STAGS 2, page 17
‘Who has the key?’ I asked.
‘Perfect. And –’ she reached inside her collar and tie – ‘me.’ She wore a key on a chain, and she dangled it in front of me like a hypnotist. ‘And I was with Father Wright.’
‘Perfect could have let them out,’ I insisted doggedly.
She sighed. ‘Let them out, got them all into Longwood to wait for you outside the church, then corralled them all back in again, and got them all to sleep?’
‘I know it doesn’t seem likely but …’
‘Greer,’ she said, her voice of command back again, ‘it’s been a long night. Yes, we were chased by Brutus through a tunnel, and of course that made you edgy on the way back. Can we just put it down to an overactive imagination?’
I knew what we’d experienced, but I wasn’t about to argue with Cass at one in the morning. She was, after all, the boss. ‘Sure. Let’s go to bed.’
We all went up the stairs and dropped the girls off at their rooms. Shafeen was staying in the queen’s bedroom again, his old room from last year, and on the doorstep he drew me inside.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Greer,’ he said, ‘do you really want to be alone tonight?’
I thought about going back to Lowther, and the scrutiny of Jeffrey’s glassy eyes.
‘Don’t worry,’ Shafeen said as he closed the door. ‘I’ll sleep in the chair. We don’t have to be in the bed together.’
I’d missed him so much, and spent all of that evening being so afraid and so relieved in turns that something clicked in me. I’d felt just about every emotion you could name that night. It was time to feel this. I put my hand up to his cheek. ‘But what if I want to be?’ Then I kissed him, and the way he kissed me back told me that I didn’t have to worry about Cass any more.
Queen Elizabeth may have slept in that bed.
But we didn’t.
Scene iv
Things were just getting interesting when there was a knock at the door.
Shafeen rolled off me. ‘Damn.’
He put the bedside light on, and I blinked at him. ‘What time is it?’
‘2 a.m.’
I groaned. ‘Maybe they’ll go away.’
‘Greer,’ whispered Nel’s voice urgently from outside the door.
I threw back the covers, shrugged on a robe, padded to the door and opened it a crack. ‘How did you know I was in here?’
‘Durrr,’ she said. ‘Come on. Bring the code pages. And Shafeen.’ Her eyes were shining with excitement.
‘What is it?’
‘I think I might’ve figured it out.’
‘Figured what out?’
‘The code, dummy.’
Shafeen and I followed her out of the door. Halfway down the passageway I stopped outside Louis’s room. ‘Should we get the twins?’
Nel hesitated for a split second, then said, ‘No. Not them. They’ve got enough to process tonight.’
But just as we turned into the wing of the house where we girls were staying, a figure blocked our path.
‘Where are you going?’
I must have jumped about a metre in the air. When I came down again I clutched at my heart. ‘Jesus, Ty.’
She stood there, arms crossed, legs slightly apart in a Peter Pan stance. We weren’t getting past her.
We all started to bullshit.
‘Um … I had a bad dream,’ I said.
‘And I’m taking her to get some water,’ put in Nel.
‘Me too …’ said Shafeen lamely.
‘Uh-uh,’ Ty said. ‘No. Enough.’ She wagged a forefinger at us. ‘It’s truth time. You guys are up to something, and I want to know what it is. Whatever it is, you’re doing it without the twins,’ she narrowed her eyes, ‘and I bet you forgot I was even here.’
Shafeen, Nel and I looked at each other guiltily. She was right. We had. We’d consulted on whether to wake the twins, but we hadn’t even thought about Ty. Ty had her answer. For a second, she looked unbelievably hurt. Then she raised her chin, every inch Queen Cynthia. ‘You know, I’m not some token black character in your little drama. I’m not just here to ask questions and get things wrong, so you can all get them right. I just got chased through a wood by a pack of dogs, same as you. I just sat and tried to decode Act Five, same as you. But you have this little Secret Squirrel trio thing going on, and something happened last year that no one is telling me. So wherever you’re going, I’m going with you.’
