Tigers

by M A Bennett

  ‘Shut up, Gidders,’ said Rollo, not entirely displeased.

  I could not focus on Gideon’s bawdy nonsense right then. I wanted to focus on what had happened to me in the Long Gallery. This had been no courtship. This had been a carefully coordinated plan to scare me to death. In fact, if that ancient pistol had backfired a little to the left, I would be dead. And all for what? A game to amuse these privileged young sprigs of English nobility? I had been an innocent, a greenhorn, a rube.

  ‘How long have you been doing this? This hunting of the guests?’

  ‘How long has the family been doing it? Centuries, old boy,’ admitted Rollo brazenly.

  ‘And has it ever … gone really wrong?’

  ‘Right, you mean?’ Gideon sniggered. ‘Couldn’t possibly say, old chap.’

  It was then I began to feel an emotion I had not yet felt at that house.

  Anger.

  The anger helped me decide. Last night I had turned from the hunted into the hunter, and I was not going back. Today I was going to be a hunter again. I would no longer be a willing victim. ‘So,’ I said coldly to Rollo, ‘what is on the agenda today?’

  ‘Well, I thought about what you said. I think we will have a spot of foxhunting after all. Not a proper meet. No master, no hunt servants – just the seven of us, and we’ll take the gamekeeper’s boy to do the wet work.’

  He reached for a second piece of toast and buttered it lavishly. ‘Might as well give it a bash. I’m feeling rather optimistic.’ He bit into his toast with even, white teeth. ‘According to your methods, we just have to call him by his right name, correct? We just have to christen him, as we did with you. I had a flash of inspiration for your foxy friend.’ He gathered the glances of the Medievals. ‘Reynard.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Gideon. ‘Like that bloody endless poem.’

  ‘The Masefield,’ said Charles.

  I knew what they were talking about. The poem that was on the syllabus for our English literature Probitiones, entitled Reynard the Fox, by the English writer Mr John Masefield. It was the story of a hunt, and it was extremely long, but rather good.

  ‘Reynard,’ repeated Charles, echoing his betters as he always did. ‘That’s a jolly good name.’

  ‘It is a mistake to anthropomorphise animals,’ I murmured. ‘It elicits sympathy.’

  Gideon got to his feet. ‘But it worked last night, didn’t it?’ He ruffled my hair as he walked past me with his plate. ‘We named our little savage, and we caught him.’

  I swallowed. So this was how they saw me – a brown savage, more animal than man. They had no intention of teaching me their ways. So there was no point in being nice any more. ‘But you didn’t catch me,’ I said. ‘I caught myself. Maybe because you didn’t call me by my right name.’

  They all looked at me as if the tiger-skin rug had got up and talked. Then they all started hooting and laughing in mock-shock.

  ‘Someone grew some balls overnight, didn’t they?’ said Gideon from the sideboard as he harvested more scrambled egg.

  ‘Someone got ideas beyond their station, more like,’ said Miranda in a superior voice.

  ‘Oh, I like this new Mowgli,’ said Rollo in admiration. ‘Yes. This could be a rather interesting day.’ He dabbed his mouth with his napkin and got to his feet. ‘Leave that, Gidders. Let’s go and get Reynard.’

  Midday

  The hunt was a very different proposition to the casual cubbing of yesterday.

  After breakfast I found a full suit of clothes on my bed, including the famous jacket of (according to my mother) hunting pink. I examined myself in the looking glass and even I could see that I looked well in the shiny black boots, the white breeches, the red jacket and white tie. If it were not for the colour of my skin, I could have been one of them.

  We mounted our horses at the grand front entrance – I had my old friend Satan. He rolled his eye at me as the groom held my stirrup, but once I mounted he stood stock still. He knew better, after yesterday, than to cross me. Now I had the more difficult task of teaching the Medievals to respect me likewise.

  We waited while the kennelmen brought the hounds, in a white-and-tan mass, tails wagging with joy. Ina came round with a tray loaded with small silver goblets. She held them up to each of the seven riders, beginning with the ladies and ending with me. I might have been lowest in rank, but I was the only one favoured with a smile.

  ‘Stirrup cup, Aldrin?’ she murmured.

