I thought the hunt was over. But it wasn’t.
Suddenly deathly tired from exercise and about a million emotions, I sat on the cold shingle and gazed at the dead stag in the shallow water, one side of his body and one of the great antlers clearing the surface of the lake. He’d looked noble in life, but almost mythical now. All you could see was half a silhouette above the silver water, and the other half a perfect reflection again, but this time completing the antlers and the bulk of the body to make some strange alien creature. It was like one of those paintings you do in nursery school – you know, when you paint on one half, then fold the paper over. The lake was all shimmery in the dusk and it looked like that one in Excalibur, the one where Arthur gets his sword and then chucks it back at the end. The lake suddenly flashed and blurred as my eyes filled with tears. As I wiped my eyes I thought, They should leave him there. It’s a fitting place for him.
But no. As I watched, the beat keepers and Perfect waded into the lake to drag the dead stag to the foreshore. They did this by pulling his antlers like bike handlebars. Once the deer was on the shingle Perfect drew his own sword – a hunting knife that flashed in the twilight – and cut the stag’s throat. As the stag bled out on the pebbles Perfect shanked him in the belly, and proceeded to cut him open with a sort of sawing action. Then, as if I was watching some sort of horror film, I watched him shove both hands inside the stag and sort of flop the guts out into this plastic-lined hunting bag. The innards looked like blue snakes and seemed to move as they shifted and settled, smoking with the last warmth of life. The pearly steam in the twilight gave the corpse an even more magical appearance, although now the butchered stag looked more Halloween than legendary. I shivered as Henry wandered over with his lieutenant Cookson. ‘You cold, Greer?’ he asked solicitously. He could hardly give me his jacket as he’d already given it away. Instead he made a considerably less charming offer. ‘If the game bag wasn’t so heavy I’d ask if you wanted to carry it. The guts stay pretty warm all the way home.’
‘It’s like a hot handbag,’ said Cookson, with his usual gift for saying what Henry had already said but taking it down to the next level.
I recoiled from this gross image, but then, to show that I wasn’t entirely ignorant of the traditions of hunting, I said, ‘Better leave them to the hounds. I wouldn’t want to deprive them of their prize.’
Henry and Cookson wandered back to the kill, and it was then that I noticed something odd. The hounds weren’t there. They’d just vanished; there wasn’t a single dog to be seen. It was really weird. Perhaps they knew the hunt was over and had just slunk back up the hillside like ghosts, ready to be kennelled for the night. It seemed strange that they hadn’t hung around for their reward, but at the same time I was glad I didn’t have to watch them feasting on the stag’s innards.
But the horror wasn’t over. Perfect seemed to be juggling something slimy in his hand, cutting bits off and handing them round. He put a piece in my palm – it was like hot red jelly. ‘Thanks, I guess,’ I said. ‘What is it?’ Of course Perfect didn’t answer; I never heard him speak to anyone but his master.
‘It’s the deer’s liver,’ said Shafeen at my elbow. ‘You’re supposed to eat it. Everyone in at the kill gets a bit.’
‘Raw?’ I said. ‘Really?’
‘They don’t call it a blood sport for nothing,’ said Shafeen, putting it gingerly in his mouth.
I dropped mine on the shingle in disgust and wiped my hand on a tissue. I know I’d had black pudding for breakfast, but this was a step too far. The Medievals, though, were all munching away happily, like it was Haribos or something.
As the butchery on the shore continued Piers wandered over. ‘I say, want one of the hoofs? Traditional to give one to the first-timers, you know?’
I felt sick. ‘I’m good,’ I said.
‘Please yourself,’ said Piers, clearly displeased at my disrespect for tradition. ‘Dashed odd. What about you, Punjabi? Nice souvenir to have. One for you and one for Carphone, eh?’
‘I’m not a first-timer,’ said Shafeen coldly. ‘Chanel might, but I doubt it.’ He looked around. ‘Where is Chanel?’
Chanel had gone. She’d completely disappeared.
We looked all around the lake, walking round in groups of two or three. I went with Shafeen and we called her name until it echoed off the water and the mountains. We met the others coming back, without any of us having laid eyes on Chanel. While we were doing that, Perfect went up to check the bothy and the cars, but he came back shaking his head.
It was frightening. The terrain had totally changed with the setting of the sun – the lake was a black slick, the night air smelled of butchered beast. Hills were dark hunched shoulders and the trees, lacking their summer leaves, were black antlers against the purple sky. The search was on for real, as soon it would be night.
