STAGS 5, page 6
Like an idiot, I waved before I could stop myself.
‘Who are you waving at?’ asked Cass, amused. ‘I don’t think any ships can see you from here.’
‘Oh, just the gulls,’ I said, pulling myself back into the room, red-faced. ‘I’m just so happy to be here. What’s the other way?’
Of course they had to follow me across the room to the other window – so the drone hovered on unseen. Louis opened the opposite casement wide. ‘And this way,’ he said, ‘is the mainland and England.’ I could see just how close the Peel Tower was and made a mental note of how to get back there. I reckoned it would take me no longer than a quarter of an hour.
‘Have you been to Longcross lately?’ I asked Louis, knowing he had.
‘I’ve been down a couple of times,’ he said, perching on the windowsill. ‘The repairs seem to be on track. Soon the family seat will be back to its best. In time for me to settle there as earl.’
I didn’t dare meet his eyes but made the mistake of glancing at Cass, who shot me a knowing look. Cass, of course, knew that Henry was alive – she had seen him at her and Louis’s eighteenth. But she’d obviously kept that small detail from her twin. Why? And did she know what was to happen to me on the Red Hunt? Or had Louis kept that from her?
I looked back at the pewter-grey roofs, towers and crenellations, and slapped the sturdy wall of the North Tower. ‘I would have thought that inheriting this pile would be enough.’
‘That’s not how it works,’ said Louis. ‘You need land below the oat line. English land.’
As a MacDonald of the Clan MacDonald, that stung me, which was ridiculous really as I’d literally found out I was a Scot about five minutes ago. But I kept my feelings to myself. Ever the gentleman, except for when he was in murder mode, Louis helped me down from the windowsill and placed the heavy key in my hand. ‘We’ll let you get ready. We eat at seven in the Great Hall.’
‘And you’ll see some familiar faces,’ smiled Cass.
With this terrifying thought, the twins left me to dress. Just as I’d anticipated, an outfit had been left for me on the inevitable tartan bedspread. I held it up. It was a posh frock, the colour of old gold, with a close-fitting bodice and a standout skirt. I peeled off my travel clothes and put it on – it was that stiff silk that felt cold to the skin, but the age-speckled mirror told me the colour did wonders for me. I was sort of glowing, all pale skin, black bob, iridescent silk. I did a nice smoky eye with a shaking hand, and instead of a red lip I went for pale sixties mouth, letting the eyes do the heavy lifting. I’d brought black heels and an evening clutch that would just about fit a lipstick and a phone. Hell yes, I’d brought my phone, and I woke it up to check the time. This time I wasn’t about to travel without it – I’d made that mistake at the first huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ weekend at Longcross. Ratio might be looking out for me, but even the HAWK’s electronic eyes couldn’t see through six-foot-thick stone walls, so while I was inside the phone was my only insurance policy, my only Savage link with the outside world.
The phone said 7 p.m., and as I read the time I noticed something else. There were no little connectivity bars at the top right of the screen, no friendly Wi-Fi symbol, that reassuring little pile of smiles. Instead, there were two stubborn words at the top left:
No Signal
My stomach lurched a little as I read that, but I wasn’t really surprised. I was in the arse end of beyond, all silver sea and glowering black mountains. Of course there was no signal.
I supposed I’d better go down, but I chucked the phone on the bed. There was no point taking it; it afforded me no protection.
It was basically a very expensive clock.
11
I got lost on the way down to the Great Hall, so I was a bit late to dinner. Eventually I had to ask this footman-type person the way and he showed me, opening these huge oak doors for me to walk through. I can tell you it was pretty scary walking into that room. As my mouth dried and my heart speeded I reflected that in both of the great houses I’d visited – Longcross, Cumberland Place and Longcross again – I’d never been on my own. I’d always had my fellow murderers with me. But here at Castle MacLeod, for one night only, it was me, myself and I.
