S.T.A.G.S.

by M A Bennett

  ‘I’ll go,’ I said, and Nel and Shafeen fell back at the edge of the quad. I felt, as I’d felt ever since we came back from Longcross, that I had a certain power, a cloak of invulnerability like something out of Clash of the Titans. I had something on them – that they hadn’t helped me out of the lake – and they were wary of me, especially as they didn’t know how much more I knew. But as I walked across the grass towards them, feeling their watchful eyes on me, I was as nervous as I’d been on my first day at STAGS. They looked, as a group, as they always had: comfortable, entitled and forbidding. I had to separate one from the pack; and if you want an answer, as my dad always says, go to the top. ‘Cookson,’ I called, pleasantly enough, ‘can I have a word?’

  He sort of pushed himself off the well, hands still in his pockets, and I was struck by a memory of Henry at Longcross, pushing himself off the panelled wall in exactly that manner. It was uncanny. Cookson strolled easily to meet me, in the middle of the grass, as if we two were about to fight a duel, with our seconds standing a little way behind.

  He stopped, facing me in his duelling stance. I suddenly felt the old hostility return and that my cloak of invulnerability had been stripped away. What had gone down at the inquest? Had we been dropped in it?

  ‘Hi, Cookson,’ I said, not really sure how to start.

  ‘It’s Henry actually.’

  I was a bit taken aback. I’d almost forgotten his first name was Henry. All that time we’d known him as Cookson because there could only ever be one Henry. And now, here was another one, this BTEC version. ‘Henry,’ I began. It sounded weird. ‘I … We were just wondering what happened at the inquest.’

  He stared me down with eyes that looked bluer than usual, eyes that were suddenly like the old Henry’s. For a moment I thought he’d refuse to answer. Then he said, grudgingly, ‘The coroner ruled it was death by misadventure.’

  I needed to be quite sure. ‘What’s misadventure?’

  ‘An accident due to a dangerous risk taken voluntarily,’ he stated in a superior voice. ‘The coroner decided that Henry had climbed Conrad’s Force voluntarily, so the fact that he fell off it was his own fault. Misadventure.’

  Misadventure. It was a good way to describe the whole weekend at Longcross. An adventure gone wrong. ‘Did he say anything else?’

  ‘What else could he possibly say? It was a terrible accident,’ he said pointedly. ‘And that’s all.’

  So that was it. I stood very still while I processed the information, the sharp breeze stirring our Tudor coats, the rooks cawing in the trees. It took me a minute to realise what it meant.

  The matter was closed and we were off the hook.

  The thing is, so were they.

  I felt massive relief coupled with a keen disappointment. It’s not like I had wanted some earth-shattering revelation about the huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ to come out at the inquest, but at the same time I felt weirdly let down. It felt like nothing had changed.

  Just then the bell rang from the chapel spire for afternoon lessons. Lara called to Cookson, like the siren I’d always thought her, in an alluring, tempting voice. ‘Hen,’ she said, ‘come on. We’ll be late for Greek.’ I went cold. Hen had been her nickname for Henry. As his girlfriend, she had been given the unique privilege of shortening his name. Now she’d passed on the nickname, along with her affection, to this second Henry, who turned and sauntered to join her, supremely confident in his gait. He leaned down – he even seemed to have gotten taller – to kiss her on the mouth. Then, hand in hand, they walked to the Honorius building, leaving me open-mouthed in the middle of the quad. Shafeen and Nel came to meet me, and we all stared after them.

  Shafeen gave a long, low whistle. ‘The King is Dead,’ he said with something like awe. ‘Long Live the King.’

  Nel sighed. ‘Is this another one of those King Sisyphus conversations?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Yes. Sort of. “The King is Dead, Long Live the King” was the traditional proclamation in medieval England when the king died. It meant the people were never without a king. It made everyone feel secure, and there was no opening for a pretender to seize the throne. It represented tradition, continuity, all the things that the Medievals are so fond of.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’ said Nel.

  ‘Don’t you see what’s happened? They’ve gone seamlessly from one Henry to another. Even the queen, in this case Lara, has hooked up with the new king. It’s like Hamlet.’

