FOXES, page 7
And underneath, the legend The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Nel saw it first. ‘My God, that looks like …’
‘… Brutus,’ I finished.
The face of the snarling black dog took me right back to that night in the subterranean tunnel to Longcross church, when Gamekeeper Perfect’s scary hound had chased us down.
‘Well, he can’t hurt you now,’ said Shafeen drily.
The joke helped me calm down. This was just a stupid prop. And The Hound of the Baskervilles was a story. It wasn’t real. None of it was real. This was the house of someone who didn’t exist.
Except.
Something nagged at my memory. I scanned the rest of the room silently, inviting the recollection to reveal itself. And while I read the synopsis of the story underneath that glowering hound’s head, a name jumped out at me.
Henry
It was enough to make me read on.
Henry Baskerville, the duo finds out, has arrived in London to take up his post at Baskerville Hall, but he has already been intimidated by an anonymous note of warning and, strangely enough, the theft of a shoe.
And, just like that, the memory unlocked.
Something must have shown in my face or my posture, because both Shafeen and Nel said, ‘What?’
I pointed. They both read the label.
‘Which bit?’ said Shafeen. ‘The anonymous note of warning?’
‘No,’ I breathed. ‘The shoe,’ I said. ‘She lost a shoe.’
‘Who did?’ quipped Nel. ‘Cinderella?’
‘No, Ty. And he lost one too.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Henry.’
‘De Warlencourt?’
‘No,’ I said again and pointed. ‘Henry Baskerville.’
‘I don’t get it,’ said Shafeen.
I didn’t want to talk there, with all the tourists gawping. I jerked my head at the door and we clattered downstairs, much to the disgust of the Cumberbitches, who clearly thought we weren’t showing enough reverence for their idol. We swept past the Spanish-cockney policeman and out into the cold air.
‘OK.’ I pulled them both past the now-much-longer queue, and stopped outside a deli called, inevitably, the Holmes Cafe.
‘You remember that first night at Longcross?’
‘Which time?’ asked Shafeen.
‘This year, not last. We were all wearing our fancy-pants stuff, and Ty had this amazing white satin dress on, and she teamed it with trainers?’
‘Yes,’ said Nel. Shafeen said nothing, probably because he wouldn’t have noticed if she’d been wearing a bin bag. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I told her they looked great, and she said a weird thing. She said she hadn’t planned to wear them, but that she’d lost one of her evening shoes. Not both. Just one.’
‘With you so far.’
‘OK, backstory: in the film of The Hound of the Baskervilles – got to admit, I’ve never read the book – Henry Baskerville, the American heir to Baskerville Hall, stays in London before going to the country to collect his inheritance. He stays in a hotel, and those were the days when you used to put your shoes outside the door at night to be cleaned. You know?’
They both nodded.
‘So the shoe completely vanishes. Not both, but one. Anyway – spoiler alert – it turns out much later that the shoe has been given to the Hound of the Baskervilles to smell so the dog can hunt Sir Henry to his death. Same thing happened with Ty. They didn’t use seeds in her pockets, like they did with you, Nel. She wasn’t a drag hunt. She was a human hunt.’
‘Who am I, RuPaul?’ protested Nel saltily. ‘I wasn’t a drag race. I was a human hunt too.’
‘You know what I mean. They stole her shoe, so that the hounds could smell it and learn her actual scent. The game is – literally – a foot.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘I’m saying that Ty is in more danger than she thinks she is. I think this is all somehow about her.’
They both considered this in silence, as we watched the tourists filing in to the shop for their Holmes-pressos and Watson-cinos. It was not until we’d started wandering towards the Tube that Shafeen spoke.
‘Supposing you’re right. And I’m not saying you’re not – God knows I’ve learned that lesson by now. But that was at the beginning of the stay. Now she’s with Louis. She might be pretending, but he’s not. He likes her, and he’s Lord de Warlencourt. I think he’ll protect her.’
‘She never struck me as someone who needs protecting anyway,’ said Nel comfortingly.
I remembered Ty, when she'd visited me in hospital, saying: I'm coming for them, Greer. I'm gonna let slip the dogs of war. But then Shafeen said, ‘Everybody needs protecting,’ glancing at me.