I walked into the Great Hall, a huge baronial room with the bottom half panelled in wood and the top half painted blood red. The ceiling was a forest of criss-crossed oak beams, and six ornate candelabras hung from it on long ropes, illuminating the inevitable stags’ antlers on the walls. Those same walls bristled with pikes and swords and shredded banners, which looked like they’d been well used over the centuries. At one end of the room there was a vast stone fireplace and a bonfire-sized blaze burning. Above the fireplace was a huge picture of a pretty lively battle between two angry-looking bunches of Scots wearing two different tartans. A shiny oak table was placed in the middle of the room, and the distance between me and the only place setting left empty seemed incredibly long. I suddenly seemed to have forgotten how to walk, and I could feel eyes on me as I stumbled to my place as if I was the worst catwalk model at Fashion Week.
Once I was seated I had the chance to look around. Lord Peregrine was seated at the fire end of the table, his face above his dinner jacket even more florid than usual from the heat. Lady Fiona sat at the other end looking much cooler in green taffeta, a diamond clip replacing the kirby grip in her hair. The twins sat either side of me, in matching tuxedos and black tie, their blond hair slicked back, identical except for their partings, which were on different sides, making them a mirror image of each other. The lovely, super-duper, happy-happy surprise though was the presence of the original Medievals from the year above me at STAGS: Cookson, Piers, Lara, Charlotte and Esme, all dressed up to the nines, all looking as comfortable as I felt uncomfortable.
Great.
There was one more person at the table. A tiny, shrivelled old lady wearing a lace blouse and a Celtic brooch set with garnets who was sitting next to Lady Fiona. She had white hair scraped back in a bun, and milky eyes of watery blue. She reminded me of the creepy old blind woman in Don’t Look Now. As soon as I sat down the old crone set up a querulous cry. She pointed in my general direction with a forefinger that resembled a twig.
‘I see somebody … I see somebody …’ Her voice wavered, and her accent was pure Highland Scots, quite different to Ratio’s Glaswegian drawl.
Lady Fiona laid a hand on the old lady’s arm, lowering the accusing finger to the tablecloth. ‘It’s the MacDonald girl, Nanny.’ She turned to me. ‘This is Nanny. She was my nursemaid when I was a girl, and the twins’ nanny too. She’s a part of the family.’ I looked at the shrivelled lady – she was definitely more Nanny McPhee than Mary Poppins.
‘Nanny, this is Greer MacDonald,’ said Lady Fiona loudly, as if to a child. ‘She’s come for Lammas.’
The unseeing eyes narrowed. ‘I never thought to be breaking bread with a MacDonald.’ Then, I’m not kidding, she spat neatly over her shoulder. ‘Is she pretty?’
Louis said, ‘Very,’ with a smile in his voice.
‘Does she have dark hair?’
‘Black as a raven’s wing,’ supplied Cass poetically.
Nanny shuddered. ‘Pretty maids with dark hair get into trouble. Just like that other one.’
Other one? Who could that have been? But before I could ask, Nanny looked right at me and said, in a sort of actor-y, important voice: ‘Rowan-tree and red thread keep the devils frae their speed.’
I had no idea what this meant. The only red thread I’d seen recently was in Ratio’s room in Glasgow, linking all his aerial photographs of Longcross and its residents through the years on his Crime Scene wall. But the rowan tree reference I suddenly got. Rowan was the tree in the legend that everyone seemed so keen to tell me about – the MacDonald victory over the MacLeods. Rowan was the tree that grew at the Bloody Stone. I lifted my eyes to the picture of the battle above the fire and, sure enough, at the centre of the mêlée, there was the Bloody Stone and the rowan tree. It seemed weird to me to have a huge painting in your castle of your greatest defeat, a bit like having a poster of a football team that had thrashed yours, but maybe the painting had kept the desire for revenge alive all those centuries, a revenge that could be taken, at last, this weekend.
Hooray.
The old woman’s words, which sounded suspiciously like a curse, presumably meant that the MacDonalds, including me, were the devil. It was not the nicest greeting I’d ever had at a dinner table, and I wasn’t at all sure how to respond to it. So instead I turned to the Medievals, who were watching me hungrily.
‘How’s Oxford?’ I asked, just as I’d done at Longcross on Boxing Day.
‘Divine,’ said Lara, sounding bored.
‘Only two years left though,’ said Esme, pouting like a little girl.
