STAGS 2, page 20
(Clip ends)
‘Yes, we do,’ Nel said grimly into the sudden silence.
‘Let’s watch it again,’ I said, and we did.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘so Ben Jonson got out of being hanged, just as Cass said – and that was a year after The Isle of Dogs.’
‘It must have been,’ said Shafeen. ‘Like you said to Cass, Spenser was in the play.’
‘I’m getting in a muddle with the timeline. Let’s Google Ben anyway.’
‘Where do we start?’
‘Where does everyone start?’ I said. ‘Wikipedia.’
‘OK.’ Nel expertly tapped away, no clumsy thumb syndrome for her. ‘The entry’s pretty long.’
‘Just give us the bare bones,’ said Shafeen, ‘until you get to the meaty bits.’
‘All right,’ said Nel. ‘Here we go. Early Life: son of a bricklayer. Westminster School. Supposed to go to Cambridge but didn’t. Fought as a soldier in Flanders. Became an actor. Career: ah, here we go. Look.’
We all huddled together around the shining screen of the Saros 8S. And this is what we read:
In 1597 his play The Isle of Dogs was suppressed after causing great offence. An arrest warrant for Jonson was issued by Queen Elizabeth I. Jonson was jailed in Marshalsea Prison and charged with ‘Leude and mutynous behaviour’. Two of the actors, Gabriel Spenser and Robert Shaw, were also imprisoned. A year later, Jonson was again briefly imprisoned, this time in Newgate Prison, for killing Spenser in a duel on 22 September 1598 in Hogsden Fields (today part of Hoxton). Tried on a charge of manslaughter, Jonson pleaded guilty but was released by benefit of clergy, a legal ploy through which he gained leniency by reciting a brief bible verse (the neck-verse), forfeiting his ‘goods and chattels’ and being branded on his left thumb with an M for manslayer.
One bit jumped out at me straight away. ‘There’s the neck verse again!’
‘There’s a hyperlink,’ said Nel.
‘Punch it, Chewie.’
Nel did, and by the flickering of her eyes we could see her speed-reading the text. ‘OK, so here’s the deal,’ she announced. ‘Apparently if you were literate and condemned to hang, you could save your life by speaking a verse from the Bible. If you could do that, in Latin, that meant you could be tried in a church court instead of a normal one, as a clergyman – you know, a vicar or a priest. The loophole was known as “benefit of the clergy”.’
‘Even if you weren’t a clergyman?’
‘Yes. You just had to read this one verse from the Bible, and that was what was known as the “neck verse”.’
‘And what’s the verse?’
‘Let’s see. It says:
The biblical passage traditionally used for the literacy test was Psalm 51, Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam (‘O God, have mercy upon me, according to thine heartfelt mercifulness’). Thus, an illiterate person who had memorised the appropriate psalm could also claim the benefit of clergy, and Psalm 51 became known as the ‘neck verse’.
‘Read it again,’ I demanded suddenly.
‘All that? Can’t you –?’
‘No,’ I said urgently. ‘Just the Latin bit.’
Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.
I had to take a beat. ‘It was on the family tomb,’ I whispered.
‘How d’you mean, on the tomb?’
‘Nazereth’s tomb. Henry’s tomb. Those words were carved into the stone over the names. Remember?’
‘Oh yes!’ exclaimed Shafeen.
‘But …’ I frowned. ‘Why that one?’
‘Why that one what?’
‘The psalm that saved Jonson’s life carved onto the tomb of the man he killed. Isn’t it a bit of a coincidence?’
‘Well, it’s a psalm, isn’t it?’ said Nel. ‘A verse of the Bible. There are always verses of the Bible on tombs, aren’t there?’
‘I don’t know – are there?’ I said. ‘It seems a bit neat.’
Shafeen looked over Nel’s shoulder at the verse. ‘It’s very short, isn’t it? The neck verse, I mean. Surely anyone could just memorise it and save their lives.’
‘Well, that’s exactly what happened, according to this,’ said Nel, ‘so in the 1700s they closed the loophole. But Ben Jonson wasn’t one of those people. He wasn’t just gaming the system. He was highly literate.’
‘So reading gave him his life back. He was literally saved by the book.’
