STAGS 2, page 6
He came to, as if I’d woken him. ‘There’s an elephant in the room.’
‘You’re damn right there is,’ I said grimly. ‘Haven’t you noticed that no one has mentioned Henry? Even though all of us, except Ty and the twins, were there at Longcross when he died? And even though I’m pretty sure these were his rooms?’
‘That’s not what I meant. There’s an actual elephant in the room. Or part of one.’ He nodded to the wastepaper basket. I looked at it carefully. It was massive, made of wrinkly grey skin, and round the bottom were these huge discoloured semicircular toenails. I swallowed, feeling suddenly nauseous. The bin was made of a hollowed-out elephant’s foot.
‘Ew!’ I said. ‘That’s gross.’
‘Yes,’ he said grimly, sipping his drink, never taking his eyes off the hideous foot-bin.
I looked closer. ‘Why has it got that twine round it?’ Halfway up the leg, between where the ankle and the knee would be (if elephants in fact have knees and ankles), there was a ratty old piece of thin rope.
Shafeen wiped his mouth with the back of the hand that was still holding the glass. ‘It’s a tether.’ His eyes were glittering dangerously. ‘To tie up the elephant. To keep it in its place.’
I looked at the twine dubiously. ‘There’s no way that little bit of string would hold an elephant that size if it decided to walk off.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘That’s because they tie the elephant up with that twine when it’s just a baby. At that point the rope is strong enough to hold it. The elephant grows up believing it can’t get free, because it’s been conditioned to captivity. And by the time it is strong enough to escape, it just doesn’t try. It learns its place very early on. And it never leaves it.’
I thought about the sadness of it, that even elephants could be institutionalised from an early age. ‘You were at prep school with Henry, weren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was he like back then, before STAGS?’
Shafeen thought for a moment. ‘He was a little angel. No trouble. Or rather, nothing you could pin on him. But trouble surrounded him. And it always did. Right till the end.’ He took a drink. ‘And now there’s another one. There’s always another one. Henry. Cookson. And now this one.’ He jerked his head at Louis.
I sighed. ‘You were the one who said to give them a chance. Well, now I’m saying it. Give them a chance.’
He shrugged. ‘All right, fine.’
‘It’s not like he shot the elephant.’
‘No, he didn’t.’ I didn’t even know Cass had been listening, but now she broke in. ‘It was our grandfather. Montgomery de Warlencourt. Colonel in the British Army, magistrate at Jaipur during the Raj and all-round shit.’
It was the most I’d ever heard her say in one go. Maybe the gin had loosened her tongue. She swung her glass around as she talked, and the crystal-bright liquid sloshed over her hand.
For the first time I saw how beautiful she was. The de Warlencourt looks were just as effective on a girl as on the boys – her choppy gamine hair was just like Jean Seberg’s in À Bout de Souffle, and her grey-blue eyes bright with drink.
‘He was a British magistrate at Jaipur?’ exclaimed Shafeen. ‘He might have known my family.’
‘Probably,’ she said, in her clipped upper-class voice, making no effort to be quiet. ‘He was probably a prick to them. He was a prick to everyone.’
‘Cass,’ said Louis, low-voiced, warningly. He’d swapped over with Cassandra – it was her turn to talk; just as I’d never heard her say so much, I’d never heard him just say one word at a time before.
‘What?’ she protested. ‘He was an old bastard. Everybody knows it. He treated the natives app-all-ingly.’
Shafeen visibly warmed to her. ‘Have you ever been to Rajasthan?’
‘Yes. We went out for the old jerk’s funeral, two years ago.’
‘And what did you think of it?’
‘It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen,’ she said, with complete, straight-faced honesty. And that was it. Cass talked, Shafeen talked, he laughed, and she drank.
Everyone broke off into pairs and actually sat down. Nel and I were sharing one armchair, Ty and Louis sat in the other. He’d chivalrously given her the seat, while he reclined on the arm with the same easy, catlike grace that Henry always displayed. Their heads grew closer and closer until her afro began to loll on his shoulder. But I was too mellow to be worried for her. After two drinks I’d begun to feel warm and happy. I was chatting to Nel but doing that thing when you are half listening to other conversations. Shafeen and Cass were in the window seat, next to the offensive wastepaper basket, and I could hear snatches of conversation.
