S.T.A.G.S.

by M A Bennett

  After the lower decks I went out of a back door and toured the stables, the kennels and the gun rooms behind the house. I stroked the velvety noses of the horses when they put their heads over the half-doors to greet me, enjoying their lovely hay-and-horse-poo smell. Their flanks steamed in the cold, but I imagined riding out with Henry through flower meadows on summer days, in jodhpurs and matching white shirts. Jeez. My fantasies were as old-fashioned as the world Henry inhabited.

  I greeted the tumbling, tail-wagging crowd of black-and-tan hounds in their kennels. ‘Hello, Arcas. Hello, Tigris,’ I called, assuming the three dogs I’d met with Henry were somewhere in the seething mass. I couldn’t remember the other name. The dogs looked happy, harmless and completely different to how they’d looked in their Baskerville-mode, when they’d come baying after Nel. After a bit I turned away, and that’s when I saw a figure way across the stable-yard, watching me.

  I knew him straight away by his sheer height and bulk. It was Perfect, dressed in his padded waistcoat that looked like a Kevlar vest, all ready for the shoot. I wondered why, if the shoot started as early as Henry said it did, he was back at the house. All his clothes were mud brown or moss green, and in the woods and spinneys I’m sure he’d be well camouflaged, but in the limestone courtyard he stuck out like a sore thumb. He didn’t seem to be trying to hide though. You know when you catch someone’s eye and they immediately turn away? Well, he didn’t do that. He just kept on staring. Perfect alone, of all the servants who had seen me nosing around, didn’t greet me or avert his eyes respectfully or stop what he was doing. He’d been staring before I spotted him, and he went on staring afterwards. I couldn’t tell whether he didn’t like me hanging with the hounds, or just didn’t like me. Either way it was unnerving. I quickly scuttled out of the stable-yard and out of his eyeline.

  By now I was shivering a bit, partly because I’d left my waxed jacket in my room, and partly because of Perfect’s creepy gaze. So I ducked inside a place called the Orangery. (Most of the rooms at Longcross, not just the bedrooms, were helpfully named, like a Cluedo set.) The Orangery was blessedly warm, like a greenhouse, and crowded with vines and fruit trees. I counted the bright oranges and bunches of grapes dangling from the branches even this far into autumn. I went into the ice cellars, great subterranean stone rooms, now empty of ice and littered with old sledges and ice skates, but somehow still holding close a winter of their own. It was so cold there that I soon scurried back inside the main house.

  There I found, on the ground floor, more drawing rooms with empty fireplaces, and a music room with silver-framed black-and-white photographs on the piano, of blond boys who might be Henry when young, or Henry’s father when young, or even Henry’s grandfather when young. I saw an armoury bristling with bows and arrows, and, best of all, a massive library, a vast room covered floor to ceiling with books.

  I like libraries, with their leathery-papery-dusty smell, and this one was a good one, so I spent quite a bit of time in there. There was a polished wood floor, with small floorboards laid in a sort of herringbone pattern. There was a huge chandelier suspended from a soaring frescoed ceiling. A pair of big glass doors opened out onto the grounds, with an uninterrupted view across the lawn to a huge fountain. There was a little mezzanine deck above the main bit, with loads more books and little wooden ladders to reach them.

  I looked at the shelves, and pictured the tiny blond Henry from the silver-framed piano pictures climbing on the ladders to reach the volumes he wanted to read. Sometimes it was hard, particularly when you saw Piers and Cookson at play, to remember how intelligent the Medievals were. But they all knew loads about everything and I thought I now knew why. If they all grew up with a crap-ton of books like this, no wonder they were brainy.

  I had a look at some of the spines. Coleridge. De Quincey. Wordsworth. Southey. The poets I recognised from English lessons, the ones who’d been as knocked out by the Lake District as I was and couldn’t stop rabbiting on about it. And then I found other poets from further afield: Dante, Baudelaire, and our old friend Ovid. I browsed though some of the books for a while – man, they were old, probably should’ve been in a museum. But then again, Longcross kind of was a museum.

