S.T.A.G.S.

by M A Bennett

  There was, as I’ve said, only one Henry at STAGS. The black embossed type jiggled in front of my eyes. I should have known. Huntin’ shootin’ fishin’. It sounded like some sort of joke; the ‘g’ was missing from all three words. But the Medievals didn’t make mistakes; if they made errors – the Punjab, the Carphone Warehouse – they were deliberate. Henry had written the blood sports like that for a reason, exactly as he said them. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. Longcross is his house. You lucky beast,’ she said. ‘You’ve got the chance to be a Medieval.’

  I sat on the bed heavily and squinted up at her.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  Jesus was so excited that she forgot herself so far as to actually sit bedside me. ‘Henry de Warlencourt always asks people from Six One to his house for the weekend at Michaelmas Justitium – hunting season. If you do well in the blood sports, and they like you as a person, then next year when you go into Six Two you could be a Medieval.’

  Despite the novelty of actually having a conversation with my roommate, I was silent, processing it all.

  ‘You are going, right?’ prompted Jesus. ‘Longcross is supposed to be amazing. The absolute lap of luxury.’

  I had the power for once, and I just shrugged. I wasn’t willing to share any confidences. If Jesus wanted to know about my stuff, she’d have to be a bit nicer to me. All the same, I did need information, so I thawed. ‘Coaches?’ I said aloud. Knowing the Medievals, I wondered if it meant actual coaches, with eight horses for each, snorting and pawing on the drive.

  ‘Henry sends for the estate cars,’ Jesus said. ‘You get driven to Longcross by his gamekeepers.’

  I looked from The Invitation to Jesus’s jealous expression. If I’d been heading home at half-term, to see Dad, I would never have even thought of going to Longcross. But I wasn’t. Dad would still be in South America, and I was due to go to my Aunty Karen’s in Leeds. Now, I have nothing against my Aunty Karen, or indeed Leeds, but she has twin toddlers who are a total pain. That’s why I didn’t want to live with her and ended up coming to STAGS.

  So, although I had never hunted, shot or fished, I seriously considered going.

  I might have been academically smart, but I was monumentally stupid not to realise sooner what was going on. It’s not as if I wasn’t warned. I was, in very clear terms. The warning came from Gemma Delaney. Gemma Delaney was a girl who had got into STAGS three years ago, also from Bewley Park, my old school. She was always held up as a shining example to the rest of us – she had her picture in the Bewley Park reception next to the sparsely filled cabinet of achievements (so different from the medieval atrium of STAGS, where you can hardly see the oak panels for silverware). Gemma came to talk in assembly at our school a year ago, to encourage us to try for a scholarship at STAGS, and I’d hardly recognised her. Gemma used to have dip-dyed hair with dark roots and straw ends, and a strong Manchester accent. In assembly that day she had long honey-blonde hair, a spotless STAGS uniform and clipped vowels. I know now that she’d looked like a Medieval.

  She looked very different now, outside the chapel at STAGS, clutching at my arm as we were all filing out of morning Mass. I turned to look at her. Her face was as pale as bone, her hair lank, her eyes haunted. ‘Don’t go,’ she said. The ‘o’ of ‘go’ was flat; in her urgency, her northern accent had returned.

  I knew exactly what she meant at once. She meant The Invitation. She meant don’t go huntin’ shootin’ fishin’. I wondered how she knew. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Just don’t,’ she said, more forcefully than I’d ever heard anyone utter anything. She pushed past me, to be carried along with the crowd. I stood for a moment while students flowed around me, weighing up what she had said. But I hadn’t really absorbed it. As she disappeared into the crowd the feeling of unease faded with her.

  The truth was, after weeks of being ignored and belittled and excluded, I was flattered to be wanted, to be invited by the Medievals. The night before, I’d met Henry himself crossing the Great Hall in Honorius. He too had touched my arm, and spoken to me, actually spoken to me, for the first time ever. ‘You are coming this weekend, aren’t you?’ he’d said urgently. ‘It will be such a laugh.’ He pronounced it larf.

  ‘What kind of laugh?’ I said laff.

  He smiled again, and my insides did a little flip. ‘You’ll see.’ He squeezed my arm and I looked down at his hand where it lay on my sleeve – long fingers, square nails, and a gold signet ring on the little finger. A signet ring with a design of two tiny antlers.