I looked at Shafeen and Nel, my old conspirators from last year. We’d always been a three. But they both nodded.
‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’
Nel’s room was more austere than mine or Shafeen’s. It was dark, and furnished in bronzes and chocolate browns, and had a creepy dog head on the wall above the fireplace. Presumably someone’s favourite pooch had been rewarded for a lifetime of devotion by having its head chopped off and mounted on a plaque. I remembered that last year Nel had taken the thing down. This year she was stronger.
She led us to her desk. Her light was on and her phone lay on a bunch of papers on the blotter. She sat down in the chair and we all stood around her.
‘So I was noodling round on the Internet,’ she said, ‘looking up codes and stuff. I was interested in that keyword thing. Apparently decryption with a keyword is called a plaintext attack, and it works like this.’ She showed us a piece of paper. ‘So you have the alphabet, and you have the displacement cipher, just like we said before. You slip the alphabet one place to the right.’
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
‘So far, so simple,’ I said.
‘Yeah, but then we have to find the right keyword. That’s the hard bit,’ said Ty.
‘That’s exactly what I thought,’ said Nel. ‘But it was simple when I just thought about it.’
She wrote four letters on the paper.
DOGS
She looked up at us. ‘Has to be, doesn’t it?’
My heart started to beat faster. I bit my lip. She was absolutely right.
‘So, I wrote out the key like this with the keyword added:’
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
D O G S A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V
‘But then obviously there are letters that are duplicated – all the letters in DOGS –‘
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
D O G S A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V
‘So you leave those out:’
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
D O G S A B C E F H I J K L M N P Q R T U V W X Y Z
Nel pointed to the pages in my hand. ‘All we need now is to try it. And I’ll bet you my dad’s jewellery collection that it works.’
I got out the coded manuscript. ‘Which bit?’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Shafeen. ‘If Nel’s cracked the cipher, it should all work, whichever line we choose.’
I chose a line at random. Well, not totally at random. I chose a line which had a question mark at the end of it. I’d been intrigued by question marks ever since I’d seen Sherlock Holmes sneaking back from the dead and writing one at the end of Watson’s typescript in A Game of Shadows. So I isolated the question from the manuscript and wrote it out.
It said:
WMUJSRTIAANDSMCTEDTTUQLASDLSOFTTEAA?
‘OK. Here goes.’ I leaned over Nel, and, using the key, decoded the first few letters. ‘W-O-U-L-D. Would! It’s would!’ I’d never been so pleased to see a word in my life. ‘Nel, you little beauty.’ I hugged her hard from behind. The next two letters deflated me a bit though, as they didn’t seem to fit.
S-T
WOULDST
‘Don’t freak out,’ said Nel. ‘That could just be the beginning of the next word.’
‘No,’ said Ty, ‘It’s wouldst, an Elizabethan word. It’s the past tense of “will”. Carry on.’
I did. And this is what I got:
WOULDSTTHOUKEEPADOGTHATTURNEDANDBITTHEE?
‘Split it up,’ urged Shafeen excitedly.
WOULDST THOU KEEP A DOG THAT TURNED AND BIT THEE?
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ I breathed.
We stared at the line for a moment. ‘OK, chaps,’ I said, never moving my eyes from the paper. ‘Copy out the key and take a couple of pages each, and then decrypt your pages onto notepaper. Have we got enough pens? Yes? OK, let’s get decoding.’
With Shafeen and I on the bed, Ty at the desk and Nel on the floor, we spent a concentrated hour with our heads swimming with letters. We did three pages each and Ty, who seemed quickest of us all, did four. By 3 a.m. we had thirteen pages of handwritten play stacked up on Nel’s desk.
Act Five.
I looked at the others. They all looked back at me. We all had a fragment of knowledge, a few pages of the final act in our heads, secrets half revealed. But now we would put them together.
