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 something 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 gently. ‘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.
‘I thought I might ask Shafeen,’ she said. ‘I bet he’d know.’
I looked at her sideways, surprised. ‘Why Shafeen?’
She looked at the ground.
‘Just because he’s Indian?’
She shrugged, and said defensively, ‘OK, yes. They cook with a lot of seeds and spices, don’t they?’ She was getting mad at me, and I was glad. Her spirit was returning. ‘I just thought he might know, that’s all.’
I shook my head, smiling. ‘Nel, Nel, Nel.’ For just a second my eyes left Henry and travelled up the line. I fixed my eyes on the tall figure of Shafeen where he stood silhouetted on the horizon, handling his gun competently. ‘He’s not some throwback maharajah, you know. He probably eats McDonald’s when he’s not at school just like we do.’ I repeated what Shafeen had said to me, that first night after dinner. ‘His father runs a bank in Jaipur. You’re as bad as they are.’
‘Sorry,’ she said sulkily. And we walked on to catch Lara up. I smiled to myself. I should’ve felt bad but I didn’t; at least Nel wasn’t thinking about the dogs any more.