‘I hear you’re coming up in the Michaelmas term,’ said Charlotte, italicising as usual. ‘Super exciting that we’ll be overlapping by a year. We’ll be able to show you around.’
‘Yes,’ said Piers, his voice already blunted by drink. ‘We can show you how we do things down there.’
‘Absolutely,’ said Cookson. ‘I think you’ll feel right at home.’
Christ. As I’d suspected when I’d met them all at Longcross, they clearly had their own little fun and games going on at the heart of that ancient university as well. The thought of that made me even more determined that they must be stopped.
‘So what happens on Saturday?’ I said chirpily, helping myself to soup. Actually, I was feeling anything but chirpy – tonight was Thursday, so technically I had two days before I became their prey. ‘On the Red Hunt, I mean.’
‘Well, you can relax for much of the day,’ said Lady Fiona. ‘Deer stalking takes place in the first or last two hours of daylight, and we take the view that many of our guests may be … tired – from The Gathering the night before.’ This might have been a joke, but as she never seemed to smile it was difficult to tell. ‘So we’ll set off in the evening on Saturday. It will be just kitchen sups that night, as we’ll be back fairly late.’ I didn’t know what ‘kitchen sups’ were, but the catering was the least of my worries. I needed to know what actually happened on the hunt, specifically where it went, so Ratio could program the correct flight path into the HAWK, and film whatever happened to me.
‘We’ll cover the terrain in small groups, usually two guests to one guide.’
So I’d be with Henry then – that was something.
‘No bright colours, no perfume.’
I remembered Aadhish’s diary – tigers could detect perfume and I supposed stags were the same. ‘And what route will we take? Where is the actual hunt?’
‘Well, in your honour, my dear,’ Lady Fiona said, collecting the glances of the others, ‘we will take the route of the battle between the MacDonalds and the MacLeods. We’ll begin at Loch Eynort.’
‘A beautiful spot,’ mused Lord Peregrine, to nobody in particular.
‘We’ll surround our stag and close in until he’s at bay,’ said Lady Fiona, as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘Then whichever group is closest will take a clean shot. Then the deer is gutted, we bind him on a garron and bring him home.’
‘A garron?’ I asked.
‘A Highland pony. We’ve been after the same Old Imperial for a number of seasons, so hopefully we’ll bag him this time – but we haven’t managed it yet.’
I thought I knew why – the Old Imperial was a decoy, an excuse to have a hunt. The real prey was whichever poor innocent they’d brought here from the mainland – in this case: me.
The mains came around – something meaty with vegetables swimming in a red wine sauce that resembled venous blood. ‘And what about Lammas Eve itself?’ I asked, as they all munched hungrily. ‘What happens on the hillside?’ I didn’t want to even say the name of Ben Horneval – that mountain had a hoodoo on it as far as I was concerned.
‘Oh, it’s a rare old party,’ began Lord Peregrine, managing to squeeze out a few words before his wife took over.
‘There’s traditional Highland folk music and dancing,’ said Lady Fiona, railroading over him. ‘Then we all share the Lammas loaf, which is special bread baked for the day.’
‘And the young folk “Flit the Fire”,’ said Nanny, a strange light in her unseeing eyes.
‘Oh, is that where you jump over the bonfire?’ I’d seen stuff like that before in the South of England on Bonfire Night.
‘Nay,’ said Nanny in her quavering voice. ‘They jump under it.’
Not for the first time that night I thought Nanny might be losing it a bit. Jumping under a bonfire didn’t make any sense.
‘Then we roast the prey in the needfire,’ the old lady went on hungrily. ‘All his finery and jewels must be laid aside, and he must be naked as a babe.’
‘Ah, these romantic Highland figures of speech,’ said Lady Fiona smoothly. ‘She means the stag, don’t you, Nanny? The stag must be stripped and skinned before we can roast the venison on the needfire.’
I went cold. Nanny had given them all away. Stags didn’t have clothes or wear jewellery. Lady Fiona had shut her up, but it was pretty clear that I was to be the prey. If their plan went smoothly, I would be dead by then – killed by ‘accident’ at the Red Hunt the day before. Did that mean they would strip and burn my dead body? The thought was utterly barbaric. I pushed my plate away – appetite suddenly gone.