‘I’m going to call her,’ I said decidedly.
‘That will get her into trouble,’ said Nel.
‘Text then. Gimme your phone.’
After a year at STAGS I’d got out of the habit of bringing my phone out with me, but Nel, as ever, had hers. She handed it over. I signed in to Instagram and messaged mrs_de_warlencourt.
She still hadn’t replied to my messages of the previous evening, about the Reynard fox heads. This made me even more uneasy, but I tapped in a new message anyway.
Hey – did you ever find your evening shoe? The one that went missing before our first dinner at Longcross?
I hoped against hope for an instant reply, but there was nothing. ‘Check back later,’ said Nel, and then we were at the Tube and Ty was forgotten in the palaver of tickets and trains.
13
When we emerged from the Tube, Parliament was right on top of us.
I vaguely remembered seeing it on that school trip from Bewley Park all those years ago. Usually things get smaller as you get larger – ever been back to your old primary school and tried sitting on one of the chairs? – but the Houses of Parliament obviously hadn’t heard of this rule. It seemed even bigger than I remembered. It was massive and hugely impressive and made me feel weirdly proud. The building itself was mad – there were spires on top of spires, and gargoyles and buttresses like some giant Gothic OD. Iced with dollops of snow, it all looked amazing – cool, Christmassy and totally, totally British.
We wandered along for a bit, taking in the amazing architecture, the heavily armed gates and the statue of some random king on his horse. We looked up at his iron majesty, but his plinth was covered in snow. ‘Wonder who he is.’
‘Whoever he is,’ said Shafeen, ‘I bet he was injured in battle and died later from his wounds.’
Nel and I both turned to look at him. ‘How on earth,’ said Nel, ‘do you know that?’
Shafeen grinned. ‘There’s this urban myth,’ he said, ‘about equestrian statues. Like a code. If one hoof is raised, the rider was injured in battle and died later. If two hooves are raised, so the horse is rearing, the rider died in battle. And if four hooves are planted on the floor, he lived to conquer.’
‘Cool,’ I said. We wandered along a bit more, and then back again. Even with our Baker Street detour we had a chunk of time before the parliamentary session. ‘What shall we do?’ I said. ‘Get some lunch?’
‘I’m still full of breakfast,’ said Nel. ‘While we’re here, why don’t we visit an old friend?’
‘Whaddya mean?’
‘Ben Jonson,’ she said. ‘He’s buried over there in Westminster Abbey.’ She pointed to a white stone church with twin bell towers, which in any other context would be massive but next to this huge citadel of a parliament looked a bit titchy.
‘Is he?’ said Shafeen.
Nel nodded. ‘Yup.’
‘Then let’s go,’ I said.
We joined this queue inside the abbey grounds – much, much longer than the one at Baker Street. We felt like proper tourists again as we shuffled in to buy our tickets and guidebook, our eyes adjusting from the bright snowy day outside to the incense-smelling twilight of a church. The smell took me back at once to the chapel at Longcross, but this was a different beast altogether. Beast was right, because being in the abbey felt a bit like being in the belly of some huge animal, with the white buttresses arching above us like a ribcage. There were candles in the gloomy corners, and amazing stained glass splitting the daylight into all its colours.
‘OK,’ said Shafeen. ‘Let’s look for Ben.’
I looked doubtful. The place seemed bigger on the inside, and even at approaching-lunchtime the place was packed with tourists. ‘Where shall we start?’
Fortunately, Nel seemed to be a bit more clued up. ‘Poets’ Corner, of course.’
Poets’ Corner was easy to find as it was easily the most crowded bit of the crowded abbey. It was also mental. The name was quite misleading, as there were not just poets here but pretty much every famous writer you could think of. Everywhere I looked there were my favourite novelists. (OK, full disclosure: I hadn’t exactly read all of them, I had at least heard of them.)
The Brontës, Dickens, Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis, Rudyard Kipling, they were all here in the writers’ Hall of Fame.
Nel turned around 360 degrees on her heels. ‘God, Nathaniel would love this.’
