Tigers

by M A Bennett

  I knew I should call out for Rollo, just like I had given up Melati to the Queen of England. But I knew in my heart that I should not have called out then, and that I should not call out now. It had been my fault that Melati’s life had ended that day, to spend eternity on the floor of our house in Jaipur. Was I about to end another life? I looked at the fox, and the fox looked at me. Neither of us moved. I didn’t speak, but I sent him a message – this will sound foolish – with my eyes. Go, I said. Run. Be free.

  And the dog fox with the black points trotted past me into the open country.

  I turned my horse’s head to the covert and caught the white blob of a face in the corner of my eye. I turned to see Rollo looking right at me. He had seen the whole thing.

  He rode over. ‘What the bloody hell d’ye think you’re doing?’

  ‘I … I …’

  ‘That was him! That was the fox!’ He flung out his arm to the fox’s path. ‘You were supposed to turn him back. Show him to the hounds.’ I was silent.

  ‘Are you an imbecile? What happened?’ I could have told him. About the tigress and the queen. But I didn’t even know how to begin.

  ‘Cat got your tongue?’

  A tiger got it, I thought, and absurdly wanted to laugh. Instead, I said, ‘I thought he was a cub. I did not know he was an old fox.’ But I did know.

  He regarded me with his cold blue eyes. ‘Some hunter.’ He curled his lip. ‘By Royal Appointment.’

  Then he rode away.

  And I wanted to cry.

  I haven’t seen him that angry ever. In all the years he has presided over my humiliation at STAGS, he’s always done so with a smile, killing with kindness, cutting with charm. This was not the flash of irritation he’d shown over Ina the night before. This was white-hot anger. I felt it in my middle just under my ribs, right in the very heart of me. His anger, and something else too. Yes – his disappointment.

  I didn’t know what to do, so I followed. We were a sombre procession riding home. Rollo’s mood affected all of us. No one spoke until we had all dismounted in the stable yard. Serena laid a hand on Rollo’s arm, but he shrugged it away. ‘I’ll see you all at dinner.’ Then he strode off alone, back to the house, flicking his boot angrily with his riding crop as he walked. I had to endure the scornful glances of the Medievals, but after Rollo’s scorn I barely felt them.

  In my bathroom I ran the hottest water I could into the claw-footed bath and attempted to boil myself warm again. Largely it worked – the feeling came back into my fingers and toes and limbs. But there was something cold in my core, and I thought I could give a name to it. Rollo’s anger – no, his disappointment – still lodged in my chest like a stone. I must have stayed in that bath for hours, almost unmoving, watching the branches wagging about on the brow of the distant hill, watching the sky rot from white to grey to black. I stayed in there until the water was cold, then I heaved myself out and dressed for dinner.

  Evening

  As if I was not nervous enough, dinner was in the Great Hall, a place I had not yet been. The first thing I saw in the enormous baronial room was a tiger-skin rug, stretched out on the floor. Immediately I was reminded of Melati, reclining forever on our floor in Jaipur, but as I walked closer I could see that this one was a male – an enormous, grizzled old warrior, doubtless laid low by some de Warlencourt blunderbuss many moons ago. I mentally named him Shere Khan, and I skirted him carefully and took my place at the table – a much more formal setting than last night, with a snow-white tablecloth, regiments of steel cutlery and sentinels of crystal glass. Silver candlesticks stood guard in pairs all down the length of the table, and the Medievals sat, boy/girl/boy/girl, in strict rotation. The young men, including myself, were in the evening uniform of white tie and tails. The young ladies were in coloured taffeta of green, amber and red. They reminded me of traffic lights.

  They all spoke to each other, over the space of three courses, as if I was not there. They spoke of plans for Christmas, families they all knew. They spoke of the royal family, and Charles, the new Prince of Wales – with whom some of them seemed to have more than a nodding acquaintance – with obvious approval. They spoke of the civil rights movement in America with just as obvious disapproval. Then they moved on to the Stonewall riots. The only issue that seemed to exercise them as much as black people having a voice was homosexuals having a voice. Those who had taken part in the protests over the summer in New York occupied Gideon’s particular Seventh Circle of Hell. ‘I’d shoot the lot of ’em,’ he said. ‘Bloody deviants. The scum of the earth.’