‘Old Imperial will be the biggest red stag we’ve caught in a hundred years,’ Peregrine bumbled in. ‘Plenty of fine meat to go around.’
This seemed irrelevant, since they wouldn’t be roasting him; they’d be roasting me. I swallowed, feeling suddenly sick. Everyone was looking at me, and all I wanted was to run out of the room and keep going. But I knew the whole weekend depended on me keeping my cool, and not letting on that I knew what I was in for. Desperately I cast around for something to say, and St Aidan himself came to my rescue. ‘Are there any white stags?’ I remembered the legend of the saint and his white stag, and the stained-glass window in the chapel at STAGS, depicting a hind as white as snow.
Nanny started as if I’d said something blasphemous, and her milky eyes almost popped out of her head. She crossed her ancient heart. ‘Graveyard stags,’ she said spookily.
‘White stags are messengers from the otherworld,’ said Cass, by way of explanation. ‘They are often seen in graveyards or near burial grounds.’
‘Or battle grounds,’ put in Louis.
‘The white stag is an ill omen,’ wavered the old woman, her voice rising. ‘When the white stag is seen, he comes from the underworld to claim the head of the family. The heir of the house will die.’
‘Thanks, Nanny,’ said Louis drily.
She turned in the direction of his voice and smiled. Her teeth resembled a graveyard. ‘Never fret, my love, my precious. Nothing can befall you while Nanny has the Faerie Flag.’
The mains were cleared and a pudding appeared – not a fancy iced concoction but something solid and schooly, with custard.
‘What’s the Faerie Flag?’ I asked, as everybody but me tucked in.
‘It’s a pennant of yellow silk, stitched with gold crosses and red rowan berries,’ said Louis.
Rowan again, I thought. ‘How old is it?’
‘No one knows,’ said Nanny. ‘It was brought by the wee folk many centuries ago. The heir to the MacLeods had been born in this very castle, and his nursemaid left him alone, not knowing how to soothe him. The faeries heard his cries and flew in through the window, covering him with the flag against the biting cold, and singing him a soothing lullaby.’ Her voice had a strange power to it, as if she was telling a bedtime story. By some odd magic, I could almost see the scene playing out before me, like a film. ‘When the nursemaid returned she was shocked and frightened to see the wee folk, but the faeries told her not to be afraid, and that the flag would rescue the MacLeods in times of great need. Ever since then it has been kept in a casket in the castle.’
‘The flag is said to have kept us safe throughout the centuries,’ said Cass, cutting up her meat. ‘It extinguished a fire in the castle, and some MacLeod servicemen took it on bombing missions during the Second World War, and all returned safely.’
‘And ever since the night the wee folk visited,’ said Lady Fiona, ‘no nanny has been employed at this castle who cannot sing the faeries’ lullaby.’
‘That’s so, that’s so,’ said Nanny, nodding her ancient head sagely. ‘I remember at my interview, for your mother and father, I had to sing it word for word. Then I sang it to you every night when you were a bairn, and to Master Louis and Miss Cassandra too.’
‘Go on, Nanny,’ said Louis. ‘Give us a blast.’
It was clear that Nanny was Louis’s slave, and as we all fell silent she set up a haunting tune in her wavering voice.
‘Behold my child, limbed like the kid or fawn, smiting the horses, seizing the accoutrements of the shod horses, the spirited steeds. My little child.
‘Oh, that I could see thy cattle fold, high up on the mountain side; a green, shaggy jacket about thy two white shoulders, with a linen shirt. My little child.
‘Oh, that I could behold thy team of horses; men following them; serving women returning home and the Catanaich sowing the corn.
‘Oh, tender hero whom my womb did bring forth, who did swallow from my breast, who on my knee wast reared.
‘My child it is, my armful of yew, merry and plump, my bulrush, my flesh and eggs, that will soon be speaking. Last year thou wast beneath my girdle, plant of fertility! and this year fair and playful on my shoulder, thou wilt be going round the homestead.
