by M A Bennett
‘Greer.’
I turned, my hand on the doorknob. Her eyes were still closed, her voice really sleepy.
‘It’s Nel,’ she said. ‘I tried to tell everyone all term, but it just didn’t stick.’
I smiled. ‘Sleep well, Nel,’ I said.
chapter sixteen
As I closed the door gently behind me and turned to go back to my room, I nearly jumped out of my skin.
Henry was there in the passageway, right behind me. He was leaning on the oak panelling, feet crossed, hands in pockets, his white bow tie untied and his shirt open at the throat. He looked like a model.
I put my hand on my thumping heart. ‘Jeez, you gave me a fright!’
He smiled, and sort of pushed himself off the wall in this graceful way using just his back. ‘I’m sorry. Is she all right? I was just going to check on her.’
He was all concern, and I couldn’t help feeling a little jealous. Perhaps Nel was the reason why Lara was so salty at dinner, and not me at all. ‘She’s sleeping,’ I said. ‘Best leave it for tonight.’ I promise you I wasn’t trying to keep them apart; I genuinely was thinking of Nel, although I know you won’t believe me when you hear what happened next.
Henry nodded, looking at me intently all the time. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I want to show you something.’ He took my hand. Clearly this was the night that wouldn’t die, but suddenly I wasn’t at all tired.
He led me up some stairs, and I didn’t resist. I let my hand rest in his, feeling, as I often did, that I was in some movie. He in his white tie, me in my evening gown, him leading me through the darkened house, upward, ever upward. Twilight, I thought; Edward and Bella. And just like in that movie, it was dangerous, it was all kinds of wrong, but somehow it was right. At the very top of the house there was a long sort of gallery, with a polished floor that would be brilliant for skidding in your socks. All down both sides were Olde Worlde paintings of people who all looked like Henry. They stared down their de Warlencourt noses along the moonlit floorboards, which had a sheen like a tempting skating rink, looking like they certainly wouldn’t approve of skidding in socks. But Henry turned to me with a sparkle in his eyes and a wicked smile on his face. He kicked off his shoes. He’d clearly been thinking the same thing. ‘Come on,’ he said.
We skidded past their disapproving eyes and under their de Warlencourt noses, shrieking like kids. ‘I used to do this with my cousins all the time when I was little,’ Henry called down the gallery. ‘They’re twins, a boy and a girl, a bit younger than me. They’d go like lightning down here. It was so funny.’ We skidded up and down ten, twenty times until we collapsed under a particularly snooty portrait, breathing hard and giggling.
‘Was that what you wanted to show me?’ I gasped.
‘No,’ he said. ‘That was just a diversion. Put your shoes on.’
He led me past the curious painted eyes, and then, I’m not kidding, he opened a hidden door in the panelled wall. Behind it was a winding staircase with a little Alice in Wonderland door at the top. Henry opened it, we stepped through and suddenly we were on the roof.
The wind buffeted me, but Henry still had hold of my hand. I breathed in the cold, and let go of him, turning around and around, gazing open-mouthed at the view.
Everything was blue in the moonlight. I could see miles and miles of silvery roofs, turrets and chimney stacks; and beyond that, acres of forests, frothy like sea-foam, and the rising hills in the distance.
‘Let’s sit over here,’ Henry said. ‘It’s a bit sheltered. Do you mind the cold?’
‘I like it,’ I said. And I did. I needed to feel something, after the numbing shock of the day, and the cold was like a reviving slap in the face. Still, he took off his tailcoat and put it around my shoulders. It was warm from him, and smelled of the scent he wore. It could easily have been part of the movie I was living, but the gesture actually jolted me out of my stupid fantasy – he’d done the same earlier in the day, for Nel, just before she was hunted like a stag.
We sat down together, with a sheltering stone balustrade at our back, and an uninterrupted view ahead of us of the manicured lawns and gardens at the front of the house.
‘Look,’ Henry said, and pointed down. A fox was trotting confidently across the silvery lawn, followed by its sharp moonlit shadow. ‘It’s a vixen,’ he said.
As if she could hear Henry’s voice she stopped, one paw raised, her tail thrust straight out behind her. Watching and listening for danger.
‘She’s safe from you then?’ I asked drily.
‘Yes.’ There was a smile in his voice. ‘We don’t foxhunt at Longcross. We don’t keep any foxhounds.’
