by M A Bennett
Then he stood out of the way and Henry went past him into the room.
As Shafeen shut the door, I helped the princess sit down on the bench in the hospital corridor and then took my place beside Shafeen, peering through the square window in the door, as if watching a scene in a movie. We saw Henry walk into frame and take a seat in the chair by the bed. We saw him take Aadhish’s hand, just as Shafeen had done to Rollo at Longcross. And, as clearly as if there was not a door between us, we could see his lips form the word ‘Horatio’.
Then, ‘Horatio, it’s me.’
Did I mistake it, or did the eyelids start to flicker, as they do in REM sleep?
Holding my breath and Shafeen’s hand equally tightly, I watched as Henry de Warlencourt leaned forward in the hospital chair and gave Aadhish Jadeja a tender kiss on the cheek.
Silence.
The steady green line on the monitor by the bed gave a leap, then plummeted again like a stone.
It was a dreadful moment. I thought we’d made – literally – a fatal mistake. The princess had been wrong. There might be harm in it. The shock of waking to see the love of his youth there might kill him. What if he gave up, in order to join Rollo in the afterlife? What had we done?
But then the line recovered, soared and peaked again, and began to undulate at a steady rate as Aadhish Jadeja opened his eyes, looked at Henry and gave him a beatific smile. The monitor began to shriek persistently, sounding the alarm that life had returned.
At that point we piled into the room, followed by the princess. Shafeen and his mother sank down by the bed and Henry stepped back, his work done. I retreated with him to the corner of the room and squeezed his ruined hand. His face had taken on a new look – one that he’d worn perhaps only a handful of times before. When he’d carried a girl from a burning building. When he’d instructed an army medic to treat an untouchable. When he’d squashed a snooty chauffeur who wanted to shoo a little girl away from his car. If I were to define it, I would call it goodness. It enhanced his already considerable beauty, like a golden varnish on an old master. It made it hard to look away from him.
Of course, we were soon elbowed aside by the medical professionals, who crowded into the room and began dealing with tubes and drips and monitors and calling out incomprehensible orders. One orderly turned to us and barked at us in English, ‘There are too many people in this room. One only, please.’
Henry and I, Shafeen and his mother retreated to the door, looking at one another, not knowing who should stay.
Then came a voice from the bed, weak but still commanding. We turned as one to see Aadhish pointing with a wavering hand. The dread returned. If he chose Henry to be by his side above the princess, she would burn indeed. Hoarsely but quite clearly, in a voice that had not been used for days, Aadhish said, ‘Himani.’
Then, ‘My wife.’
29
In the corridor, Shafeen, Henry and I sank down on the bench, exhausted and happy to be on the sidelines.
We were silent for a while, watching nurses and doctors bustling in and out of the room – serious, professional but joyful at the vindication of their learning and their science and their clever ideas. They didn’t know that what had woken Aadhish had nothing to do with the head. It had to do with the heart.
Henry took out a cigarette, put it between his lips and began to pat his pockets for his lighter. Shafeen, who on any other day would be scandalised at the prospect of someone smoking in a hospital, got Henry’s lighter out of his own pocket and lit the cigarette for him. He then put the lighter in Henry’s scarred palm. We looked at it where it lay. ‘The Queen of England gave it to my father,’ said Henry.
That was when it clicked. This was the lighter Rollo had had in the diary – he’d told the same story.
Henry went on: ‘But I think he would want your father to have it.’
He handed it back, and now Shafeen looked at the lighter in his palm: gunmetal grey, with the royal coat of arms etched on the side. The totem that had saved two lives. He closed his brown hand around it and put it in his pocket. ‘Thank you,’ he said sincerely. ‘I’ll make sure he gets it.’
Henry got precisely three drags of his cigarette before someone in scrubs told him to put it out, at which he smiled and complied. The same someone took Shafeen away to sign some forms, and it was then that I turned to Henry and said something that had been on my mind for a while. ‘I hope you know that Rollo didn’t choose Shafeen over you at the end. He thought he was Aadhish. The young man he’d loved and lost. I don’t know if that makes it easier.’