I expected the Medievals to groan and roll their eyes. I expected Piers to say, ‘Dashed girl,’ and Cookson to call her a ‘bloody nuisance’. I expected the girls, at least, to opt to go home and bathe while the boys and the servants searched the estate. But, perhaps prompted by their new friendship, they were all apparently keen to help look. In fact, the Medievals swung into action like a machine. Hunters for centuries, this was their moment. They armed themselves with field torches and hip flasks and hunting knives. ‘Right,’ said Henry, ‘who saw her last? And where?’
‘She went to the loo after lunch,’ I said, too concerned to worry if I’d used the correct term for toilet. ‘But she was with us when we set off down the valley for the lake.’
‘She was definitely with us in the gorge,’ stated Shafeen flatly. ‘You gave her your jacket.’
‘So I did,’ said Henry. ‘Let’s go back up to the gorge then – it’s as good a starting place as any.’
So I wasn’t the only one to have noticed the jacket thing; neither, it seemed, was Henry the only one who liked Chanel. Shafeen had leaped in to save her from humiliation with his tiger-mother story, and he’d apparently been watching over her today. Certainly on the search he appeared more concerned about her than any of us. While I couldn’t help thinking that the Medievals were enjoying this unexpected twilight expedition as an extension of their day, Shafeen seemed properly worried. He was watchful and silent as a stone, listening intently. Watching him in the half-light tracking Chanel, I could almost believe he was a tiger’s son. He was stealthy, but he missed nothing. Just as earlier in the day we’d searched the terrain for signs of the stag’s ‘slot’, Shafeen followed Chanel’s trail as surely as a big cat. While the Medievals swigged from their hip flasks and chattered, it was Shafeen who found the only clues we had. It was Shafeen who saw, tangled in a gorse bush, a long wiry blonde strand from Chanel’s hair extensions. And it was Shafeen who saw, trodden in the mud, Chanel’s flat cap of too-natty ginger tartan. He wrung it in his hands like a cloth – he looked ill.
‘At least we know she came this way,’ I consoled him. ‘Pity we don’t have the hounds. We could get them to sniff it or something and find her.’ My remark was met by a weird silence from all the Medievals, but Shafeen turned to look at me, and even in the twilight I could see this strange expression on his face as if he’d just realised something. He opened his mouth to speak, but just at that moment we heard two dreadful sounds from the black hills.
The baying of hounds.
And a human scream.
With torch beams crossing in crazy patterns, we ran in the direction of the noise. The sound of the barking was eerie as hell, and a memory of seeing an old version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, featuring this massive hound with blood-dripping jaws, didn’t help me. Worse still was the screaming, a sound I knew to be Chanel. And worse than all that was the moment when the screaming stopped. Like Hannibal Lecter said in The Silence of the Lambs, it’s when the screaming stops that you have to worry.
In the dark and the confusion, and by some weird trick of the acoustics up in those the hills, it was difficult to know exactly where the sound was coming from. Eventually Shafeen led us to a narrow stony gorge, where limestone crevasses sliced into the hill, kind of like caves that had fallen on their side. They looked exactly like some huge monster had clawed three gashes in the landscape. At the mouth of the biggest one the hounds crowded, frenzied with bloodlust. Shafeen and I rushed forward, with Henry close behind, pushing our way through the dogs. ‘Chanel!’ we shouted. ‘Chanel!’ and then fell silent, straining to listen.
And somewhere, below the frantic baying of the hounds, I heard a tiny voice. ‘Here!’
Shafeen was ahead of me, cramming his body into the longest crevasse. ‘I’m too tall,’ he gasped.
‘Let me.’ I pulled him out of the way and crawled into the tiny space. I couldn’t see a thing. ‘Torch,’ I said, impatiently clicking my fingers outside of the cave. Shafeen put a torch in my hand and I shone it into the crevasse. There, bunched up small, filthy and tear-stained, was Chanel. I nearly cried with relief. I hadn’t realised, up until that very moment, that ever since the screaming had stopped I’d thought she might be dead.
I gave her my hand. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘You’re safe now.’
She shook her head over and over again, as if she would shake it off. ‘I can’t go out there,’ she said, more definitely than I’d ever heard her say anything. ‘The dogs.’
‘Chanel,’ I said, ‘you’re fine. We’re all here.’
