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.
He smiled tightly when I entered, and said, ‘What’s going on?’
Now we were here, I wasn’t sure what to say. Now Nel and I were both going to sound like a couple of hysterical fantasists. But one shared look across Shafeen’s legs was enough to tell me we were on the same page. I didn’t really know how to start, but I knew someone had to.
‘Look, Shafeen, I’ve … We’ve got something to tell you.’
His face became set and stern – he suddenly reminded me of a hawk; a hunter, not prey.
Nel took over. ‘Thing is,’ she said, ‘we think the Medievals meant to shoot you.’
‘God, yes,’ he said. ‘Of course they absolutely meant to shoot me.’
Nel and I glanced at each other in a mixture of shock and relief. ‘You think so too?’
‘Oh yes. They gave me the number-six shooting cup at lunch so I’d be at the end of the line, where they could turn their guns on me without hitting each other. I was aiming at a pheasant over my head and it jinked in the air at the last minute, and I swung round to try to hit it. And if I hadn’t, I’d be dead now.’
My mouth gaped open. ‘But they’d be murderers.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘it would have been a “terrible accident”. An inexperienced Indian boy, didn’t know what he was doing, got himself in the line of fire. Henry and Piers and Cookson and the rest have been shooting since they were knee high.’ He gestured, and winced. ‘They are all good shots. The verdict would be accidental death and everyone would move on with their lives.’
I was shocked at the harsh words.
‘Two things went wrong for them. One: I’ve been shooting since I was knee high too. Game hunting is a big thing in Rajasthan. Two: they missed.’
‘But they must know you would talk,’ said Nel.
He shook his head. ‘They rely on people being frightened of them, of their money, of their status. I’m not frightened. But even if I talked, what then? It’s my word against all of theirs. You two were to be scared into silence, and who else was there on the shoot? A bunch of Medievals, a few village fellows on the Longcross payroll and Frankenstein’s monster, aka Perfect, who has been the de Warlencourts’ creature for generations.’
‘So who did shoot you?’ I asked, with a sick feeling of dread sitting in my stomach.
‘I didn’t see,’ he admitted. ‘I was looking up the whole time. But I’m pretty sure it was Henry.’
Somehow I’d known he was going to say that. But I still found myself wanting it not to be true. ‘Why him?’
‘One, the trajectory of the shot. He was number five, he had a clear aim at close range. Two, when I was hit, the force spun me round before I fell. His gun had just discharged. I saw him break it and the cartridges jump out. He was literally holding a smoking gun.’ He shifted his weight a little and took a drink of water. ‘How did you two figure it out?’
‘Nel knew yesterday,’ I admitted.
‘When the hounds came for me,’ she said, ‘I knew they were hunting me. But I thought it was just the other Medievals. I didn’t think it was Henry.’ She was echoing my own thoughts. ‘I thought Henry was the good guy,’ she said sadly. ‘He gave me his jacket.’
‘Then took it back again,’ said Shafeen drily.
‘Actually –’ Nel and I exchanged a nod – ‘we have something to show you.’ Nel snapped open the cerise clutch bag she was holding and counted her magic seeds into the palm of Shafeen’s good hand. ‘These were in the pockets of Henry’s jacket.’
‘We thought you might know what they are,’ I said.
He peered at his palm. ‘I do,’ he said grimly. ‘They’re called aniseeds.’
The name made a connection in my mind. ‘Aniseeds? You mean, like liquorice?’
‘Yes. Dogs can’t resist it. In some parts of the country they drag a bag of aniseed over the hillside for the hounds to follow. It’s called a drag hunt. Dogs go mental for aniseed. It makes them crazy.’
‘I thought there were dogs sniffing at the door last night,’ said Nel triumphantly.
‘There would have been. The stag hounds and the shooting dogs are kennelled, of course, but even Henry’s fat old Labradors would make it up the stairs for a sniff of aniseed. And if you don’t get rid of those, they’ll be round again tonight.’