  So as I stood that morning outside chapel, with the pupils all flowing around me, thinking about what Henry had said, and what Gemma had said, I wasn’t really deciding anything. In my mind I was already packing. It was like that moment when you flip a coin but you already know, before the coin comes down, what you’re going to do.

  chapter four

  Once I’d decided I was going huntin’ shootin’ fishin’, it seemed like blood sports were all anyone at STAGS could talk about.

  We only had half a day of lessons on the Friday we broke up for Justitium, and every single one of them seemed to be about hunting.

  In Latin we were doing a translation of Ovid about Diana, the goddess of … wait for it … hunting. Apparently she was bathing one day and was seen naked by a guy called Actaeon. She was pretty angry, and to stop him boasting about what he’d seen she told him if he ever spoke again she would turn him into a stag. The hunt happened to be riding past and, since Actaeon was clearly as stupid as most people are in myths, he called out for help. Sure enough, he was instantly transformed into a stag.

  ‘What happened next, Miss Ashford?’ Friar Mowbray asked Chanel. Friar Mowbray had a gift for knowing when people weren’t listening, and Chanel, like myself, was clearly having trouble concentrating that morning. She’d spent the last twenty minutes staring out the window at the dripping playing fields. She gave a little start and looked down at her copy of Ovid. She placed one of her perfect white crescents of nail under the words. ‘The hunter became the hunted,’ she translated haltingly. ‘The hounds were struck with a wolf’s frenzy and tore him to pieces as they would a stag.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Friar Mowbray. She had arched black eyebrows, despite her greying bun, and they wiggled when she was excited. They were wiggling now. ‘Fifty hounds tore Actaeon to pieces as they would a stag.’ She practically licked her lips. ‘There is some dispute among classical writers about the names of the hounds,’ she droned on. ‘But these, of course, are details. Ovid has it that they were called Arcas, Ladon, Tigris …’ But I’d switched off by this point. If Friar Mowbray was going to name all fifty hounds, I was going to go back to daydreaming about Longcross.

  In history, Friar Styles too seemed to have got the blood-sports memo. She told us about Gian Maria Visconti, a useless Renaissance prince, whose sole mission in life seemed to be to ruin the ducal empire his forefathers had built up. Even this lesson came back to hunting.

  ‘Of course, Gian Maria was most famous for his singular hobby,’ said the Friar. ‘He was a great huntsman; but he did not select his prey from the animal kingdom.’ She looked down her long nose at the textbook in her hand. ‘For sport he set his hunting hounds to course and dismember men,’ she quoted. ‘Mr Jadeja, assist us with the meaning of the verb “to course”.’

  Shafeen cleared his throat. ‘To course means to chase, or to hunt.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Friar Styles. ‘It means to hunt.’ Her eyes shone with a weird light. ‘Gian Maria’s servants became his prey; he would set his hounds upon them for his own enjoyment – and if they were slow enough to get their throats torn out he would simply hire more. Little wonder, you might think, that Gian Maria earned himself the name “Gian the Cruel”.’ But there was no judgement in the Friar’s voice; more … admiration. It was creepy.

  Then it was off to Justitium Mass, the service that marked the end of the half-term. We sang, as we always did, Psalm 42; As
the running deer seeks the flowing brook, even so my soul longs for you, O God. Then the Abbot got to his feet. As well as the usual bullshit about how great we’d all been so far this term, and who had got what marks, and which teams had won which sports, the Abbot also chose – yes, you’ve guessed it – hunting as the theme for his sermon. Once again we were treated to the story of our founder, Aidan, and the stag.

  Mind wandering, I turned to look at the stained-glass window of the saint, but somehow my gaze never reached it. It was caught instead by the back of six perfect heads. The Medievals were sitting together a few rows in front of me. They all sat in the same way – with one leg crossed over the other so you could see their coloured stockings, emphasising their elevated status. Piers, Cookson, Esme, Charlotte, Lara. And, next to Lara, Henry de Warlencourt. I found myself staring at the back of his head: the scroll of his ear, the way the close-cropped blond hair glittered at the nape of his neck and disappeared into the black collar of his Tudor gown, the lighter, longer wavy hair growing in a swirl at the crown of his head. I shivered, but I wasn’t cold. It was hard to believe I’d be spending the weekend at his house.