  Charles agreed. ‘The Raj had the right idea. They condemned queers to death. Strung ’em up like rats.’

  All of them drank heavily. Not one of them spoke to me or looked at me. I wonder if they had been briefed by Rollo or were merely following his lead. I began to question my own existence. But that was Rollo for you. His charm was palpable. When he smiled at you, the sun shone. When he frowned, the clouds came and you felt the chill of the shade.

  As the evening wore on I found that I could not bear it. I had to speak to him.

  I wanted to wait until the traffic-light girls were gone. I knew, from my mother’s tutelage, that it was traditional at the end of the meal for the womenfolk to withdraw to the drawing room to drink coffee, and for the men to stay around the table drinking port. But that did not seem to be happening. Unable to stand it any more, I burst out: ‘Can’t we hunt him tomorrow?’

  There was a silence, and everyone’s eyes swivelled to fall on me. I looked at Rollo. Would he pretend he did not know what I was talking about?

  He did not pretend. ‘We might put up another fox,’ he said coldly. ‘But not that one. He’ll be in Yorkshire by now.’ He turned away to talk to Gideon. I had to stop him.

  ‘I could catch him for you,’ I blurted rashly. I knew I had let the fox go today. It had been my fault. And I was by no means certain that I could catch that particular fox for Rollo. But I felt I had to try. I had to lay him at his feet as a tribute. Then maybe he would not look at me as he was looking at me then.

  ‘How?’ he asked pointedly. ‘Look them in the eyes, I suppose.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Call him by his right name. Know him. That’s how you find him.’

  Rollo looked interested. He turned to the ancient butler. ‘A bottle of the Veuve Clicquot 1912, Coles.’

  The old man bowed. ‘Very good, m’lord.’

  All the staff filed out behind him, and I wondered why it took five of them to get one bottle of wine. Ina gave me a tiny smile as she passed. Watching them all go gave me a tiny jag of panic under my ribs. When you are being bullied at school, you don’t like it when the teacher leaves the room. This was like that.

  And then, just to make matters worse, all the electric lights went out.

  The girls squealed happily. Rollo said easily, ‘Ah. What a nuisance. Bloody power cut. Happens all the time. At least we have the candles. The old ways don’t let you down.’

  The air was humming with a certain energy. The staff leaving, the lights going down – I felt like I was filling up with foreboding, like a glass of dark wine.

  ‘Let’s play a little game,’ said Rollo, ‘to test your theorem.’

  ‘A parlour game?’

  ‘Let’s call it a variant on hide and seek.’ He rose and walked over to me, standing just behind my chair. My flesh began to prickle.

  ‘I must call you by your right name.’

  I kept my eyes looking dead ahead and listened. In this insane ceremony of his, would he call me Hardy, as he had when I came into his house as his guest?

  ‘I name you Mowgli.’ I felt a hand on my head, just as the Abbot blessed the kindergarten children in the chapel at STAGS.

  ‘But we have to christen him properly,’ urged Gideon. ‘Wet the baby’s head.’

  ‘You’re absolutely right, Gidders.’

  Then, at last, I turned my head, just in time to see Rollo hold his glass of claret high and pour
it all over me. Over my carefully combed hair, my dress shirt and my tail coat.

  As the wine dripped, I looked imploringly at the door. Surely the butler would be back with the champagne Rollo had asked for, and then this insanity would have to stop? But no one came.

  Rollo bent close to my ear. ‘We’re going to see if we can catch you,’ he whispered. ‘If you get away, you win. If we catch you, we do.’

  ‘What do I win?’ I asked, heart thumping.

  ‘Your life,’ said Gideon.

  ‘You are joking,’ I said nervously.

  ‘Of course he is,’ said Rollo smoothly.

  ‘So?’ I could barely trust my voice. ‘What do I win?’

  ‘What do you want? What do you want most of all?’

  He walked around my chair and hopped up nimbly onto the long table, perching right in front of me.

  ‘I know what you want.’ He looked directly at me. ‘I’ll give you what you want most of all.’

