by M A Bennett
‘Is this the part where we put worms on hooks?’ I asked, suddenly remembering my dream.
‘Actually, no. Browns don’t really go for bait. That is, they do, but they have pretty sharp teeth, so they can often bite through the line. It’s better to use lures, like this one.’ He reached into one of the plastic containers and brought out, not a maggot as I’d expected, but something rather beautiful. It was a shiny, tiny fish made of foil and plastic, with coppery, shimmery scales of golds and gilts and bronzes and a little triple hook instead of a tail. It was kind of jointed, so when Henry wiggled it, it looked as if it was swimming. ‘Authentic fish-like action,’ he said.
I’d happily have worn it as a necklace. ‘It’s cute,’ I said.
‘That’s a lure. It’s called a Rapala. Irresistible to brown trout.’
‘So they eat other fish?’ I wasn’t sure about the cannibal angle.
‘Worse than that. This lure is supposed to replicate the markings of their own young. Brown trout eat their babies.’
I looked at the poor little shining thing. ‘Jesus.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘nature can be cruel. Man isn’t the only predator.’ He stood up in the boat. ‘Let’s try our luck, Perfect. Greer, sit tight for this one and we’ll try you next.’
I won’t lie. There was a fair bit of chugging around in the boat, and stopping, and waiting, and let’s try over here. But the sun was out and I could watch the amazing lake-and-mountain scenery and it was all really nice. Most of the time, if I’m honest, I watched Henry confidently casting the line into the water, looking like he was born to fish, which I guess he was. I remembered seeing Brad Pitt in A River Runs Through It. Ever seen that movie? Brad was pretty fine in it, but he had nothing on Henry. I did think about Shafeen and Nel, and hoped they weren’t worrying about me. I wished there was a way to tell them that I was fine. That I was finer than fine.
I was really relaxed when suddenly it got all exciting, and the lure bobbed under the water and Henry grabbed the rod and started to pull madly. It looked as if the fish might get the better of him, when he jerked the rod back with a practised little flick and this huge bronze fish flipped out of the water and into the bottom of the boat. I snatched my wellies back out of his way and watched Henry free the lure from the trout’s mouth, then bash its head in against the side of the boat. All at once, everything was calm again and the fish was still, lying shining in Henry’s hands, scales shimmering in the sun, eyes open and beady, but dead.
‘Peace out, brown trout,’ I said, a little sadly.
Henry laughed. ‘We don’t have to feel too sorry for him. They’re not very nice fish.’
I remembered the kill-your-babies speech. ‘OK, but just because you don’t like something is not a reason to kill it.’ Suddenly I remembered the game books, and the human names, but it all seemed like a far-off nightmare.
‘Then how about this for a reason,’ said Henry, as Perfect placed the fish in a plastic container and snapped closed the lid. ‘They are food, and jolly tasty food at that. You’ll find out at lunch. Nothing like eating fresh trout that was swimming around half an hour ago.’ He picked up another rod and tested it in his hand. ‘You’ll notice from our menu this weekend that we eat everything we kill.’
I narrowed my eyes against the sun.
‘So you wouldn’t just hunt for fun?’
‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Fun is the by-product. You have to hunt for a reason.’
He was so believable.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Your turn.’
He stood me up in the boat, holding my hands all the time. Then he did that Tom Cruise in The Color of Money thing again, getting behind me and putting his arms around me, only this time instead of a pool cue (or a gun) it was the fishing rod. He showed me how to spread my feet for balance and cast the line with a flick of the wrist; how to dangle the lure so it didn’t catch under the slipstream of the boat. There was lots of waiting, but to wait in that setting, with Henry’s strong arms around me and his warm body at my back, was something I was happy to do for as long as it took.
But then my rod jerked down, bending like an archer’s bow.
‘Go on, pull,’ cried Henry, suddenly animated, yanking at my arms. The fish was incredibly strong, and I didn’t know if I could hold on to him, even with Henry’s help. Heart beating, I pulled back with all my strength. ‘Now reel!’ shouted Henry in my ear.