I wasn’t jealous. I was glad. This chat was good for both of them – she’d come right out of her shell and he could talk about his beloved homeland. I heard threads of of dialogue – strange and beautiful names that sounded like poetry on his lips: Hawa Mahal, Jantar Mantar, Naharghar. Then the talk wove across the map from Rajasthan to other provinces of India, Cass talking about a temple of Necromancy she’d been to in Orissa where the locals believed you could wake the dead. Her voice fell into one of those sudden silences that happen in the middle of lots of chat – the gramophone had ground to the middle of the record and was doing that wheezy, grindy noise. We all turned to look. Cass’d fallen silent, her mouth a little open, her eyes unfocused.
She looked a strange green colour, like that ill-looking chick from Guardians of the Galaxy. Then she leaned over and threw up in the elephant’s foot.
Scene xii
‘Kerr-ist!’ exclaimed Louis, leaping to his feet. ‘Every bloody time.’
Shafeen, for once, looked a bit lost as to what to do. ‘Should I take her to lie down?’
I was a pretty cool girlfriend but not that cool. ‘I’ll do it. You chat to Nel.’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said, ever the gentleman. ‘That would be better. On her side though,’ he added – already in doctor mode.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s not my first rodeo.’ At least two of my friends had thrown up at my last school’s prom.
I got Cass’s arm over my shoulder and half walked, half dragged her through one of the connecting doors. ‘No way,’ I exclaimed to myself, as I saw the layout. Louis had his own bathroom! I got Cass to the basin and cleaned her face. She was floppy and compliant, and not really heavy at all, so I was able to manoeuvre her to Louis’s bed. I put her on her side, undid the buttons of her Tudor coat and loosened the white neckerchief we all wore underneath. I wasn’t going to undress her though.
On the side table a bunch of silver-framed photographs caught my eye. I’d learned at Longcross that the upper classes didn’t hang photos on the wall, just paintings. I remembered that there had been dozens of silver-framed photos standing up on the grand piano and it was a bit like that here – lots of pictures of blond relatives, and dogs and horses. There was even one that could have been Good Old Monty de Warlencourt, wearing the white military dress of a viceroy, bristling with medals. At his shoulder stood a boy about Shafeen’s age in a white turban, fanning him with this enormous feather fan. Shafeen would do his nut if he saw that.
I looked around a bit, more interested in what wasn’t there than what was. There was not one photograph of Henry. Not a single one.
And I couldn’t believe Louis had a double bed – we didn’t get a double bed. This was really unfair. What was Louis, some sort of unofficial head boy? I was about to leave, feeling guilty for snooping, when I noticed there were two pairs of pyjamas neatly folded on the pillows. The pyjamas were exactly the same: a discreet, classy check, with ivory buttons, folded with military precision.
They looked identical.
Except for one thing.
At the back of the neck of each, ironed on absolutely straight, were two regulation STAGS nametapes. One said Louis de Warlencourt; the other, Cassandra de Warlencourt.
When I went back into the living room the elephant’s foot was gone. Shafeen was pacing like a new father, and immediately, like the sweetie he was, asked after Cass. Louis was back in the armchair, seemingly totally unconcerned about his sister’s fate – not in a callous way so much as an it-happens-all-the-time way. I wondered, having seen that brief glimpse of raw grief on the stairs, whether it was the loss of Henry that made Cass drink.
Louis, however, didn’t analyse. ‘Never could take her sherbet, old Cass,’ he said fondly. ‘She’ll be right as rain in a bit. Just needs to sleep it off.’
‘I’ll bring her back to Lightfoot later,’ offered Ty quickly. ‘I’ll stay for a bit, make sure she’s OK.’
Nel, Shafeen and I were obviously surplus to requirements, so we let Louis show us to the door. We parted in a friendly way – he and Shafeen even shook hands warmly. As soon as we were in the cloister, I glanced at Shafeen in the moonlight. I expected him to say something like, ‘Jesus,’ or, ‘Thank God that’s over.’ But instead he said, ‘I hope she’s OK.’
