FOXES, page 20
I remembered Shafeen saying, I think they’re pretty vicious when cornered. I’d thought a pet fox would be just like a lap dog, but of course they would always be wild. Furry on the inside, I thought. The Company of Wolves.
‘He was just hungry and thirsty,’ Henry went on, ‘but it felt like he hated me and was trying to kill me. I was in short trousers at that time, and my legs were running with blood. I was screaming and screaming, but nobody came. Not the mater, not nanny, not anyone.’
I shifted closer to sit by him, hand on his hunched shoulder, but couldn’t speak.
‘I couldn’t stand it any more. Just cowering in a corner, watching for those amber eyes burning out of the dark, waiting for the next attack. My nerves were in shreds. I thought he would eat me alive. So the next time he came for me, I fought back.’
‘What did you do?’ It was a whisper.
‘I bit him.’
‘You what?’
‘I don’t even know how it happened,’ he said. ‘He leaped for my throat and I sort of grabbed him.’
He was shaking now. ‘He was trying to bite my neck and I was wrestling with him. Suddenly I found there was fur in my mouth and I bit down, hard. I tore his ear. I tasted his blood.’ He sounded as if he could still taste it now. ‘Then he screamed, Greer. You never heard anything like it. It was strangely human, and utterly horrible. And so piercing. I knew they would hear it all over the house. And the second it happened, the second it was the fox who screamed, not me, the pater let me out. He knew the tables had turned, you see, that I’d bested the fox somehow, and the natural order had been restored. Freedom was my reward.’
‘Either a hunter or the hunted be,’ I murmured.
‘That’s it,’ said Henry. ‘That’s it in a nutshell. And if that fox hadn’t screamed, I don’t know if he would ever have let me out.’
I wanted to say this was ridiculous. I wanted to say that there was no way Rollo would let his son and heir starve if he couldn’t stand up to a fox. But I couldn’t say it. I just wasn’t sure. ‘What then?’
‘They put me to bed and called Doctor Morand. He patched me up as if I’d just fallen over in the playground. He didn’t ask any questions. He never does.’
I remembered that this was the elderly doctor who had treated Shafeen after he’d been shot. Then I’d thought it barbaric that he should be fine with a guest being shot in the arm on the estate. Now I realised he’d seen much worse in the course of his medical career.
‘So what happened to Reynard? They put him down, right?’
‘No. They let him go.’
My mouth dropped open. ‘They didn’t.’
‘They did, you know. And a few days later, at the Boxing Day meet, we chased him with the hounds. My legs were still in bandages, but the pater expected me to get up and ride. I remember to this day putting tight riding boots over those dressings. The blood started seeping through the bandages, but I was determined to pull them on. I wasn’t about to let the pater down.’ Henry clasped his hands around his knees, as if his legs still hurt him. ‘And Reynard gave us the run of his life – everyone said that meet was legendary. Even grizzled old colonels who’d been hunting for years said that was the best hunt they’d ever been on. I was only eight, it was my first hunt, but I rode like a maniac. And eventually we caught him. Reynard.’
Now it was me who looked at the fox on the wall, as if the creature was eavesdropping.
‘I knew it was him, because of the ragged ear where I’d bitten him. When the hounds ripped him apart, I was right at the front of the pack. I loved every second of it, Greer. They “blooded” me with his blood and I felt it warm on my forehead, and I was glad. I was so exhausted I nearly went to sleep in the saddle on the way back to the house. The pater kept laughing and patting me on the shoulder, saying things like, Young puppy’s ridden himself into the ground. For the first time in my life I felt like he was proud of me.’
His voice wavered dangerously, but he carried on.
‘The next day they mounted the fox mask on the wall in my room, and he’s been with me ever since, to remind me of our battle. Reynard 2008. A week after that Boxing Day meet, at the beginning of January, the pater sent me to STAGS prep. He said – and I remember this quite particularly – he said: You’re ready now.’
Somehow, in the course of this terrible tale, he’d curled into a foetal position and I’d reclined on the bed and was lying next to him again, like we were a couple. We faced each other as we’d done that first night when he’d put his thumb on my mouth, mirror images. Then I’d thought him a dream, a wraith from the other side of the Looking Glass; then the dividing line between life and death ran down the middle of the bed between us. Now we were both living in the here and now, and the playful banter of that night was gone like a dream itself. This was the most real Henry had ever been with me, the most raw.
‘Since then I’ve hated the pater. And the mater too.’
The crack in his voice told me that he didn’t hate either one of them. But I wasn’t about to argue with him right then.
‘I get him,’ I said softly. ‘But why her?’
‘Well …’ he reached out and lifted a lock of my hair out of my eye, tucking it behind my ear. His hands were cold. ‘Let me ask you a moral question. What’s worse: to be a monster, and to torture someone, or not to be a monster, and to stand by and watch that someone suffer, without having the courage to do something about it?’
I understood. It was why we were going to Longcross. If we didn’t help Ty, that would make us worse than the Order. ‘Is there … is there a chance she didn’t know?’