At last we were to find out what was so damned dangerous about The Isle of Dogs.
Scene v
‘How shall we do this?’ I asked. ‘Read it in turn?’
Nel shook her head. ‘If we do that it will take all night.’
‘How about a read-through then?’ I said. ‘A table read, like they do for movies.’
‘But we don’t have all the actors,’ said Ty. ‘Shall we wake the twins now?’
‘No,’ said Shafeen, so forcefully we all looked at him. ‘Not yet.’
‘Why not?’ I asked, curious.
‘Let’s see what’s in it first.’ He looked at me directly. ‘Humour me.’ He clearly suspected something but I wasn’t sure what.
I shrugged. ‘If you say so. Then you’ll have to read in the parts the twins play.’ I indicated in the manuscript. ‘Lupo and Volpone.’
‘Goddit.’
‘And Abbot Ridley’s part,’ said Nel, blushing even in the lamplight. ‘The Earl of Greenwich.’
I shook my head. ‘Already dead. He’s not exactly going to be making a comeback, is he?’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that,’ said Nel, who’d got a later bit of the play to me. But at that moment, all hopped up with excitement, I could have no idea of what we were about to read. We all sat on the four-poster bed, in the light of the dying fire, so we could pass the pages around easily.
It all started innocently enough, with a long speech from the mourning queen. Queen Cynthia was alone in her palace and alone on the stage. It was a speech full of bitter regret, as the queen tried to come to terms with the dreadful birthday hunt in which she’d taken part, ending in her lover the Earl of Greenwich, disguised as the humble peasant Robert Horne, being torn to death by her own hounds. Ty, despite struggling a little with other people’s handwriting, still gave a beautiful reading, her low, musical voice giving life to the words for the first time in hundreds of years. By the firelight, in the midst of Longcross Hall, suddenly what she was saying was all about Henry. The queen wrestled with her own grief, lamenting the lifetime of love she had lost and torturing herself with the thought of what could have been between them if they had had the time to become lovers, and had managed to ‘journey beyond a kiss’. But at the same time, she racked herself with the guilt of being an ‘unwitting murderer’. Although her situation was massively different to my own, and our fates were separated by centuries, I could feel tears pricking my eyes in sympathy. Shafeen watched me as Ty spoke but said nothing.
He didn’t have much to do in the scene because, in this final part, the queen worked alone, acting without the father–son team which had tempted her into the dreadful hunt. In fact, the queen ordered that every hound in the kennels on the Isle of Dogs should be slaughtered. She vowed that she would never hunt again, and decreed that Volpone and Lupo, the counsellors who had tricked her into hunting her own lover, should be banished from court.
Instead, she turned to Canis, the earl’s grieving servant, to find her a wise woman from the village for a very dark purpose. And so Shafeen, instead of playing Volpone and Lupo, found himself cast as, for want of a better word, a witch.
And here is where things got really dark. The firelight suddenly became this charmed circle, and beyond that four-poster, the room, with the copper fabrics, the paintings and the dog’s head above the mantelpiece – everything went away. I was watching the play as it was being read aloud, as if it were a film. Shafeen was no actor, but his strong clipped voice with just a trace of a Rajasthani accent somehow worked for the enchantress, bargaining for spells with a great queen. So I listened, not to Ty and Shafeen, but to Queen Cynthia visiting a village crone, haggling for the dead.
I listened as the witch told the queen how many years it had taken her to find the incantation that raised the dead, but that in the end, after years of travelling to the Holy Land and back, she had discovered the words in a scroll of the Bible. The queen begged for the secret and the witch named her price but warned her that Greenwich might not come back in a form she could love, or even recognise. The queen, racked with guilt and loss, insisted. The scene ended with the queen paying the crone, counting the price of thirty pieces of silver into her gnarled hand and leaving the hovel with the incantation to raise the dead, a ribbon of paper torn from the Bible, shoved into her bodice next to her heart.