You do, I thought, thinking of Piers and Cookson. I looked out at the view, all the way to the horizon. ‘Is all this yours?’
‘Well, my father’s.’
‘Yours one day.’
‘Yes.’ He said it almost wistfully, as if it was never going to happen.
‘How far does your land go?’ I asked incredulously. He pointed – a spire in the far distance, milky blue in the moonlight, stuck up like the blade of a sundial. ‘That far,’ he said. ‘That’s Longcross church. It dates back to 1188. When Conrad de Warlencourt came back from the Crusades, it was said he brought the True Cross with him, the actual cross on which Jesus was crucified. He set it in the hillside at dawn and the long shadow of a cross fell across the land. Long-cross, you see? Where the shadow fell he made a vow to build a church.’ He stretched out his long legs so they actually dangled off the edge of the roof. ‘A village grew up around the church, as villages do, and Conrad built a manor house. Subsequent generations added to it, and in the reign of Queen Anne, Edward de Warlencourt built this main bit of the house. It’s quite a nice little family project.’
His understatement didn’t fool me. I could tell by the warmth in his voice that he was enormously proud of his birthright. I thought of our little home in Arkwright Terrace in Manchester, in a red row of houses that actually did look a lot like Coronation Street. I responded with an understatement of my own. ‘You’re so lucky.’
Strangely, he didn’t agree at once, as I thought he would. Instead he let a long silence fall. An owl had time to hoot twice before he spoke again. ‘This world is disappearing,’ he said. It seemed like an odd thing for a seventeen-year-old to say, but he obviously meant it.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said reassuringly. ‘Half the people in the cabinet went to a school like ours. People like you run the country.’
‘That’s all changing,’ he said. ‘Privilege is becoming a dirty word. Estates like this are being turned into theme parks. Tradition is becoming irrelevant. The whole world is online.’ He spoke of the Internet as though it was a foreign land. He picked a clump of moss off the roof and whipped it over the balustrade. You couldn’t hear it land. ‘It doesn’t matter what school you went to any more, just how many followers you have on YouTube.’ He said it scornfully, a Savage tone for a Savage word. But there was a waver in his voice and I thought for a moment that he might even cry.
And here’s the weird thing. I felt sorry for him. In that moment I forgot about Nel and the drama of the day and I sat there on this fricking huge palace of his, in the middle of his acres of land, with those thousands of millions of bricks that he owned cold under my bum, and I felt sorry for Henry de Warlencourt. He was right. He was trying to hold back something that couldn’t be held back. I might have felt even sorrier for him if I’d known he wouldn’t live to inherit Longcross.
‘I’m so sorry Chanel got scared,’ he said. ‘I feel utterly responsible, as she is my guest.’ He sounded sincere. ‘It could be that … I don’t know if anyone explained … It might be that …’ Good manners fought with the need to present himself as the host with the most.
I rescued him. ‘That it was the wrong time of the month. That’s what Cookson said.’
He caught my tone. ‘You don’t believe it?’
I rested my chin on my knees. ‘Do you
ever watch movies?’ I asked. ‘Or does the monastic rule of the Medievals not allow it?’
‘Yes, I watch films. Not very often, but sometimes.’ He sounded vaguely amused.
‘Ever seen a film called The Shooting Party?’
‘No,’ he said politely. ‘No, I haven’t seen that one.’
‘It’s set in a big manor house like this one, just before the outbreak of the First World War. The lord of the manor has a shooting party, and his little grandson is staying at the house. Well, the grandson has this pet duck, and they establish this duck really early on, and the kid’s relationship with it.’ There was a sudden breeze and I pulled Henry’s coat closer around my shoulders. ‘They keep coming back to this duck, and it does stuff like gatecrashing their tea party in the drawing room – you know, all this cutesy stuff. Well, of course the duck goes missing just before the shoot, and the kid is distraught, and he and his maid go looking for it, and all the time you’re thinking, There’s no way that duck is making it to the end of this movie. It’s going to end up as a pile of feathers, and the kid will be devastated, and the score will swell, and everyone will cry, and it will be some big premonition of the carnage of the Great War, blah blah blah.’
‘And what happens?’