‘Who – Ty?’ asked Nel. ‘She looked pretty cosy to me.’
‘No, not Ty. Cass.’
Now I shot him a proper look, my eyebrows disappearing under my fringe.
‘What?’ he said. ‘You said to give them a chance. I did.’
I had to smile. ‘Are you falling for the famous de Warlencourt charm?’
He looked at me sidelong and grinned. ‘I wouldn’t go that far. The jury’s still out on him. But I’ll admit I was wrong about her.’
We walked across the quad, under the long shadow of the Jerusalem tree, our feet crunching on the frost that had already formed in the shade, our breath smoking.
In the silence I thought how I’d been wrong about her too. I’d thought Cass was a bit of a drip – a shadow of her brother. But I now thought she had hidden depths. There was one thing for certain – she’d loved Henry, really loved him, and she mourned him, just as I did.
But I’d been wrong about her in another way. I wasn’t worried about Cass any more. I was more worried about Ty, as I was pretty sure she would be walking back across this frozen quad alone.
I didn’t think Cass lived in Lightfoot at all.
I thought she shared a room – and a bed – with her brother.
Scene xiii
I did tell Nel about the pyjamas-on-the-bed thing, on the way to the theatre the next morning. To my surprise, she took it pretty calmly.
‘It’s not that weird, is it?’
‘It’s very weird.’
‘Well, I’m an only child …’
‘… so am I …’
‘… but siblings often share beds, don’t they?’
‘Yes, when they’re seven,’ I said. ‘Not when they’re seventeen. What if she lives in Honorius, and not in Lightfoot at all?’
‘How would she get away with that?’
‘Well, let’s see,’ I said. ‘How about by looking exactly like her brother, same Tudor coat, same red stockings, same hairdo even.’
Nel stopped in the middle of the Lightfoot quad.
‘D’you think that’s why she got her hair cut?’
‘I think that could be part of it.’
We started walking again.
‘What should we do?’ she asked.
‘Why do we have to do anything?’
‘Well, it’s against the rules, and we’re … well, we’re Medievals.’
‘De Warlencourts seems to have their own rules here.’
‘Not just here,’ said Nel with a shiver of recollection in her voice.
‘Let’s just leave it,’ I decided. ‘Medievals aren’t unpaid spies for the Friars.’
‘I tell you one thing though,’ said Nel. ‘If she does live in Honorius, she could hardly be your mysterious messenger in Lightfoot. The person who gave you the play, I mean.’
‘I s’pose,’ I conceded. ‘She still has a room there though. She could use it as an HQ.’ But to be honest, I didn’t give much attention then to the possibility of what Gone Girl called ‘Twincest’. I had a play to put on.
In the next few days it seemed like nothing could go wrong. Our one and only act of The Isle of Dogs really came together. The art students made a beautiful Palace of Placentia set, glossy marble columns, gilded coving and coats-of-arms all designed around dogs. The music department was writing the score, and the chapel choir was going to sing an Elizabethan chant to underlie my prologue. Our production counted as coursework for their Probitiones in art and music too. I felt as if I was getting an awful lot of help. But because everything was so smooth, and easy, and obstacle-free, I didn’t even question what was going on, or realise that I was skipping into the forest as innocently as Red Riding Hood in Hoodwinked.
Pretty dumb, really.
The first sniff I had that something dark was going on was when I got the second act of The Isle of Dogs.
Scene i
‘It’s about a hunt.’
I’d taken the play – two acts now – down to the Paulinus well first thing in the morning. Shafeen and Nel looked puzzled, as well they might.
‘What’s about a hunt?’ asked Shafeen.
‘The play, dummy. I got the second act last night, after Commons, just like the time before. The same way – pages under my door, delivered by Mr Nobody. And the second act is all about an upcoming hunt. Look.’ I riffled through the pages and found Act Two, placing the manuscript on the stone surround of the well. ‘You remember in Act One, it was that prologue from Poetaster, and then it was Queen Cynthia, and the father and son courtiers, and her wanting to marry the Earl of Greenwich, and a bit of comedy-servant business from Canis. It was all nicey-nicey and we never saw the earl. Well. In Act Two we do meet the earl. And the first thing he does is to insult the father and son. He likens them to dogs.’
