STAGS 2, page 4
I told him all about the play, and the day, and Abbot Ridley and Friar Waterlow. He propped himself up on his elbow, turned towards me and gave me his full attention, frowning slightly, dark brows drawn down over dark eyes. When I’d finished he said, ‘Can I see it?’
I opened my satchel and put the play in his hands. As he leafed through it, I said, ‘Shaf?’
‘Mmmm?’
‘Was it you?’
‘Was what me?’
‘Was it you who put the play under my door?’
‘Don’t be dumb,’ he said, but affectionately. ‘Why would I do that?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘you were so keen to get my mind off the Order of the Stag and on to my exams.’
‘Where would I get a genuine Renaissance play?’
I shrugged. ‘I dunno.’
‘You’re barking up the wrong tree. You need to look at the guy who is going to benefit from all this. Mr Teacher-of-the-Year.’
‘You think that Abbot Ridley gave it to me?’
‘Oh, he definitely gave it to you. He’s a clever fellow, our friendly neighbourhood Abbot, I’ll give him that.’ There it was again, that unmistakable edge. Shafeen really didn’t like Abbot Ridley, and I wasn’t sure that it was just jealousy after all. I put that aside for the moment.
‘I don’t think it was him,’ I said. ‘You should’ve seen his face when he read the title page. It was like he’d just looked into the Lost Ark. He couldn’t have been more gobsmacked. It looked like genuine surprise to me.’
‘Well, whoever gave it to you, I’m glad you were given it,’ Shafeen said. He rolled onto his back and addressed the ceiling. ‘You’re the one who was most affected by the Longcross weekend – you were nearer death than any of us. And when Henry … died, it hit you hardest. You were closer to him than Nel or me.’ I looked down but I didn’t deny it – I didn’t want to lie to Shafeen. ‘And I know you’ve found it hard to … let go of him.’
I hadn’t realised he had seen so much. I mean, I knew he’d known that Henry had called me beautiful, and that he’d kissed me once in that crazy movie moment on the Longcross rooftops. But then Henry had died. Just for a moment, I wondered what it was like to be in Shafeen’s place. You could front up to a rival who was alive, that was a fair fight, but what about one who was dead? I didn’t know what to say, but luckily he changed the subject. He pointed at the play where it lay on the quilt.
‘Can I read it tonight?’
‘Sure,’ I said. What I’d said to Nel hadn’t been entirely true. I did trust some people. I trusted her and I trusted Shafeen. Completely.
Shafeen put the pages on his desk and threw his glasses on top of them.
He came back and put his arms around me.
‘Are you going to tell me if it’s suitable?’ I teased.
‘No,’ he said bluntly. ‘I’m prepared for the worst. If it was banned, and burned, and they shut down the theatres, I’m imagining it can’t exactly be the Barbie movie.’
‘It’s actually completely tame,’ I said. ‘I know it says “tragedy” on the title page, so there must have been some bad stuff in there, but on the evidence of the first act, which is all I have, I’ve got no idea why it was so scary for the Elizabethans.’
‘Maybe the really hardcore bits were in the later acts.’
‘That’s what Abbot Ridley said.’
‘But I think you should do it, whatever. I’m all for it.’ I was quite surprised that the cautious Shafeen had so few reservations about this mystery play, but he explained at once. ‘Ridley’s right about how it will help your university admissions.’ (I’d told him what I hadn’t been able to say to Nel.) ‘Even you must admit that until this happened you hadn’t been working to full capacity.’ He held up both hands, as if in surrender. ‘I don’t blame you, I don’t blame you at all. But if you don’t get in to Oxford and I do, what will happen to us?’