  I registered a sudden silence. The Abbot was staring down from the pulpit right at me, an amused look on his pleasant face.

  ‘Have we lost your attention, Miss MacDonald?’

  My cheeks burned as the whole school turned to look at me, even the Medievals. They all looked pretty haughty, except Henry, who looked at me with a quizzical smile that set my heart thumping. ‘As I was saying …’ intoned the Abbot exaggeratedly, gently poking fun at me. He pushed his glasses higher up his nose and read from The Life of St Aidan, where it balanced on the eagle lectern. I gave him my full attention, although I could have recited the lesson by heart: ‘The blessed saint, when the hounds were running close, held up his hand to the stag and rendered him invisible. In such wise the hounds did pass him by, and their tooth did not touch him; whereupon Aidan restored the stag to the sight of men, and his pelt and antler could again be seen, and the stag did go upon his way in peace.’

  As we filed out of chapel I was left with the strong impression that even the Abbot knew what I’d be doing that weekend, and particularly wanted me to hear his lesson.

  When I clattered back up to my room after Mass, my stomach was doing weird somersaults. From the landing window I could see shiny, expensive cars already coming and going in the STAGS drive; parents collecting their little darlings, watched jealously from the windows by those poor saps who had to stay at school for the weekend. They were the ones whose parents lived overseas (lots), were in the armed forces (some) or were the children of foreign royalty (a few). I was one of the lucky ones; I had a luxury weekend ahead of me and there was nothing to do now but pack for Longcross. I’d packed once, of course, for Aunty Karen’s, but I’d since unpacked again, having a feeling that the stuff I’d packed for Leeds wouldn’t quite cut it at Longcross. Frankly, I wasn’t sure what kind of stuff would cut it at Longcross. Happily, help was at hand.

  chapter five

  As I got to the top of my staircase in Lightfoot, I saw that Esme Dawson was sitting in the window seat.

  The leaded diamond panes threw shadows that criss-crossed her as if she was in a net. She gazed prettily out at the grounds, looking self-consciously posed, as if she was modelling for a photo shoot in some posh magazine. She’d arranged herself, I was sure, so I’d find her like that.

  She uncurled herself gracefully when I approached my door. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘We haven’t formally met. I’m Esme.’

  ‘Greer,’ I said guardedly.

  She actually shook my hand. I noticed she wore a gold signet ring, just like Henry. ‘How d’you do?’ she said.

  Now, I have literally never been asked this question before. I know it’s how people used to greet each other in Ealing Comedies and stuff. But I’d never heard it In Real Life. I suppose this was how the Medievals rolled. How do you do? A number of answers popped into my head. To be honest, Esme, I’m not really sure how I do. One minute you and your fellow sirens are sniggering at me and making jokes about me sounding like I’m from Coronation Street, and the next, you’re nice as pie … But of course I didn’t say any of this. I was just happy that someone was talking to me. ‘Fine, thanks.’

  ‘Ready for the weekend?’

  ‘Not remotely.’

  She smiled, segueing neatly from Country Life spread to toothpaste ad. ‘Henry asked me to come and help you pack, and also answer any questions you may have.’

  ‘Well, I have a whole bunch of those.’

  She gestured to the heavy oak door, with my name and Jesus’s (real) name on it, and a message board with lots of scrawled messages, all for Jesus. ‘Shall we?’

  I opened the door. Jesus was already there, lolling on her bed – she must have made a quicker getaway than I from chapel. At the sight of Esme she got up at once and stood to attention. ‘Would you excuse us?’ Esme asked sweetly.

  Jesus went bright red, shot me a jealous look and scuttled from the room.

  I unhooked my chapel cape from my shoulders and threw it across my chair. My wheelie suitcase gaped empty on the bed, and my clothes were all over the place. Esme eyed the mess, and me.

  I was busted. I like to think of myself as a Strong Feminist Girl, but since Henry had invited me to Longcross, I’d been letting the sisterhood down a bit by obsessing about what I would wear. I’d ignored the Friars in every lesson, while having mini-daydreams about walking in Longcross’s grounds in elegant tweeds, or boating on a lake in a white tea dress. In each scenario I was accompanied by Henry de Warlencourt, chatting and laughing at my side. Thing is, I didn’t have tweeds, or a white tea dress. And even though Henry’s grounds probably didn’t, like my daydreams, come straight out of some Merchant Ivory film from the eighties, they probably weren’t far off. My skinny jeans and beanie hats and the ironic film T-shirts that my dad liked to buy me certainly wouldn’t fit in.