It was still hard to believe. ‘They seemed so nice as well, those dogs. When they weren’t in their “wolf’s frenzy”, I mean. Arcas and Tigris even came to greet me this morning when I …’ I stopped.
‘When you what?’
‘The names,’ I said. ‘The names of the hounds.’ I turned to Shafeen. ‘That last day at STAGS, Friar Mowbray told us in Latin about Actaeon being ripped apart by fifty hounds. She started to tell us the names. They were called Arcas, Ladon and Tigris.’ I looked to Nel. ‘Henry’s hounds have those three names. He called them by them yesterday. And I bet the others are all named after the other forty-seven.’
‘I bet they are.’ Shafeen shifted, wincing slightly with pain as he did so. ‘So are you convinced now, Greer?’
I nodded. ‘Yes. I wasn’t convinced last night,’ I admitted. ‘That is, I knew Nel’d had a fright, but I couldn’t quite believe she was being hunted. I met Henry outside Nel’s room – he was coming to check on her. He … convinced me of his concern.’
I couldn’t quite look at Nel for the next bit. For all I knew, she’d liked Henry too, and had been as horribly disillusioned on the huntin’ day as I’d been on the shootin’ one. ‘He took me on the roof, and we had this really good chat. He reassured me we were quite safe. He said – and this I remember – he said, “I give you my word as a gentleman that you are not going to get shot. And neither is Chanel.”’
‘Well, he wasn’t lying; you have to give him that,’ said Shafeen. ‘I was the target of the day.’ He narrowed his dark eyes at me. ‘Did he tell you that you’re beautiful?’
‘Yes,’ I said in a small voice. I guess Henry was lying about that.
‘Did he kiss you?’
Man, he was clever. ‘Yes.’
‘So what changed your mind about him?’ he asked, much more gently. ‘When did the scales fall from your eyes?’
‘At dinner tonight,’ I said. ‘You know that big black book they wrote in after the stag hunt?’
‘The game book? Yes. They write up their kill for the day.’
‘Well, you’re in it. They wrote your name down too, under all the pheasants.’
Even the sardonic Shafeen looked shocked. ‘You’re sure?’
I nodded. ‘I saw it, in black and white.’
‘That probably means they wrote me in it yesterday,’ said Nel. She looked like she was tearing up, as if she couldn’t quite believe such cruelty existed.
I put my hand over hers. ‘Yes. And I saw something else too. The way that Henry showed Lara. They were smirking. They thought it was funny.’
In that look, my whole world had changed. You see, all that time I’d been trying to convince myself, like Nel had, that the cruelty had come from all the other Medievals. Not him, never him. But in the end I had to wake up. It had been Henry’s jacket, Henry’s house, Henry’s weekend. Henry’s doctor. No hospitals. I looked at the neat white bandage at the top of Shafeen’s arm, contrasting with his brown skin, and the bottle of painkillers on the bedside table.
‘Looks like the doctor patched you up pretty good.’
‘Oh yes. He looked after me very well, for a guy who was clearly the wrong side of eighty,’ he said with a tinge of irony.
I looked at the tightly wrapped dressing.
Nel said, ‘You mean, he didn’t look after you?’
‘Oh no, he made sure I was comfortable. He looked after me all right, like he’s been looking after the family for fifty years. Had to make sure there was nothing to tell, and no need for a hospital, just like he does every time.’
There it was again. ‘Every time?’
‘Yes. You haven’t quite caught on yet, have you?’ He looked at Nel. ‘Either of you. It’s bigger than just this weekend. They’ve been doing this for years.’
Nel and I were silent for a minute, taking this in. ‘Shafeen,’ I said gently, ‘if what you’re saying is true, we have to go to the police.’
‘No,’ he said, more decidedly than he’d said anything.
‘But –’ began Nel.
He cut across her. ‘We don’t have enough on them yet. I’m not leaving till we’ve got proof. What do you think I’m doing here?’
I opened my eyes wide at him. ‘You mean, you knew?’
‘I’ve had my suspicions for years. Kids go off for the weekend at Justitium and they come back like ghosts. Shattered creatures who move around the school like zombies, not daring to say anything to the Medievals. They just keep their heads down and graduate.’