That shook me. We’d both applied to Oxford – in fact, all three of us had: me and Shafeen and Nel. This wasn’t as coincidental as it sounds. STAGS had this dumb, antiquated system where you basically applied to Oxford or Cambridge, the only foundations that were considered medieval enough, or didn’t bother with university at all and did something else, like the army or the civil service. We’d all three agreed to apply to Oxford. The three of us were the very best of friends, and we’d been through so much together, it seemed dumb to just chuck that away. And I didn’t feel like Shafeen was being big-headed or anything by saying he might get in to Oxford and I might not. One of the things I really liked about him was that he was absolutely honest, and if I was absolutely honest myself, he’d got over the trauma of last year by working and I’d got over the trauma of last year by pissing about.
I didn’t even know whether Shafeen and I would be together forever, but I was really happy that he obviously wanted me to work hard enough to get to Oxford. He pulled me on top of him and I began to kiss him extra passionately with relief and thankfulness. It was like movie kissing, swelling-music-on-the-soundtrack kissing. He responded, kissing me harder and harder. I felt the heat of him, and thought, not for the first time, how easy it would be to go further than this, to let the flames burn me up. You weren’t supposed to be in the houses of the opposite sex after Commons, and this was obviously why. The house friars patrolled the dormitories, and weren’t averse to popping in randomly to people’s rooms, even the Medievals. Partly because I was afraid of the house friars, but mainly because I was afraid of myself, I pulled away. I got up and straightened my clothes. ‘I better go.’
Shafeen pulled on my deer-leather belt to draw me in for a last kiss. ‘Either way,’ he said, ‘I’m just glad you’ve found something to get your teeth into.’
As I tiptoed down his staircase I replayed what he’d said. I’d always thought that was a weird expression.
That night it reminded me of a bite, the bite of a dog.
Scene viii
Louis de Warlencourt
Cassandra de Warlencourt
Two names, etched in black, clear as anything.
They’d either been written by the same hand, or their twinnish connection was such that they had identical handwriting. You did hear of such things. Twins can be freaky – the ones on film, certainly. Think of The Shining.
I stepped back from the sign-up list as if from a blow. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d be having any more dealings with the de Warlencourt family, beyond seeing the twins around STAGS from time to time. I didn’t even know they did drama, as they were in the year below me. But here were their names, on the sheet I’d pinned up on the corkboard outside the Refectory, calling for sixth-form drama students to audition for The Isle of Dogs.
I stood staring at those two names, the first and second on the list, marked so confidently in night-black ink. It took me some moments before I could step forward again and read the rest of the list. I recognised some of the other names, and one more stood out, a long way down, written faintly in a round hand in blue Biro.
Tyeesha Morgan
Ty. The first de Warlencourt scholar. The girl I’d befriended when she’d first arrived, but, if I’m honest, had forgotten about since the whole dead-Abbot thing. She’d had what I’d considered to be a lucky escape, when the twins had invited her to Longcross at Justitium, and then the holiday weekend had been postponed out of respect for the old Abbot’s passing.
I walked very slowly to the Paulinus well, where Shafeen, Nel and I always gathered after breakfast before the bell went. I must’ve looked a bit white, because they both immediately asked me what was wrong.
When I told them, Shafeen said, ‘Sins of the fathers.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I shot back, thinking for a mad moment that he was taking a shot at my lovely dad.
‘It’s from the Bible. Don’t you ever listen in there?’ he teased, nodding to the chapel.
‘Not much.’
‘The sins of the fathers are visited on the sons. You already hate those twins, even though you don’t know them, because of Henry.’
‘Not just Henry,’ said Nel. ‘You read the hunting books. It was Henry, his father, his father’s father, and the whole poisonous family tree right the way back to Conrad de Warlencourt and the Crusades.’
‘So, because they are from a long line of bad guys, we assume the de Warlencourts are all shits.’
‘But they ARE all shits,’ I protested.
‘So far, yes,’ admitted Shafeen. ‘But the twins have not actually done anything to you yet except smile. You can’t arrest them for smiling.’ He peered down the well into the murky depths as if looking into the past. ‘They might not have been trained to be little hunters, shooters and fishers. I don’t think they were even brought up at Longcross, were they? I think they were raised in London. From what you said, I think they just visited Longcross sometimes in the holidays.’