‘No,’ he said stiffly. ‘She used to come every day and knock on the door, try the handle and talk to me gently through the wood.’
Then I understood why he’d looked so terrified the other night. When he heard the creak of the doorknob. It had taken him back there, to that dreadful cupboard in the boot room.
‘But she never let me out, however much I begged and pleaded. Because she feared him more than she loved me.’
‘She does love you,’ I said gently. ‘I’m certain of it. She never stops talking about you. And she comes in this room every night, or tries to.’ Then I realised the meaning of what the sleepwalking countess had been saying that night. When she’d murmured, I’ll save you, she hadn’t meant she would save Henry from falling from the waterfall. She’d always known he was alive. She’d meant she would save him from Reynard, all those years ago; but she hadn’t had the courage.
‘She’s like she is because those few days broke her,’ he said coldly. ‘She’s been … struggling, mentally, ever since. She tried to compensate; she smothered me with love. But I could never forget that she’d left me in that cupboard.’
I imagined him trying to deal with the trauma, an eight-year-old, on his own. He should have had counselling, therapy, but these were relatively new sciences. The Medievals didn’t do that. They were all about the stiff upper lip. And this was the consequence. They’d taken an innocent little boy and created a monster. ‘Who else knows this?’
‘Just Cass,’ he said. ‘I had to tell someone. That’s why she hates the pater so much. And the mater too.’
That explained a lot, not least why Cass herself had so many issues of her own following Henry’s ‘death’. But this didn’t have to go on for ever. There didn’t have to be endless generations of messed-up privileged kids. The cycle, surely, could be broken. ‘Why don’t you change? Why don’t you help us? There’s some dark plot going on and you must know all about it. We’re pretty sure something’s going to happen to Ty at the Boxing Day meet, but it’s more than that, isn’t it?’
For the first time that night, he was silent and wouldn’t meet my eyes. But I wasn’t about to give up on him.
‘You’ve literally been given a second chance at life. Why not live this life differently?’
He looked at me for a long, long time, then seemed to make up his mind. He got up off the bed and held out his hand. ‘Come with me.’
For the second time in my life, Henry de Warlencourt took my hand and led me through a secret door. But this time we went down, not up – not to heaven, but to hell.
40
The secret door was – Narnia of Narnias – in the back of the mahogany wardrobe.
It clicked open mutedly to reveal a little spiral staircase, with that ancient but familiar smell of old stone, which led us down and down to the bottom of the house and below.
I kept one hand in Henry’s with the other trailing down the gritty wall, the stone rough under my fingertips, wondering all the time where we were going. As we corkscrewed down into the blackness, I started to see a glow of light. It might have been comforting if it wasn’t for what I heard.
Chanting.
This spooky, monkish chanting, of a lot of people in an echoing chamber. We rounded the last turn of the stair, and the world opened out again, into a vast, cavernous space.
We were in some sort of underground chapel. I remembered then what Caro had said – the house was built in Georgian times, but the foundations are much older. This must have been part of the original house – the one where Nazereth de Warlencourt lived. I looked about me in the candlelit dimness. There were no windows, but a forest of pillars around the perimeter of the room reaching up to arch and meet at the top in these monastic-looking cross-ribs. The place was lit by about a thousand candles set into little niches. We were in a stone gallery high up in the eaves of the vaulting, and Henry ushered me along it, a finger to his lips. We had an ideal vantage point, completely hidden from below but with the scene set out beneath us, complete and perfect, as if we were sitting in the stalls of a theatre. We stood, leaning together on the stone balustrade and looking down.
And I could hardly believe what I saw.
Far below, on a paved floor of a complicated design, stood probably about fifty figures. They were all in floor-length red gowns with deep cowls that entirely hid their faces. Set upon their heads were black antlers.
For the second time in my life, I came face to face with the Dark Order of the Grand Stag.
It was then, after all this time, that it hit me. I’d buried my trial so deep that I wouldn’t have to think about it. The horror of facing a circle just like this one, of being questioned with my neck in a noose, of being branded on the thumb, the searing and sudden pain, all came back to me. I think on some level I’d been able to convince myself it had all been some sort of nightmare, despite the brand that was with me every second of my life as a permanent reminder.
For a horrible moment I thought Henry had brought me here to serve me up like a Christmas turkey, as some sort of sick STAGS sacrifice. I started shaking until he put an arm about my shoulders and pressed his lips to my hair. ‘Steady,’ he breathed. ‘Steady. They’re not here for you.’
‘Jesus,’ I breathed, ‘what is this?’ I turned to him. ‘Henry. What is this?’
I could see him struggling with himself. I honestly think that until that moment he hadn’t fully committed to betraying them.
‘It’s the Red Mass,’ he murmured. ‘The Order’s ritual.’
