by M A Bennett
‘Ironic, really,’ said the Abbot, following my gaze.
‘What is?’
‘St Aidan. His power was to protect his disciples from fire.’
I nodded at the saintly face as I turned to go. ‘Perhaps he did.’
I was nearly at the door when he called after me.
‘Greer. If it’s any consolation, I don’t think you are in any danger at all.’
2
After all that, I ambushed Shafeen and Nel on the way out of Commons.
I marched them off to the Paulinus well, because even though it was fricking freezing, it was the place where we always discussed important stuff. Set as it was right in the middle of the green quadrangle, you could see any would-be eavesdroppers approaching from miles away. The first thing I did, of course, was to share Reynard’s letter with them. They read it together, one dark head and one blonde head bent over the paper, and I watched their eyes widen as they absorbed the fact that there was a centuries-old secret society working against the DOGS.
Straight away Shafeen noticed something I hadn’t. ‘This is the same seal, and the same writing.’
‘As what?’ I asked.
‘As the Monteagle Letter. The letter I got at Cumberland Place. The letter that warned us not to go to Longcross. It had the same fox seal, and the same writing.’
‘So the Abbot was telling the truth when he said we weren’t supposed to be targets,’ I blurted out. Then, of course, I had to explain all about my meeting with Abbot Ridley in the chapel.
‘So this letter is from the Abbot?’ asked Nel, the girl with the one-track mind. She’d had a crush on the Abbot since day one.
‘He said not,’ I assured her. ‘But he wouldn’t tell me who Reynard is. The Abbot’s definitely one of the FOXES, but I don’t think he’s at the top of the organisation. And he kept going on about being briefed and stuff. I don’t know if he’s even a teacher, but he gives a pretty good impression of being one.’
The idea of him being some sort of Man from U.N.C.L.E. undercover agent obviously increased the Abbot’s glamour in Nel’s eyes. She had an interesting take on the whole thing. ‘Well, that suits me if he’s not really a teacher,’ she said archly.
There was no need to ask her what she meant. ‘You’re not seriously planning to take that whole crush thing to the next level, are you?’ I said despairingly.
‘Why not?’ she asked, wide-eyed. ‘It’s not against the law. Not now, anyway.’
‘Hmm, I dunno,’ I said doubtfully. ‘He’s still supposedly in a position of power over you, and that makes it a bit … well … icky.’
‘Leaving aside Nel’s love life for a moment,’ said Shafeen, ‘I think him clamming up like that is a good thing. We’re obviously not required to do anything just yet, even if we choose to join the FOXES. Like I said last term, we can’t spend all our time Sherlocking. We’ve got grades to get. Nel and I have got our Oxford interviews. This way we can concentrate on our own thing and wait for him to make a move, and be ready to support him all the way.’
‘You’ve changed your tune,’ I said, a bit sharply. Shafeen had never had much time for the Abbot before. ‘You would run with the fox then, not ride with the hounds?’
‘A hundred per cent,’ he said.
‘Nel?’
She nodded in agreement. ‘Nathaniel Ridley, contra mundum.’
I must’ve looked blank.
‘Against the world.’
So we watched the wall, and term just carried on as if nothing had happened. A couple of times I tried to talk to Ty privately, but she wasn’t having it – in company she was as friendly as ever, but even so she was always able to avoid any alone time with me – as slippery as one of those silvery fishes in Longmere. The one time I did catch her alone, she was crossing Bede’s Piece one evening. I saw her footsteps falter as she came towards me, but it was too late for her to avoid my path. I tried to talk about the FOXES then – what were they planning? And when? Ty just shook her head and said, ‘Seen anything of Henry lately?’
‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘You?’
She gave me a weirdly hostile look, and I thought then how odd it was being friends with someone who trusted me as little as Ty did. She made as if to walk past.
I grabbed the sleeve of her Tudor coat. ‘Ty,’ I said, ‘what happened at Longcross, with Henry? That night when you talked to him?’
She looked at me with her head on one side. She smiled, almost in her old way. ‘We got on like a house on fire.’
Then I was alone in the middle of the playing fields, the night growing dark around me.