‘Henry said they used to skate along the Long Gallery with him in their socks,’ I said.
‘There you go. Not exactly psychopathic behaviour.’
‘I suppose not,’ I said, remembering, with a jag of memory, the night when Henry and I had done it too. That was the night he’d kissed me. I looked at Shafeen guiltily through my lashes, hoping he couldn’t read my mind. But he’d turned his back on the well and was looking out at the school buildings.
‘What if the twins are the ones to break the cycle? What if we can help them break the cycle by actually being nice to them and showing them how to be human beings, by example? This school has never been bad, not the very stones of it.’ He swept his arm wide, taking in all the splendour. ‘It’s the people.’
I couldn’t fault his logic. I’d thought something similar myself just a day or two ago.
Shafeen went on: ‘And even if they are terrible people, what harm can they do you, just being in your play? We’re not at Longcross. They can’t hurt us here. You need a cast. They are doing drama, just a year behind you. You have to at least let them try out. If you don’t, then we are as cliquey as the last bunch of Medievals.’
‘But how will they feel about me, about us? What if they know what we did?’
Shafeen came to me and took my face in his hands. ‘What? What did we do?’
It was hard to say it out loud. ‘Murder.’
The crows rose from the winter trees, cawing in protest at the word.
He dropped my face abruptly, as if he couldn’t carry my head and all the weight of the guilt inside it. ‘Dear God, Greer. We’ve been over this. You’ve carried that burden for a year now.’
I was silent.
‘Listen to me.’ Shafeen talked slowly and clearly, as if I was six. ‘He committed suicide. And no one knows that but us. The confession video Nel recorded at Conrad’s Force never went online. It is safe in the Saros Orbit storage. As far as the inquest was concerned, Henry’s was a death by misadventure. An accident. Why should his cousins hold you – or us – responsible, just because we happened to be at Longcross on the same weekend that he died? As far as they know, we were his friends.’
I was about to protest that I was Henry’s friend. But I stopped. I didn’t really know what we were. ‘I s’pose.’
‘They might be crap actors anyway,’ said Nel. ‘The twins, I mean.’
‘But what if they’re good?’ I said.
Shafeen shrugged. ‘Then you have to cast them. And by the same token, you can’t cast Ty if she’s crap, just because she’s one of the de Warlencourt scholars.’
‘He’s right, you know,’ said Nel. ‘Let’s see how the twins perform when they audition. They might be OK. We might all come to be friends. They might even,’ she said, ‘embrace our Savage ways. The rest of the world is doing it.’
‘I guess.’ It was hard to believe in a Savage world here, where everything as far as the eye could see was so ancient. For a moment, for a split second of a moment, I felt an indefinable pang. If all this got modernised, would I actually be … sorry?
Scene ix
When the chapel bell struck one Nel and I were seated in the theatre, with the first act of Ben Jonson’s Isle of Dogs in front of us.
Abbot Ridley had advised me to transcribe the manuscript for the actors, and since there were no computers at STAGS, I’d stayed up copying out the parts by hand. I’d grumbled a bit about this, but Abbot Ridley, even though he was not nearly as Medieval as the old Abbot, had said that even if there had been photocopiers or scanners at STAGS I wouldn’t have been able to use them on such a priceless manuscript, as the light might damage the pages. I thought that after I’d copied the pages out he would have advised me to give the original to Friar Waterlow to keep locked in the Scriptorium, but no – he just told me to keep the play safe in my room. I locked it in the drawer of my desk and wore the key around my neck, tucked under my Tudor coat. At every moment I was expecting The Isle of Dogs to be taken away from me – by the Abbot, by Friar Waterlow, by some outside agency (the Government?). But no – for some reason an eighteen-year-old girl was allowed to keep it safe, this precious, priceless thing. It felt quite poetic that I stashed it in the same drawer as my box-fresh, rose-gold, state-of-the-art Saros 8 smartphone.
