S.T.A.G.S.

by M A Bennett

Then Henry. ‘Five!’

  ‘Woohoo!’ I said, trying to enter into the spirit.

  Shafeen was last – zero suspense of course. Everyone knew he was six, but everyone still cheered politely when he said the number soberly.

  I saw Piers and Cookson exchange a look, and felt a sudden little shiver of foreboding.

  chapter twenty

  Now I thought of A Knight’s Tale and the lady watching her knight jousting, and beating every other competitor in the lists.

  Henry’s Crusader blood surfaced again, and I thought it sweet (sweet!) that he wanted me to watch him. The only thing was, I was feeling a small, niggling doubt that he could actually beat Shafeen. Shafeen had been looking over at us at lunch with a strange set expression, and now he strode to his place in the line with a grim determination. In a western, he’d be twirling his gun right then, not carrying it broken neatly over his arm.

  Now we were much closer to the action than we had been before lunch, and the noise was incredible. The guns all wore ear defenders over their flat caps, but we bystanders didn’t have any, and I felt as if my ears were bursting. There was that weird smell again, the acrid burning smell of the cartridges, and they popped out of the guns and fell bouncing to the grass. Henry was taking aim and firing in quick succession, and had a pretty good hit rate. But Shafeen was amazing. He was an absolutely crack shot. I would never have thought it of him. He was like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird – a fine upstanding character, but put a gun in his hand and he was totally accurate and deadly. He tracked the birds with his gun, and shot them cleanly out of the air one after another, swapping his shotgun with his loader like a relay runner without even looking behind him. The pheasants rained down from above, landing on the damp grass with a dull thud. One of them narrowly missed me and lay at my feet like a tribute.

  I picked the pheasant up and held it in my hands. It was quite, quite dead but still warm – so weird to think that something could be dead and warm at the same time. The little head lolled over my hand. All I could think about was how beautiful it was – there were about fifty colours in the feathers, from sort of teal green to dark red and loads of different browns in between. As I looked at it, its little golden feet already curling up in death, I felt really sad; like when-you-really-feel-like-you’re-going-to-cry sad. I hated both Shafeen and Henry at that moment.

  Then a properly strange thing happened – this black spaniel trotted up to me, very politely took the bird from my hands and carried it, careful as a mother, over to Henry’s pile of feathered bodies.

  Shafeen lowered the barrels of his gun. ‘That was my bird,’ he called furiously.

  Henry turned to Perfect, who was, of course, his loader.

  ‘Yours fair and square, m’lord. Right over your head it was.’

  ‘Looks like the score’s even, old chap,’ said Henry to Shafeen, squinting against the sun.

  Shafeen looked from one to the other. ‘Oh, well, if you can’t win like a gentleman,’ he said contemptuously.

  I caught a furious look flitting across Henry’s face, before he composed his features. There was a horrible moment of tension, broken by the racket of the beaters calling the last drive of the day. Nel, Lara and I retreated back behind the loaders’ line for safety, and the sky darkened with birds taking flight. Of course we all looked upwards, our eyes on the birds, to see whether Henry or Shafeen would be victorious, so no one saw exactly what happened next.

  I remember a terrific volley of gunshots and watching more poor pheasants cartwheeling out of the sky. Then I remembered a single gunshot, so loud it almost seemed to come from right next to my ear. My hearing dulled instantly, as if the ambient sound had been turned down. My ears were whining with this eerie ringing sound. Muted under the ringing, almost like it was underwater, I heard a cry. It was as if everything was happening in slow motion. I looked down and to my right in the direction of the shout, in time to see Shafeen spinning around with the force of a blow and falling to the grass.

  He’d been shot.

  The Shooting Party, I thought, and started to run. I was absolutely convinced that, just like the guy who gets in the line of fire in the movie, Shafeen was dead. By the time we girls got there, there was already a small knot of loaders and dogs and Medievals around him. I had to fight my way through wellies and dogs to get close.

  He was a horrible colour – his dark skin almost green. He was on his side, clutching his arm and rolling slightly, so at least he was alive. No one else was touching him, so I knelt and prised his hand from his arm and saw an ugly tear in the arm of his jacket. I folded back the material and could see that the tear went through the jumper, through the shirt.

