FOXES, page 26
54
Shafeen looked at me and nodded, and like a couple of zombies, we drifted back down the stairs.
Outside the door of the great hall, Shafeen stopped.
‘Are you OK?’ I asked him. He looked far from OK.
He shook his head. ‘I feel like I need an M on my thumb.’
I clutched my own brand. ‘But … why?’
He started pacing. ‘I led him to Acre Wood. I did. I told Rollo to go there. Then he was ambushed and had the accident. Greer –’ he nodded upstairs to the room of death – ‘did I do that?’
‘No,’ I said, very definitely. ‘You heard Doctor Morand. He was poisoned.’
‘But who would do that?’
I actually thought there were quite a few candidates, the same Usual Suspects I had in the frame for the Guy Fawkes figure.
I caught his hand. ‘Let’s not do this now. We’ve got to put on a show.’
We heard the clashing of cutlery and crystal and the rising laughter of the guests. It seemed impossible to walk back in there like nothing had happened. But it suddenly seemed very important that we should. I squeezed Shafeen’s hand and plastered on a smile. Together we walked through the great doors and behind the lines of chairs, and no one even noticed us but Nel, who leaned back in her seat with a quizzical look. With the coded communication we’d perfected during the last extraordinary year, I shook my head a tiny amount. She rocked back into her place, watching us guardedly, but asked no questions.
Mechanically, I parried Piers’s increasingly drunken conversation. ‘Hear you’ve been in town,’ he slurred. ‘What d’ye get up to?’
I could have boasted about the STAGS Club, or the House of Lords, or even the London Oratory. But I didn’t care any more for Piers’s good opinion, so instead I said, ‘We went to the Isle of Dogs.’
He barked with laughter. ‘Ah, the Îles des chiens. The Canine Islands.’
‘You been?’ I asked.
‘God, no,’ he said, and I turned away from him. The food was gravel in my mouth, the wine vinegar. I couldn’t look at Shafeen, couldn’t look at the countess, as the minutes crawled by. I assumed Ty had come down by now, but I couldn’t check. I couldn’t look left or right. Where was Doctor Morand? What was he doing up there? Why was he not coming down to give the dreadful news to the countess? Was he informing an unseen Henry that he was now the Earl of Longcross and ensuring the succession? The king is dead, long live the king. I couldn’t think about Henry or Ty or anybody else but Rollo. What crimes he and Aadhish committed in 1969 that needed to be forgiven?
The snow fell politely outside as the guests inside got more and more raucous. The whole thing was so Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap it wasn’t even funny. It was post-modern as hell. We were even snowed in inside a country house on Boxing Day. Actually, it was more like a giant game of Cluedo. We had three clues – the earl in the bedroom with the poison. But whodunnit?
This was awful. Shafeen and I knew and no one else in this room did, and to cap it all, the countess leaped to her feet and clapped her hands. Now I had to look at her, and her happiness was devastating. ‘Bates,’ she called, ‘I think it’s time for the Veuve Clicquot ’84. We’ll go ahead with the speeches and the toasts as planned, and of course drink to dear Rollo’s health.’ I swallowed miserably. How ironic to call for her husband’s favourite champagne when he was already dead. How awful that I would actually get to taste it for the first time once there was nothing to celebrate. How dreadful that, while Rollo was lifeless in his bed upstairs, the faithful Bates was to be sent scuttling to the cellars for the legendary vintage his master would never taste again.
The cellars.
The champagne that didn’t exist.
The hundreds of bottles swaddled in straw.
‘If you were to shake it – disaster.’
The cellars of the Houses of Parliament.
Guy Fawkes and his lantern.
Remember, Remember …
I got to my feet. ‘Get out,’ I said.
Everyone was chatting and laughing – no one heard me. I shouted it. ‘GET OUT!’
Now the people close to me started to hear. Dear Shafeen, dear Nel, the twins and the Medievals. Shafeen started to his feet and took hold of me. For the second time that day, I shook him off. I climbed up on the chair, and then onto the table. China cracked under my feet, glasses overturned, cutlery crashed. I shouted it again. ‘GET OUT! EVERYBODY, GET OUT!’