‘Yes. But remember he lost all his money and property, and was branded on the thumb with an M for manslayer.’
‘Ouch.’
‘Yes. But I imagine more than the pain would be the disgrace. For the rest of his days, everyone would know he took a life. If you’re literally branded a killer, it must make it that bit harder to climb up the social ladder.’
‘But it can’t have affected him that much,’ I said. ‘He wrote all his most famous plays after his trial, and made his fortune. In his lifetime he was more famous than Shakespeare.’ Not for the first time, I felt a warm admiration for Ben Jonson. ‘Abbot Ridley said he became Court Poet under James I.’
‘Hmm,’ said Shafeen doubtfully. ‘If Abbot Ridley said it, maybe we should look that up for ourselves.’
‘What do you mean?’ demanded Nel defensively.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘he did say that Esmé Stuart was a woman.’
‘Are you saying he was deliberately misleading you? Because I –’
‘Calm down. I’m just saying maybe he knows more about drama than history. Now, thanks to this lovely little puppy –’ I tapped the Saros 8S smartly with my fingernail – ‘we can look stuff up ourselves.’ This convinced Nel. She had always been an advocate of Savagery. ‘You always made the point that being Medieval is all very well, but it limits your access to information,’ I reminded her.
‘And that’s why they do it,’ said Nel. ‘Look at China. It’s got two great walls. The first one you can see from space, but the other you can’t see at all. It’s a firewall, stopping social media and censoring the Internet. Because people with information can rise up and rebel. STAGS,’ she said, ‘is China.’
‘Exactly. We could’ve found this out in five minutes, right back when this all started,’ I said. ‘But we didn’t. Why?’
‘I guess we’re institutionalised,’ admitted Shafeen.
‘Like the baby elephants,’ I murmured.
Shafeen nodded. ‘We were tethered and never learned to break free.’
‘What?’ asked Nel.
‘Nothing. Let’s get searching. The Friars can’t stop us now.’
On that ancient bed, the storm now howling outside, we went, once again, on an Internet binge. We were drunk with our ability to search anything – the world, once again, was at our fingertips. With the light from the phone illuminating our faces, and the lightning outside intermittently lighting the room, we went down a rabbit hole of Ben Jonson-ness.
We looked up his childhood, his schooling, his military record. We looked up his friends, his plays and all his poems. Then we looked up his trial, his eleventh-hour escape from the noose. And the neck verse. We watched a million different versions of the psalm, set to music by someone called Allegri. It was the same haunting piece that was in the clip from QI, sung by choristers from King’s College, Cambridge, to Cambridge, Indiana. There was even a video of these American college kids all doing the neck verse. One even rapped it.
Then Shafeen said, ‘Hey, why don’t we search up Longcross? It would be interesting to see if there’s any presence at all online, or if it’s too Medieval for that.’
Nel tapped in the search term. ‘Well, there’s a village in Surrey called Longcross. And a film studio. But as far as this Longcross goes … Oh, actually there’s quite a few results – loads actually – but they all relate to Henry’s death. They’re all the news reports from last year, or those creepy fan sites.’ She scrolled away. ‘Hang on – here’s something different. Oh. It’s just the “Longcross Portrait” of Queen Elizabeth I.’
‘Let me see.’ Shafeen grabbed the phone. ‘Painted in 1586,’ he read, ‘artist unknown. Oil on canvas … oh, here’s a photo.’
He clicked the picture and did that reverse-pinch thing that you do to make things bigger.
Then his eyes widened and he dropped the phone on the bed.
He leaped up, wrenched open the door and propelled himself through it. Nel and I looked at each other and followed him.
Scene x
At first, we didn’t know where Shafeen had gone.
We were trying to be as quiet as possible and obviously didn’t want to put any lights on. The last thing we wanted was to run into Perfect and his hellhound doing the security sweep before bed. From down here we could hear that the storm was sending the dogs in the stable-yard mad. Every time there was a peal of thunder or a flash of lightning, they howled. It was properly eerie. And you could hear, now, just how many of them there were. It sounded like there were hundreds. This was quite different to the Disney-esque, cute ’n’ cuddly pile of pups that we’d seen in the kennels. These dogs sounded serious. They were baying for blood. I couldn’t speak for Nel, but I was ready to run back up the stairs, when the lightning lit up the atrium and we could see Shafeen’s back disappearing into the Queen’s Dining Room.