‘Gemma Delaney!’ I said suddenly.
He nodded. ‘She’s one of them.’
Nel said, ‘Who’s Gemma Delaney?’
‘This girl from my old school. She told me not to come to Longcross. She must have been here last year.’
‘She was,’ said Shafeen. ‘And she’s not the only one. Some of them come back injured, some of them just thoroughly scared. All of them are put back into their place; the carefully marked-out place the Medievals have decided for them. Sometimes,’ he said, ‘they don’t come back at all.’
‘What?’ Nel and I chorused.
‘There’s this legend going around the school. Some kid in the nineties – went to Longcross and never came back. They chose him well: boy from a Third World country, here on a scholarship. Brown skin, funny name –’ he pointed to himself; ‘at STAGS on a scholarship –’ he pointed at me; ‘not the right type –’ he pointed to Nel. ‘Sound familiar? The story goes he was killed in a hunting accident at Longcross.’
‘But that can’t have been Henry,’ I protested, still not quite able to stop defending him, to let my fantasy go. ‘He wasn’t born even.’
‘You don’t get it, do you? This has been going on for years. Christ, my father even came here.’
Then I remembered – there was some longstanding beef between Henry’s dad and Shafeen’s.
‘What happened?’
Shafeen shrugged his bare shoulders. ‘He never told me. It was like he was ashamed. But now I’m sure it had something to do with this.’
‘Why would he send you to STAGS, if something so terrible had happened to him there?’
‘Nothing happened to him there. It happened at Longcross – nothing to do with the school. He got a great education. He went on to Oxford, then Sandhurst, then took up his governorship in Rajasthan. I guess he wasn’t to know that the son of his nemesis, Rollo de Warlencourt, would be at STAGS at the exact same time as me. They didn’t exactly keep in touch. My dad thought STAGS was a great school, full of the right people. He was half right.’
‘Which half?’
‘STAGS is a great school. That is, the education is great, and the friars are good teachers, but the kids are all in on it.’
‘On what?’ said Nel.
‘On the huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ thing.’
‘Who is?’ I said.
‘All of them. Your roommate for example. What’s her name?’
I nearly said Jesus. ‘Becca.’
‘She’s in on it. And yours, Nel.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I said slowly.
‘Was your roommate there when you got The Invitation?’
I thought back. ‘Yes.’
‘Did she encourage you to go?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did she say you might become a Medieval?’
‘Yes,’ I said, shamefaced.
Shafeen struck the snowy sheets with his good hand. ‘That’s the carrot. They have their elite little group which rules the school, and everyone is so desperate to join them they’re easy to fool. Even me,’ he admitted. ‘The truth is, Becca will probably become a Medieval now, for helping them trap you. Was it the first conversation she’d had with you all term?’
I nodded.
‘Same for you, Nel?’
‘Yes.’
‘You see?’ Shafeen sat up straighter, all animated. ‘This is what they do. They make you feel unwelcome; starve you of friends, of smiles, of conversation. Then, when they finally talk to you, it’s like the sun has come out. Believe me, I understand. They’ve invited me a few times over the years. Apparently they couldn’t even wait for the sixth form for me. They hate me.’
‘Why?’ I asked, interested.
He shrugged, and grimaced, and I could see for the first time that it hurt him. Not his arm, although I’m sure that killed him too – but the fact that the Medievals didn’t like him. I saw then the years of bullying and exclusion he must have endured at STAGS. ‘I don’t know why,’ he said, in this sort of small voice, suddenly sounding like a little boy. ‘Maybe it’s because I don’t fit their idea of a misfit, if that makes any sense. They don’t quite know what to do with me.’ He glanced at me quickly. ‘I wasn’t fair to you, Greer, that first night at dinner. My father does run a bank in Jaipur, but he’s its president. And we are from Indian royalty, and we do have a palace in the hills. We have the right money; the Jadejas are as old as the de Warlencourts, and probably as wealthy. We have the right background – my father went to STAGS, then Oxford, then Sandhurst. I live like them, I speak like them, I hunt and shoot and fish like them. I guess it’s just the brown skin and the funny name that aren’t quite right. I’m still a Savage, in the truest sense, from the days of the Raj and the Empire. No; even further back. You heard them in history, Greer. Henry will always be one of the Crusaders, and I’ll always be an Infidel.’
