Tigers

by M A Bennett

  I stopped in my tracks. There had not been a statue there before.

  ‘I am Diana, goddess of the hunt.’

  It was, of course, the statue that spoke. She pivoted on her plinth, looked down and addressed me, her blank eyes as black as a shark’s. ‘When Actaeon looked upon my nakedness, he had to be killed.’ The voice was Francesca’s. The moonlight had leached her hair of its fiery red colour and lent a luminous sheen to her already-white skin. If Francesca was the statue, that meant she was standing there naked.

  ‘Are you looking upon my nakedness?’

  I was. Of course I was. She was the first naked girl I had ever seen. I told the truth. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you think I’m beautiful?’

  I told a lie. ‘Yes.’

  She seemed satisfied with this answer, and I counselled myself. This was only Francesca. The voice of the knight, though distorted by the metal helm, I now knew to be Charles. I tried to slow my heartbeats with this knowledge. And it worked, until something truly incredible happened. Francesca raised her bow, pulled the string back to its fullest extent with a creak of the wood and pointed the wicked arrow right at me.

  ‘Well, now you’ve seen me, Mowgli, you’d better keep moving,’ she said, her voice thrumming on the taut bowstring like the song of a sitar. ‘We don’t want any accidents.’

  Then she actually loosed the arrow. It sheared through the air and thumped into the great door behind me, just inches from my head.

  I sprang to the side, but if she’d wanted to hit me, it would have been too late. I skidded down the passageway in the other direction from the armoury and went through another pair of great doors. This was a vast room, the floor as polished as ice, with a chandelier hanging above, capturing the moonlight in its brilliants. The walls were covered in something, floor to ceiling, and a curving iron ladder offered the sanctuary of a gallery above. I scrambled up it and lay down, heart nearly bursting out of my chest. I was still for some moments, trying to calm myself. Until that arrow, I could believe it was only a game. Now I knew it was much more serious.

  Minutes ticked by and I began to take in my surroundings. A row of shapes beside my face resolved into being. Books. The walls were covered in books. This was a library. The friendly moonlight helped me read the lettering on the spines next to my head – dates. Black books with no titles, just dates – decades stretching back in time; perhaps encyclopaedias or something of that sort.

  I heard a muffling, shuffling sound from below and froze again, listening. A soft thud; footsteps approaching; footsteps retreating. I was confident that where I lay I could not be seen by any pursuers below, but I was also trapped. I wished then, very hard, for some secret passage that could take me from this place. But it was no good wishing. I would have to go down eventually. I waited for utter silence and then made my move.

  As I descended I could see very clearly and unmistakably, by the light of the big double doors, a body, lying prone on the parquet. I trod closer.

  It was Gideon, lying dead with an arrow in his chest.

  Someone was shouting. It was me. My screams echoed through the malignant house.

  Better keep moving. We don’t want any … accidents. Had Gideon been an accident? Now giving myself away didn’t matter. Now was not a time for games. Now was the time for grown-ups – for the servants, for the police, for the coroner.

  But no one came to my aid. Once I’d stopped howling, there was waiting and darkness and silence. The silence told me something.

  They were not going to stop.

  They were going to carry on with this twisted game of hide and seek.

  My one hope was the servants. Ina said she lived in. But I did not know where her quarters were, and I knew that, however great the emergency, I could not burst into a young woman’s room in the dead of night. Discovery would result in the dismissal she so feared. As for the footmen and the housekeeper and the butler – who was to say they wouldn’t be on Rollo’s side? Who was to say this was unusual? The de Warlencourts needed prey, and I was it. For all I knew, the order for champagne was the signal to the servants to get out of the way. This might be quite a commonplace weekend at Longcross Hall. Gideon had been caught in the crossfire, but if they had no qualms about killing one of their own, what had they got saved up for me?

  I had no choice but to run again. I burst through the heavy doors into the Great Hall and scanned the room to make sure there was no one in there. There were the antlers on the wall, frosted with moonlight. There was the polished table, littered with the detritus of dinner; the servants had indeed disappeared. But there was someone in the room.