  ‘Why thank you, Armstrong,’ I said. My mind was on the hunt ahead, but I did think, rather distractedly, that she looked remarkably pretty that morning. The winter wind blew a few brown curls from under her cap, and the low sun turned her green eyes to jade. Her earthy prettiness was the daytime antidote to the poisonous moonlit nakedness of Francesca.

  I shifted my gaze to Rollo. It was hard to break the habit of a lifetime and I still watched him almost constantly. It looked as though the hunting pink was made for him, which I imagine it was. He sat easily in his saddle, supremely confident, like a king. I had pledged to be his champion today: to bring him Reynard and lay him at his feet like a trophy. As I watched Rollo take a golden horn from his saddle and raise it to his lips, as the procession of death moved off down the drive, the hounds baying in competition with the horn, I thought what a fool I had been to make such a promise. I had no power to bring Reynard to account, and I dreaded to think what Rollo would do if I failed him again.

  And failure came almost at once. Not far from the house, in open country, Rollo reined in his horse to a stop. The other Medievals circled him as if he were their general, as he shouted over the heads and tails of the hounds, to me.

  ‘Well, Mowgli?’ he said. ‘Which way?’

  I swallowed. It was a cold day, but my reins slipped between sweaty fingers. Everyone looked at me, from the riders to the hunt servants to the hounds. It was time to make good on my promise.

  I closed my eyes, making them all go away. I thought only of the pointy, bright-eyed face of the fox. ‘Reynard,’ I whispered, calling to him. Yesterday I spared him, as I wish I’d spared Melati. I cared about him. But I cared about pleasing Rollo more. Shutting out the sound of the snickering Medievals, the grumbling servants and the whimpering dogs, I concentrated on the fox and only the fox. Where would he go?

  I thought about myself last night. The sweaty, dry-mouthed panic and heart-pounding fear of the pursued. Where does someone go when they feel in danger? Somewhere they feel safe. Where had I instinctively gone? To my room. Where would Reynard go? To where we’d first found him when cubbing. To the spinney that was his lair.

  ‘This way,’ I said, spurring Satan. And this time I took the lead.

  Now I was at the vanguard, leading the field. We’d been doing The Charge of the Light Brigade in English lit., and the lines marched in my head with the drum of the hoofbeats. Half a league, half a league, / Half a league onward. I put Satan over every five-bar gate like a maniac, and he popped over them like they were nothing. And I was always one step ahead of Reynard. Reynard was to discover, as I had done, that his room was no haven. Incredibly, he was there, and the riot the hounds made put him up. He emerged from the undergrowth, took more than a glance at us this time, and ran.

  I cut him off at every covert, every spinney, every ditch. It was as if we were playing chess and I was always one move ahead. Then, finally, we cornered him in a valley on the far side of Longwood.

  Into the valley of the shadow of death, I thought.

  There was one last check, when he looked me in the eye. It was different, this time, to when we looked at each other yesterday. Then I was going to let him go, and today I wasn’t going to do that. He knew it too. He knew he was finished. He was a brave soldier – he snarled at me right at the end. And after that last moment of defiance, Perfect, the gamekeeper’s boy, called on the dogs.

  The hounds, in a frenzy, tore him limb from limb. I watched them, feeling nothing. I never stopped, even then, to ask myself why it was so impo
rtant to me. Why I had to take this life for Rollo.

  The keeper’s boy waded in with a stick and beat the hounds away from the corpse. Red-mouthed and rabid, some of them growled at him, but he did not flinch. He took the fox, now a blur of meat, from the grass and it dangled from his hand. The body was a thing abominable – limbless, tailless – but the head was intact, still open-eyed, still staring.

  Surely the winter sun shouldn’t be this bright? Surely the day shouldn’t be this beautiful? Where was the pathetic fallacy of driving rain that we’d also learned about in English lit.? But it was beautiful; the sun of Rollo’s smile shone upon me and the horrible thing in the hand of the gamekeeper’s boy. I was Lancelot to Rollo’s Arthur, and all was well with the world.

  Then the dreadful child Perfect drew a hunting knife and sheared off the head. Unbelievably, he held it out to me.

  ‘Sir, you want the mask?’