Fumbling, panicking, I reeled the spool and Henry pulled; he reeled and I pulled. We both reeled, we both pulled. I don’t know which one of us landed the trout, but at last the silvery fish cleared the water, flicking its tail madly, crystal drops showering from it, glittering like chandelier brilliants in the low autumn sun.
‘He’s a beauty,’ crowed Henry. ‘Don’t let him go whatever you do.’
I turned so the fish dangled over the boat, and Perfect took him down, dumping him in the bottom of the boat, where he wriggled like a mad thing. He was so strong he actually made a knocking sound on the wood. ‘Got ’im.’
‘You did it!’ said Henry. We clung together, gasping and laughing, both soaked with lake water. The words He’s a beauty – don’t let him go whatever you do were echoing in my head. I was ecstatic. The previous night, and all thoughts of a dark conspiracy, were totally forgotten in that sick moment of triumph. I was one of them. I was a Medieval at that moment and it felt great. I loved fishin’. I loved Henry. I even loved grumpy old Perfect, who became almost chatty at the sight of my first catch, as if I’d joined some sort of club or something. He forgot himself so far as to actually speak to me. ‘Tek ’old of ’im, miss. Don’t let ’im muck yer abart. He’s a reet wick one, that un.’
I bent to try to get hold of my prey.
‘Watch out, Greer,’ warned Henry. ‘Brown trout have really sharp teeth. Be careful when you’re handling him.’
I managed to pick up the fish. He was surprisingly heavy, and his scales felt very slippery. I held him behind his head, my fingers clear of the gaping jaws, but I didn’t know what to do next.
‘Shall I?’ asked Henry, looking at me very directly with his blue eyes.
‘No,’ I said, suddenly sure. ‘I’ll do it.’ The fish was wriggling madly, but I bashed his head sharply against the wood of the boat, and, to my great surprise, he fell still, as if he’d been switched off. I held on to him, in a sort of trance, and was still hanging on to him about a minute later. Perfect had to prise him from my hands and place him with the other fishy corpse in the plastic coffin.
I sat back down beside Henry, suddenly in something like shock, and he threw an arm around me. ‘You did well there, Greer. Unlike deer or pheasant, trout are the kind of prey that can bite back. They can really do you some damage.’
I thought about that as Perfect turned the boat around to chug back to shore. I’d thought I was going to be the fish today. The prey with the power to bite back. Now I knew it was all stupid. Our plan, cooked up in the estate room in the small hours, was ridiculous. This was the way to live. I wasn’t afraid, or sorry, I was totally pumped. I’d cried for the stag, I’d mourned the poor feathery pheasants, but the fish I’d killed with my own hands and I’d loved it. I remembered at school, back in Lightfoot with Esme, when I’d thought I wouldn’t mind the death of a fish. What I hadn’t known then was that I would absolutely revel in it.
Henry, looking at me beadily, saw it straight away. ‘Feels good, doesn’t it?’
I nodded, speechless for a moment.
‘There’s a light in your eye,’ he said. ‘A predator’s look. You’re beginning to understand.’
‘Understand what?’
‘Huntin’ shootin’ fishin’, of course,’ he said. ‘Why we do it.’
‘I’m not sure about the other two,’ I admitted, ‘but I don’t really care about fish.’
‘Fish can be amazing too,’ he said. ‘Think about the eels that swim for thousands of miles every year to spawn in the Sargasso Sea. And the salmon, so determine
d to breed that they will leap up the steepest of waterfalls.’
‘I suppose they have a reason,’ I said, suddenly aware of his arm still around me. ‘They are fulfilling their biological mission. They want to … reproduce.’
There was a charged silence. ‘Yes,’ he said heavily. ‘Nature will go to any lengths to replicate itself, to ensure that its kind survives.’
By the time the boat returned to the jetty for lunch, I was almost convinced that Shafeen and Nel and I had made the whole huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ thing up. I’d worked so hard on pretending to have a good time and like Henry that I’d actually had a good time, and I actually liked Henry. All that creeping around at midnight seemed like some stupid gothic fantasy.