Now there was a proper torrent of reaction – and above the hubbub I could hear, over and again, the same comment: ‘The girl’s drunk.’
I had been, but I wasn’t any longer. ‘No,’ I yelled. ‘I’m not drunk. We all have to get out now!’
A couple of footmen approached, Josh and another guy – white gloved hands reaching up to pull me down. There wasn’t much time.
I took a deep breath and shouted as loudly as I could, projecting like an actor. ‘In the name of Henry de Warlencourt and the Dark Order of the Grand Stag, I charge you all to leave this place at once!’
I don’t know where that came from – maybe the ghost of Ben Jonson. And I didn’t know whether it was the archaic form of words, or the fact that I’d invoked the name of their cult, but it certainly shut everyone up. In the brief silence I looked desperately at the countess. I met those blue eyes, so like Henry’s, and knew at once what had convinced her. It was the name of her son.
She gave a single, regal nod and everybody moved as one. Everyone got up with a scrape of chairs and a flurry of napkins, flying and falling like doves. ‘Out of the house,’ I shouted above this new row. ‘Into the driveway and just keep going.’ Now I took Shafeen’s proffered hand and jumped down. ‘GO!’
Everyone flowed through the double doors into the great hall, then out of the front doors into the shock of the night air. In the doorway I bumped against Josh and I clutched his liveried arm. This couldn’t just be an exodus of the affluent. ‘Get everybody from downstairs out of the house immediately,’ I said, emphasising every word. ‘You got that?’
‘Yes,’ he said, and ran.
55
I wasn’t heroic enough to wait for everyone else to go first; I jostled with the rest as we flooded out into the atrium.
There the doctor, finally, was coming down the great staircase and watched this exodus through bewildered eyes. ‘Is anyone else upstairs?’ I shouted.
‘Just the earl,’ he said, mystified.
It was too late for him. ‘Get out!’ I said.
There was pushing and shoving as the panic spread. As we emerged into the snowy night, I breathed a lungful of frigid air with relief. But I kept going. I was in the front now, leading everyone up the drive, marching ever forward, shrugging off questions from lords and ladies, politicians and princes. I kept going, and we were nearly at the frill of the forest before I looked back. When I stopped and turned, everyone else did likewise. I watched with infinite relief as all the footmen, kitchen maids, under-butlers and cooks hurried up the drive until the flow trickled, then stopped and there was no one left. I saw Doctor Morand physically holding Caro de Warlencourt back from returning to the house, talking and talking until she collapsed against him, convinced at last that there was no point going back for her husband. So that was everyone.
Everyone.
I found Nel and grabbed her wrist. ‘Ty came down to dinner, right?’
She looked at me blankly.
‘While we were upstairs, Ty came down, right?’ My voice rose. ‘She was at the dinner, right?’
She spread her manicured hands. ‘I don’t know. That is, I didn’t see her. Look, Greer, what the hell are you –’
Then I ran.
I ran back down the drive, pushing through all the people running away, swimming against the stream, a trout in the tide. Shafeen and Nel were at my heels, but I was too fast for them. I had to get to the house, had to get back to Ty, before –
The force of the blast blew me back.
I threw an arm across my face against the incredible heat, then took it away to see tongues of fire licking through the windows, and an inferno taking hold of the roof.
I fell to my knees, tears streaming down my face. All I could think of was Missy Morgan. If her shining girl was in that conflagration, I might as well have lit the fuses myself. Shafeen’s and Nel’s arms enclosed me in a strong circle. The three of us clasped each other on the icy ground, our backs frozen, our fronts warmed by the fire, like on Bonfire Night.
‘No,’ I moaned. ‘No, no, no, no, no,’ over and over again. No one could survive that blaze.
And then, indistinct at first, then clearer and clearer, a silhouette formed in the heart of the flames like a phoenix. The blur resolved into the shape of a figure carrying another figure. As they came closer I recognised the one being carried first, her Afro hair a dark halo. And, carrying Ty, his hair as golden as the fire, was Henry de Warlencourt.