When I’d told Ty that I hadn’t seen Henry, that was almost the truth. Shafeen, Nel and I had scoured the Internet for any clues as to his whereabouts. By night, with our curtains closed and doors locked, we’d take out our Saros smartphones and look for him. All those creepy fan sites were there, and the faceless Facebook pages, and the threads of conspiracy weaving all through Twitter. There were thousands of posts paying tribute to Henry’s beauty, and his style; plenty of pictures of his house, and his horses, and his clothes – what I call Privilege Porn. Oxbridge dining societies would still have moonlit black-tie dinners in his name, and YouTube nutters would jump off stupidly high waterfalls in what they called the De Warlencourt Challenge. And yet no one, but no one, was suggesting that Henry was still alive. No one had an inkling that Henry was still lurking somewhere on Google Earth. There hadn’t been a single sighting, and his de Warlencourt features hadn’t been captured in any photographs.
Except one.
It was a grainy photo of the fire-ravaged facade of Longcross, which we’d found on the Daily Mail Online. It was a creepy enough photo, with the windows like empty eye sockets, the glass burned and cracked and blasted from the heat of the inferno. Bruised eye sockets too, charred and blackened all around from the flames. I’d been the one to see it first – I’d pinched and enlarged the picture until it was hopelessly pixelated. But there, I was sure, was a face at one of the windows.
‘That’s him,’ I said.
The others looked over my shoulder. We were on Shafeen’s bed in Honorius, curtains open so the moon could see in. Nel peered closely. ‘That could be anyone.’
‘With blond hair,’ I said.
Shafeen peered. ‘Could be a hard hat. That’s a workman, trust me.’
‘No. It’s him. I can tell by his face,’ I insisted.
‘I dunno,’ said Nel doubtfully. ‘I mean, it could be. But …’
‘But what?’
‘Not being funny,’ she said reluctantly, ‘but you could be projecting. It’s like the Man in the Moon.’
‘What?? Explain,’ I demanded.
‘Well, you know how people see a face on the moon’s surface? But there’s nothing really there. I mean, there is something. But not a face. Just seas and craters and stuff.’
I stared at the picture, the hollows that could be eyes, the slash of a mouth. The seas and craters of – a face?
‘All right,’ said Shafeen. ‘Suppose it is him. What’s he staring at?’
I didn’t reply. I knew for a fact that was Henry in the window. I could tell by the way he was standing, the way he was staring.
And I had the oddest feeling he was staring at me.
3
I didn’t say anything to the others, but back in my own room I fired up Instagram and sent the picture to mrs_de_warlencourt.
You never knew – she might have been able to confirm my suspicions that Henry was still living in the shell of his ancestral home. But the account lay dormant. I wasn’t sure, weirdly, if I missed mrs_de_warlencourt or Ty more, and that was mad since they were the same person. But something was keeping me and Ty apart, and his name was Henry. That beautiful sisterhood we’d formed in my hospital room had stalled. Henry was the reason Ty couldn’t trust me.
As for the three OG friends, we spoke way more about Rollo’s death than Henry’s resurrection. Shafeen and I went over and over that
deathbed scene that we’d witnessed. It wasn’t so much the doctor’s revelation that Rollo had been poisoned that consumed us (although we did indulge in some Knives Out guessing games about whodunnit), but that last, cryptic apology that Rollo had spoken to Aadhish Jadeja, via his son. Shafeen dwelled on that a lot.
‘Why was it so important to him?’ he wondered aloud. ‘Of all the people in that house, the one person he wanted to say goodbye to was me, because he thought I was my father. Why did he need to see him? Why did he need to say what he said?’
‘Hmm,’ I mused. ‘It was his Rosebud moment.’
‘Rosebud?’
‘Citizen Kane. When Kane dies he says one single word: Rosebud. No one has a clue what he’s talking about. And the whole of the rest of the film is finding out what the hell he meant.’
‘Well,’ said Shafeen, ‘Rollo said considerably more than one word. But we still don’t know what the hell he meant.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘All that Kiss me, Hardy stuff – I mean, what was all that about? And the apology?’
