STAGS 2, page 27
Honorius house colours: a white stag’s head on a ground of red and gold with a cedar tree as a charge.
BEDE
The Venerable Bede was an English Benedictine monk who wrote The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a draft of which survives in the Scriptorium at STAGS. Bede house incorporates the extensive playing fields known as Bede’s Piece.
Bede house colours: a white stag’s head on a ground of red and blue, with a book as a charge.
OSWALD
Oswald was king of Northumbria from 634, uniting the kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira to become the most powerful ruler in Britain. Oswald did much to promote the spread of Christianity in the north, and fittingly the school chapel can be found in his house.
Oswald house colours: a white stag’s head on a ground of red and green with a crown as a charge.
PAULINUS
Paulinus was a Roman missionary and the first Bishop of York. The Paulinus Well, built during the bishop’s mission to Northumbria in the seventh century, stands in the middle of Paulinus quad. The waters at its depths were said, upon drinking, to turn a sinful man to God.
Paulinus house colours: a white stag’s head on a ground of red and purple with a well as a charge.
LIGHTFOOT
Lightfoot is the girls’ house at STAGS, and is the newest of all the houses, built originally as a dwelling for masters in 1550. It is a handsome Tudor building with its own Garden Quad, and it was first named Aidan’s House. The name was changed when Bishop Joseph Lightfoot of Durham successfully lobbied for the admission of girls in 1880. Since then, Lightfoot House has borne his name.
Lightfoot house colours: a white stag’s head on a ground of red and silver, with a bishop’s mitre as a charge.
By the first day of Michaelmas Term, all students must be equipped with the following uniform
Black Tudor coat
Scarlet stockings (unless you are a Medieval, in which case you may wear knee-high stockings of a design of your choosing)
Narrow brown deer-leather belt
Plain white wing-collar shirt
White clerical tie
Black knee breeches
Black deer-leather lace-up shoes
Regulation black PE kit with STAGS crest
Uniform may be purchased from our suppliers: Keytes of Berwick-upon-Tweed.
The STAGS uniform must be strictly observed year round. A scarf in the colours of one’s house may be worn during Michaelmas and Hilary Terms.
JUSTITIUM – a short holiday that falls roughly in the middle of each term, when students are permitted to return home if they wish
MEDIEVALS – the prefects, usually between three and six in number, chosen from among the final-year students at STAGS
PROBITIONES – final examinations at STAGS, set in the final year
FESTINA LENTE – the STAGS school motto: ‘Make Haste Slowly’
MEDIEVAL – anything traditional or historical, in line with the highly prized values of the school
SAVAGE – anything modern or technological, considered not in keeping with the ethos of STAGS
For more from the exciting world of S.T.A.G.S.…
Read on for an extract …
1
Last night I dreamed I went to Longcross again.
It seemed like I was watching myself, as if I were in a film, if that makes sense. There was a whole bunch of people on horses milling around in front of the grand entrance to Longcross Hall, all wearing their hunting stuff. And I was one of them. I was on this elegant grey horse, wearing boots and breeches and a midnight-black coat with a nipped-in waist and a black riding hat. I was holding the reins with one gloved hand, and in the other I held a little silver cup. I was drinking from it and smiling.
Shafeen and Nel were there with me too, both looking amazing in their riding gear; Shafeen, like all the gentlemen, wearing hunting red. Sorry: pink. The twins were there, immaculate on twin white – sorry: grey – horses, but when I looked for someone else, someone who also had blond cropped hair, he was nowhere to be seen. I couldn’t see Ty either, and she definitely would’ve stood out in this company, as the only black person in the hunt.
We were all chatting and laughing, but there was an air of anticipation. The horses were shifting their hooves, the riders turning their heads with impatience. There was a bunch of hounds milling around, sniffing and yapping and weaving in between the horses’ legs. We were all waiting for something.
And it came.