  This lunk of a boy was holding out the fox’s head to me in his massive hand. I looked at the others nervously. But all of them, all, for the first time, were smiling at me. Not with malice or agenda, but with congratulation and admiration. Perhaps this boy was weak in his wits?

  Rollo said, ‘It’s your right to have the head as a trophy. It was your kill.’

  Only then, looking at the pathetic bloody thing in the baby giant’s hand, did I realise what I had done. Then I was sorry, and the golden glory of Rollo’s approval dimmed a little. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No. Take it away.’

  Perfect, not understanding, looked at his master.

  ‘That’s all right, Perfect,’ said Rollo. ‘Stick it in the ice cellar.’

  ‘Very good, m’lud,’ said the man-child, and he retreated with the horrid thing.

  ‘I’ll get it mounted for my room,’ said Rollo. He looked at me with the same look of admiration with which the other Medievals had regarded me. ‘It’s quite the trophy. I shan’t want to forget this day.’

  Then he did a frankly incredible thing. Commanding Perfect to come closer, he dabbled his finger in the neck hole of the fox’s head and then placed the finger between my eyes, in a strange twist on the bindi that marks the Hindu people. The blood was warm and stinking – the metallic smell of last night. I recoiled. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘It’s called blooding,’ said Rollo. ‘It’s a tradition on your first hunt. You are one of us now.’

  And suddenly, just like that, I was in.

  Afternoon

  Late in the afternoon I had the house to myself. The Medievals had retired – no doubt to wash and dress for dinner – but I could not relax. My victory made me restless, and I prowled the house like a tiger. I left my boots in the boot room and my jacket in my own room, but otherwise I stayed as I was. Like a knight returning from battle who couldn’t bear to relinquish his armour, I strode those ancient rooms in my muddy breeches and shirt. In the armoury, as I regarded myself in a shiny shield, I loosened the stock at my throat. I liked what I saw. My hair was ruffled, my colour was high, but there was a new look in my eyes. I was no longer a child to be bamboozled by tricks. I was a battle-hardened man.

  I stalked about the house as if it were my own. It was important to me to revisit all those places from the night before, in the daylight, as a victor. I had to adjust to my new status. Places like this had to be home to me. If I was to fulfil my father’s dream of Oxford and Sandhurst, then I had to be an English gentleman not just for this weekend, but forever.

  Aadhish was no more.

  Mowgli was no more.

  This was the age of Hardy.

  There was one more place I had to go. The Long Gallery, where I’d managed to ignominiously injure myself with a backfiring duelling pistol. And it wasn’t until I reached that long, gilded room that I saw another living soul.

  Rollo was wandering the gallery in the twilight, under the eye of his ancestors. He too was in his riding breeches and shirt, and as we walked towards each other we could have been mirror images, through a glass darkly.

  He looked wary. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Walking off the saddle-sore,’ I said. ‘You?’

  ‘I like to come up here and think sometimes,’ he said. ‘It makes me feel like I belong.’

  My eye ranged along the rows of portraits. ‘Because they all look like you?’

  ‘Something like that. All those centuries of blond hair and blue eyes.’

  I thought of the pictures in our summer palace in the Aravalli Hills. Of all those pictures of the ancestors. Of the centuries of black hair and brown eyes that made me. Of how different Rollo and I were. And how similar.

  I pointed to the portrait nearest to us. ‘Who is this one?’

  ‘The rebel. Nazereth de Warlencourt. He turned his back on the family, changed his name and went to London to become an actor.’

  I looked at the man with Rollo’s face. ‘And did he come to a terrible end?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ said Rollo, smiling a little as if at a private joke. He wandered down the gallery and I kept pace with him. I no longer felt like a courtier who had to walk several paces behind the king. Now we were equals.

  He stopped in front of another portrait; another man with the de Warlencourt face, but moustachioed and wearing the uniform of the Scots Guards.

  ‘And this one?’

  ‘The conformist,’ he replied. ‘STAGS and the army. Duly produced his son and heir.’

  ‘Who?’ I asked, expecting another portrait.

  ‘Me,’ he said.

  Of course.

  ‘This is Colonel Monty. My father.’

  Indeed.