In the dead of night, the queen went into the Underwood, believing she was alone, but followed at a distance by the faithful Canis. By the light of the Dog Star, at the roots of the great oak where Greenwich had been torn apart, she took the incantation from her bodice and, shaking with terror and longing, prepared to speak the secret words aloud into the blood-soaked ground.
‘Stop,’ I said to Ty.
Our spell was broken, and we were back in Nel’s room at Longcross. ‘Don’t say them. Better not.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Ty was herself again, a Tower Hamlets girl.
‘Don’t say the words out loud,’ I said, feeling foolish. ‘You know, in case you say them in the right way or something.’
Shafeen said, ‘What right way could there possibly be?’
I looked at him very directly and used his own words back to him. ‘Humour me.’
Ty shrugged and missed the lines out. We could all read what they were, but they remained unspoken, for now. We moved on to the next section, which began with a long stage direction. Since I was Poetaster, AKA the narrator, I spoke the instruction aloud.
And this was where the play got even stranger. The stage direction went like this:
(By the arts of the sidesmen, the ground shall be set to bubble and boil, as if it were seething, by use of black fustian or the like cloth, shaken by their hands. From the cloth, as if from the earth, shall rise a player in the form of THE GRAND STAG, a chimera half-man and half-deer. He shall be played by a fellow of more than usual stature, in a riding hood that shall fully obscure his face. He shall have a stag’s antlers set upon his brow, to better increase his great height. He shall be a monstrous thing, to strike fear into the watchers, and his entrance shall be marked by the pipe and timbrel, and the drum shall be like to thunder.)
In the following scene, this monstrous thing, this chimera, which was half-man and half-deer, began to speak to the queen. The scene was in prose, with just a couplet of poetry at the end. And what happened in it chilled my very soul.
Queen Cynthia
Who are you?
Grand Stag
Do not you recognise me? Hast known me, in one form or other, these many years.
Queen Cynthia
Art going to kill me?
Grand Stag
Nothing will befall you now. You have our protection.
Queen Cynthia
Who is we?
Grand Stag
The Order.
Queen Cynthia
What Order?
Grand Stag
The Dark Order of the Grand Stag. We protect our own.
Queen Cynthia
Shall I see thee more?
Grand Stag
Every time you hunt.
Queen Cynthia
But I have vowed to hunt no more.
Grand Stag
Each man in his life, and woman too,
Must make this choice as must ye:
Either the hunter, or the hunted be.
‘Oh my God,’ said Shafeen. ‘The Dark Order of the Grand Stag.’
‘I know,’ I said, feeling sick. ‘Stags again. And the Order.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but look at what it’s called.’ Before I could ask what he meant, he said, ‘Who had that page?’
‘Me,’ said Ty, raising her hand like she was in school.
‘Was there anything strange about that part? About how it was written?’ he asked.
She looked surprised. ‘Yes, actually. There was one word to a line; they were sort of stacked up on top of each other. Let me find it.’ She scrambled off the bed and over to the desk, where we’d left the original manuscript. She found the page and showed us.
‘Thought so,’ said Shafeen. ‘Look.’
On the notepaper page, he marked four letters. ‘See?’
I looked again.
And then I saw.
The
Dark
Order of the
Grand
Stag
‘DOGS.’ I said. ‘And there’s the acrostic, at last.’
‘How d’you mean, acrostic? What acrostic?’ asked Ty.
‘I started a few other Jonson dramas while I was trying to choose my play. They all had an acrostic at the beginning, which sums up the play, called “The Argument”. That’s what put me onto finding the acrostic in the Lorem ipsum pages. The Isle of Dogs didn’t have an Argument at the beginning, it just went straight into the Prologue. I think this is why. DOGS stands for the Dark Order of the Grand Stag. DOGS is the acrostic, but of course Jonson couldn’t write down his Argument at the beginning of the play. He’d have been arrested before it even started. He kept the message back until the very end of the play.’
