen.
‘It’s Ks for me,’ said Ty.
‘And I’ve got Gs,’ I said. ‘Brilliant. Now what?’
No one spoke for a while. Then Ty, who had been very quiet up until then, spoke up. I guess she felt that we were such an established trio of friends that she was a bit of an outsider. ‘How about we look for words that we know must be in there?’ she suggested.
‘How d’you mean?’
‘You know, like Act Five, scene one, scene two, etc. And character names. There must be Cynthia, Greenwich – actually not him, he’s dead – Lupo, Volpone, Canis. Even Placentia for the palace, and Underwood for the forest.’
‘Ty,’ I said, ‘that’s quite brilliant. Let’s look.’ We did, and it was a frustrating exercise.
‘It’s no good,’ said Shafeen, at length. ‘They’ve obviously messed with the format. The character names aren’t separate, nor are the act or scene headings. They’ve run the text all together to make it denser. It’s hopeless.’
We’d just about given up for the night when the twins walked in. I’m not sure why, but I instinctively shuffled the pages away. Not, I think, that they would’ve noticed.
The two de Warlencourts, so alike, looked very different at this moment. Cass looked radiant; Louis ashen. They flopped into the two remaining chairs like guests on the worst chat show ever. Cass started to speak.
‘Father Wright is convinced there was a body …’
‘Exactly,’ Louis took over. ‘There was a body.’
‘But it isn’t there now,’ countered Cass.
‘Might it not have –’ there was no nice way to say it – ‘rotted?’
‘Not to that extent, not in just a year,’ said Louis. ‘There would be … remains.’ I noticed that the power dynamic between the twins had changed yet again. Now they were speaking exactly the same amount, as equals. I’d never seen this version of their relationship before.
‘I think we should just leave it,’ said Cass. ‘He’s gone. Does it matter where he is?’
‘It matters very much,’ said Louis. ‘We’ll have to speak to the police and the coroner’s office in the morning, and the funeral directors too. There must have been a post-mortem, and then they would have released the body to the morticians. I’m going to bed. I have to be sharp for all that.’ And he climbed the stairs alone, Ty looking wistfully after him.
Cass stayed on, staring into the flames. Her euphoria gone, she looked dog tired. I put my glass of mulled wine into her hand and she gave me the ghost of a smile.
‘Sorry we ditched you at the church. It took longer than we thought.’
‘No, no worries. You had bigger fish to fry.’ I remembered, suddenly, saying this to Abbot Ridley. Call me Ishmael.
‘You got back all right though?’ She indicated us all with a gesture of her glass. ‘Evidently you did.’
‘Ish.’ We all looked at each other. I was loath to give Cass something else to think about, but I wanted her take on the Curious Incident of the Dogs in the Night-time. ‘Actually we were … chased … through Longwood. By dogs.’
She sat up. ‘By Brutus?’
‘That’s what we thought at first, but no, not him. Dozens, maybe hundreds of dogs. Smaller than Brutus, but loads of them. We literally got dogpiled.’
She rolled her head around on her neck in the way really tired people do. ‘I think you must have been imagining it.’
‘But you have dogs here, don’t you? And I saw more coming yesterday from my window.’
‘Yes. We’re building up a pack.’
‘What for?’
‘We used to ride to hounds at Longcross, but we haven’t done so for many years.’
‘What’s riding to hounds?’
Shafeen said shortly, ‘Foxhunting.’
‘Ah.’ I frowned. ‘Isn’t that illegal?’
She shrugged, a shrug that told me something I knew only too well – that on de Warlencourt land, the de Warlencourts made the laws. Thinking back to last year’s weekend of blood sports, I supposed I should be grateful that Longcross was lowering the prey down the food chain to just foxes. ‘Louis decided to revive it, and we’re building up the pack for a Boxing Day meet here at Longcross. We’re breeding from Henry’s hounds – Arcas, Ladon, Tigris and the rest.’ She clicked her fingers smartly. ‘Actually, I bet it was foxes who came for you. There’s loads of them in the woods. That’s why we’re bringing back the hunt.’
‘Foxes don’t hunt people though, do they? It’s the other way round.’
‘What about all those urban foxes chewing kids’ arms off in Fulham?’
‘That’s babies,’ I said. ‘And besides, this was definitely dogs.’
‘But they’re all kennelled for the night. They can’t get out.’
‘Well, I think they did.’
She got up wearily. ‘Come with me.’
I shot the others a look and followed Cass out into the night. I stayed very close to her, under her de Warlencourt protection, all the way to the stable-yard. We were literally going to the dogs. When we walked under the stone arch the beautiful red roses were black. We went through to the kennels and looked through the bars of the kennel doors, like we were the ones in jail. But it was the dogs who were firmly locked in. And so many of them. Seriously, it was like 101 Dalmatians in there. Hundreds upon hundreds of dogs, all curled up cosily, all fast asleep with only the occasional twitch or thump of a tail as they dreamed of chasing rabbits. It was actually super-cute, or it would have been if we hadn’t been chased through the woods earlier.