Henry let his head fall back against the wall, his tanned throat oddly exposed. ‘I don’t know either.’
I had something else to say and I didn’t know how I was going to put it. But I felt that Henry was kind of owed something for what he’d done. ‘Rollo … your father … did love you, you know. When he talked of you to me he had tears in his eyes. I know it’s not much, but …’
He stopped me. ‘It’s enough.’ He closed his eyes, and I thought for a moment he might sleep. So the next thing I said I murmured into his ear, so softly, like a whisper. ‘You did a good thing today. For Shafeen.’
He lifted his head off the wall and turned to look at me.
‘I didn’t just do it for Shafeen, Greer. I did it because you asked me to. I did it because I love you.’
30
The Tiger Club’s Rolls-Royce drove us back to Shafeen’s house, then the driver was to take Henry back to the club to pack up his luggage.
He was staying the night with us as Shafeen’s guest and would fly back to England in the morning. Part of me was relieved that we had only one night to get through – one final episode of the particular soap opera in which I’d found myself. Shafeen and I would return the following weekend in time for the start of our Trinity term. Our final term at STAGS.
The emotion of the hospital – what had happened to Aadhish, what had happened to all of us in our different ways – rendered Shafeen and Henry and me silent in the car. I watched the fat moon sailing high in the sky, keeping pace with us as we drove. A trite sixth-form film-studies phrase floated into my head and stuck there.
Love triangle.
Shafeen and I had just taken things to the next level. I’d been happy – happier than I’d ever been. And then Henry had to go and say what he’d said. I looked at Shafeen’s dark head next to me, and Henry’s blond head in the front seat. Then I looked to the heavens. Genuine question, I asked the moon silently. What the hell am I going to do now? The secret I was now keeping sat in between me and Shafeen like a buffer.
Back at the house, Shafeen and I got no further than the atrium, collapsing on the divan just inside the doors, for a time too exhausted to speak, just listening to the plashing of the peacock fountain. I actually think we went to sleep for a bit, because when we woke it was pretty late.
Groggily, I turned my head on the cushions to address Shafeen. ‘Did they say when your father would be dis- charged?’
He turned his head to match mine, our foreheads almost touching. ‘Next week,’ he said sleepily. ‘They’re going to keep him in for a few days for observation. I can’t believe he’ll be back here, Greer.’
I took his hand.
‘And I owe it all to Henry. You were right about him. He did come back from the dark side of the moon.’ He picked at the tassels on the divan, pulling them through his long fingers, as if it cost him something to say that. I was silent. I couldn’t tell him why Henry had changed.
‘That’s why he asked us on the tiger hunt. He wanted us to witness it. He wanted us to stop him because he knew that it was wrong.’
‘So you think he did know?’ I asked. ‘He did know there was to be a man tied there, along with the goats?’
‘Yes, I think so. Don’t you?’
I couldn’t answer this. ‘All I know is, when we came he was glad,’ I said. ‘I could see he was. He was surprised but relieved. You’re right. He wanted us to stop it. But
why couldn’t he just stop it himself?’
Shafeen stretched his arms above his head. ‘Perhaps he himself feels coerced.’
‘Explain.’
‘Well, you read my father’s diary. Father thought that Rollo was the Grand Master. So did we when we first read the game book, the first time we went to Longcross. Remember, it was only that tell-tale comma that gave it away that the Grand Master and Rollo de Warlencourt were not one and the same person. My father had it wrong. Rollo was an Eggman. The Medievals were the Eggmen. Gideon was the Walrus.’
‘You’re making zero sense right now.’
‘You know – that really trippy Beatles song called “I Am the Walrus”. My father referenced it in the diary. The Walrus is the leader. The Eggmen are the followers.’
‘Oooooh,’ I said – a long, drawn-out sound.
‘What I mean is, Henry is an Eggman too. He might be one of the Grand Stags, but he isn’t the master of his own fate. Someone else is controlling him in turn.’