‘Well, the duck survives. But on the last shoot of the weekend, a person gets shot. A peasant who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
There was a long silence, then Henry spoke. ‘I give you my solemn promise,’ he said, ‘no, my word as a gentleman: you are not going to get shot. And nor is Chanel.’ He sounded genuine. ‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘here’s a notion: tomorrow, for the shoot, would you like to take your time? You don’t have to participate at all. You could meet us for lunch after the first drive.’
‘Is that how things used to be?’ I mocked gently.
‘Yes,’ he said a little stiffly. ‘But I wasn’t trying to be sexist. On this occasion I was considering your feelings more than ancient traditions. The guns all have to be up at six. Chanel has had a shock; maybe she’d like to sleep a little later. You could have a leisurely morning, and then join us at the folly for lunch.’
It must have been after midnight, so a lie-in, and, I’d bet, another breakfast on a silver tray, did sound nice.
‘OK,’ I said.
‘That’s settled then,’ he said, saying in his Medieval way exactly what I’d said in two letters. ‘Lara will collect you at noon.’
The third siren. I’d wondered when she’d come into play. I don’t know whether it was the champagne or the moonlight, but I felt kind of brave. ‘She’s very beautiful, Lara,’ I said, quite truthfully. Then he turned and took my face in his hands. Somehow, even though I was wearing his jacket, the hands were warm.
‘She’s not as beautiful as you,’ he said.
I defy you to know what to do with your face if someone is holding it and says that to you. I’m not saying I didn’t like the compliment; it’s just that I’m pretty sure I adopted a dopey expression.
‘You’re the fairest of them all,’ he said.
I felt as if I was melting. The language fitted exactly into the fairy-tale setting. It was pretty romantic, but I had to call him on it. ‘Aren’t you and Lara …’ I didn’t know how to match his courtly language – ‘going out?’
Suddenly his face was very close to mine. ‘Not any more,’ he said.
And then Henry de Warlencourt kissed me, right on the mouth.
chapter seventeen
As usually happens to me when I mean to sleep in, I woke up really early.
I lay there in the dim light, Jeffrey watching me, thinking about The Kiss, A Happening So Significant It Deserved Capital Letters. I relived The Kiss about a hundred times, and then ran through every second of Henry escorting me, like a perfect gentleman, to the door of this very room, kissing me again on this very threshold, and saying goodnight.
I wondered now if it was a drunken kiss, but he had seemed entirely sober. Maybe then it was a consequence of the day of drama, a releasing of tension. But it didn’t feel that way – if it was, why didn’t he go and find Lara? You’re the fairest of them all, he’d said. I hugged the compliment to myself – but then I had another thought. Would Henry want, you know, more? We were here for the rest of the weekend. There were no parents, we had our own rooms, and the only adults that were here, the kids told them what to do, not the other way round. My stomach felt really icky and I put my hands on the place, which felt sort of fizzy inside, over the soft cotton of my pyjamas. What if there was a time when Henry didn’t say goodnight and go, when his feet crossed the threshold of Lowther? What if he stopped being a gentleman?
The thought was so terrifying, and so exciting, that I was suddenly wide awake and I had to get up. ‘Morning, Jeffrey,’ I said to the stag’s head and went to open the curtains.
The view looked quite different to how it had yesterday. It was still knock-your-eyes-out beautiful, but the sky was grey and overcast; one of those days where if it wasn’t raining yet, it would be soon.
The Cogsworth clock on the mantel said 7 a.m. I groaned. It had been after midnight when I’d left Nel’s room, so God knows what time it had been by the time Henry brought me back to Lowther. I must have had zero sleep.
I thought about waking Nel; such a luxury, after weeks of isolation, to have someone to talk to. But it was too early. Let her sleep. Besides, I felt a bit guilty – had she liked Henry too, before I stole him away? She’d seemed weirdly ready to exempt him from her paranoid notions of being hunted.
I got that fizzy feeling in my stomach again at the thought of Henry, and decided I must be hungry. But there was no sign of Betty – she had no doubt been instructed to let me sleep. Emboldened by The Kiss from her master, I looked around the room for something I knew must be there. Behind one of the curtain ties I found it: a marble button in an ornamental gilt surround. I pressed it, and in less than two minutes there was a knock at the door and Betty was in the room. She looked properly pissed off at being summoned by the likes of me, and gave me the evils even worse than usual, her lips pressed into their customary disapproving line. ‘Could I have some breakfast, please?’ I asked.