  I knew now I had nothing to lose. ‘And what is that?’

  ‘You want to be like me,’ he said, clearly now, so that all his minions could hear.

  ‘You want to walk like me. Talk like me. Don’t you, Mowgli? Because, you see, even someone like you can learn to be human too.’

  I recognised the similarity to the Jungle Book lyrics a split second before the laughter started.

  ‘So, Mowgli,’ said Gideon, over all the vultures crowing, ‘here are the Laws of the Jungle.’ Once again, he was attempting to assume the role of leader. ‘No going outside, including the roof. No bedrooms except your own. And no help from the servants.’

  I looked back at Rollo for evidence of a joke. This was insanity. But he only smiled sleepily and quoted, once again, from The Jungle Book. This time he was playing Shere Khan, the tiger giving the defenceless man-cub a head start to make the chase more ‘interesting’. He leaned very close to me, as close as a kiss. And started counting. ‘One …’

  I looked into his blue eyes, then at all the other Medievals.

  He meant it.

  They meant it.

  I ran.

  Night

  It is impossible to describe how unnerving it was being in that house in the dark. Outside the Great Hall, and beyond the golden light of the candles, it was hard, at first, to see anything at all. I knew that the Great Hall led into the atrium where the grand staircase was, so I made for that. I galloped up the stairs on all fours like an animal. From the Great Hall I could hear the Medievals baying to me – Run, Mowgli, run. I could not tell you how many flights I climbed, or when my instinct told me to stop climbing and run down a passageway, or where I ended up. I paused in my flight and tried to let my eyes get used to the dark. There was no light but the weak silver moonlight, filtering through the diamond-paned windows. I was in a part of the house that I have never been in before. Judging from the dim view through the window over the neat and formal gardens – the green now rendered in silver and grey – I was reasonably high up, perhaps on the third floor. Turning back, I could just make out that I was in a wide passageway, with carpet on the floor and paintings on the walls, and chairs squatting at intervals, arms open in welcome, inviting me to sit down. I knew I could not. I had to keep moving, but also, like any prey, I had to gauge where my pursuers were. I stood very still and listened. The catcalling from the Great Hall had stopped, but the silence was much more frightening. It was so quiet that I could hear the sound of my own heart thumping. Then a sudden sound almost made me jump out of my skin, like the tiger downstairs. It was a regular wheezing, like someone breathing, but almost mechanical. Then the music started: a plinky-plonky guitar arpeggio, filling my veins with ice. Then the voice began to sing – a woman’s voice – and I think I will remember the song it sang for the rest of my days.

  It was a breathy little-girl voice, and it was spine-chilling. She seemed to be singing to a tiger, asking him to teach her how to kiss him, and to show her what to do. It had a refrain which went wah wah wah – half little girl crying, half grown woman kissing. It was deeply disturbing. Almost in a trance, I walked towards the sound, until I could see, in the moonlight, the wide metal bell of the gramophone – the same gramophone that had been transported up to the folly. The device was now sitting on a side table, between two chairs, and black vinyl was turning, turning. Numbly I watched the record revolve, my mind whirring too. I had to deal with two possibilities. Either the gramophone had been set going by an unseen hand, in which case the Medievals were already ahead of me, or there was some supernatural force at work in this dreadful house. Either way, I could no longer stay. Game or not, I abandoned the hunt. I just wanted to get away. The breathy music seemed to enter the very bones of me, poisoning my flesh from within, and the passageway seemed in the darkness to be leaning in, closing down to trap me as I turned and ran.

  No bedrooms, except your own. Gideon’s words came back to me. The Laws of the Jungle dictated that I could not go into any bedroom except my own. But that meant that I could just go to my room and sit this nightmare out. If I was on the third floor now, I had to get back down to the first floor, where my bedroom was. I ran swiftly back down the stairs and turned right into the passageway where I knew my room was located. For a panicked moment I could not remember the name of my room – something to do with a number. I looked at the names lettered in gold on each door. Forster, Fenwick, Musgrave, Raby. Something to do with a number. That was it: Levens.