It suited me to believe that. It suited me not to have to think badly of Henry at that moment. ‘So who is the Walrus now?’
‘Same guy as it ever was,’ said Shafeen. ‘Gideon Villiers. The Old Abbot.’
‘So,’ I said slowly, figuring it out, ‘you think that the Old Abbot is making sure that the death hunts carry on. If they are prevented at Longcross – like the Boxing Day meet was – they’ll just carry on somewhere else. Here. Maybe in other countries too.’
‘Maybe. But maybe Henry wants to stop now. He’s been running away from his true nature – or his new nature, if you believe his fall changed him. He’s known this was all wrong for a long time. He wanted to change, but he didn’t know how. I think you showed him how.’
He looked at me intently. Almost too intently. Had he guessed? I had to deflect from this dangerous subject.
‘And you?’ I asked. ‘He once said you were running away too. What does he think you’re running away from?’ I thought of something pretty profound, for me. ‘From India?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Quite the reverse. England. Great Britain. And the Raj. Whatever my feelings about India’s history, and the past, they were things that were important to my father, and like it or not they are important to me.’
He went to the bureau by the front door and opened the top drawer. He slid out something framed and rectangular.
The photograph of the tiger hunt.
He placed it reverently on the wall, carefully hanging it back on the redundant hook, neatly obscuring the white rectangle that had been protected from fading all those years.
I hauled myself off the divan and went to stand at Shafeen’s shoulder, looking past him to that exclusive group of people, both men and women, standing together with Melati the tiger stretched on the ground in front of them. Shafeen’s father, a boy of eleven, with his foot on the tigress’s neck. His parents: the smiling maharajah, the glamorous maharani. Prince Philip, tall and beaky as a heron. And there, in the middle of the picture, Elizabeth, Queen of England.
It was a troubling image, but if Shafeen had made his peace with it, then so must I – these elite predators, this private club.
This club.
I shifted my gaze to the tall, blond, moustachioed guy next to the queen, wearing the striped tie of the Tiger Club.
Monty.
Monty de Warlencourt, all medals and moustaches, posing with the queen. That family don’t have much luck with horseflesh, was what Colonel Moran had said. And it was true. Henry’s grandfather Monty had been killed in a riding accident when something knocked him off his horse. And Henry’s father Rollo had fallen from his horse when it had been spooked by a tall man rearing up from the undergrowth. I’d witnessed it myself.
Something nudged at me then – the echo of a memory. I’d stood somewhere, in some ancient establishment, looking at a photo in a frame just like this one, of someone in a stripy tie. At the Tiger Club? No. somewhere else.
STAGS.
Where it had all begun.
My eyes still on the photograph, I said to Shafeen, ‘What time is it in England?’
He checked his watch. ‘Morning. Why?’
I didn’t reply but flipped out my phone and texted Nel:
Humour me on this one. Go into Abbot Ridley’s study. Find the picture of him in a stripy tie. It’s on the wall behind his desk. Send me a photo.
I was so used to all those times I’d texted Ty and not got a reply that I wasn’t expecting one now. But this was Nel, the Queen of Tech, we were dealing with.
First, she texted:
…
Then:
OK then
I blessed her in the name of God and Krishna and any other deity I could think of. She was such a good soldier, never asking unnecessary questions, always cutting straight to the chase.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Shafeen.
‘Just a hunch,’ I said, trying to order my thoughts. ‘Give me a minute.’
I settled back on the divan for a long wait, but it took Nel less than five minutes to get back to me. She was so quick that it made me wonder whether she was already in ‘Nathaniel’s’ study, but I couldn’t think about that now.
She’d sent a good picture from her state-of-the-art Saros phone to mine. I pinched it wider with my fingers and stared.
There was Abbot Ridley, probably in his late twenties. He looked as handsome as ever, curls ruffled by the wind and one eye half closed against the fierce Indian sun. I knew where he was because of the edge of a white veranda over his right shoulder and a set of sweeping white stairs. I expanded the photo. The date on the frame said 2015. And, even more damning, around his neck hung a stripy orange-and-black tie.