At least Shafeen and Nel would be at lunch. I needed to talk to them. Now I had a different plan to the one we’d spent the night crafting. I wanted to talk to Henry. Maybe the entries in the game book were some kind of sick joke. Maybe it was some bizarre tradition, or an accident book just like Shafeen had said. Maybe the aniseeds in the jacket were a coincidence. Maybe Henry’d put them there to keep his hounds to heel – it was his jacket, after all – and forgotten all about them when he’d given the jacket to Nel. Perhaps the names of the hounds were just a classical joke; it was just the kind of intellectual gag the Medievals would enjoy. I was reaching, I know, but I just couldn’t go through with what we’d planned. I couldn’t believe that this shining golden boy, this charming young man who’d taken pains to give me a really nice morning, could be a monster. Maybe, I thought as I walked hand in hand with Henry to the boathouse, we’d invented the monster, in the darkness of the midnight library.
chapter twenty-seven
Of the three cool places I’d had lunch on the Longcross estate, the boathouse was the coolest.
It was a long wooden building on the lakeshore, with a kind of planked balcony on stilts that came right out over to the water. Inside there was no fire this time (obvs – not with all that wood about), but there was a bunch of little closed braziers all around the table, which made the place beautifully warm. The coolest thing about it – and this is where the boathouse smacked down the bothy from the huntin’ day and the folly from the shootin’ day – was that there were actual boats inside with us, rocking in the greenish water, reflecting in the candlelight.
Yes, I said candlelight. Because apart from the fact that there were – well – boats dining with us, everything else was just as if we were in some smart dining room. As ever there was the snowy white tablecloth, the crystal glasses, the rows of silver cutlery and the pyramids of fruit; green apples today, just the colour of the boathouse water. It was a magical setting.
I was so intrigued by the boathouse, and, if I’m honest, so hooked on fishing (sorry), that I almost forgot that I was about to meet Shafeen and Nel again, and that we had a plan to put into action. By now I was well and truly back in the de Warlencourt corner. I know this makes me look really bad, particularly when you hear about what came next, but really, you had to be in Henry’s company to understand the sheer charm of the guy.
I was sitting between Henry and Cookson – a Henry sandwich – and nowhere near Shafeen and Nel. They were way down the other end of the table, seated together. They both looked immaculate, but they both also looked tired. Nel was back in her own stuff, all slightly too bright and too tight. I was glad to see it. She suited the hell out of it. She was obviously wearing her ‘screw you’ to the Medievals clothes, just as I’d done last night when I’d worn my mum’s dress. Shafeen had on a cream shirt with a discreet green check and a moss-green waistcoat. His arm was now in a professional-looking sling – I guessed the ancient doctor had called again this morning. He was struggling, wrong-handed, with his soup. His longish layered hair was kind of a bit messy today – I guess grooming was difficult one-handed. But he looked handsome, and noble, what I called his Prince Caspian look, and I suddenly thought, irrelevantly, You’re beautiful too.
I was torn between happiness to see my new friends – for that was what I considered them now – and a desperate need to tell them to abort our plan. You see, I’d figured that if we went ahead we’d be alienated from this world forever, maybe even expelled from STAGS. It was like the secret door to the Longcross roof that I couldn’t find again without Henry, the way to Narnia, which, once closed, could never be opened again. If we turned back from the road we’d taken now, we could stay in Narnia forever. We could all go back to STAGS, and have a happy sixth-form experience in the comfort of our new friendship. I knew it would be hard to persuade them to give it up; Nel had been badly scared by the hounds. Shafeen, I guessed, was motivated less by the fact that he’d been shot than that his father had been humiliated in the same way. He was Prince Caspian for real, sworn to vanquish his father’s enemies. He had a whole family history to avenge.
The soup had been cleared away and the servants brought out the fish course. Staring up at me from the plate, with one dull eye, was a brown trout, his side slashed three times and neatly fitted with three slices of lemon. I looked at the fish, and the fish looked at me. ‘Is this …?’
‘Yes,’ said Henry. ‘It’s the one you caught.’