  The tiger-skin rug. Eyes and mouth wide, snout ridged in a snarl. His eye teeth were almost luminous. Earlier I’d dubbed him Shere Khan, and in the Jungle Book film he would have been my enemy. Now he meant home, and with the servants gone he was the nearest thing to a friend in this devilish house. I genuinely did not know what to do next, or where to run. So I did the only thing that seemed to make sense to me. I lay on him, face down, and rested my cheek on his massive skull. ‘Shere Khan,’ I said, ‘help me.’ Then I said it again in Hindi, in case he didn’t understand. But he was silent. ‘Say something,’ I said. ‘Cat got your tongue?’

  Then a phrase of my father’s came back to me.

  Sometimes you have to put your hand in the tiger’s mouth.

  He didn’t, of course, mean it literally – in India, that was the quickest way to lose a hand. But I was safe with this tiger. I curled my hand round Shere Khan’s jaws and put my fingers between his teeth. The tongue was a solid dry mass – desiccated flesh, rough as sandpaper. It had no answers for me. I took out my hand and rolled onto my back, defeated.

  The moon looked on, remote and heartless, through the diamond-paned windows. But suddenly something, caught in a stray moonbeam, gleamed at me from the wall. I jumped up and walked over to the panelling. There, crossed and mounted on the wall, were a pair of ancient long-nosed guns.

  Duelling pistols.

  They were beautiful things. The stocks were made of polished wood inset with a decorative silver scroll. On the right-hand gun, the curlicues on the scroll wreathed about the central design of a little Christian cross. On the left-hand gun, the cross was upside down.

  I touched one silver barrel. It was cold. I grasped the left-hand gun of the pair and wrenched it down. It was surprisingly heavy as I tested it in my hand. I checked the powder and the musket ball – it was loaded. I raised it level with my shoulder, aimed it squarely at Shere Khan’s head and closed one eye. I felt better already.

  You see, when my father said that sometimes you had to put your hand in the tiger’s mouth, he didn’t mean in the way I just had. He meant sometimes you have to face your troubles head on, be brave, take action. ‘Thank you,’ I said to Shere Khan, still pointing the pistol dead between his eyes.

  I did not leave the room in the same way I entered it. I did not run. I walked. I was clothed in the confidence – the warmth, the overcoat of false courage, that man has worn ever since the age of firearms dawned.

  I was no longer alone.

  I had a gun.

  Back in the atrium I sniffed the air and listened. My father had taught me well and I knew I was a dead shot. Even with an old flintlock like this, I reckoned I could do some damage. Now I was not trying to escape my pursuers. I was trying to track them. The painted queen had been right. Either a hunter or the hunted be.

  On silent feet I went back to the armoury to find Gian Maria Visconti. I put the gun barrel into the black space between helmet and visor, but the suit was empty. I banged on the breastplate with the stock of the gun. ‘Hello!’ I shouted, making myself laugh, giddy with courage. The armour sounded as hollow as an old tin can. Very well then. Charles was somewhere else.

  Back to the hallway again and I looked to the head of the stairs, but Francesca the archer had gone too. Not that I would have cared, now, if she had been there – I had my gun.

  I climbe
d the stairs and kicked open the chalk-marked door to my own room like a cowboy. There was no one there. The letters had gone from my mirror, and there was a tidemark of blood around my basin but the flow had stopped. The boar was still once more, staring glassily down the barrel of my gun when I pointed it at him.

  I went back to the place I had started: the passageway with the gramophone in it. The Louis XIV chairs squatted still, the bell of the gramophone emitted no sound and the glossy black disc sat as still as a pool of ink. In fact, there was no sound at all in the house. Almost by tacit consent we had exchanged places – they were now hiding from me. My heart swelled with the power.

  In the cavernous stairwell once more I heard something at last – faint noises from the very top of the house. I climbed again, this time all the way up until the stairs ran out. I moved soundlessly, gun held low, into a place I’d never seen – an enormously long room with moonlight streaming in at intervals. There were portraits all the way along the walls. In the dim light I could only make out the nearest one – apart from the clothes, the man in it looked exactly like Rollo. The room was so long I could not see the end of it – it disappeared into blackness.

  And then I heard it. The whispering.

  Mowgli, Mowgli, Mowgli.