Nel and I followed him and found him lighting all the candles in one of the silver candelabras on the dining table.
‘Shafeen?’
He didn’t answer.
Nel tried. ‘Shafeen? What’s going on?’
The candles warmed the room into light.
Shafeen said, ‘Help me.’
He went over to the Longcross Portrait and began to heave at the huge dark-wood chest that was covering the bottom of the frame. Nel and I exchanged glances. ‘Come on!’ he hissed.
We leaped forward and began to pull too. For a time, it seemed like the chest just wouldn’t move, but eventually we felt a bit of give and were able to pull it forward. It made quite a row as it scraped over the floor, but luckily the thunder covered the noise. Eventually we managed to angle it to the side, so the whole picture frame was revealed.
Shafeen snatched up the candelabra and held it to the painting. There was Elizabeth, enormously powerful, staring out of the frame in her green hunting gown. Red hair the colour of blood, jade eyes as direct as an arrow, skin white as bone. Shafeen moved the candelabra down to the bottom of the queen’s skirts.
And what he revealed I still have a hard time believing to this day.
It was a pair of feet. But not dainty female feet shod in satin as you might expect.
They were the cloven hooves of a stag.
We stood back as if stunned. None of us even spoke for probably a whole minute. You couldn’t call it silence though – with the storm howling outside and the dogs howling in reply.
‘How did you know?’ I said at last.
‘You can see the stag feet on the photo online. And look – there’s something else.’
He moved the candlestick a little to illuminate the ground between the queen’s deer feet. There on the forest floor were words tooled in gold. They read:
EITHER THE HUNTER, OR THE HUNTED BE.
‘That’s where Cass got it from.’
‘Yes. She must’ve grown up with this picture.’
‘I wonder when they decided to put the chest in front of it.’
‘I’m guessing Friday night,’ said Shafeen darkly. He carried the candelabra over to the end of the dining table and sat down. We sat across from him.
He put his hands palms down on the table, fingers spread. ‘Here’s what I think went down: Jonson got wind of the death hunts happening at court, using the hounds kept on the Isle of Dogs. A way for nobles to have some jolly fun while getting rid of undesirables in society. He wrote a thinly veiled play about it. Then Gabriel Spenser, an actor in the play, blamed him for ruining the family’s relationship with the queen, who had been a guest at Longcross. Spenser challenged Jonson to a duel. But Spenser was really Nazereth, a foppish, airy-fairy noble, and Jonson was an ex-bricklayer and ex-soldier and tough as shit. So Jonson killed Nazereth.’
‘And then what?’ I asked. ‘Raised Gabriel Spenser – AKA Nazereth de Warlencourt – up from the grave?’
‘The bringing-back-from-the-dead thing I don’t buy,’ said Shafeen. ‘That’s just wishful thinking on Cass’s part – she’s grieving, and damaged by some fairly major brother issues, and reaching for any scraps of comfort that she can find. She’s turned an old family myth into gospel.’
‘But do we think that Nazereth and Gabriel Spenser were the same person?’ asked Nel.
‘I’m prepared to believe that Nazereth had an alias,’ I said. ‘It was the only way a young nobleman could go on the London stage. People did it all the time. Some scholars even think Shakespeare was an alias for the Earl of Oxford, don’t they? But I don’t think Jonson came here and did some sort of comeback show in the crypt for one night only and brought forth a dead man.’
‘Then how did the play get to Longcross?’
‘If Jonson wasn’t ever here then it could’ve been Nazereth’s own copy,’ suggested Shafeen. ‘Maybe from the London house. Or perhaps Esmé Stuart brought it here – if there is a painting of Stuart in the library, he might well have been a family friend. If he knew Jonson, he surely must’ve known Spenser/Nazereth.’
‘And how, Einstein, did the fifth act get into the tomb?’
He paused. ‘That I don’t know. Perhaps the family buried it with him. People do get buried with letters or personal effects, don’t they?’
‘Yes, but usually lockets and stuff,’ I said, ‘Not pages of code.’