Now this was a novel experience for me. Because of the whole game-hanging, rotting-flesh thing of which Esme had so scornfully informed me, this was the only time we’d eaten what we’d actually killed. Now, I’m not a big fish eater; if I ever have it, it is in the form of the good old Captain Birdseye’s Fish Fingers or Filet-o-Fish from the golden arches. I certainly wasn’t in the habit of eating the full-on scales-and-tail type. I didn’t really know how to cut it up, but, by watching Henry, I sliced through the crispy skin and flaked off some of the pinkish flesh onto my fork. It was super-delicious, but I couldn’t really relax and savour my fishy victim. For one thing, I had no appetite, as I was so apprehensive about the afternoon and what would happen at the going down of the sun. For another, I couldn’t just sit back and let everyone else carry the conversation. If I was going to send a message to Shafeen and Nel, for once I had to shout the Medievals down and take the lead myself. I didn’t know how I was going to find the courage to begin, and then Henry did something which convinced me that I must.
Shafeen had been struggling with the fish in front of him, and Nel clearly had as little idea about how to tackle it as I had, so Henry got up from the table, walked round and crouched down beside Shafeen. As if he was some TV chef he deftly sliced the fish along the backbone, and flaked off the flesh from the two sides, leaving these neat little fillets on the plate, which Shafeen could fork up one-handed.
It was so beautifully done, so kindly and without fuss, that I was convinced, yet again, that Henry was one of the good guys. (I know, I know.) Surely he wouldn’t bother with the chivalry if he’d wanted us all dead? Surely the hangman doesn’t give the condemned man a leg up to the gibbet?
I had to let the others know we were in abort mode. ‘It’s a beautiful lake, Longmere,’ I said to Cookson, but loud enough for the whole table. ‘It reminds me of Loch Ness. I went there once with my dad.’
Dad and I had never been near Loch Ness – that is to say, Dad probably had, because he’s filmed pretty much everywhere, but I’d never even been to Scotland. Everything I know about Loch Ness came from watching The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, a film not known for its gritty realism.
Cookson swallowed his mouthful. ‘Really?’ he said in that way the upper classes use when they think you’re talking shit but are too polite to say so. ‘You think Longmere is like Loch Ness?’
‘Well, I mean in the way the mountains surround the water,’ I improvised desperately.
Cookson’s manners took a dive. ‘Like ninety-nine per cent of the lakes in the British Isles, you mean?’
‘No, I see what Greer means,’ said Henry, coming to my rescue as he walked back around the table. ‘Something about the surrounding mountains. Long Fell looks a little bit like Meall Fuar-mhonaidh in the right light.’
I
had no idea what Henry’d said – he might as well have been talking Martian – but he was unwittingly helping me to get my point across. I just needed one of the Medievals to mention the most famous thing about Loch Ness. They were certainly smart enough to have heard of that.
‘I don’t know a thing about Loch Ness,’ said Esme. Then she shivered deliciously. ‘Except for the monster.’
There it was. I thanked the Medieval gods silently.
‘Oh, I do,’ enthused Charlotte. ‘Granny’s estate is near there. And I can tell you, all that monster stuff is nonsense.’
‘It’s belief either way,’ said Henry.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Charlotte.
‘Well,’ he said, forking up his own fish, ‘you either believe it exists, or you believe it doesn’t. There’s no proof either way.’ He turned to me, looking at me very directly in that way he had. ‘What do you believe, Greer?’
Just then I had the uncanny feeling that he knew exactly what we were really talking about. Did I believe he was a criminal, potentially a killer? Or not?
He watched me, and Shafeen and Nel watched me. The whole table watched me. ‘I believe,’ I said slowly, ‘that there is no monster.’
I looked straight at Shafeen and Nel. I felt bad for them, as if I was letting them down. But I couldn’t go ahead with what we’d planned. These were serious accusations. They would mean police, social services, the ruin of young lives.
I’m not sure if Nel got what I was trying to say. But Shafeen knew all right. ‘But there is proof,’ he almost shouted. Now everyone looked at him. ‘Proof of the monster, I mean. There have been sightings. Many, many sightings over decades. People have seen the evidence with their own eyes.’