There was the sound of a horn, clear and sweet as death, and we began to move off. We all trotted down the drive and then began to gallop across the open fields. Then I saw everything from above, like that helicopter shot of the hunt at the beginning of The Remains of the Day. The hounds, who had picked up a scent, streaked ahead in a white-and-tan arrowhead. Beyond them a flash of fire – a fox, running easily and well ahead of us. He ducked into a covert and under the dark shadow of the trees of Longwood.
Once we followed it into the woods everything changed. This will sound weird, but the fox was now human, a figure dressed head to foot in red, a hood drawn over its head. It was running through the blackthorn of the undergrowth, the branches whipping at its face. I felt exhilaration and dread for the running figure. Jaws snapped behind it, and however fast it ran they nipped at its heels. It was no good. As we burst out into a clearing, the low sun in my eyes, the jaws closed on the red runner at last.
I crowded in with the rest of the hunt as the hounds tore at the red clothing. I watched in horror as the dogs ripped and wrenched, my whole body drenched in dread as riders jumped down to whip the hounds away and turn the motionless figure over. I was suddenly certain that when they did I would see my own face. But when the riders stood back, almost respectfully, the body was gone and there was just a fox, furry and forlorn, stretched dead on the winter grass. Then my point of view spiralled up and up, over the hills and far away, until the fox, that little smear of red, could no longer be seen.
You see? Even my dreams have camera moves.
I didn’t do that sit-bolt-upright-gasping-for-breath thing that they do in the movies though. I woke quite gradually, blinking myself into consciousness, and for a minute I didn’t know where I was. It took me a good few seconds to click that I was in room K9 of Alnwick Cottage Hospital, and I was totally alone – just me and my throbbing thumb.
Slowly, as things do after a vivid dream, everything came back to me, resolving like a darkroom photograph. Only a few days ago I’d been onstage at the De Warlencourt Playhouse, the school theatre at STAGS. I’d been glorying in the triumph of my production of Ben Jonson’s lost play, The Isle of Dogs. I’d been playing the character of Poetaster, the narrator of the play and a thinly veiled version of Ben Jonson himself, when everything had gone very, very wrong. While speaking the epilogue with my head in a noose (part of the play, don’t ask), something had gone wrong and I’d been hauled upwards until I was hanging by the neck.
And that was when things had got really weird.
I’d found myself in the middle of a circle of figures wearing red hooded gowns and stag antlers, led by the Old Abbot – who was, oh yes, supposed to be dead – putting me on trial for the murder of Henry de Warlencourt.
Naturally, when I came round in this very hospital bed, I thought I’d hallucinated the whole thing, especially as I’d then had a cosy bedside chat with none other than my own ‘murder victim’, Henry de Warlencourt himself. And TBH, I would still think that I had been hallucinating if it wasn’t for one little detail. The sentence that had been visited upon me by the Dark Order of the Grand Stag: the brand on my thumb. The same brand that had been burned into Ben Jonson’s flesh 400 years ago.
M for Manslayer.
I squinted at my phone. It was actually quite a reasonable hour – but of course it was the dead of winter, so it was just getting light outside. In the weak winter dawn I held up my thumb to the light. It felt strange, as if I was doing a thumbs-up, as if everything was OK. But everything was most definitely not OK. I could see the newly healed scar tissue of my brand, that pink, slightly stretched look that scars have, making a perfect capital ‘M’ in the pad of my thumb.
As soon as my nurse, Nurse Annie, had unwrapped my thumb the night before and seen the brand, she’d kicked Shafeen and Nel out of my hospital room and called in my doctor, Doctor Kyd. He’d questioned me for about a decade about self-harm, and hazing, and online cutting challenges, and all this horseshit until I’d finally convinced him that I hadn’t done it and I wasn’t a danger to myself. This wasn’t an easy task when you consider that I couldn’t actually tell him who had done it. In the end Doctor Kyd formed the opinion that I just needed to go home for Christmas to have some R & R, but still I could only get him to leave on the condition that I agreed to come back to see him at the beginning of the Trinity Term (January to you).