  ‘The first thing to say is, don’t worry about clothes,’ said Esme, reassuringly. ‘Anything you don’t have, they’ll provide at Longcross. Just take the basics – underwear, lots of socks, nightclothes. As for the rest, keep it classic.’

  She rifled through my wardrobe, and my ‘floordrobe’. ‘Here we go. White shirt. Jeans. A couple of warm jumpers.’ She flung them in the case. ‘T-shirts … hmmm.’ She picked one up. It had a picture of Nosferatu on it, saying, ‘Mornings Suck’. ‘No …’ she said, as if I wasn’t there, and selected a plain white one. ‘Yes.’ She went on picking through my stuff, rejecting the Savage, putting anything she found vaguely Medieval in the case. There seemed frighteningly few things in there. At last she turned to me. ‘Have you got a formal dress?’

  That was another for the list of questions I’d never been asked, but I actually had an answer to this one. A posh dress was the one thing I did have. My mum, who is a costume designer for movies, made me one before she left. And here’s the weird thing. She didn’t leave recently. She left my dad and me when I was sixteen months old.

  I’ve seen the last pictures of me with Mum (they didn’t make it onto my wall at STAGS); I was just a little toddling thing with a swirl of black hair and big grey eyes. I’ve looked at those pictures a lot, trying to see what was so bad about me that she had to go. I look pretty cute. I certainly wasn’t a monster. But apparently, after getting through the worst bits of shitty nappies and night feeds and teething, she decided she wasn’t the mothering type. My dad – and this tells you what a good guy he is – has never, ever said a bad word about her to me. He says dads leave their kids all the time and no one makes a fuss about it, so why should it be any different for a mum? I see his point. But, somehow, it is different.

  The one thing Mum ever gave me (OK, OK, except for life) was The Dress. Mum and Dad met when they were both working on this film at Elstree Studios. Before you go thinking it was some kind of classic, it wasn’t. It was like The Princess Diaries but even worse, if that’s possible. I t
ry not to remember the name of it. It was about some girl who doesn’t know she’s a princess till the end, and my mum had to make all the clothes for the princess actress, this horrible Disney brat. Anyway there was a bunch of nice material and beads left over and by the end of the shoot Mum was pregnant with me, and she knew I was going to be a girl, so she made this dress for the adult me. Sweet, right? Well, it would have been, except for the fact that she barely stuck around for sixteen months, never mind sixteen years. Now you know why my dad turned down all the foreign jobs for sixteen years, and only went away this year because I got into STAGS. When she left, Mum said that Dad should keep The Dress safe and I should wear it for my prom. And he did. And I did. And guess what? It fitted me perfectly.

  Spooky.

  I’m not usually vain (well, not very), but I have to say I looked pretty nice in that dress on my prom night. Dad sent Mum a picture of me wearing it, to Russia or wherever the hell she was filming. That was back in the summer, and still no reply. I’m not holding my breath.

  That same photo was on my wall in Lightfoot, and I looked at it now. It was the only photo on my wall that wasn’t of me and Dad. It was of me and my class at Year 11 prom at Bewley, just before I left the school. There were about ten of us, arms around each other, eyes wide and mouths smiling, all jumping in the air at the same time. I always got a pang when I looked at it. I missed, so much, not just those friends in particular, but friends in general.

  I turned back to Esme – she was the nearest thing I had. I held up The Dress over my Tudor coat. It was beautiful. This, I knew, would be suitable, even for the Medievals, even for Longcross. You see, I didn’t wear it to the prom out of loyalty, or yearning for my mum or any of that sentimental horseshit. I don’t actually care about my mum. I wore it because it is a gorgeous dress. And you can tell it was made for me; it is a silvery grey which picks out the silver in my eyes, and there are tiny black beads, sewn in a kind of swirl on the front, the kind of swirl you see flocks of starlings doing at dusk on an autumn night. Well, you do at STAGS anyway.