  He was right. I hadn’t seen the play, but in the Kenneth Branagh version when his dad RIPs, his mum (Julie Christie) starts spooning his uncle Claudius (Derek Jacobi) before you can say, ‘To be or not to be.’ I nodded. ‘And just like that,’ I said, ‘order is restored.’

  At that moment a shaft of weak winter sunlight penetrated the quad, and it was as if the same light, at last, illuminated my stupid brain. ‘Order,’ I said. ‘That’s it.’ I grabbed both my friends by their black sleeves.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Shafeen.

  ‘Nel’s room. Now.’

  chapter thirty-three

  Fortunately Nel’s roommate wasn’t in her room.

  We bundled in and I locked the door behind us. I even drew the curtains. Then I sat the other two down on Nel’s bed.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Nel, at exactly the same time Shafeen said, ‘Look, what is all this?’

  ‘Nel,’ I said, breathing heavily, ‘where’s your phone?’

  Nel unlocked a drawer and got out the Saros 7S. With one touch it sprang into life with its friendly but futuristic chime.

  ‘Play me the video,’ I said urgently. ‘Play me Henry’s confession. I just want to check something.’

  I hadn’t seen it before, and it was a tough watch. Like watching a tragic movie for the second time around, when you know the ending. Like when I saw The Fault in Our Stars for the second time, and I couldn’t quite believe they were going to let that kid Gus die of cancer, even though I’d seen it before and I knew they did. I watched now, somehow hoping I’d misremembered it all.

  I watched myself, soaking and shivering, knee deep in rushing water, talking to Henry at the top of Conrad’s Force. I could hear my own voice, raised above the sound of the water, shouting, ‘Did you get all that?’ I watched Henry’s face, shot from above, as he turned at the sound of Nel’s voice, super-loud, right next to the phone, saying, ‘Oh yes. We got it.’ I watched his expression change as the Saros 7S’s powerful torch was turned on him, the water below him turned to milk and he realised he was being filmed. As he looked directly into the lens I flinched a little. He seemed to be looking right at me, and I was suddenly sure he could see me even now. I shifted uncomfortably on the bed, and watched him extend his dripping hand up to the camera.

  ‘Give me that thing,’ he said, low and deadly.

  Then Nel’s voice, louder and bolshie, saying, ‘Wouldn’t do any good. You could take this phone from me, but the video’s already been uploaded to the Saros Orbit. It’s a satellite storage system, totally secure.’

  Shafeen joined in: ‘Isn’t technology wonderful, when you find the right application for it?’

  Then came the moment I’d remembered, the creepy moment when Henry drew himself up, more powerful than ever, his eyes shining with that freaky, almost religious light. ‘You can’t win,’ he said. ‘You can’t upset the order.’

  ‘There!’ I said. ‘Wind it back.’

  Nel scrubbed back along the timeline with her manicured index finger. Henry did a little backwards dance in the water, and then spoke again. ‘You can’t win,’ he said. ‘You can’t upset the order.’

  This time Nel let the slider run on past her own barnstorming speech about the powers of social media. Henry’s voice said, ‘The order will go on, even without me.’

  Then Shafeen’s voice. ‘There’s a new order now.’ Nel stopped the playback, and she and Shafeen looked at me.

  ‘So?’ said Shafeen. ‘We knew Henry was obsessed with order. D
on’t you remember the shooting lunch, when he said the lower orders of nature should be culled? We were the lower orders of nature, and when we got the better of him, he couldn’t take it. He was so obsessed with the concept of natural order that it controlled his life.’

  I shook my head. ‘Listen again.’ This time I took the Saros out of Nel’s hand and scrolled it back myself. ‘The order will go on,’ Henry said, ‘even without me.’ I looked from one to the other. ‘Now do you hear? He said, “The order.” Not order. The Order.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ admitted Nel.

  But Shafeen turned to me, wide-eyed. ‘A religious order. It’s a freaking cult.’

  ‘The order of the what though?’ asked Nel.

  ‘What’s this all about?’ I said. ‘St Aidan’s stag. A school called STAGS. Antlers everywhere.’ I raised both hands to my head, fingers spread, thumbs to my temples. ‘The Order of the Stag.’

