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 was 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.