  I climbed up to the mezzanine and had a little bit of a mooch around. The leather-paper-dust smell was most intense up there, as if that was where the real treasure lay. I had a browse and saw that, running along the bottom shelf of that whole level, almost hidden in the shadow of the balustrade, there was a whole bunch of books with no names but with dates. Rows upon rows there were, a whole collection of black books with tooled gold numbers on the spine, bound in that morocco leather. I ran my finger along the spines. They each represented a decade, and they spanned centuries, from the Middle Ages to the present day. I wondered if they were photo albums, and then told myself not to be a dummy; photographs weren’t invented back then, duh. I was about to pull one out and take a look when the chime of a wall clock brought me to myself. I had got so used to the library-silence that I jumped about a mile in the air, and looked at the clock.

  It was twelve noon, and I was supposed to meet Lara in my room.

  I slid the book back into place with a satisfying thunk, and while I clattered down the spiral staircase the twelve metallic chimes spurred me on like some sort of reverse Cinderella. It had taken just one morning to transform me, not from riches to rags, but from rags to riches. I was utterly sold on Henry’s world. What was not to like about a world uncluttered by TV, Google, YouTube, iTunes, the ringing of phones, the beeping of microwaves? Who couldn’t live like this, without all the noise and craziness of the modern world? If you needed a little excitement, there was always huntin’ shootin’ fishin’.

  chapter eighteen

  On the bottom step of the grand staircase Lara Petrova, the third siren, was lolling like an expensive cat.

  She stood up at my approach and blocked my path, almost as if she was guarding the upper reaches of the house. She half closed her ice-blue eyes at me. ‘Where have you been?’ she demanded.

  ‘Just looking around,’ I said.

  ‘Whatever for?’

  I wasn’t scared of Lara any more. I had the talisman of Henry’s Kiss still printed on my lips, like some invisible superpower from a Marvel movie. So I shrugged insolently before I answered her question. ‘Just plain nosey, I guess.’

  She looked at me sharply. ‘And what did you find?’ It was a funny question.

  I thought about the Narnia thing, and felt like telling her I’d found another world. Then I thought of all those poets. ‘Beauty,’ I said.

  She looked relieved and you could see she thawed a little. She said, a bit huffily, ‘I’d already been to collect you, but you weren’t there. I was just on the way to call for Chanel.’

  I smiled at her pleasantly. I didn’t think she was on the way to anywhere. I think she was waiting for me. I wondered if Henry had already told her about last night.

  ‘I’ll go and get her if you like,’ I offered. I felt a bit uncomfortable being alone with Lara. Either she already knew Henry had kissed me, and was styling it out, or she didn’t know a thing and was ignorant of the fact that she was about to be dumped. Either way I felt, unexpectedly, a little bit sorry for her.

  ‘Let’s go together, shall we?’ she said breezily, smiling her charming smile at me, in a complete one-eighty from the cold, suspicious attitude she’d greeted me with. I don’t know why, but I got the distinct feeling she didn’t want to allow Nel and me to be alone together. She took my arm conspiratorially and we climbed the stairs like that, her hanging on as if she was my best mate. Henry evidently hadn’t told her a thing.

  Nel was sitting on her bed, ready but subdued. Because all her lovely new gear had been wrecked yesterday, she was wearing Longcross clothes, and they washed her out. She looked pale and not quite herself. I could now see that Nel’s own style – brand-new, colourful – really suited her. Now that she looked like the Medievals, it seemed as if somethi
ng had been lost. I grabbed my jacket from my room, and, as it had started drizzling, gave in to wearing a cap today. In a trio, like some bizarre variety act, we all trooped down the staircase and out of the front door.

  Then Lara led us into the woods.