‘It’s deathbed confession stuff, isn’t it?’ said Shafeen, clearly still affected by what he had seen. ‘As a good Catholic it’s the last chance saloon, the final moment to repent of any sins before shuffling off this mortal coil. And what he’d done to my father was clearly top of his shit list.’
‘True,’ I said, ‘but what about what he’d done with him. Think about it. Rollo’s exact words were: “But I’m not sorry for what we did together.” That sounds like they both hunted – or shot or fished – someone else.’
And there I always hit a roadblock. Shafeen simply couldn’t bring himself to believe that his father had done anything wrong back in that Justitium weekend in 1969. ‘You could always ask him,’ I said simply.
‘I will,’ he said. ‘At Easter. I haven’t even told him Rollo’s dead.’
‘You haven’t?’ I was surprised. ‘Why not?’
‘My parents know about the fire and everything,’ he said. ‘But I wanted to break the news about Rollo myself. I’m going to India at Easter and that’s only a few weeks away.’
‘Why in person?’
He looked at me very directly. ‘You were there, Greer. You know how … weird it all was. Rollo’s death is all caught up in what he said about my father. I just feel like it’s something I want to tell him myself.’
Fair enough. Then a thought struck. ‘Maybe,’ I would say, if I dared, ‘if your dad did … join in all their reindeer games, as it were, he was sort of forced to? You know, he maybe had to play along with the death hunts, otherwise he’d be the victim himself?’
‘No,’ Shafeen would say. ‘Not Father. He would never do that in a million years.’
And I’d shut the hell up. But the facts were there. A dying man had spoken.
What we did together.
Rollo’s Rosebud moment was pretty damning for Aadhish.
So the FOXES were at bay, hiding in the undergrowth for now. Cass and Louis, Henry’s twin cousins, went about their business, untroubled by any rumblings of revolution. Neither one of them, it seemed, had seen Henry in the fire, but Cass happily believed him alive, and Louis – as he was still Lord Longcross, following the death of Uncle Rollo – happily believed him dead. The new lordling was merely marking time until he could leave school and take over the estate. Nothing more was said about Rollo’s untimely death. The word poison was never mentioned – according to the press, he’d died in the fire. The Earl of Longcross was gone, his body was ash and there would be no prospect of a post-mortem. Shafeen, perversely, seemed happier since he had seen the living, breathing Henry de Warlencourt. He knew very well that I thought of Henry, that I wondered what he was doing and that I’d found him a changed character. But it was almost as if he could deal with a living rival better than a dead one. I got the sense that he thought this was more like a fair fight. And there, at the head of it all, the Abbot stayed in his post, watching and waiting.
But soon the DOGS and the FOXES and all the other creatures of the forest had to take second place to something else. The Probitiones loomed – the STAGS equivalent of A levels – and straight after Christmas and all the drama of the fire and Rollo’s death, we had to cram for our mocks. All of us had to work hard, and our exams consumed our days. Even when they were over, we were into the last big push of revision, before the real deal in the summer. I was accepted into Oxford, followed by Shafeen and then Nel, and it almost seemed as if we’d all be leaving the school without any more drama. And we would have, if it hadn’t been for one thing that happened just before the Easter holidays.
One Savage intrusion into our Medieval world.
It was a phone call.
4
When I was summoned to the Abbot’s study, two days before half-term, I knew something big had happened.
As I followed the Year 10 kid who had come to get me from my history class to the gatehouse I thought: Here we go. The game’s afoot. He’s going to keep me posted, as he said he would.
So when I walked into the dark-wood study and saw Shafeen sitting at the Abbot’s desk with the old-fashioned phone receiver in his hand, I was shocked. The Abbot was standing over him, one hand on his shoulder, looking down at Shafeen with an unreadable expression. As I walked forward Shafeen lifted his head to look at me – his face was grey. I went straight over and stood by him.
‘What’s happened?’ I asked the Abbot. He just shook his head. And that’s when I knew it was serious.