  Now I recognised him. In the portrait he would be not much older than Rollo. I’d seen him more recently, filled out and grey at the temples, but now I looked more closely, it was unmistakably the same man. ‘If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Me neither,’ joked Rollo. ‘How come you?’

  ‘He told my father about STAGS. Recommended that he send me there.’ I didn’t tell Rollo the rest, not yet. That my father had asked Monty how to make me into an English gentleman. ‘He said it was the right sort of school.’

  ‘Well, he was correct,’ said Rollo. He ran a finger along the gilded frame, almost with affection. ‘He was right to tell your father that.’

  That was a matter for debate. ‘Where is he this weekend?’

  ‘In London with the mater. They have a little boy.’ It was interesting that he did not say my brother. ‘I’m the heir, and now they have a spare.’ He gave a short laugh, which was almost like a bark and totally without humour. He looked back at the picture. ‘He’s a good sort, the pater. But he expects a lot.’

  ‘Mine too.’

  ‘Fathers, eh?’ Rollo said. Then he looked away from his own and down the long room. ‘One day there’ll be a portrait of me here.’ We began to walk again, more slowly now. He was silent for a time, then he suddenly burst out, ‘Do you ever feel that your life is mapped out for you?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you know. STAGS. Oxford. Sandhurst. The army. Then I’ll take over here. Marry the right sort of girl – some deadly debutante the mater’s found by sticking a pin in Debrett’s. Pop out an heir or two. There’ll be decades of good estate management and being a jolly good squire, reading the lesson in Longcross church at Christmas, opening the grounds once a year for the county show. And a spot of huntin’ shootin’ and fishin’ whenever I want a little excitement. My face will get redder, my waistline rounder. People will describe me as florid or well preserved.’ He crammed his hands into his pockets as he walked, and I mirrored him again. ‘I mean, I even know how I’ll die. Here in this house, in my four-poster bed that kings have slept in, with the eminently suitable wife I haven’t met yet by my side. Longcross will pass seamlessly to my son and heir. Then it will all begin again.’ He sighed. ‘It’s all so fucking boring.’

  The word pulled me up short. The Medievals did not tend to swear – it was all bloody this, bloody that.
That word, that powerful word, was a clue to the strength of his feelings.

  ‘Do you know what I mean?’ he appealed. ‘Is everything planned for you?’

  I thought of Ritu. ‘Yes.’ I pictured the future he’d outlined, but with Ritu and me in the Aravalli Palace, and I didn’t like one bit of it.

  He nodded, slowly. ‘You see, don’t you? I see you see.’ And he took a step closer, until I could almost feel his breath. ‘And we can’t … deviate from the path,’ he murmured. ‘To do so would be to risk so much.’

  ‘Risk,’ I echoed, almost in a trance. I felt like Mowgli talking to Kaa the python. I was lost in Rollo’s blue gaze. ‘Risk … what?’

  ‘Disapproval.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘Society’s. The family’s and, most of all, my father’s.’

  ‘And mine.’

  He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Well, he would have been proud today.’ He let the hand lie there for a moment while he studied me with his blue eyes. Numerous other pairs of blue eyes, ranged along the gallery, watched me too.

  I felt I couldn’t move. ‘I … I’d better dress for dinner,’ I said at last.

  Looking back as I write this, I now think his face fell a little when I mentioned dinner. He removed his hand and dropped his python’s gaze – the spell was broken. ‘Dinner,’ he said. He didn’t meet my eyes again. ‘Ah yes. Dinner. Of course.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Better go and change.’

  He went, and my shoulder burned where he’d touched it.

  I was so happy then.

  But not for long.

  Evening

  Tonight’s dinner could not have been more different from last night’s.

  Yesterday, after I had let Reynard go, Rollo was tetchy and coldly furious. The Medievals took their lead from him and studiously ignored me. Tonight, with Reynard dead, they were witty and urbane and friendly. The champagne flowed – they drank a toast to me as champion hunter and I felt like I walked on the moon. Then we drank to everything and everyone we could think of. We even drank a toast to Reynard the ex-fox – very funny; everybody laughed. I was courteously drawn into the conversation. They went on a charm offensive and I had no defence in the face of it.