We all rushed forward. Henry was breathing heavily, staggering with the strain, his face black with soot, his blue eyes shining out. Ty was conscious but coughing harshly. Shafeen took her from Henry’s arms. ‘We’ve got her,’ he said. Then, ‘You did great, Henry. You did great.’ He looked, in fleeting disbelief, from Henry to me. I let out a half gasp, half sob. Ty was safe. And Shafeen had finally seen Henry.
But there was no time to lose. Shafeen, fully in medical mode, took Ty to the grass to lay her down and shouted to Nel to run and find Doctor Morand in the crowd. Henry, still gasping for breath, wordlessly took my hand and smiled. Face filthy with ash and soot, only his eyes were unchanged. Then, before anyone else could recognise him, he pulled his fingers from my grasp, turned and walked away in the direction of Acre Wood. My hand released, I found I could no longer stand. I sat back heavily on the cold ground, unable to speak or move. I sat and watched the fire and it was some moments before I realised I wasn’t alone.
Tame as a lap dog, a fox sat by me.
He was watching too, with eyes of fire.
We were just a girl and a fox, sitting together as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And together we regarded what, in another story and another land, his kind had done, the fiery foxes among the Philistine corn.
And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind of the sea.
56
I stayed in my room a lot those first weeks of Hilary Term.
The shock of the fire still burned in my mind, a flame that wouldn’t be doused. According to the traumatised twins, the damage to Longcross Hall was considerable, so at the moment no one could live there, not even a ghost. As there had been no big Henry reveal on the night of the fire, Louis was, as far as he knew, the Earl of Longcross. As such he had thrown himself into a grand rebuilding and restoration programme of his ancestral home. The twins both treated me like a heroine; there had been no bodies found inside, except for their already deceased uncle, and the shell of the house had been saved. Only Bates, the faithful family butler, hadn’t been seen since the fire. I thought of what Henry had said – that a faithful old family retainer would never betray the family. How wrong he’d been. Bates had waited until the countess had ordered the champagne to detonate the fuses in the cellars, certain in the knowledge that everyone would be seated for the speeches and toasts, and perhaps even for the Return of the King – Henry de Warlencourt. I couldn’t avoid the sickening conclusion that, as Bates had been so close to the blast, he’d been as good as vaporised by the explosives. Had his ashes drifted on those thermals, high above the house he’d served for so long?
Even though my hand hadn’t been the one to light the fuses, I felt like the villain of the piece. If only I had figured it out earlier. If only I had realised what Bates was up to with the champagne. If only I had realised that the big conspiracy that we’d been trying to uncover wasn’t by the Order of the Stag, but against them. Perhaps, then, everyone could have been saved.
We talked, quite a lot, about the champagne that didn’t exist. It was Nel who came up with the best theory, possibly because, when we’d first got to Cumberland Place, she’d felt very much like a spare part and was able to observe everything closely. One evening when we were all leaning on the Paulinus well, our old haunt, she cracked what Sherlock Holmes might have called ‘The Champagne Problem’.
‘How come Rollo asked Bates for the Veuve Clicquot ’84,’ I mused, ‘when both of them knew it didn’t exist? And how come Bates just obediently went to get it every time?’
‘My question,’ said Shafeen, ‘would be, how did those non-existent champagne bottles turn up in the cellars of Longcross Hall, full of explosives.’
‘I’ve been thinking about this,’ said Nel. ‘Do you remember, when we first got to Cumberland Place, every time Caro tried to talk about Henry being alive, her mother, Lady Whitehaven, rang her up? And then it turned out she wasn’t on the phone at all – it was just a ruse to get Caro out of the room.’
I picked a frill of lichen off the well and flicked it from my fingernail. ‘Yes …’
‘Well, I began to notice,’ Nel went on, ‘that when Rollo sent Bates for the Veuve Clicquot ’84, as soon as Bates was out of the room Rollo started to talk about some big family secret. Once he talked about Henry. Once he talked about the plan to block the fox-hunting bill. And once, Shafeen, he talked about your dad and Longcross in 1969. All things he wouldn’t necessarily want a servant to hear.’