SO …
By the time that was all over I was pretty tired but still nowhere near sleep, because then I was faced by the stone-cold realisation of what I couldn’t tell the doctor: the only way that brand could have got onto my thumb was if it had been put there by the Dark Order of the Grand Stag. And that meant the whole trial in the De Warlencourt Playhouse at STAGS, far from being a figment of my oxygen-starved imagination, had actually happened In Real Life. And that realisation, let me tell you, was not exactly conducive to sleep. I must’ve slept eventually though, because I had the dream.
I lay there in the grey dawn trying to figure out what the hell it meant, but already it was starting to fade in that pesky way that dreams do. All I could remember, by the time Nurse Annie bustled in with a breakfast tray, was that it was about a fox.
2
‘Your last gourmet meal, modom,’ said Nurse Annie, in a terrible attempt at a posh accent. Her eyes twinkled. ‘We’re discharging you today.’
I scooched up a bit on the pillows and made a knee-hump for the tray. ‘You are?’
‘Yes, hinny. We need the beds and you need to get on with your Christmas holidays. A bit of fun and relaxation is what the doctor’s ordered.’
Christmas. I’d almost forgotten. The big day was just over a week away, and I’d be seeing my dad. Back when life was normal (ya know, before my hanging, my trial by the Dark Order of the Grand Stag and my post-mortem chat with Henry), Shafeen and I had arranged to stay with Chanel in Chester for the week before Christmas. Somewhere in the middle of that week, unbelievably, was my Oxford interview, so I’d planned to train it there and back. Then, as Chester was pretty close to Manchester (by name and by nature), I was going to go home from Nel’s on Christmas Eve. I guessed that, now I’d banned my dad from coming home early from his shoot in Madagascar, that arrangement still stood.
Sure enough, Nel turned up soon after breakfast with Shafeen in tow. They both looked quite different from their school selves. Shafeen wore a winter jacket over a wine-coloured hoodie and jeans, and Nel wore this fluffy peach jacket that looked like it was made out of Muppet skin.
They both hugged and kissed me, and Shafeen took my hand at once. ‘Let me see.’
He and Nel bent over my thumb. He lifted his dark eyes to mine. ‘So it was all real. The trial, I mean. Those bastards. We have to get them now.’
Nel said, ‘Wait, what? What trial?’
‘Not here,’ I said, low-voiced. ‘In the car.’
I thought Doctor Kyd and Nurse Annie were on the level, but I couldn’t escape the fact that the Old Abbot had supposedly ‘died’ here, and the paramedics who had attended me at STAGS (and Henry at Longcross for that matter) were also from this hospital. My friends stepped outside while I got dressed – Nel, God bless her, had packed me some clothes in a wheelie case.
When I was done I examined myself in the mirror. Nel had chosen a kind of Victorian blouse to wear with jeans, and it had one of those high frilly necks so you couldn’t see the fading rope mark at my throat. She was all thoughtfulness, that girl. But the white of the blouse only emphasised how pale I was. My black bob hung lankly to my shoulders and the fringe had done that annoying separating thing that it did when it needed a wash. Little wonder – I hadn’t washed it since just before we’d performed The Isle of Dogs. But there was no real visible tell of my recent trauma, except perhaps a new and guarded look in my eyes. If it wasn’t for the brand on my thumb, you’d never know. I pressed the print to my reflection, right where my nose was, and it left a smoky whorl with a perfect M in the middle. The thumbprint, and all it meant, terrified me. At that moment I wanted to smash the mirror, like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. But surely there was nothing to be afraid of any more. I’d made it out of the heart of darkness.
Hadn’t I?
I shrugged on a chunky cardigan and my coat, opened the door and smiled a smile I wasn’t really feeling at Shafeen and Nel. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’
At reception I signed the discharge forms myself as I was over eighteen. I said my thank-yous to Doctor Kyd and Nurse Annie, and the reception doors whispered open as we left, letting in an icy northern blast. I felt a bit wobbly and I walked across the car park to Nel’s gold Mini leaning on Shafeen’s strong arm. Alnwick Castle cast a chill shadow over us, snow still on the battlements and the arrow slits watching us like eyes. It was nice to get into Nel’s car and blast the heating. ‘Shotgun!’ I said out of habit, before I remembered that the word might have unfortunate connotations for Shafeen, since he was the one who had once been riddled with pellets from Henry’s gun. But if it did, he said nothing. He just smiled and opened the passenger door for me in a courtly way, before folding his long legs into the back seat.