‘Of course, miss,’ she said stiffly. ‘I’ll bring it right away.’
And she did – the same silver tray, and silver dome, and silver coffee pot. In less time than it seemed humanly possible to make it. As she set it on the bed she said, ‘I’ll light the fire when you’re bathing, miss, so as not to disturb you.’
That was Betty’s deal. Everything she said was perfectly considerate and obliging, but I could tell she absolutely hated me underneath. She did it all with a look, old Betty. And the funny thing was, I was much nicer to her than any of the Medievals were. I never heard any of them saying please or thank you; they just barked orders at the servants. But if anything I overdid it, because she made me nervous.
I overdid it now. ‘Thank you so much, Betty,’ I said, gravely rehearsing, in my head, a Rebecca-type fantasy where I was the new bride of the lord of the manor, and Betty was that scary old bat of a maid. Except instead of being the young Mrs de Winter I was the young Lady de Warlencourt.
The idea of being the lady of the house wouldn’t leave my head. When I’d got dressed in the shootin’ gear that Betty had left out – similar to the huntin’ clobber except everything had about fifty pockets – I decided that since I had time to kill (it was a long time before lunch, before I saw Henry), I would explore the house.
As I looked around Longcross, at some point as I moved from one enormous, gilded room to another, I morphed from Joan Fontaine in Rebecca to Keira Knightley in Pride and Prejudice. I was Elizabeth Bennet, nosing around Pemberley, absolutely gobsmacked at Mr Darcy’s riches. I wasn’t thinking Henry and I would really get married or anything dumb like that, but I did think, all the way round, what it would be like to be Henry’s girlfriend and have access to this place 365 days a year. Long summer holidays, Christmases; wow, Longcross would ma
ke a fantastic Christmas house, holly everywhere and a huge tree in the atrium reaching right to the top of the grand stairs. I imagined myself under such a tree, in a Christmas jumper, drinking mulled wine with Henry. Keira and Joan fled as I cast myself in the picture. It suddenly seemed totally possible. When Henry’d said he wasn’t with Lara any more, didn’t that mean he was with me?
From then on I went over the house like I owned the place. Now and then I’d see a servant, a maid, a butler, a secretary or something, but they would just say, ‘Good morning, miss,’ and respectfully stop what they were doing and sort of stand to attention until I’d left the room. It was as if the servants thought I was too lofty to be allowed to see them doing their menial tasks, and their behaviour just fuelled my fantasy – for that one morning, when there was no one around to challenge me, I was mistress of the place.
I went up to the long gallery at the top of the house, where I’d skated with Henry, but I couldn’t find the door in the panelling through which he’d led me to the roof. It was like in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where one time you can find a door to Narnia in the wardrobe, and then when you look in the same place you can’t find it again. For a minute I wondered if I’d imagined the whole thing: that incredible view, Henry giving me his coat, that conversation about The Shooting Party, and of course The Kiss. The thought of him never kissing me again, the door being closed on that too, made me suddenly go cold.
I continued my tour. There were dozens, hundreds, of rooms in the place, many of them bedrooms. Every one of them had a name – Grey, Bamburgh, Levens, Clifford, Fenwick. I didn’t know whether they were people or places but they all seemed to come from the world that Henry revered. There were no modern names. No room was called Kanye.
I went back downstairs and wandered around the ground floor. At the end of one flagged passageway I found a room with one wall entirely covered in an enormous, ancient-looking map, a huge walnut desk in front of it that looked like it belonged on a ship, and an antique-looking globe standing on that, as if Henry owned the whole world. I found kitchens, storerooms, laundry rooms, wine cellars, and all the time I didn’t see any technology anywhere. This cruise ship, this nation, of a house was obviously run without the aid of any state-of-the-art equipment. The kitchens had those old-fashioned Aga ovens. The wine cellars had dusty bottles on racks as you’d expect, but no electronic humidifiers or digital thermometers. And here’s another funny thing. I never once saw a phone. Not even a landline. Not even one of those old-fashioned ones with the rotary dial and curly flex, nor those even older ones you see in Ealing comedies, those black upright ones with the funny little trumpet that you unhook and hold to your ear. Maybe all phones were considered Savage, not just mobiles.