While copying out the parts, I felt a sense of ownership over the play. I didn’t want any one else to have a complete manuscript. Writing it out, scribbling with my ink pen (again, STAGS’s preferred writing implement), in the dead of night until my fingers turned inky black, I had almost begun to believe that I was the writer of the play. That Ben Jonson and I, both low-born, scholarship kids, had somehow merged. He was standing at my elbow, sitting at my shoulder, looking out of my eyes. Another ghost to join Henry behind the curtains.
I’d written out an overview of the first act, and the Dramatis Personae, and pinned them up backstage, so the actors would at least know what the hell they were auditioning for. I’d also written out one speech for each main character. Luckily for my right hand, there were very few characters – not millions like in some Shakespeare plays. We were only looking for Cynthia (the queen), Lupo (the dad courtier), Volpone (the son courtier) and Canis (this kind of dumb servant). Apart from that there were just servants and courtiers who had one line, so they would be easy to fill. But those four main parts were the pillars that held up the play. The Earl of Greenwich (the dude the queen wanted to marry) didn’t appear in the first act, so we didn’t have to worry about him, and nor did the King of El Dorado (the dude everyone else wanted the queen to marry).
I’d picked a peachy speech for each character, and now Nel and I just had to sit back and see what we got.
And the first thing we got was Louis de Warlencourt.
I suppose nine hundred years of inbreeding had narrowed the family genes down to one very definite type. There were the blue eyes, the blond hair, the slim, tall figure. But it was the voice I wasn’t ready for. I had never heard Louis speak before, only seen him smile at me once, with Henry’s smile. But for him to have the voice too gave me the chills. He sounded exactly like Henry. I had to grip my pen to stop myself from making some weird noise. It took me a long time to register what he was actually saying, but when I did I had another realisation. He was good.
Watching him stride about the stage, listening to him perform a speech that hadn’t been spoken in four centuries, made me shiver again, this time for a different reason.
My son, the courtier’s skill is no great mystery,
It is no riddle but merely this:
To give the queen her will, but follow mine
To marshal her great wealth, while building ours,
To defend her borders, while hedging our family about,
To fill her coffers and likewise fill our own.
To find an heir for her as you are mine,
To make this land the greatest on the globe,
And our own family the greatest in it.
To be the lapdog but the wolf beneath;
To smile and smile yet not bare the teeth.
He spoke the speech with confidence and authority. Lupo, the elderly courtier, the most important person at court except the queen, manipulating everyone, running everything, with a God-given assurance that everyone will do exactly what he says. And then, when he doesn’t get his way, when he comes up against someone who outranks him, displays twisty-turny cunning and absolute ruthlessness. He was perfect for the part.
Cassandra, next up, was so similar to Louis in appearance, except in her the ashen-blonde hair fell to her flat chest. She was so timid when she announced herself, saying, ‘I’ll be reading for Volpone,’ that she was barely audible. She seemed to have none of her twin’s confidence. But when she started to read, the timidity worked really well.
Hereditary showeth in the face;
I hope likewise to imprint my father’s grace,
Like a whelp in the litter that follows his sire’s path
And plants his footsteps in the prints of those paws
That have gone before.
You could see a young man cowed by his father, desperate to serve his queen, but more desperate still for his father’s approval. She brought something really touching to the part – I guess you’d call it pathos – which actually made me feel sympathy for her, something I’d not expected to feel for a de Warlencourt ever again. And, of course, the family resemblance, father for son, would work incredibly well for the play. All we’d have to do would be to give Louis some ageing make-up, shove Cassandra’s hair into a hat, and job done. Nel was obviously thinking the same thing. She turned to me, her meticulously shaped dark eyebrows almost at her blonde hairline.
‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘But there are still plenty of others to see.’
We then sat through forty minutes of Medieval try-hards doing really bad versions of what Louis and Cassandra had already done. We smiled and said thanks and that was really great and next, until there was no one left.
When the last one had gone, Nel looked at me.