Needless to say, I did all the talking in the car. I had so much to tell, and I’d waited so long to tell it. I described my trial by the DOGS all over again, that circle of creepy, antlered figures in the theatre, led by the Old Abbot as judge. I went through it all in fine detail: what he had said; what I had said; what I had felt. Then I filled them in about my two visitors from Longcross the night before, Cass briefly and then, at much greater length, Ty. I told them about Leon Morgan, Ty’s tragic great-uncle who had been taken to Longcross when little more than a child and had never come home again. I told them about Ty being mrs_de_warlencourt, the mysterious Instagram messenger who had been my guide throughout the last crazy weeks, and that her last cryptic statement, ‘There is another Place’, had meant Cumberland Place, the de Warlencourt London home. And I told them about Ty’s determination to return to Longcross to thwart whatever plan the twins might have and to end the cycle once and for all.
Of course, Shafeen and Nel had about a million questions and we were a long way down the motorway before a silence fell. There was this massive sign over the road saying THE SOUTH, with a huge white arrow beneath it, and as we followed the arrow my stomach flipped over. As we drove further and further south I thought about Ty. After a year of being three conspirators, I now felt that, without her, there was someone missing from our group. In that short intense conversation in my hospital room last night I felt that she had been a true friend to me, much more so than I’d been to her, and I felt incredibly invested in her welfare. I rubbed the pad of my branded thumb with the middle finger of the same hand, a new habit of mine that accompanied deep thought. I must have made some weird little sound because Shafeen leaned forward. ‘Are you OK? Does it hurt?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t hurt. It’s just …’
‘Yes?’ he prompted gently.
‘It’s Ty,’ I said, letting out a long breath. ‘I keep thinking of her, back at Longcross, without any of us. It just feels like we are ditching her.’
‘We’re not,’ said Nel. ‘Don’t worry.’
But I did worry. It felt like she was up there, fighting the good fight against the Order of the Stag, and we were going to Nel’s to swim in the pool, and watch movies in the cinema room, and go Christmas shopping in Chester. I wasn’t sure I could enjoy all that while Ty was at the mercy of the de Warlencourts. I still wasn’t certain in my own mind if the twins were goodies or baddies (to Cass I gave the benefit of the doubt; Louis, well – the jury was still out), but I was more worried about the creepy uber-Order who had tried and branded me. Moodily I stared out of the window, watching the road signs flash past. One of them said CHESTER.
I sat bolt upright. ‘You missed it!’
‘Missed what?’ Nel didn’t take her eyes off the road.
‘The turn-off. To Chester.’
‘I know.’
‘Aren’t we going to Chester?’
‘No. I mean, yes, but not yet.’
‘Where are we going then?’
I saw her eyes meet Shafeen’s in the mirror, saw him give a tiny nod.
‘We’re going to another Place.’
I knew from the way she said it. She managed, just by some strange trick of speech, to put a capital on that last word.
We were going where Ty had told me to go.
We were going to de Warlencourt HQ.
We were going to Cumberland Place.
The Real Isle of Dogs
The Isle of Dogs was a real play.
Ben Jonson was said to have written it in collaboration with fellow playwright Thomas Nashe, but as Nashe denied any involvement when things got sticky I haven’t given him any of the credit. His name does appear in this book, however, if you look carefully.
The Isle of Dogs was performed by Pembroke’s Men in July 1597, at one of the playhouses on London’s Bankside, probably The Swan. A report was immediately made by one of Elizabeth I’s informers and her response was swift and severe. The theatres were closed at once and the order went out for a number of playhouses to be destroyed. Nashe fled the city while Jonson and his players burned every copy of the play. But Jonson, along with Gabriel Spenser and Robert Shaw, were caught and imprisoned in the Marshalsea. In August they were tried by Elizabeth’s foremost advisors, William and Robert Cecil. They were father and son.