  I forgot how to be brave. What was it, at the foot of the stairs, that had made me feel less afraid? Ah, yes. That was it. The gun.

  I raised the thing to shoulder height and pointed it into the dark, towards the whispering. Mowgli, Mowgli. I was convinced, then, that I was going to die.

  They’d already killed Gideon, and he was one of their own. Be the hunter or the hunted, the painted queen had said.

  I made my choice.

  I squeezed the trigger and fired into the dark at my unseen adversary.

  The ancient gun backfired and there was a flash and a firework smell. The blast knocked me off my feet and there was a searing pain at my left earlobe. I put my hand to my ear and it came away wet. My shoulder was sticky with blood. I think I blacked out for a moment and as I came to, Rollo skidded over to me and knelt by my head. Someone struck a match and I thought I must still be unconscious because Gideon stood with them, grinning all over his face, an arrow sticking out of his bloody chest. Closest of all was Rollo’s face, a portrait of concern.

  ‘Wake up, Mowgli. I say, it was only a rag. What possessed you to get hold of that bloody hand cannon? You could have shot your bally head off!’ I could have sworn he sounded relieved. He picked up the pistol very carefully by the stock and handed it to Charles, who wrapped it reverently in his tail coat. I got a very strong sense that the gun was worth far more than I was. Francesca, now fully clothed, took a couple of candles from the sconces and lit them from Rollo’s match, holding them high like beacons of justice.

  Charles was peering at my ear. ‘Just a flesh wound,’ he pronounced, as if he were a doctor.

  ‘All right,’ said Rollo. ‘Show’s over. Charlie, go and switch the electrics back on. All you others, time to go to bed. Come on, Hardy.’ He hauled me to my feet and plonked me on one of the Chippendale chairs that lined the Long Gallery. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it to my ear. ‘Hold this tight,’ he said, not unkindly. But I thought, even then, that one could not tell if he was more concerned for my ear or for the gold silk of the Chippendale.

  I’m writing this back in my room with Rollo’s handkerchief pressed to my ear. When I take it away the bleeding has stopped, but there is a large stain on the cloth that looks like a red map. A map of a country where this sort of behaviour is normal.

  Postscript

  I cannot sleep anyway, but I have just remembered something else. As I was sitting on that chair in the Long Gallery with my left ear pouring blood, my right ear heard Gideon and Rollo talking. I am going to record it like the scene of a play, such as Mr Orton might have written.

  Gideon: Shall we write him up?

  Rollo: Write him up?

  Gideon: In the game book.

  Rollo: Not exactly a kill, was it? Strictly speaking, he shot himself.

  Gideon: Still a scalp for the Order though …

  Rollo: (reluctantly) I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right somehow.

  Gideon: Why ever not?

  Rollo: Well, he chose the Judas pistol. So something about it feels like … it’s not exactly … cricket.

  Gideon: If he’d got hold of the Jesus one instead you wouldn’t be standing here. (Pause) We always write ’em down, even if we only wing ’em. (Another pause) I am Grand Master, old boy.

  Rollo: What you mean is, you don’t want your first weekend as Grand Master to pass without a scalp. (Pause again) All right. What day is it?

  Gideon: Technically Sunday.

  Rollo: We can’t just write him up. Bit of a giveaway.

  Gideon: Just write some birds down as well. Then it looks like it happened on a shoot.

  Rollo: All right. I’ll get the book.

  I have no idea what this exchange meant, but I write it here in case it becomes important later.

  In case I never get out of here.

  ‘My God,’ I said, giving Shafeen such an enormous shove he nearly rolled off the divan. ‘That’s the game book. They’re talking about the game book.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said soberly. ‘What they wrote is the very page we read when we were in the library the first time we went to Longcross. That’s the game book I stole and brought back to STAGS.’

  ‘And d’you remember all that palaver about the Grand Master, Rollo de Warlencourt? Whether or not he and the Grand Master were two different people?’

  ‘Only separated by a comma,’ said Shafeen. ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘Well, now we know for sure. Gideon – the Old Abbot – was the Grand Master that weekend.’

  Shafeen looked down at the diary where it lay on the silken cushions. ‘That doesn’t let Rollo off the hook though,’ he said, his mouth set in a hard line. ‘He’s still complicit in all this.’