  ‘And every one of them is a part of it,’ said Shafeen. ‘All the Medievals.’

  ‘Not just the Medievals,’ said Nel slowly. ‘The Friars too.’

  ‘The Friars?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I may not be as clever as you two –’ she waved away our polite protests – ‘but I do know about fashion, and I notice accessories. That ring that Henry wore – the gold signet ring with the antlers? The Friars all wear them, the men and the women.’

  Then it was Shafeen’s turn. ‘Come with me,’ he said in his commanding voice. He was in full-on Prince Caspian mode and we got up at once and followed him.

  We left Lightfoot and the sun was setting as we walked through the chapel cloister, across Paulinus quad – now empty of Medievals – and over Bede’s Piece in the direction of Honorius. The whole of STAGS, shadowy and looming, surrounded us in a dark embrace. The lighted windows watched us like eyes. We slipped into Honorius and up the stairs to Shafeen’s room. The boys didn’t have to share, as there were four boys’ houses to the girls’ one, so there was no roommate to worry about. Through the heavy oak door there was just an empty room, a room I’d never seen before. It was really nice, all oak panelling and emerald-green curtains, which Shafeen drew.

  He unlocked a drawer in the desk and pulled out something heavy and black, and we all sat on the bed together. It was a repeat of how we’d just sat in Nel’s room – although now instead of huddling around a phone, we were huddled over a book.

  It was a big book, bound in morocco leather, with no title but just a date.

  It was the Longcross game book from the 1960s.

  ‘You brought it with you?’ I exclaimed.

  ‘I said I would.’ He clicked on the bedside lamp and for a moment we all looked at the book in his hands, bathed in a circle of golden light, like it was some sort of holy text.

  1960–1969

  A decade of huntin’ shootin’ fishin’. A decade when the rest of the world was changing. Swinging London and the Beatles and England winning the World Cup and Vidal Sassoon haircuts and the moon landings. And all the while, at Longcross, things were fossilised, as they had been for centuries, and dead creatures were written down in ink on paper in books. Shafeen ran his long fingers over the spine almost tenderly, his fingertips caressing the gold-stamped date, as if he was stalling, afraid of what he might find. Then he got all businesslike. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘let’s see just how far back this goes.’

  He opened the book on his lap and we all crowded around it.

  He turned the yellowing paper and our eyes scanned the pages and pages of handwritten inky scrawl. I gave a long, low whistle. There were hundreds of entries. Each one represented a bird, a fish or a deer who had died on that day. It was literally a book of the dead. And, in among them, were names; names of people, of kids who had been tricked and tracked as we had been. And at the top of each page, at the very head of the hierarchy, more names – the hunters who had chased them; broken, injured or even killed them.

  Shafeen turned the pages forward until he came to the year he was looking for. ‘1969,’ he said under his breath. ‘Michaelmas Justitium.’

  He ran his finger down the page, and I could see, over his shoulder, the entry we’d seen that night in the library, when Perfect had almost caught us. The name of an Indian boy whose long-ago fate, even more than Nel’s or Shafeen’s, had made me risk my life to catch Henry.

  ‘Aadhish Jadeja,’ I said, pointing. ‘There.’

  Shafeen shook his head slightly, not looking up. ‘I’m not looking for Dad,’ he said. His finger travelled up the page, to the very top. ‘Jesus,’ he breathed.

  I read over his shoulder. ‘Proceedings of the Order of the Stag, Longcross Hall, Michaelmas Justitium 1969.’

  ‘So it’s true,’ Nel said.

  ‘Not that,’ said Shafeen impatiently. ‘The names.’

  I followed his finger and read the names of the hunters, of those in attendance on that fateful weekend in 1969.

  ‘The Grand Master, Rollo de Warlencourt.’ Henry’s dad. No surprise there. But then I read on. ‘Charles Skelton, Miranda Petrie, Serena Styles, Francesca Mowbray.

  The Friars. All Friars.