  Through the skin.

  I nearly puked. A horrid gash was seeping blood.

  ‘Shot grazed him,’ observed Piers casually, peering down. ‘Dashed good job.’

  I looked up at him incredulously. ‘A graze is what you get on your knee when you fall over at primary school. This is not that.’ It was deep, and the blood kept coming.

  Piers shifted his feet and said sulkily, ‘I just meant there’ll be no pellets to dig out. Painful business that.’

  Cookson nodded. ‘Doctor’ll patch him up and he’ll be right as rain.’

  I flapped my hand impatiently. ‘Never mind all the chat,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to tie something round his arm.’ I’d seen it in movies.

  I looked up and no one was moving. The servants all stood well back, as if they didn’t feel that it was their place to intrude on the doings of their betters. All the Medievals were in this semicircle, looking down at Shafeen writhing and moaning. At that moment I assumed they simply didn’t know what to do. I remembered seeing this film called The Admirable Crichton, where this aristocratic family goes on a sea voyage and gets shipwrecked, and then when they’re on this desert island it turns out the rich family don’t have any survival skills and so they’re at the mercy of this really resourceful butler called Crichton, who effectively becomes the boss on the island. Here in the covert it was Nel who woke up from her stupor and was more use than the rest of them put together. She took off her brand-new Hermès belt, dropped to her knees and helped me tie it tightly round Shafeen’s upper arm. Esme and Charlotte, who’d been perfectly happy to shoot birds into a million pieces a minute ago, were making a hysterical fuss about blood. The boys just sort of stood about, as if they didn’t know how to help – or didn’t want to. Shafeen was now shivering, and his eyes were half closed. I took my jacket off and Nel did too, and we draped them over him. That shamed Cookson and Piers into action, and they did the same. Strangely Henry, the king of jacket-lending, kept his on. It was almost as if he was in shock too.

  ‘What the hell happened?’ I yelled, hoping to shake him out of his stupor.

  He didn’t reply or even look at me.

  ‘Dashed difficult to say,’ said Piers, filling the silence. ‘Someone mis-shot, I think. Punjabi was edging out of his line. Getting a bit competitive with old Henry, don’t you know.’

  ‘Impossible to say who,’ said Cookson smoothly. ‘Just an unfortunate accident.’

  Henry said nothing, but looked down at Shafeen with an unreadable expression on his face. Then he knelt and put out a hand. ‘Come on, old man. I’ll help you up.’

  Shafeen’s dark eyes focused. ‘No,’ he said quite clearly. ‘Not you.’

  Henry recoiled as if he was the one who’d been shot. He stood up and stumbled backwards.

  This wasn’t the time for their childish feud. ‘Someone’s got to take you!’ I exclaimed, worry making me shout at poor Shafeen. ‘What if you collapse?’ What I really wanted to do was pick him up and carry him down the mountain myself, as he’d done to Nel. I turned to Henry. ‘Can we get a car up here?’

  Henry shook his head.

  ‘I’ll take him.’ Piers put his hands under Shafeen’s armpits. ‘Come on, Punjabi. Jeldi, jeldi.’

  But Shafeen was tall, and drifting in and out of consciousness. He w
as a deadweight. Piers and Cookson between them couldn’t carry him. ‘Perfect,’ called Henry calmly, ‘have the beaters take the gate off.’

  I thought it was some kind of ill-timed joke, but, unbelievably, Perfect and the beaters literally took a gate out of the nearby dry-stone wall, and laid Shafeen on it. Like coffin bearers, we all lifted it between us, and that’s how we got Shafeen down the hill.

  All the way down I looked at his pinched face growing paler and his tweed sleeve darkening with blood. Nel smiled at him. ‘Now I’m carrying you down the hill,’ she said.

  He looked at her, focused and half smiled. Then his head lolled sideways again and his eyes closed.

  Back at the house, a swarm of servants flooded out of the grand entrance at our approach, followed by Henry’s fat Labradors. The menfolk lifted Shafeen from the gate. By this point he was conscious and could walk with help, and two of the under-butlers took him into the Boot Room. We all followed.