  I turned the handle and then I saw something right in front of my nose that I had not seen earlier – perhaps it was the moonlight that picked it out. It was a pair of deer antlers, drawn in chalk on the wood, just like I’d seen on my leather suitcase. But I did not have time to wonder about the strange rune that marked out my door at that moment. I burst through it, locked it behind me and then leaned on it, breathing hard.

  I had not found the room particularly welcoming when I arrived. It was icy cold, like anywhere in northern England, when you moved more than a yard away from the fire. The leaded windows (now stained dark with night) had no curtains, but the four-poster bed did, and there was a boar’s head on the wall over the mantel, but at that moment it seemed like safe harbour in a storm. Nothing was stopping me from staying in here, closing the heavy drapes around the bed until I was in a square of safety, pulling the brocade bedspread over my head and waiting for daylight. It didn’t seem very glorious, nor very manly for my newly eighteen-year-old self, but I no longer cared. At least nothing could happen to me in here. I put on every light and lamp in the place to banish the dark corners.

  I was not willing to leave the room to visit the bathroom. Luckily my room had a fitted basin, so I was not dependent on the washstand and the brass cans of hot water that poor Ina had to carry up and down. I took off my tail coat and untied my tie; rolled up the sleeves of my wine-stained dress shirt. Before I ran the tap I leaned on the cold porcelain with both hands and regarded myself in the mirror above the basin like I was looking at someone else. All black hair and black eyes and brown skin; tall enough to be a man. I looked at that person like Rollo had looked at me, with that unforgettable stare of utter contempt. But the person in the mirror just looked scared. I despised him.

  I looked away from his gaze and ran the hot tap into the basin. The tap gave a gurgle, then a spit, then it began to run.

  As I’ve already written, I’d put on all the lights, so I know that what I saw was real.

  What came out of the tap was not water, but blood.

  For the first fraction of a second I thought it was brown water, which sometimes gushes out of the ancient plumbing at STAGS before it runs clear. But I put a finger below the flow and held it to my nose. It even had the sickly meat-and-metal smell I remember from tiger hunts.

  I jumped away in horror before it could splash me and caught my reflection in the mirror once again. The room was arctic; the blood was warm and so the mirror steamed up at once. My terrified face blurred with condensation, but a few lines stayed clear. Lines tha
t made up letters, written on the mirror by an unseen hand.

  R U N

  I started backwards. Who was doing this? I turned frantically, expecting to see someone in the room, but there were only blank windows, a dying fire and the empty bed. The only presence was the boar’s head on the wall. As I looked – and I swear to all the gods this is true – the head moved. It swivelled on its mount, neck straining, snout snuffling, little tusks curled like an elephant’s, to look straight at me.

  That’s when I took the mirror’s advice. I unlocked the door, wrenched it open and ran.

  As the upstairs held no sanctuary for me, I went all the way down the grand staircase again, to the ground floor. No longer caring for Gideon’s Laws of the Jungle, I rattled at the great doors to the outside but they were, of course, locked. I pelted down a passageway, right to the end, and pulled open a door into the dark. Once inside, I looked around, eyes adjusting, but I could hardly have found a less friendly haven. The hunter’s moon – my only ally tonight – described the filigree of chainmail and the wicked blades of a thousand swords and spears mounted on the walls.

  An armoury.

  The room was flanked with suits of armour and it was chilling walking between them, my bare feet soundless on the parquet flooring. At every instant I expected the faceless knights to turn and look at me, as I was convinced the boar had done. It occurred to me that I could hide among these metal ghosts. Could I even put on that suit and stand, sleeping on my feet, until morning? As I put out a hand to touch the nearest breastplate, a voice spoke out of the blackness.

  ‘I am Gian Maria Visconti, Renaissance prince.’

  I froze to the spot as the hollow tones boomed out of the metal helm. ‘This is my armour. For sport I set my hunting hounds to course and dismember men.’ The knight raised one creaking arm and pointed his jointed finger at me.

  Heart still pounding, I reversed out of the room as fast as I could and ran the other way, doubling back on myself towards the stairs. I raced through the cavernous atrium, past the grand staircase, with the statue standing at the top.