The tie of the Tiger Club.
My vision seemed to lurch and my head felt like it was spinning.
I placed the phone in Shafeen’s hands. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘He’s a Manslayer.’
‘Ridley?’ he said.
‘I mean, we’ve known it for a while, since we discovered that he has a brand like mine, but it’s different knowing what he did – who he killed. I thought he might have been tried and branded by mistake, like I was. I mean, I’m damned sure I’ve never killed anybody. But now we know different about Abbot Ridley.’
‘Greer,’ said Shafeen, ‘what the hell are you talking about?’
I took a breath. ‘It was Abbot Ridley.’
‘What was Abbot Ridley?’
‘Who caused Monty’s death. In his role as one of the FOXES. He came to Jaipur in 2015, infiltrated the Tiger Club somehow, got himself a tie. Don’t you remember that line from Reynard’s letter? If they don’t know who we are, they never see us coming. Monty never saw Ridley coming.’
I could see the scene play in my head like a movie – Monty setting out from the Tiger Club on his customary morning ride, always the same horse, always the same route. A figure rising out of the undergrowth, Monty’s horse rearing, the old man falling. It was a dreadful end.
But then I thought of another scene – just one of the many that prompted this revenge killing. A small black boy by the name of Leon Morgan, newly arrived in England on the Empire Windrush, being chased by hounds and, even worse, by his hosts at a country house called Longcross. Goodness knows how many Dalit victims over the centuries had been tied to trees like goats on the plains of the Tiger Club … Aadhish Jadeja pursued through the haunted halls of Longcross. When you thought about it like that, Nathaniel Ridley was a hero.
I was yanked from my cinematic visions by another text from Nel. The sharp, tinny tone and the vibration of the phone brought us back to ourselves, the text banner neatly obscuring the Abbot’s face in the photo.
What’s up?
There was no way I could articulate the brainstorm of the last two minutes in a couple of lines of text. ‘We’ll tell her in person,’ said Shafeen. He was right. Telling Nel that the man she was so thirsty for had Manslayed Monty de Warlencourt didn’t feel like something you should do in a
text. We both huddled over the phone as I typed.
Nothing. Explain later. Coming home soon.
She replied straight away:
Both of you?
At that moment the front door opened and we looked up. Henry de Warlencourt walked into the atrium and dropped a heavy holdall at his feet. He clocked us both staring at him.
‘What?’ he said.
I looked at Shafeen and he gave me a single nod. I texted to Nel:
All three of us. Henry’s coming too.
Her response was entirely natural:
Henry???!! WTF …
I couldn’t express in a text the enormity of what had happened here. The diary, the Tiger Club and the hunt. I couldn’t convey in little pixelated characters that declaration of love at the hospital, and the triangle, and the dark side of the moon. That would all have to be done in person. So instead I just texted by way of explanation something that was true, but that was intimately connected with Aadhish and Rollo and The Jungle Book and the whole mess of past and present and future.
He wants to be like us.
S.T.A.G.S. was founded in the seventh century by St Aidan the Great. The name Aidan means ‘fire’ in Gaelic, and he is considered to be a protector against fire. He was dubbed ‘the Great’ in order to distinguish him from the lesser saint St Aidan of Ferns. Our St Aidan was born in Ireland, and became a monk on the Scottish island of Iona. He travelled to Northumbria, where he was made Bishop of Lindisfarne. Realising the value of education, he founded a school in the hope that he would train the next generation of Christian leaders. The school began with just twelve boys as pupils, but it grew into a centre of education and a jewelhouse of scholarly knowledge.
Aidan was canonised upon the performance of a miracle; he saved a stag from the hunt by turning him invisible. That stag gave the school an emblem, and a name. Today, after a thousand years of exceptional scholarship, S.T.A.G.S. has educated a dozen British prime ministers and countless members of both houses of parliament. St Aidan’s dream that he would train the future leaders of men has become a reality.