  They laid Shafeen down by the fire, in the midst of the detritus of walking sticks and an old wetsuit and the rows of wellingtons. The Labradors sniffed him and Nel, despite the dogs, crouched down next to him like Florence Nightingale.

  ‘Shall I go outside and wait for the ambulance?’ I said.

  Henry looked strangely blank.

  ‘You’ve called an ambulance, right?’

  Henry turned to the mammoth headkeeper. ‘Perfect, go to the village for the doctor.’

  ‘For Chrissake!’ I shouted. ‘Wake up!’ I had. It was as if that shot on the hillside had wakened me from a dream, a lovely dream of the past. It had ripped a jagged hole through the fantasy of this morning. I took hold of Henry’s arm and dragged him outside. Perfect, the shadow, followed.

  In the fresh air I could say what I hadn’t wanted Shafeen to hear. ‘Your lovely antiquated life is all very well, but this is an actual emergency! He’s losing blood! What if he dies?’

  ‘He’s not going to die,’ said Henry. ‘It’s a flesh wound.’ But, in concession to me, he said, ‘Be as quick as you can, Perfect.’ Perfect touched his cap and walked, not very fast, I have to say, in the direction of the stables.

  ‘What, are you going to send him on a horse?’ I yelled. That’s exactly what they did in The Shooting Party, but that was set before the First freaking World War.

  ‘Of course not,’ he snapped. ‘In the estate car.’

  ‘But Shafeen needs hospital treatment.’

  ‘The nearest hospital is an hour and a half away.’

  Then I calmed down a bit. If that was true, then I supposed Henry’s plan was the quickest way to get Shafeen medical attention.

  But I was still breathing hard. Henry laid his hand on mine, but this time I didn’t get the electric shock. ‘It’s better this way,’ he said gently. ‘Trust me.’

  Thing is, I wasn’t sure I did any more.

  chapter twenty-one

  The night Shafeen got shot, I didn’t really expect there to be a dinner.

  But I should have known better. It would take more than a human shooting to keep the upper classes from their meals.

  I sat on my bed in Lowther for a long, long time, cold despite the merry fire, thinking and gazing unseeing at the dying light outside. Jeffrey watched me, saying nothing. That’s what I liked about Jeffrey. He knew when to keep quiet and let a person think.

  When Betty came with my clothes, I didn’t even let her get as far as laying them out on the bed. ‘Betty,’ I said curtly, ‘I’ll dress myself tonight. That will be all.’ Weirdly, she looked a lot less fierce as she nodded and left. Maybe she preferred a world without pleases and thank-yous, a world where her masters knew their place and she knew hers. Was she more comfortable that way? With commands, rather than requests? Was Henry right about the natural order of things?

  Either way, I didn’t need her tonight. I knew exactly what I was going to wear and how I was going to have my hair and do my make-up. I shook my mother’s dress out of the case – luckily it was the kind of material that fell perfectly, with no creases.

  I put it on, and decided there would be no princess ringlets tonight. I warmed up my tongs and ironed my black hair dead straight, fringe to my eyelashes, bob skimming my shoulders. I looked in the mirror with a kind of grim satisfaction. The Dress was perfection – silver grey, strapless, with thousands of tiny jet-black beads swirling and clustering down the front like a murmuration of starlings. My mother might not have been much of a mother, but she sure as hell could make a dress, and I respected her for that. There was a lot of work in it, every bead sewn on by hand. I thought then that she must have loved me a little, to make this dress for me.

  I rummaged in my make-up bag for my blackest eyeliner and drew two smooth wings over my eyelids, flicked up at the outer edges. I took one last look in the mirror. The princess was gone. I looked like myself again, and, I was pleased to see, a little bit dangerous.

  I decided I couldn’t face drinks in the drawing room, if they were even happening, so I went straight down to dinner, alone. I wasn’t surprised to see at once that Shafeen was missing. I had half expected Nel to stay away too, so that there would be one less at dinner every night, like in that Agatha Christie film And Then There Were None. But she was there, or at least half there, a ghost of what she’d been.

  Now I was sitting one place away from Henry, with Lara in between us. At lunch I’d been next to him. I expected that I was being punished for shouting at him about the ambulance.