She meant, of course, her uber-crush Abbot Ridley. I hadn’t heard her mention him this whole trip, but to be fair we hadn’t had any girlie time alone just us two. I imagined that if our original plan had gone ahead – a cosy week in Chester, no horrifying end to the term – we’d have talked of little else. I remembered the kiss she’d given the Abbot in the wings of the De Warlencourt Playhouse, and remembered, too, the feeling of foreboding I’d had even then.
‘I mean, all these writers, playwrights,’ she qualified. ‘It’s right up his alley.’
I wondered if Nel was up his alley too. ‘Did he say you could call him Nathaniel?’ It came out a bit harsher than I meant.
Nel met my eyes. ‘No,’ she said softly, after a beat. ‘But I do. In my head, that is.’
Sensing dangerous ground, I changed the subject. ‘D’you think they all come out at night when everybody’s gone?’ I said, delighted with the idea. ‘That would be one hell of a literary salon.’
‘They’re not all buried here, surely,’ Nel said.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Shafeen. ‘I think these are memorials.’
‘Well, Shakespeare’s buried in Stratford-upon-Avon for a start,’ said Nel, pointing at the bard’s memorial, ‘so he’d have a bit of a commute.’
‘Doesn’t seem to bother ghosts,’ I said. I knew from experience that spirits could zip about the countryside with no effort at all.
After quite a bit of looking we found the memorial to Ben Jonson, in a gloomy corner perched above what looked like a medieval fire door. The monument was a massive disappointment. I’d identified with Ben all last term. Copying out his lines, I’d almost felt like I was channelling him, and when I’d played Poetaster in The Isle of Dogs I’d almost felt like I was him, but I felt no connection at all with this slightly pudgy stone effigy. That’s probably why I said something so dumb. ‘That doesn’t look like him at all.’
Shafeen actually laughed. ‘And how,’ he said, ‘do you know that?’
‘Well, you know, like how I imagined him. And look – they even got his name wrong.’
It was true. They’d put an ‘h’ in Jonson, like the baby wipes I took my make-up off with.
‘Like Shafeen said, that’s just a memorial,’ said Nel. ‘That’s not actually where he’s buried.
‘Well, that doesn’t count then,’ I declared. ‘Let’s find the actual grave.’
But that was easier said than done. The abbey was literally built on gravestones; they were set into the floor like the most Gothic paving stones ever. It was a vampire’s castle, a necropolis. We saw memorials for everyone from Isaac Newton to Stephen Hawking in this giant mall of the dead, but no Ben Jonson. I felt like a crap version of Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code. His Robert Langdon had found what he wanted in Westminster Abbey right away. We, on the other hand, were not too good at this treasure-hunting lark.
‘I’ll just google it,’ said Nel.
‘You can’t google in a church,’ I said, shocked.
‘Why not?’ she asked.
‘Because –’ I couldn’t actually think of a reason; my Medieval sensibilities just felt it was wrong. In the end I came out with a line from When Harry Met Sally. ‘Because of God.’ I looked for back-up. ‘Shaf?’
Shafeen shrugged. ‘Not my God,’ he said to Nel. ‘But I suppose Greer’s right.’
Nel sighed and put the phone away. ‘Fine. Why not ask the guys in red then?’
The guys in red were guides in red clerical gowns. Now, I had not been the biggest fan of red gowns ever since my trial by the Dark Order of the Grand Stag, but even I couldn’t be afraid of these characters. They were kind of churchwardens-slash-guides and were kind-looking, elderly, rosy, walking around with soft footsteps, helping dumb tourists like us with our dumb enquiries. The nearest chap was busy, so I looked about for someone else in red.
And that’s when I saw it.
It was the figure from my dream.
Someone else in head-to-toe red, but this time a hooded onesie, standing in the middle of the transept, facing away from me. The figure was absolutely still as tourists milled around it, and something about the stance and the stillness gave me a thrill of fear. Wordlessly, as if I was back in the dream that had birthed it, I walked towards the figure.