‘Or,’ said Nel, ‘maybe the family thought it was something secret and dangerous that had to be literally buried. It was in code, remember. And they wouldn’t know it was an act of a play. It was just gobbledegook.’
‘Maybe. That whole play thing is a bit of a mystery. I can’t get my head around it,’ admitted Shafeen. ‘But the painting is a different matter. That’s tangible evidence. In a time when pictures were stuffed with allegory, it is very suggestive that Elizabeth was implicated in the death hunts, and worse.’
‘What,’ Nel asked, incredulous, ‘could be worse?’
Slowly, hairs rising on the back of my neck, I said, ‘That Elizabeth I was the Grand Stag herself.’
Scene xi
‘Are you actually saying,’ asked Nel, ‘that the Queen of England was the head of the Dark Order of the Grand Stag?’
‘That’s what the painting is saying,’ said Shafeen. ‘That’s what Ben Jonson is saying.’
‘But what even is the Order?’ asked Nel. ‘Why’s it got a different name to the one Henry told us about? That was just the plain old Order of the Stag.’
‘I think I might know this one,’ I said. ‘You know how Scientology has all these levels, and Tom Cruise and John Travolta are up at the very top?’ I got all animated. ‘I think DOGS is the ruling order of the Order of the Stag. It’s an order just made up of the Grand Masters: the guys – or gals – in charge of the Order of the Stag. Cass said Nazereth used the title. And it passes down from one dude to the next, like the Dread Pirate Roberts.’
‘Who the hell is the Dread Pirate Roberts?’
‘You know, in The Princess Bride.’
‘I never saw it.’
‘You never saw The Princess Bride? Nel, it’s –’
‘Greer,’ she said, ‘focus.’
I did. ‘OK, OK. In The Princess Bride, there’s this character called the Dread Pirate Roberts. He’s this fearsome pirate, but it turns out that he isn’t one person. He’s lots of people.’
‘You mean, like a team?’
‘No. It’s a title, and it passes down from one Dread Pirate Roberts to another. They keep the name, because everyone already dreads it and the new guy doesn’t have to build up a reputation from the start. The outgoing Dread Pirate Roberts elects the next Dread Pirate Roberts.’
‘You established that the Old Abbot was the Grand Master, or the Grand Stag as he’d have been known in Elizabethan times,’ said Shafeen. ‘But who is it now?’
‘Why does it have to be anyone?’ I said. ‘What if it really is all over? Henry died, then the Abbot died. There was no new hunting book in the library, remember? And you can’t assume the twins are guilty by association, you said so yourself. Maybe that’s it. End. Finito.’
Shafeen looked doubtful. ‘It was Henry himself who said the Order would carry on. They were his last words.’
Nel said, ‘But if what you’re saying is true, and the Grand Stag is a title that is passed on only after death, it wouldn’t be an Order, would it? Because there wouldn’t be more than one Grand Stag at a time. I think the meetings would be pretty boring.’
‘Hang on a second,’ I said. ‘In The Princess Bride –’ They both started to groan theatrically, making the candles flicker. ‘No, wait, wait: the Dread Pirate Roberts doesn’t die. He retires. He passes his title on to the hero, Westley, and goes off into the sunset to enjoy his wealth. What if you are Grand Stag for a fixed term, like being President? Then you hand it on to a successor. But all the living ones come to the meetings, like a ruling council.’
‘Yes, but the Old Abbot did die …’
‘Or so we thought,’ said Shafeen.
‘Oh Jeez,’ I said. ‘This isn’t another resurrection theory, is it? I thought you didn’t believe in the whole raising-from-the-dead thing?’
‘I don’t. But who told us that he died?’
‘Abbot Ridley. He got a phone call. We were there.’
‘But we only heard his side. You’re the film buff. Please tell me you’ve seen movies where someone is talking to no one on the phone.’
I had – a whole bunch. It happened in Hitchcock all the time.
‘And that time when we all went in to the Scriptorium to look up Pembroke’s Men,’ went on Shafeen, ‘Friar Waterlow would’ve known about the play by then. Why didn’t he say, Well, my dear, I hear you’ve made something of a discovery?’