Shafeen frowned. ‘But Bates would know. Bates would know the wine he was being sent to get didn’t exist.’
Nel nodded. ‘That was weird to me too. But try this on for size: what if it was some sort of agreed de Warlencourt code to clear the servants from the room? Bates accepts it, and obeys it, because he’s a servant and has been faithful to the family for about a hundred years.’
‘But he wasn’t faithful to the family,’ I said. ‘Not in the end.’
‘Well, that’s exactly it.’ She got all animated, pointing her finger in my face. ‘When the time came for Bates to put his gunpowder plot into action, what better way to get explosives into a cellar than to disguise them as wine? Wine lives in a cellar anyway.’
I straightened up. ‘That’s exactly what the original gunpowder plotters did. Guy Fawkes pretended the barrels of gunpowder that he stored under Parliament were wine.’
‘There you go,’ said Nel. ‘And what better name for this mythical wine than the one that had been used for years to keep the servants out of the room, to exclude the lower classes, to keep the kids away from the big boys’ table? Calling the explosive “Veuve Clicquot 1984” was pure social justice on a wine label. It literally said it on the tin.’
I looked down into the blackness of the well as I thought about this, another door into the dark, just as the cellar door had been at Longcross that day. ‘But wasn’t that risky? What if someone had walked past?’
‘Someone did,’ said Nel. ‘Us. And we only happened to go past the cellar door because we came in the tradesmens’ entrance. All the other hoity-toity guests went in the front door. They wouldn’t dream of poking around in the cellars.’ She shrugged. ‘We saw Bates unloading the bottles. Greer, you even picked one up.’ The thought made me shiver, knowing what I now knew. ‘But we didn’t know there was anything odd about them. Who would?’
‘Rollo,’ said Shafeen. ‘If Rollo had seen, he would have known there was something afoot.’
‘But Rollo wouldn’t go to the cellars. He has servants for that.’ Nel smoothed the facings of her Tudor coat, like she was a barrister, before delivering her closing argument. ‘Rollo was strictly upstairs. Bates was downstairs. That’s the point.’
Ty was off school for a bit – it was her turn to be in Alnwick Cottage Hospital as a precaution against smoke inhalation – but as soon as she was back, I tracked her down in Lightfoot.
We hugged for a long, long time, sat on her bed and talked about the fire. ‘Where were you during the hunt dinner?’ I asked. ‘You weren’t just doing your hair, were you? Not for all that time.’
She looked down, pleating the bedspread between her fingers. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘I was making a new acquaintance.’ Then she looked up.
‘Henry,’ I said. It was a statement, not a question.
She nodded.
‘So he was actually with you when the blast happened?’
‘I guess. He came to find me in my room and we talked – for ages. Then there was a noise and a flash and I don’t remember anything else except being carried out by him to you.’ She bit her lip, as if it cost her to say what she had to say. ‘He saved my life, for sure.’
There was much, much more to ask. I desperately wanted to know why Henry had sought her out, what they’d talked about. But there was one more urgent question. ‘Ty,’ I said, tracing the tiny flowers on her bedspread, ‘what were you doing in the covert that day? Who told you to lead Rollo to Acre Wood?’ A thought occurred to me. ‘You know he’s dead, I suppose?’
She didn’t quite meet my eyes. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. She sounded wretched.
‘Please tell me you didn’t have anything to do with that.’
‘Oh God, Greer, I don’t know.’ She was close to tears. ‘He was only supposed to fall off his horse. You have to believe that. Not … not this.’
I thought again of my first conversation with Rollo at Cumberland place, about The Lion in Winter and the fall of a king. ‘But the fall wasn’t all there was,’ I said. The fall hadn’t killed Henry and it hadn’t killed his father. ‘Rollo was poisoned.’
Ty looked as if she’d won the lottery. ‘He was?’
‘According to the family doc.’ I took her hand and spoke sternly. ’Ty. You’d better tell me everything. You said Rollo was only supposed to fall off his horse. But it got much bigger than that. The explosion at Longcross … that was … that was …’ I searched for the right word. ‘Terrorism. It was attempted mass murder. Who planned that? Are you … are you working with them?’