But she just kept shaking and shaking her head and stayed huddled up in her corner.
I crawled back out to Shafeen and Henry. They were wearing identical expressions of waiting and worry. ‘She’s fine,’ I yelled over the baying. ‘But she won’t come out while the dogs are here.’
‘Can you call them off?’ shouted Shafeen to Henry. Somehow, in an emergency, they’d become allies.
‘Certainly,’ said Henry. ‘Leave it to me.’ He nodded in my direction. ‘Tell her to get ready.’
I ducked my head back into the cave and held out my hand. ‘Henry’s taking care of the dogs,’ I said. ‘He says to get ready.’ Evidently she trusted Henry more than me, because this time she put her hand in mine. It was icy cold.
I pulled her to the mouth of the crevasse, my body between the dogs and her. The noise was really deafening. I don’t mind dogs at all, but even I was freaked by them. There must have been fifty, and they were utterly transformed from the friendly, slobbery, tail-waggy creatures I’d met this morning. Their teeth were pin sharp and white, their tongues red, their jaws foaming like that Hound of the Baskervilles. This, then, was the hounds in the ‘riot’ mode Shafeen had told me about. And I remembered something else too, from further back, from a Latin lesson at STAGS. The fifty hounds that had devoured poor Actaeon had entered a ‘wolf’s frenzy’. Well, this was a wolf’s frenzy if ever I saw one. Something about Chanel was driving them crazy.
Then I saw Henry walk out of the darkness behind them, holding the game bag on his shoulder. ‘Now!’ he shouted, and opened the bag. He tipped the deer’s guts out, still steaming as Cookson had promised, and threw them right into the middle of the pack of dogs. In a fervour, they ripped the innards apart, blood flying everywhere. At the same moment I pulled Chanel out of the cave and past them, but great streaks of red splashed onto Henry’s jacket, making her shriek with horror. It wasn’t exactly Carrie, but it wasn’t far off. I dragged her as far as I could away down the hillside, but her legs gave out and she collapsed on the grass. Beat, I flopped down next to her. Shafeen ran over at once and fell to his knees. ‘Are you OK?’ he said.
Chanel was craning round him to make sure the dogs weren’t following. But the animals were otherwise engaged. They were now quiet, feeding like a silent wolf pack, calmed by blood.
Still, it was only once the beat keepers had dragged them off a fair distance away that Chanel could bring herself to speak. She nodded shakily, the opposite to the head-shaking in the cave. ‘Now I’m all right.’
Henry came over and knelt too. He and Shafeen looked like rival suitors for the princess’s hand, one dark, one fair. And even though the princess was now pretty ragged, her long blonde hair everywhere, her beautiful new clothes ruined, they still had eyes for no one but her. Then Henry did a weird thing. He reached out and I thought he was going to embrace her, but instead he took his jacket back. He pulled it right off her shoulders. ‘It’s all covered in blood,’ he said, by way of explanation. ‘I’ll get Perfect to bring one of the Land Rovers as close as he can to pick you up. You’ll be warm and dry in no time.’
He went to instruct his headkeeper, and the dogs, spotting him at once, swarmed around him devotedly, playful as puppies once again. They stayed at Henry’s heels as he gave his orders to Perfect, but as it turned out the headkeeper’s transportation was not needed. Shafeen literally took matters into his own hands. ‘Come on,’ he said to Chanel. ‘No point waiting for protocol. You’ll freeze.’ And in one fluid motion he picked her up and strode up the mountain with her in the direction of the cars, with all the Medievals looking on, open-mouthed. He looked all dark and tall and masterful, and she looked all blonde and pretty and pathetic draped in his arms. It was like that bit in Sense and Sensibility when Willoughby carries Marianne out of the rainstorm.
I collapsed onto the cold grass, full length, gazing at the stars. I was absolutely exhausted by the day. A whole morning of walking. The stag at bay. The shooting. And then, before I’d even processed the reality of being a stag murderer, all the drama of the search for Chanel. (By the way, if you’re thinking that the killing of the stag was the murder I committed and that he was my only victim, you’d be wrong. I wish.)
I got to my feet eventually, only the fear that I’d be left behind giving me the strength to shift my weary bones. On legs that could barely hold me up, I followed the torches back to the cars. And all that time, after everything that had happened, all that I was thinking (and I realise that for a Buzzfeed feminist this doesn’t paint me in a very good light) was that what I would really like would be for someone to carry me up a mountain like that.