S.T.A.G.S.

by M A Bennett

  And I was. Now I knew Jeffrey wasn’t a joke. Now I knew that he hadn’t come into this world as a head on a plaque. I knew how he’d died, and that he was once a living, breathing creature. Like the one who had run right past me and stirred the autumn air, and like the one I’d dispatched as he stood at bay in that Camelot lake. I hoped Jeffrey knew I wouldn’t have pulled the trigger on my own. But did that make it any better? More than ever I felt the lack of a TV to fill the accusing silence. Instead I dried my hair in front of the fire, watching that instead. It was really quite absorbing. Historical telly.

  When Betty came to dress me, my greeting was a bit over the top with relief. Used to how it went by now, I let her help me into my dress. The blood colour suited me, making me feel even more guilty. As she sat me before the mirror to do my hair I said, hesitantly, ‘Betty … could I have it a bit less, well, ringlety than last night? You know, wavy rather than curly? Please?’ I wasn’t really sure, as you can probably tell, how to talk to servants, but I needn’t have worried; she was very obliging in her sullen way. ‘Of course, miss.’ And she did a good job. Soft waves this time, with my heavy fringe parted in the middle. The strong colour of the red dress required a bit more make-up than last night’s soft rose, so I swept some smoky grey over my eyelids. I was pleased with my appearance, till I thought suddenly of Chanel getting ready, and what the hell she must be feeling.

  Amazingly, after all the drama, we weren’t even very late sitting down to dinner. I saw at once though that the table was only set for eight.

  Chanel wasn’t there, and there was no place set for her, as if the servants had known.

  I sat down at the now familiar array of silver cutlery. Tonight I was seated between Esme (meh) and Cookson (yuck).

  ‘Is Chanel OK?’ I asked Esme.

  ‘She’s fine,’ she said soothingly. ‘She was just a bit shaken up, so she had a bath and got into bed. Henry’s having dinner sent up to her room.’

  I suddenly felt a little pang of envy – I could have handled dinner in bed myself. It suddenly seemed an impossible task to have to endure all those fancy courses while making chat with random Medievals. Shafeen and Henry, my only allies and fellow Chanel-rescuers, were at the other end of the table. Shafeen was talking, guardedly, to Piers, when he wasn’t having to endure Charlotte pawing at him from his other side. She had clearly been impressed, too, by his Willoughby-chivalry on the mountain. Henry and Lara were talking with their blond heads together, low-voiced. She seemed pretty salty about something – maybe she hadn’t liked Henry giving Chanel his jacket or, even more likely, him practically lying on top of me when we shot the stag. He certainly didn’t seem like a one-woman man.

  I remembered the feeling of his arms around me, that warm sensation which had died with the stag. And, as if my memory had prompted him, Henry stood up, glass in hand.

  ‘A very special toast,’ he said, ‘to Greer, a novice hunter who dispatched a stag on her first outing.’ He looked at me with his very direct blue eyes and the warm feeling returned. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Greer MacDonald, the dispatcher of the stag.’

  I wasn’t sure what to do, so I just sat there like a dumbass while they all stood up and raised their glasses. They repeated my name, and my new bizarre title, all staring at me. Then they all drained their glasses and sat down and there was a ripple of applause. It was surreal. I’d never been toasted before, but I kind of wished it wasn’t for that. At the time I believed Henry thought he was being gallant, but I’d so much rather he hadn’t – I would have preferred it if he’d taken the credit, as with the credit went the guilt.

  Then it got worse. Two footman types brought out this big black book between them and opened it in front of Henry at the right page. The volume looked really old, with one of those aged greenish-black leather covers that in books they call ‘morocco’. A third footman handed Henry a pen. It wasn’t exactly a quill, but it looked like the oldest working pen you could get; one of those wartime fountain pens ministers used for signing peace treaties.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I asked Esme.

  ‘Henry’s writing you down in the game book,’ she said.

  Jesus. ‘Just me?’

  ‘No, silly,’ she said. ‘The date. Who was there. What we killed, and how many. And your name, as the dispatcher.’

  Great, I thought. My murder was literally going down in the history books. ‘Oh, wonderful,’ I said. ‘I’m so glad my noble achievement will be recorded for posterity.’