  The dinner was very serious to start with, but within the space of a couple of courses, once the wine started to flow, the Medievals were as rowdy as ever, chattering away and shrieking with laughter. It was as if nothing had happened to Shafeen.

  I toyed with my food. It was fish soup, which I’m not a fan of at the best of times, but especially when I remembered that this was what they did – we’d had venison the night before we killed the deer, pheasant with lead shot garnish before the shoot, and tomorrow we were to go fishing. I couldn’t believe the sports would continue after what had happened, but apparently, from what I was hearing around the table, such incidents were not uncommon. I must have heard the words ‘these things happen’ about a hundred times.

  These things happen. These things happen. Everyone had a story about an uncle, cousin, guest, who had been shot during a drive. I was not convinced.

  The only direct reference to Shafeen came when Henry stood up, tapped his silver knife on his glass till everyone fell quiet and said, ‘I will not, of course, be giving the shootin’ toast tonight, out of respect for Shafeen, who sustained a slight injury.’

  I thought of the blood seeping through Shafeen’s jacket and had to bite my tongue. ‘Instead I give you Shafeen, and our best wishes for his speedy recovery.’

  ‘Shafeen,’ they all said, seriously and respectfully. Then Piers added, glass high in the air, ‘The Punjabi Playboy!’ And they all fell about laughing. I put down my glass. I felt the wine would choke me.

  Then two servants approached Henry. One placed the morocco-bound black book in front of Henry, open at the right page, and the other one handed him a fountain pen. Oh, I thought, he’s still going to write in the game book though.

  From where I was sitting I couldn’t see exactly what he was writing, but I knew he’d be recording the number of pheasants massacred that day. Then he wrote one last entry, and he turned the book to face Lara. Their eyes met and they both smirked. That was his mistake, because when he showed the book to her, he also showed it to me.

  I’ll never forget what I read there. I can still, to this day, see the scrawl of ink, drying on the paper in the candlelight.

  1 x Shafeen Jadeja

  That was when I knew.

  All the terrible thoughts I’d tried to keep at bay upstairs, sitting on the bed while night fell outside, crowded in on me, gathering like the darkness had outside my window. Henry de Warlencourt had listed Shafeen in the book as prey. He was of no more value than those pheasants. Henry had not just written h
is name down, but had entered him as a quantity. ‘1 x Shafeen Jadeja’, as though there were thousands of him in the world. Pheasants and peasants, both expendable and worthless.

  I thought I was going to be sick.

  Fortunately, as soon as the game book was closed, the table all rose as we ladies retired into the drawing room for coffee, giving me an escape. Nel, the three sirens and I settled into various chairs and sofas, the Medieval girls absorbed in the ritual of handing round and lighting cigarettes. I wondered how the hell I’d be able to make conversation now I knew what I knew. I made sure I sat next to Nel. I had to speak to her, had to apologise for not believing her. I was a very new friend to her, but I had already been a totally rubbish one. And I had been an even worse feminist, dismissing her as a hysterical, crazy psycho.

  I looked for a distraction, and when the maid came in with the silver coffee tray, and there was all the milk-and-sugar kerfuffle, I seized my chance.

  I grabbed Nel’s arm, hard enough to hurt. I had to wake her from her zombified state – had to let her know that I was serious. ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you. You were right all along,’ I muttered in a low voice.

  ‘Wha—’

  I cut across her. ‘No time. Don’t ask any questions. Tell them you’re going to bed. Meet me in Shafeen’s room in ten minutes. Bring the seeds.’

  ‘The seeds?’

  ‘Yes. The seeds.’

  chapter twenty-two

  Shafeen’s room was on a different floor to mine and Nel’s – probably some weird morality thing, even though Longcross was turning out to be the least moral place I’d ever been.

  His room had a name too – it was Raby. When I knocked on the door and went in, Nel was already there. We both sat on Shafeen’s bed, in a weird mirroring of last night when I’d sat on Nel’s.

  Except he wasn’t in a dressing gown. He was sitting up, the bed sheets to his waist, smooth brown chest and broad shoulders rising above. His dark hair was all bed-head messy and falling all round his face. I thought, completely irrelevantly, how handsome he was. Some feminist, Greer. A white bandage was wrapped around the top of his arm, and a bottle of painkillers sat on the bedside table.