But, as I started to walk, it did too. I broke into a trot, then a run, and it paced me, staying ahead. My feet pounded the paving slabs that separated me from the dead, and tombs, tapestries and shredded banners of battle flashed past on either side. I pushed past tourists, shoving and shoulder-barging, ignoring all the protests in different languages, and Shafeen and Nel calling Greer! as politely as they could from behind me. I followed the figure in red down the transept, round a corner and into the nave. I was pretty sure that running in a church was far more disrespectful than googling, but at that moment I didn’t care. I had to see that face.
Suddenly the figure had to push through a guided tour and I was gaining. I shoved my way through the little knot of people listening to their guide in their shared language, reaching my hand out to grasp a handful of red cloth. I swear my fingertips grazed the fabric – the tough utility cloth of a pair of overalls. I had them now. I burst out of the other side of the group to find – nothing.
The figure in red had completely disappeared.
I spun through 360 degrees, just as Nel had done, but instead of wonder I felt only confusion. Where had they gone? The only figures in red that I could see now were the warden types. Mr Onesie had gone.
I looked down in despair, and there, right under my feet, was a black diamond of stone, worked with black lettering. Instantly I forgot the red runner. ‘I found it!’ I exclaimed – probably a bit too loudly for a church.
Shafeen and Nel caught up with me, breathing heavily. Nel leaned on a pillar and Shafeen doubled over. ‘Greer,’ he said when he could speak, ‘what the hell? Why did you just take off like that?’
I didn’t feel I could explain about the fox and the dream and the figure in red. So I just grinned cheekily. ‘Ta-da!’ I said, indicating, with magician hands, the stone beneath my feet. They both gathered around, forgetting to be pissed off.
The stone was a square with sides about the length of a school ruler, hewn out of dark slate and set on its point like a diamond. In the dim transept it would have been easy to miss. We could have walked around that abbey all day and never found it. It occurred to me then that, were it not for the red runner, I might have missed it completely. Was this what they had wanted to show me?
We knelt on the cold stone reverently and took a closer look at the grave. The writing was not that easy to read, seeing as it was carved into black stone, but in the gloom we could just make it out.
O RARE
BEN JOHNSON
‘Spelled wrong again, poor fella,’ I said sadly. ‘And what is that line? O rare Ben Jonson? It doesn’t make sense. He wasn’t rare, he was unique.’
Shafeen said, ‘It doesn’t look like the right spacing either.’ He was right, the O and the RARE were too close together. It looked like they’d just not bothered to get anything right – the spelling, the lettering and certainly not the content.
‘You’d think they could have written something better than that,’ I said, ‘for the grave of someone who was so good with words. You know, used one of his best lines, his greatest hits.’ I was getting angrier than I had any right to be, but I felt that it was pretty pathetic for a playwright of Ben’s stature. ‘It’s really small too,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t he get a huge tomb?’
‘Well, I won’t suggest googling,’ said Nel testily as we all got to our feet. ‘Although, at the end of the day, it’s just reading. Why it’s any different from reading a guidebook, which everyone is doing, I don’t know.’
Then I realised what I’d been holding in my hand the whole time. The Poets’ Corner guidebook they’d given me with the tickets. I waved it. ‘Good call, Ms Ashton. It probably says right here.’
I leafed through the glossy book and found the right section. I felt it dissed Ben a bit as he was shoved in with Shakespeare and Other Elizabethans. ‘Here we go. Oh, this is really sad.’
‘Go on,’ prompted Nel.
‘It says here that the Dean of Westminster promised Ben Jonson that he could be buried in the abbey,’ I said, ‘but Jonson said he was too poor for a normal grave and that two foot square would do for him. That’s why he was buried upright.’
I remembered Abbot Ridley saying something about that, when we’d discussed Ben Jonson last term. Buried standing up. Suddenly I found that small black diamond of stone incredibly moving. It seemed so tragic that, when other, richer poets could rest in peace on their fat backs, poor Ben had to stand up for all eternity. It was then that I realised I really felt a kinship with the playwright. I had shared more than his work. I had shared his trial. I knelt again and put my thumb on the stone just under his name, the thumb that had been branded just like his. It left no mark, but that didn’t matter. I felt that the ghostly Ben Jonson, from that other plane, was reaching up to touch my thumb with his own. Like I was high-fiving the dead.