As if I’d taken over his sentry duty, the Abbot gave up his place and retreated to the window. Nervily, I just waited with one hand on Shafeen’s shoulder as he talked into the phone. I stared, almost unseeing, at the collage of things in frames behind the Abbot’s desk. A master’s degree certificate from the University of Oxford. A younger version of the Abbot in graduation gear standing with two tall, good-looking parents outside the Sheldonian Theatre. A slightly older, gap-year-aged Nathaniel Ridley (wearing an orange-and-black stripy tie that made him look like an overgrown schoolboy) on some sort of safari in a hot place. And all the time Shafeen’s voice was there in the background, speaking Hindi to the person on the other end of the phone. I felt it under my hand, rather than heard it; that beautiful, frightening, alien language.
Eventually Shafeen replaced the phone receiver onto its old-fashioned stand, so carefully, as if he might shatter it. ‘That was my mother.’ He didn’t seem able to say any more, as if the switch from one language to another had temporarily glitched his brain.
I looked at the Abbot. He said softly, ‘I received a phone call from a hospital in Jaipur. Prince Aadhish has suffered a heart attack. I informed Shafeen myself, then invited him to call his mother. But I thought he would like you here.’
Instantly my memory flipped back to the term before, when Abbot Ridley had received a phone call, on that same ancient rotary phone, about the Old Abbot’s ‘death’. I said hesitantly, ‘The prince. He’s not … not …?’
‘No,’ said Ridley. ‘Not dead. He is stable but has not yet recovered consciousness. In view of his condition, and the fact that we are only two days from the Easter break, I think it best that Shafeen goes home without delay.’
Shafeen got up, slightly unsteadily. He looked dazed. ‘Yes. Yes, of course. I’ll see if I can get a seat on an earlier flight.’
He didn’t look in any condition to do anything. As I watched him struggle to even work the door handle I made up my mind. I wasn’t going to let him face this alone.
‘Better see if you can get two,’ I said. ‘I’m coming with you.’
He turned, still dazed. ‘Coming where?’
I caught his hand and gave it a little waggle. ‘Where d’you think? To India.’
5
Of course, it wasn’t as simple as all that.
I had to make things right with my dad (easy – he was going to be filming for most of spring), get some jabs (harder – and quite painful, if I’m honest) and get a visa for India (har
dest – the Abbot had to pull some serious STAGS strings at the Foreign Office). But the short version is that three days later Shafeen and I were landing at Jaipur International Airport.
It had been in my mind to invite Nel – we’d always been a three – but this was Shafeen’s thing really and I was there to support him as his girlfriend. This wasn’t Glastonbury – I couldn’t just invite her along. Nel actually didn’t seem to mind – as her parents were overseas too, she was staying at school for this sixth-form half-term Revision School they were doing. Although that sounded absolutely deadly to me, she seemed quite content – I was pretty sure she saw it as an opportunity to get closer to the Abbot, now that she knew he wasn’t, in a conventional sense, a teacher. At any other time this would have been a worry, but at that moment I had no bandwidth for anyone but Shafeen.
That remembered heat, like opening the door of an oven, hit me as soon as we left the plane. I’d been to India once, visiting with Shafeen the summer before, but had forgotten, after our polite English sunshine, how fierce the sun could be.
After the hubbub and crowds of baggage claim, the Jadejas’ driver, Hari, was a welcome sight.
His slick appearance, with crisp, white shirt and sunglasses, and the long, black car that was waiting for us reminded me just how rich Shafeen was.
Henry rich.
Shafeen had paid for my plane ticket without hesitation, and now his driver helped us politely into the car, which was so air-conditioned that goosebumps immediately stood up on my arms. I sipped ice-cool bottled water as Hari smoothly answered Shafeen’s questions over his shoulder while at the same time negotiating Jaipur’s mental traffic. I looked at the back of Hari’s sleek head. He must have his own life, his own family, like the driver guy in Parasite, but he had given his life to the Jadeja family. The parallels between the Jadejas and the de Warlencourts were complete. A handsome older dad. A much younger mum. An only son and heir – the image of his father. And now, here, the Jadejas’ version of Bates, the faithful family servant. I just hoped Hari was a bit more faithful than Bates had turned out to be.