  ‘Oh, totally,’ I said, but my voice sounded, even to myself, a little bit doubtful. Was I starting to … not feel sorry for Rollo – that would be ridiculous – but to understand him a little? ‘Let’s keep reading.’

  But Shafeen was already turning the page.

  Sunday, 26th October 1969

  Morning

  When I woke the basin and the tap were back to normal. The mirror was clean. I examined myself in it. My ear had scabbed over during the night. It hurt to the touch and the edge was slightly ragged. I wondered if it would always be a slightly different shape to the other one. It is lucky that I wear my hair fairly long.

  I washed and dressed and went to breakfast in the morning room. I eyed the queen’s portrait again. I had taken her advice, and for what?

  But something was different. The Medievals all greeted me when I entered and took my seat. Their triumph of the night before, where they had tasted first blood, made them almost amicable. They seemed quite content for me to question them about their ‘jape’; in fact, they seemed rather proud of themselves.

  ‘How did you change the water in the basin?’ I asked as I applied marmalade to my toast with a silver spoon.

  ‘That room has its own cistern. We just filled it with pigs’ blood. Or rather, young Perfect, the keeper’s boy – he did it,’ said Rollo amiably.

  ‘Didn’t want to get your hands dirty?’ I asked acidly. I think I had a right to be annoyed.

  ‘Absolutely not, old boy.’

  I took a swallow of my tea. ‘Just that room? Just Levens?’

  ‘Levens is the room for japes, dear chap,’ he replied. ‘The cistern. The boar’s head …’

  ‘That was me,’ crowed Miranda. ‘You operate him from the next room.’

  ‘I did the mirror,’ said Serena proudly. ‘I wrote RUN in Vaseline when you were in the bath. It doesn’t show until it gets steamy.’

  It was like that old story of the Brahmin, the Tiger and the Fox, where the fox shows the workings of the cage
to the foolish cat. Now it all made sense. The deer’s antlers chalked on my suitcase; the same antlers chalked on the door of my room. I was a marked man from the very start. I wasn’t invited in the spirit of friendship at all. Whatever the painted queen said, I was prey, and the unhappiness squeezed my heart into a stone. And since I have been caught, whether by my own hand or theirs, I will not now be taught to be a gentleman. I know as I write this that it sounds naive in the extreme to have ever expected Rollo to keep his word in this regard. But he did promise to teach me to be like him. And I had thought that, whatever else he was, he was a man of his word.

  For now, he was still explaining the mechanisms of his trap. ‘Charlie was Gian Maria Visconti, hiding in that old tin can. Francesca was the statue of Diana, but you know that, of course.’

  I could feel myself blushing. Everyone at that breakfast table knew I’d seen Francesca naked. The lady herself seemed unconcerned – calmly munching toast.

  ‘But that arrow was real,’ I said, not quite meeting her eyes.

  ‘Bless you, Mowgli,’ she said. ‘If I’d wanted to hit you, you wouldn’t be talking to me now. I could split an apple off your head.’

  ‘Gidders was a corpse, as you know,’ Rollo went on.

  ‘Bloody tricky holding my breath while you were howling, old boy,’ put in Gideon. ‘Thought you were never going to leave.’

  ‘Then I was waiting for you in the Long Gallery,’ finished Rollo. ‘I had a rather good jape planned, using the portraits. But of course we never got that far.’

  ‘Always prowling the gallery, is old Rollo,’ teased Gideon. ‘Favourite room of the house, eh?’

  ‘That’s perfectly true,’ Rollo replied calmly. ‘I like communing with the ancestors.’

  ‘Ancestors, my arse!’ exclaimed Gideon. He turned to the collective. ‘It’s his hunting ground for the birds. Here’s his MO.’ He waved his coffee cup to encompass the entire table. ‘Takes a girl up there. Shows her all the lineage, all the ghosts of de Warlencourts past. Then takes her on the roof and gets his end away. Works every time, eh, Rolls?’ He put on a dreadful parody of Rollo’s voice. ‘One day, this could all be yours. Please let me put my tongue down your throat.’ He laughed loudly. ‘Man’s an absolute legend.’