I looked down upon the scarlet circle, blood racing. I had to grip the balustrade in front of me to stay upright, and my suddenly sweaty fingertips began to slip on the cold stone. The circle stopped chanting – I’m sure it was Latin, but I was so scared I could be wrong; they could have been talking backwards. It was a dreadful inversion of the innocent Christmas Mass we’d been to earlier that same night. If the London Oratory had been God’s House, this – with the horns and all the red – seemed like the dwelling of the Devil.
One of the number turned from the circle, mounted a dais and sat in a chair exactly like the one in the STAGS Club – maybe it was the one from the STAGS Club – with antlers growing from it like twin saplings. Another two figures approached, holding a book between them. Once their leader had taken his seat, the others sat too, on these ornamental stools set into niches around the walls. The seated figure read from the page his assistants held open. You know how, when you’re just about to faint, your blood kind of roars in your ears? Well, mine was roaring so hard it took me some moments before I could register what the Grand Stag was saying.
And Samson said concerning them, ‘Now shall I be more blameless than the Philistines, though I do them a displeasure.’
I got that churchy flashback again. He was reading some sort of Bible lesson.
And Samson went and caught 300 foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails. And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and also the standing corn, with the vineyards and olives.
I imagined the foxes with tails aflame, running in terror from their own brushes, spreading fire throughout the Philistine corn.
I registered the image a second before I recognised the voice. It was one I would never forget. I’d heard it interviewing me for STAGS, I’d heard it telling the story of St Aidan’s stag at Justitium Mass and I’d heard it trying me for the murder of the young man I was sitting with now. ‘Is that the Old Abbot?’
‘Yes,’ said Henry.
‘Not dead then?’
‘Not so much.’
‘Did they get him away from STAGS because I’d figured out who he was?’
‘It was safer that way.’
Another thought struck me. ‘And is Abbot Ridley here? He’s in this too, right?’
‘Who’s Abbot Ridley?’
‘The new Abbot. He runs your Order’s school.’
‘Never heard of him.’
This was striking. I thought I could tell when Henry was telling the truth by this point, and I thought he was telling it now. Maybe Abbot Ridley was innocent, despite him gaslighting me about Esmé Stuart and skulking around Oxford in the snow like a modern-day Harry Lime. But I couldn’t question Henry further because the Old Abbot was speaking again.
‘Brother Longcross? How many foxes for our Boxing Day meet?’
‘One. Tyeesha Morgan.’ I recognised Rollo’s voice and shivered despite myself. So there it was: what we’d suspected, confirmed. Despite her courage, and despite Louis’s regard, Ty was indeed to be the prey for this sickest of hunts.
‘One?’ the Abbot sounded surprised, and not in a good way. ‘Not two?’
‘One only.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite.’ Rollo did sound sure, to be fair.
‘You know to whom I am referring,’ said the Abbot in steely tones. ‘What of the boy? What of Shafeen Jadeja?’
Shafeen. It was a shock to hear his name like that, in this company. I waited, heart thudding.
‘No.’ In that moment Rollo sounded even more of a boss than the Old Abbot. ‘The boy will not be touched.’
Warm relief washed over me, but Henry’s reaction was quite different. His face hardened and his grip tightened on my arm. At that moment I understood. He was jealous of Shafeen. And not just because of me. Because his father liked him – a father who had locked his own son in a cupboard with a fox, a son who was never good enough for him.
‘And the recent threat?’ The Old Abbot sounded a bit huffy but had definitely climbed back in his box a bit. I wondered if there was a bit of a power struggle going on between these two – contemporaries, STAGS old boys and … rivals?
‘The Manslayer was tried and branded, as you know, and brought within this house.’
Another jolt. Now they were talking about me.
‘And?’
‘She is being handled,’ said Rollo calmly. ‘No further action will be needed.’
‘Meaning?’ The menace had returned to the Old Abbot’s voice.
‘We have brought her into the fold.’
I looked sideways at Henry, and his eyes flickered to mine sheepishly. ‘They’re talking about you, aren’t they?’ I whispered. ‘Is that your job? To handle me? Is that what you’re doing now?’
‘No, of course not. Why would I bring you here if it was?’
I saw his point. If he’d wanted to woo me onto Team de Warlencourt, he would never have brought me to the Red Mass. Roses on the pillow were one thing, midnight conspiracies to murder quite another. The Grand Stag was speaking again.
‘Very well. And now, back to our Yuletide endeavours. What of the meet at Longcross? How many brothers and sisters of the House of Lords have you managed to shepherd into the herd?’
‘Many,’ said Rollo. ‘Most. Our gatherings will have little interference in the new year, once our bill goes through the House.’
‘And the prince?’
‘Will attend.’ I took my breath in a little gasp. Rollo didn’t specify which royal family this ‘prince’ was from, but if it was the British one, then this thing went right to the top, just as it had in Elizabeth I’s day.
‘Very well,’ said the Old Abbot, sounding a little less pissed off. ‘We all meet at Longcross on Boxing Day, and at our next Mass, with the will of the Stag, we will rejoice at the success of our endeavours. Now we sing.’