‘The wolf and the fox,’ said Nel.
‘Exactly. But he’s not being nice. He calls them curs, because they are trying to break up him and the queen for their own ends. And they get all mortally insulted, and they devise a plan both to please the queen and to get the earl to fall out of favour, so that the queen will marry this king they’ve lined up, the King of El Dorado. And guess how they plan to do it?’
They both look at me expectantly, hooked.
‘They plan this huge hunt to happen in the dog days of summer – which are apparently in the middle of July, when the dog star Sirius is in the sky. This also coincides with the queen’s birthday. Because hunting is her favourite thing in the world, they say it will be this huge birthday hunt, the greatest hunt ever held in the history of England, and the earl will be her guest of honour.’ I took a breath. ‘Are you following me?’
‘Just about,’ said Shafeen. ‘Go on.’
‘OK, so the birthday hunt is going to be held in the Underwood, this big forest near the Palace of Placentia. Lupo and Volpone persuade the queen not to tell the earl about it, saying it should be this big surprise for him. And then they do a creepy thing.’
‘What?’ Nel asked this time.
‘They start to amass this huge pack of dogs, hundreds of them – breeding them and collecting them from other noble houses. And guess where the kennels are?’
‘On the Isle of Dogs,’ they chorused.
‘Yep,’ I said grimly.
Shafeen frowned. ‘But, how would holding a big dog hunt get rid of the earl?’
‘Dunno. That’s as far as it goes.’
‘You do know,’ said Nel softly, her voice shaking a little. ‘Come on, we’re all thinking it. Surely they are going to turn the dogs on the earl.’
Like they did with you, I thought, remembering Nel at Longcross running from Henry’s hounds.
‘He’s an earl,’ said Shafeen, ‘but he dares to think that he can be a king. He’s trying to climb above his station, and so he has to be stopped.’ He looked at us in turn. ‘The whole play stinks of the Order.’
‘You think they are mixed up in it somewhere?’ asked Nel.
‘I do, yes. This was Tudor times, remember? The Order has been going since the Crusades, so by the reign of Elizabeth it would be well established.’
‘Well, I’m pretty sure Ben Jonson wasn’t one of the bad guys,’ I said defensively. ‘He was a common boy. A bricklayer.’ It was one of the things that’d drawn me to him. ‘And if we’ve established anything, it’s that the Order is run by posh people – the ruling classes.’ I looked at the title page of the play, uncertain. ‘But Pembroke’s Men might be a different matter.’
‘They’d be just actors, surely?’ said Nel. ‘I think actors were usually low born – not like today with your Tom Hiddlestons and your Eddie Redmaynes.’
‘The “men” would be, yes. But the title page says Pembroke’s men. Men who belong to Pembroke. Pembroke, whoever he was, must’ve been powerful, to have men.’
I’d been at STAGS long enough to know that if there was a person you needed to look up, you did it the old-school way. Instead of Wikipedia, you looked through the gazillion leather-bound volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography.
I bore the other two off to the Scriptorium, where Friar Waterlow pointed us in the direction of the slate-blue and gold-tooled volumes almost at once. We whipped down the ‘P’ book and took it to one of the carrels. Shafeen clicked on the little light.
‘P, P, P,’ I said. ‘Pembroke, Earl of, here we go. I knew he’d be a posh boy.’ I stabbed the page with my finger in triumph. The triumph was short-lived. ‘Oh. There’s about a million of them.’
‘Check the dates,’ said Nel.
‘Isle of Dogs was 1597,’ I murmured under my breath. ‘So it must be …’ I scanned the page, ‘this one.’
Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, 1538–1601
He was the son of William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke, and Anne Parr. His aunt was Queen Consort Catherine Parr, last wife of King Henry VIII. In the court intrigues of Elizabeth I’s reign, Pembroke was regarded as a partisan of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, and was certainly in very intimate relations with him. During the 1590s, Herbert was patron of Pembroke’s Men, a theatre company who were the first group to perform a number of plays, including The Isle of Dogs by Ben Jonson. His company included the celebrated actors Robert Shaw and Gabriel Spenser, who played the Earl of Greenwich in Jonson’s suppressed play.