  Friar Skelton, the ancient-history master who’d taught us about the battle of Hattin and was so picky about punctuation that we called him the Punctuation Police. Friar Mowbray, the classics mistress, who’d taught us about Actaeon being torn to pieces by fifty hounds. Friar Styles, who taught modern history (which at STAGS included everything after the Dark Ages) and had told us about Gian Maria Visconti hunting men instead of beasts.

  And at the head of them all, Rollo de Warlencourt, the Grand Master.

  ‘Five of them,’ I said. ‘All the same age, all ex-pupils. They are all in on it. They’ve all been huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ themselves. They were Medievals when they were at school here, and they all went on to become Friars when they grew up, all except Henry’s dad. And the whole cycle keeps on going, the Order sustains itself, and Henry’s good old days continue.’

  Shafeen looked at me. ‘How far did the game books go back, can you remember?’

  I considered. ‘Middle Ages, easy.’

  ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘It started when the Medievals were actually medieval.’

  He was still looking through the book. ‘Look.’ He turned to random pages. ‘Proceedings of the Order of the Stag, Michaelmas Justitium, 1962, Baddesley Manor. Hilary Justitium, 1967, Polesden Cross. Trinity Justitium, 1965, Derbyshire House.’ He looked up. ‘It goes much wider than Longcross.’

  ‘It had to, didn’t it?’ I said. ‘There wouldn’t always have been a de Warlencourt in the upper school for a thousand years. There must have been gaps. Other leaders of the Medievals, other stately homes hosting the blood sports.’

  ‘But all connected by one thing,’ said Shafeen.

  ‘STAGS,’ Nel finished.

  ‘The cult is running the school,’ I said, ‘and the school is running the cult.’

  ‘And now,’ Shafeen said, ‘there’s a new leader: Cookson. Henry said it himself – the Order will go on, even without him.’

  ‘No, it won’t.’ I stood up. ‘Shafeen, bring the game book. Nel, bring the phone.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  I was already at the door. ‘It’s time to tell the Abbot.’ Then I froze with my fingers on the handle. ‘No, wait, what if he’s in on it too?’

  ‘He’s not in the book,’ said Shafeen.

  ‘No signet ring either,’ said Nel.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Come on.’

  chapter thirty-four

  The Abbot watched Henry’s confession from beginning to end without saying a word.

  As he watched the screen he covered his mouth with his left hand, his expression a mask of shock. Nel had been right. There was no signet ring on his left hand, just a plain gold wedding band. Now I thought about it, I was a bit surprised to see it. I had never met a Mrs Abbot. Maybe she was dead. After all, the Abbot was pretty old. He looked even older by the time he’d finished watc
hing the clip.

  When the video was over, there was a long silence, in which we could just hear the muffled tick of the pendulum clock on the mantelpiece.

  The three of us were sitting in big leather chairs across the mahogany desk from him. He was in his gown and we were all in our Tudor coats. There was oak panelling on the walls, rows of books on shelves, framed certificates behind his head. We looked like a page in the STAGS prospectus. It should have been the most civilised interview in the world. But what the Abbot had seen couldn’t have been more Savage.

  He didn’t say anything for quite a bit. Then he took off his half-glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He looked very weird, as people do when they always wear glasses and then you see them without them. He looked devastated.

  ‘Poor Henry,’ he said sadly. ‘He was quite deranged at the end. Forgive me; I did not know it was a suicide.’

  He put his glasses back on, blinked owlishly, and eyeballed us.

  ‘And is it true? This dreadful … pastime? It seems … incredible.’

  ‘Oh, it’s true,’ I said. ‘We lived it, on Justitium weekend, at Longcross Hall.’

  ‘I was hunted,’ said Nel.

  ‘I was shot,’ continued Shafeen.

  ‘And I was fished in Longmere lake,’ I finished.

  The Abbot clasped his hands before him, his fingers lacing together. ‘Why don’t you tell me what happened?’

  So we told him the whole story; Nel first, then Shafeen took over, and then me. It took so long that it grew dark outside. The Abbot wrote as we talked, on the block of thick cream paper that sat on his desk.

  ‘And this order that Henry speaks of at the end here –’ he indicated the phone with his fountain pen – ‘to what does he refer?’