  She didn’t get the sarcasm. ‘I know, it’s tremendous, isn’t it? You must be very proud.’

  The servants were handing round the main course on gold-rimmed plates. ‘It’s not the stag I killed, is it?’ I said, not entirely joking. I wasn’t sure that I could bear to eat my victim.

  Esme looked at me as if I was mad. ‘You can’t eat venison straight away,’ she said, scandalised. ‘It’s game. It has to be hung.’

  Apparently the deer hadn’t suffered enough. ‘Hung?’

  ‘So it starts to rot. It tenderises the meat.’

  The conversation was taking a bit of a gross turn so I gave up on Esme and concentrated on my dinner. I was suddenly starving after all the drama. I tucked into whatever was in front of me – some sort of chickeny meat in a wine sauce. It was really nice at first, not as good as Nando’s but pretty tasty. Then I bit down on something small and hard.

  My mind flashed to all those stories you read online about kids who have found a filling in their KFC. I discreetly spat the thing onto my plate, where it made a sharp metallic ting on the china. There lay a little ball, about the size and colour of one of those little silver balls you get on cupcakes at kids’ parties. ‘What the hell?’

  Cookson, on my other side, turned to me. ‘Whatever’s the matter?’

  I pointed my knife at the little metal ball. ‘I think Henry might be firing his chef tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s shot,’ he said. ‘You’re eating pheasant. It’s just shot.’

  I was getting a bit cheesed. I didn’t need an autopsy. ‘I don’t need to know how it died. There’s just metal in it.’

  He started to laugh, rather unpleasantly. He had one of those silent, shoulder-shaking laughs. ‘No, I mean, it’s shot. You’re eating shot. The pellets that killed the pheasant.’

  I was shocked. ‘Can’t they take them out first?’

  ‘Of course they try. But they rarely get all of them. When you’re shootin’, you use a shotgun. Not like the rifle you used today to bag that stag.’ God – did people have to keep reminding me? ‘Every gun cartridge has a ton of those little pellets inside. When you discharge the shotgun, the pellets go out in a wide arc.’ He described their trajectory with his two hands, parting them in a wide cone. ‘Gives you the best chance of baggin’ something. Little buggers get everywhere.’ He took a drink. ‘You’ll see tomorrow.’

  I didn’t know then how true his words were.

  After my blooper I kept my head down for a bit and listened to the general conversation. I expected the chat to be all about Chanel and what had happened on the hillside. But here’s the weird thing: no one mentioned it at all, to the point where I wondered if it was a manners thing. Perhaps it was ill-bred to refer, in front of your host, to the fact that said host’s stag hunt had turned into a man hunt. Not wanting to be Savage, I didn’t mention the incident either, until Cookson got stuck into the wine and eventually brought it up.

  ‘Pretty rotten luck for your friend,’ he said.

  ‘I wouldn’t say she was my friend,’ I said pleasantly. ‘I only met her properly yesterday.’

  ‘Thing about hounds,’ Cookson went on as if he hadn’t heard me, ‘is they follow their nature. They are creatures of instinct.’

  Then he leaned in close enough for me to smell his sour wine breath and said one of the most unpleasant things that had ever been whispered in my ear in all my seventeen years.

  ‘Ask your chum if she was on her period,’ he said. ‘They sniff
it out, the old hounds. It’s the blood they’re after.’

  Gross. It had been a Day of Blood: black pudding, deer murder, liver all round, a handbag full of guts, a red dress and now this lovely little factoid. After that choice piece of female biology, from the lips of Cookson of all people, I pretty much lost my appetite, as well as my capacity for making small talk. I was relieved when the sirens went off to the drawing room and I could excuse myself and go to bed.

  I was so tired I could barely climb the Wayne Manor stairs. They seemed, with their thick scarlet carpets and massive oppressive paintings, suddenly higher than the hills we’d been trudging up and down all day. When I finally reached the top, all I had to do was to turn right to Lowther, shed the red dress like a snakeskin and get into my lovely bed.

  I hesitated for just a moment, deliberating, swaying with tiredness.

  Then the sisterhood won.