  The shootin’ day was entirely different from the huntin’ one. Yesterday it had been crisp and sunny; today it was grey and drizzling. Yesterday we’d been out in the open, high in the hills, with the heather peaks above and the lakes below. Now we were in the deep woods of the estate, under a dripping canopy. But today was just as beautiful in its own way. The autumn colours of the Longcross woods were like fire. A pearly mist lay low in the clearings like smoke. The leaf mould underfoot gave off a rich earthy smell, and it was soft like a thick carpet, muffling our footsteps. In fact, so far, shootin’ was weirdly quiet. Nothing could be heard apart from the cocky, confident cawing of rooks overhead and, in the undergrowth, the shy clucking of the hiding birds who were about to meet their maker.

  Nothing, that is, apart from Lara’s hypnotic drawl. All the way, Lara talked. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Nel at all – Lara planted herself in the middle of us, and we never got a chance to say more than a quick ‘Hi’.

  I knew Lara was from a Russian family, and before she’d deigned to talk to me, I’d always imagined she’d speak like some arch-villain; like Xenia Onatopp in GoldenEye. Actually she was posher than all the Medievals, even Henry. She had one of those voices that is so upper class it sounds lazy, almost as if she couldn’t be bothered to finish her words. Her drawl fitted with her whole vibe – she had the air of finding everything deathly boring, as if it was all a giant waste of time. She was quite different from the other Medieval girls – she wasn’t over-the-top friendly like Esme or an italicising enthusiast like Charlotte. She never made sudden movements, but sort of drooped around the place. The only time I’d heard her sound sharp and alert was when she questioned me about looking around the house. The rest of the time she seemed half asleep, but she wasn’t, because now and again she’d say something that reminded you how clever she was. The whole effect was pretty annoying. It was lucky she was so beautiful to look at, or I couldn’t see why anyone would want her around. The only similarity between her and the other sirens was the inevitable hair flick; she did it just the same as they did, and every time her hair fell perfectly. Chanel, I noticed, had stopped doing it.

  Lara filled the dripping silence by telling us, in her lazy drawl, all about what went down at a pheasant shoot. ‘They’ve got famously good coverts at Longcross,’ she said. ‘People come from all over to shoot here, including British royalty, foreign royalty … you know …’ She tailed off as if she couldn’t be bothered to finish the sentence, then gathered the energy to speak again. ‘Basically you have the guns, that’s the guests at the party who are going to shoot, and each gun has a loader, that’s their kind of helper, who holds the spare guns, makes sure they’re loaded, counts the birds they’ve shot. That can get quite competitive. You’re not really supposed to count how many you’ve bagged, it’s not considered good form, but of course people do. Most people don’t stand a chance against Hen though.’

  At first I didn’t know who she meant – I thought a Hen might be a kind of super-wily pheasant. But then it dawned on me she was talking about Henry. Hen. I’d never heard anyone call him anything but Henry before; he didn’t seem the type to go for the more informal Harry or the Shakespearean Hal. This wasn’t part of Lara’s lazy thing, that she literally couldn’t be arsed to finish his name; it was more than that. It was her special name for Henry. It was a badge of ownership. For a moment that fizzy feeling returned to my stomach. How would she take it, I wondered, when she found out that Hen wasn’t hers any more?

  ‘Hen’s a brilliant shot,’ she said, more forcefully than she’d said anything else. ‘There’s this legend that he once had seven birds dead in the air at the same time. That was before my time though,’ she said, as if this was still her time. Suddenly I couldn’t wait to see him. I wanted her to know.

  ‘Each shoot is called a drive,’ she continued, ‘and the guns place themselves in a long, strung-out line in a clearing. The position of the guns in a drive is called a stand. Then the beaters, who are all from the Longcross village, walk through the woods with long sticks, basically beating the undergrowth and generally making a row until the pheasants fly out over the heads of the guns. Each gun will only shoot in the area of sky over their head – they mustn’t poach another gun’s bird; that’s strictly against shooting etiquette. The loader reloads, so that the gun can bag the maximum number of birds in each drive. Then, as the birds fall, each loader’s dog picks up the birds.’

  ‘Dogs?’ It was the first word Nel had uttered besides ‘Hi’.