I thought about this for a minute, then picked up on something he’d said. ‘You said they’ve invited you before?’
‘Oh, yes. Lots of times.’
‘But you didn’t come till now?’
‘No.’
‘Why this year?’
He looked at me pointedly, like someone does when they’re trying to shut you up. ‘I had my reasons.’ I got the message, and backed off. Besides, I thought I knew the truth. He was here because Nel had been invited. He was here to protect her.
That night of the tiger-mother story, he’d said what he said to shield Nel. He’d been the one to notice when she’d gone missing at the stag hunt. He’d carried her up the hill. I think he liked her. I looked at Nel now, sitting next to Shafeen in her cerise gown, all pretty and pink and white, her streaked blonde hair tumbling all over her shoulders. They would make a gorgeous couple, him all dark, her all light. I swallowed what felt like a stone in my throat. This morning I’d thought I had a boyfriend. By nightfall I’d discovered the same prospective boyfriend was a homicidal maniac. Suddenly I needed to go, to get as far away as I could from Longcross.
‘We need to get the hell out of here,’ I said. ‘We can pack now and just leave, before any of them are up.’
‘Go where?’ asked Nel. ‘Remember this evening when you were trying to get Shafeen an ambulance?’
I glanced at Shafeen. I wasn’t sure he knew this bit.
‘Henry said the hospital was an hour and a half away,’ Nel went on. ‘That might be the nearest town too, and the nearest police station.’
‘And even if we did get to a village,’ said Shafeen, ‘it would probably be stuffed with Henry’s backwoods tenants.’
They were right. Ever seen The Wicker Man? The last thing we needed would be for some hillbilly Lake District community to start doing weird witchcraft and setting fire to us in some straw effigy of Conrad de Warlencourt.
‘So now what?’ I asked.
‘We need evidence,’ said Shafeen grimly, ‘and I’m not leaving till I get it. This has to end now.’
‘What kind of evidence?’
‘The kind that’s written down in black and white.’
White paper, and black ink shining in firelight. Letters that spelled out Shafeen’s name. ‘The game book!’ I said.
‘Yes.’
Another image came into my mind; that morning in the library, up in the mezzanine. The rows and rows of black books bound in morocco leather, the books which had dates but no titles.
‘I’m fairly sure I know where to find your evidence,’ I said. But we couldn’t go down there and start snooping around with all the lights on, alerting Longcross’s fifty million servants to our search. My spies are everywhere, Henry’d said. And he’d meant it. ‘Thing is, we’d need a torch.’
‘How about a Saros 7S?’
Nel opened her clutch bag again and slid out a slim, beautiful tablet of smooth glass and metal, rounded at the corners and glowing like treasure. She touched the screen and it sprang into life, showing a gorgeous picture of Nel cuddling a cute fluffy cat (might’ve known she’d be a cat person) and the date and time. ‘You brought your phone with you?’
Nel nodded, a light of mischief in her eye that I was really happy to see. They hadn’t beaten her after all. She’d disobeyed the Medieval girls too. I’d brought my mother’s dress to Longcross and I was wearing it now. Nel too had broken the rules, but for something a bit more useful, her own brand of rebellion.
Tech.
‘You little beauty,’ Shafeen said admiringly, and I knew he meant Nel, not the phone. For a moment we all stared at the Saros 7S as if it was the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It seemed almost miraculous, this little piece of technology no bigger than a handspan. We’d all been starved of it for so long.
‘Does it have a torch on it?’
Expertly, Nel touched the screen a couple of times and the camera’s eye emitted a piercingly bright beam.
Shafeen’s eyes lit up almost as brightly. He threw back the covers and shrugged on a white towelling robe over his pyjama bottoms. His huntin’ look was back. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.