  Shit, I said under my breath, and turned left towards Chanel’s room.

  chapter fifteen

  Chanel’s room had a name too.

  It was etched in faded gilt on a wooden panel over her door. It said Cheviot. I know because I read it while I was waiting for her to answer my knock. Turns out I was waiting for a long time; she never did answer, so after a bit I just turned the handle and went in.

  Chanel was sitting up in bed, still awake. The dinner tray was next to her on the bedspread. Without being invited, I closed the door and went to sit on the bed. I had to move the tray a bit to sit down, and I could see that it was totally untouched.

  The fire was burning merrily, and the room was warm, but Chanel was wearing her thick white towelling robe in bed. Her face above it was the same colour as the towelling. She was ghost pale and wore a haunted look that was vaguely familiar. Suddenly, like a blow to the stomach, it struck me where I’d seen it before. It was on the face of Gemma Delaney, the girl from my old school who’d stopped me outside chapel at STAGS and warned me not, on any account, to go huntin’ shootin’ fishin’.

  Chanel didn’t say anything when I sat down. She just shrank back onto her pillows. I wasn’t really expecting a warm greeting, or a thank you for hauling her out of that cave, and it was a good job I wasn’t. She pursed her lips in a line and said nothing.

  ‘Nice room,’ I said, trying to break the ice. And it was – her walls and bedcovers were duck-egg blue and faded gold. I looked instinctively above the fireplace, and noticed an empty space with a brighter patch of wallpaper in the spot where Jeffrey was in my room. I thought she’d been spared the head of a dead animal companion, until I saw, on the floor next to the wastepaper basket, a mangy fox’s head with bared teeth lying where Chanel had taken it down.

  ‘Cheviot,’ I said, nodding. ‘Mine’s called Lowther.’

  Nothing.

  ‘Who names their rooms, really?’ I said. Still Chanel said nothing, so I started riffing nervously. ‘I mean, I’ve heard of people naming their houses – people even do it on our street, and it’s just a crappy terrace. They put up these dinky little oval china plaques, with “Dunroamin’” or something painted on there, to try to kid themselves that they aren’t living on a street with like five hundred identical houses. But a room in a house with a name? Never. I mean it’s like –’

  She cut across my monologue. ‘They were hunting me, Greer.’

  ‘Who were? The hounds?’

  ‘No,’ she said, quite clearly. ‘The Medievals.’

  I sat quietly for a moment, taking this in. I hadn’t realised until that moment what a psychological toll the afternoon had obviously taken on Chanel. Frankly, she was talking crazy. I said, gently, ‘Thing is, Chanel, there may be a simple explanation for it all. Are you …? Is it …? Is it your time of the month?’

  Now, I hate this phrase and always have – I think it’s because it’s the phrase my dad used when he tried to tell me about periods. In the absence of my mum it all fell to him, and he was so squirmy and uncomfortable, bless him, that although I love him to bits, I came to hate that phrase.

  Chanel didn’t seem to mind it though. ‘Esme said that to me too.’

  ‘And … is it,’ Jeez, I had to say it again, ‘your time of the month?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Well, there you go then. The hounds were confused, all hyped up by the scent of blood. That’s what they’re trained for after all,’ I finished clumsily.

  ‘No,’ she said. It was almost a shout. She started to shake her head just as she’d done in the cave. ‘No. They were hunting me. I was really cold coming down the hill, even though Henry gave me his jacket.’ Her voice warmed a little. ‘Those new Hunter wellies I’d bought were killing me, stupid things, and I fell behind. I was separated off from the pack, just like the stag was.’ She scraped her hand through her hair, trying subconsciously to flip it like the Medieval girls did. It didn’t work. ‘I lost sight of you all. So I thought I’d just go back to the cars, but I must’ve got lost. Then they came for me.’ She huddled further down into her dressing gown. ‘It was horrible, Greer. Like a nightmare. They came streaking out of the dark, twenty, thirty of them, barking crazily. I just ran.’ She shivered. ‘I keep thinking about Actaeon in Latin yesterday.’

  Could it have been only the day before? That last morning of lessons at STAGS seemed years ago.

  ‘Remember? Actaeon saw the goddess Diana naked, and as a punishment fifty hounds tore him to pieces.’