  ‘Yes, dogs.’ Lara put her hand to her mouth. ‘God, I forgot. Not those kind of dogs sweetie. Just little gun dogs – spaniels. They pick up the fallen birds and that’s it.’

  Nel didn’t look comforted, but she strode on with us – there was nothing else she could do.

  Suddenly there was a tremendous report of gunfire, which ricocheted all around, the sound bouncing off the dense trees. Nel and I jumped about a foot into the air. The ‘guns’ weren’t quite ready for us – they were still shooting, strung out in a long line across the clearing. As we approached, my longing to see Henry turned into something like fear. I spotted him at once – as you always can when you like someone; if you’re at a party or something, you can be four rooms away and sense when they’ve arrived. He was shooting away in total concentration; a flat cap on his blond hair, his waxed-jacketed shoulders hunched under the gun, his cheek along the barrel that was pointed skyward. I’m a peaceful person and not a huge fan of guns, but I had to admit he looked amazing. Skilful and dangerous at the same time.

  The gunfire rattled on and on, like fireworks night. The noise was deafening, and I couldn’t believe that back in the woods I’d thought that shootin’ was peaceful and quiet. I could see Nel give a little jump every time the guns discharged. She really wasn’t in a good state. Lara took her arm and sort of pulled her to one side, and I got the distinct feeling, once again, that she had been told not to leave us alone together. But Nel could relax, as that was apparently the last salvo for now. All the guns were handing their weapons to their loaders and leaving their carefully held positions, walking down the hillside towards us.

  The lure of her own kind was too much for Lara and she left our side to greet Charlotte and Esme, who were flat-capped and armed just like the boys. It gave Nel and me a brief chance to chat.

  ‘Did you sleep OK?’ I asked.

  ‘Terribly.’ She turned to me and I could see violet shadows under her eyes. She’d not fully returned to her previous Queen’s English; you could now hear the Cheshire in there. I liked her voice a lot better this way.

  ‘Nightmares?’ I asked sympathetically, suddenly guilty. My dreams had been filled with Henry on the rooftop and ball gowns and foxes and moonlight.

  She hesitated. ‘I guess they were nightmares. That is –’ she pulled at my sleeve and spoke, low-voiced, close to my ear – ‘I think there were dogs at my door in the night.’

  ‘Dogs? What were they doing?’

  ‘Just sniffing, and sort of whining.’

  Even under the jacket and the jumper and the shirt, my skin chilled. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘No. I could have been dreaming, I suppose. But I’m almost sure I was awake. I could see the slice of light from the passageway under the door, and their feet sort of interrupting it. They were walking about, trying to get in.’

  ‘But they didn’t?’

  ‘No. I wanted to lock the door, but I didn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t – I was too scared. I just put the quilt over my head and eventually I must have gone back to sleep.’

  My heart went out to her – a little girl, hiding under the covers from the monsters in her mind.

  ‘Sounds like a bad dream to me,’ I said ge
ntly. ‘Understandable after what you went through yesterday.’

  She gave herself a little shake. ‘I guess so.’

  As we got closer I could see the shooting party had dogs, and I glanced at Nel. They were quite different to yesterday’s dogs; these were pretty cute, spaniel types with curly coats. They took no interest in us as they were busy working, looking around for fallen birds. Nel kept her distance, and looked terrified of the dogs, which was to be expected. I said, ‘Are you sure you’re going to be OK? Would you rather go back?’

  She shook her head, brave girl. ‘No, I’ll be all right. It’s just that I wish …’ She stopped.

  ‘You wish what?’ I prompted.

  ‘This is going to sound really stupid. But I wish I’d brought the seeds with me.’

  ‘That does sound really stupid,’ I agreed, but nicely. ‘What seeds?’

  ‘The lucky seeds. The ones I found in the pocket of Henry’s jacket. They stopped the hounds from getting me yesterday, and in the night too.’

  I rejected the idea of pointing out that it was a narrow cave entrance and a closed door that had kept the dogs away. If the magic seeds were a comfort to her, then fair enough. ‘I wonder what they are,’ I said, to take her mind off the dogs.