  ‘I remember,’ I said softly.

  ‘I thought that was going to happen to me, Greer. I kept trying to get away, going places they couldn’t go, into woods, across streams, but they kept finding me. If I hadn’t found that cave …’ She stopped and looked down at her hands, and I saw that her beautiful nails, those white crescent moons, were all dirty and chipped. Weirdly it was the sight of the fingernails, more than anything else she’d told me, that made me want to cry. She’d probably ripped them desperately trying to crawl into the cave. But what she was saying couldn’t be true. Could it?

  Chanel was talking again, low-voiced. ‘When Dad invented the Saros smartphone we got really rich really quickly. By the time the Saros 7S came along, I was too rich for my old school – my old friends didn’t want to know me. They all thought I was stuck up. Dad and Mum thought I’d fit in better at STAGS. Dad said they were our sort of people now. But it didn’t turn out that way. No one’s talked to me all term.’

  Now it was my turn to look down at my hands. If I’d only known that Chanel was feeling just like me, I’d have tried harder to befriend her.

  ‘And then when I got The Invitation to come here, I was so happy. I thought that meant I’d made it, that I’d made the breakthrough. I got all the right clothes, everything. I practised how I would speak, studied manners and etiquette and which fork to use and all that crap. If I don’t fit here, and I don’t fit there, where do I fit? Did they bring me here as game, to hunt? Is that all I am to them, prey?’ When she wasn’t trying so hard to sound posh, she had a really nice soft Cheshire accent. But what she was saying was insane.

  ‘You’re nuts,’ I said gently. ‘Coconuts. You’re letting your imagination run away with you. Listen. If you’re honest, you were already frightened of the hounds, weren’t you?’ I remembered her wary expression in the drive before the hunt, her avoidance of their slapping tails.

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I didn’t like them, even this morning.’

  ‘Well then. All that happened is that once the stag was down they got bored, picked up another scent and followed you. Of course it was scary for you, but it’s just a game for them.’

  ‘And for the Medievals,’ she said bitterly. ‘They planned it. I know they did. The stag hunt was just the warm-up. How did they seem, when they came to look for me?’

  Truthfully, only Shafeen had seemed genuinely worried, but after Chanel’s speech, and her ridiculous paranoia about being hunted, I didn’t want to undermine her further by suggesting that the Medievals were not her true friends. So I told part of the truth.
‘They were very keen to find you. They all came along, every one of them. In fact, it was Henry who distracted the dogs.’

  ‘I’m not talking about Henry. Henry’s fine.’ There it was again – the warmth in her voice. ‘It’s the others.’

  I patted the blue-and-gold bedspread under my hand. ‘You just need to sleep.’

  She looked at me appealingly with her reddened eyes. ‘Will you stay with me? Just till I’m asleep?’

  I was deathly tired, but I nodded. ‘Of course. Everything’ll be fine in the morning. You’ll see this afternoon for what it was, a horrible accident.’ I took one of her hands, with the raggedy nails. It was clenched into a tense little fist. Smiling, making a joke of it, I prised it open, finger by finger, trying to make her relax so I could hold it properly.

  There was something in her clammy palm.

  Several somethings.

  I unfolded her hand fully and looked. They were long, pale seeds. ‘What are those?’

  She shrugged her bath-robed shoulders. ‘I dunno. They were in the pocket of Henry’s jacket. When I was in the cave I was looking in the pockets for something to throw at the hounds, anything foody to distract them. But there was nothing but these seeds.’

  I looked at them closely – they were a bit bigger than rice grains, with little ridges running the full length. For all I knew they were the sort of thing countrymen always carried in their pockets; grass seeds or something. ‘Well, you don’t need them now.’

  I picked them off her palm one by one and put them in this tiny little enamelled Chinese-style jar on the bedside table. ‘They’re quite safe there. Lie back.’

  I took one pillow away and helped her snuggle down in the bed. Then I took her hand again as she closed her eyes, only letting go of it when I was sure she was breathing easily and steadily. I suddenly felt a real affection for her – she looked like a little girl. If Cookson called her my friend now, I wouldn’t correct him. ‘Goodnight, Chanel,’ I whispered. I was already at the door when I heard her answer.