It’s unbelievable really, the reviving power of a hot bath, a cup of tea and a roaring fire.
In under an hour after we’d got back to the house in our Land Rover convoy, I actually felt human again. And it was just as well, since apparently it was business as usual at Longcross.
Dress laid out. Drinks at seven thirty. Dinner at eight.
I fiddled with the dress on the bed. This one was the dark red of arterial blood. I remembered the stag’s blood on the shingle, the warm liver I was supposed to eat. Jeffrey watched me from the wall, and I found myself actually wishing for sulky Betty to come. It was hard to be alone in Lowther with Jeffrey, and I felt that night that the stag’s head wore a particularly judgemental expression. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
And I was. Now I knew Jeffrey wasn’t a joke. Now I knew that he hadn’t come into this world as a head on a plaque. I knew how he’d died, and that he was once a living, breathing creature. Like the one who had run right past me and stirred the autumn air, and like the one I’d dispatched as he stood at bay in that Camelot lake. I hoped Jeffrey knew I wouldn’t have pulled the trigger on my own. But did that make it any better? More than ever I felt the lack of a TV to fill the accusing silence. Instead I dried my hair in front of the fire, watching that instead. It was really quite absorbing. Historical telly.
When Betty came to dress me, my greeting was a bit over the top with relief. Used to how it went by now, I let her help me into my dress. The blood colour suited me, making me feel even more guilty. As she sat me before the mirror to do my hair I said, hesitantly, ‘Betty … could I have it a bit less, well, ringlety than last night? You know, wavy rather than curly? Please?’ I wasn’t really sure, as you can probably tell, how to talk to servants, but I needn’t have worried; she was very obliging in her sullen way. ‘Of course, miss.’ And she did a good job. Soft waves this time, with my heavy fringe parted in the middle. The strong colour of the red dress required a bit more make-up than last night’s soft rose, so I swept some smoky grey over my eyelids. I was pleased with my appearance, till I thought suddenly of Chanel getting ready, and what the hell she must be feeling.
Amazingly, after all the drama, we weren’t even very late sitting down to dinner. I saw at once though that the table was only set for eight.
Chanel wasn’t there, and there was no place set for her, as if the servants had known.
I sat down at the now familiar array of silver cutlery. Tonight I was seated between Esme (meh) and Cookson (yuck).
‘Is Chanel OK?’ I asked Esme.
‘She’s fine,’ she said soothingly. ‘She was just a bit shaken up, so she had a bath and got into bed. Henry’s having dinner sent up to her room.’
I suddenly felt a little pang of envy – I could have handled dinner in bed myself. It suddenly seemed an impossible task to have to endure all those fancy courses while making chat with random Medievals. Shafeen and Henry, my only allies and fellow Chanel-rescuers, were at the other end of the table. Shafeen was talking, guardedly, to Piers, when he wasn’t having to endure Charlotte pawing at him from his other side. She had clearly been impressed, too, by his Willoughby-chivalry on the mountain. Henry and Lara were talking with their blond heads together, low-voiced. She seemed pretty salty about something – maybe she hadn’t liked Henry giving Chanel his jacket or, even more likely, him practically lying on top of me when we shot the stag. He certainly didn’t seem like a one-woman man.
I remembered the feeling of his arms around me, that warm sensation which had died with the stag. And, as if my memory had prompted him, Henry stood up, glass in hand.
‘A very special toast,’ he said, ‘to Greer, a novice hunter who dispatched a stag on her first outing.’ He looked at me with his very direct blue eyes and the warm feeling returned. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Greer MacDonald, the dispatcher of the stag.’
I wasn’t sure what to do, so I just sat there like a dumbass while they all stood up and raised their glasses. They repeated my name, and my new bizarre title, all staring at me. Then they all drained their glasses and sat down and there was a ripple of applause. It was surreal. I’d never been toasted before, but I kind of wished it wasn’t for that. At the time I believed Henry thought he was being gallant, but I’d so much rather he hadn’t – I would have preferred it if he’d taken the credit, as with the credit went the guilt.
Then it got worse. Two footman types brought out this big black book between them and opened it in front of Henry at the right page. The volume looked really old, with one of those aged greenish-black leather covers that in books they call ‘morocco’. A third footman handed Henry a pen. It wasn’t exactly a quill, but it looked like the oldest working pen you could get; one of those wartime fountain pens ministers used for signing peace treaties.
‘What’s happening?’ I asked Esme.
‘Henry’s writing you down in the game book,’ she said.
Jesus. ‘Just me?’
‘No, silly,’ she said. ‘The date. Who was there. What we killed, and how many. And your name, as the dispatcher.’
Great, I thought. My murder was literally going down in the history books. ‘Oh, wonderful,’ I said. ‘I’m so glad my noble achievement will be recorded for posterity.’
She didn’t get the sarcasm. ‘I know, it’s tremendous, isn’t it? You must be very proud.’
The servants were handing round the main course on gold-rimmed plates. ‘It’s not the stag I killed, is it?’ I said, not entirely joking. I wasn’t sure that I could bear to eat my victim.
Esme looked at me as if I was mad. ‘You can’t eat venison straight away,’ she said, scandalised. ‘It’s game. It has to be hung.’
Apparently the deer hadn’t suffered enough. ‘Hung?’
‘So it starts to rot. It tenderises the meat.’
The conversation was taking a bit of a gross turn so I gave up on Esme and concentrated on my dinner. I was suddenly starving after all the drama. I tucked into whatever was in front of me – some sort of chickeny meat in a wine sauce. It was really nice at first, not as good as Nando’s but pretty tasty. Then I bit down on something small and hard.
My mind flashed to all those stories you read online about kids who have found a filling in their KFC. I discreetly spat the thing onto my plate, where it made a sharp metallic ting on the china. There lay a little ball, about the size and colour of one of those little silver balls you get on cupcakes at kids’ parties. ‘What the hell?’
Cookson, on my other side, turned to me. ‘Whatever’s the matter?’
I pointed my knife at the little metal ball. ‘I think Henry might be firing his chef tomorrow.’
‘It’s shot,’ he said. ‘You’re eating pheasant. It’s just shot.’
I was getting a bit cheesed. I didn’t need an autopsy. ‘I don’t need to know how it died. There’s just metal in it.’
He started to laugh, rather unpleasantly. He had one of those silent, shoulder-shaking laughs. ‘No, I mean, it’s shot. You’re eating shot. The pellets that killed the pheasant.’
I was shocked. ‘Can’t they take them out first?’
‘Of course they try. But they rarely get all of them. When you’re shootin’, you use a shotgun. Not like the rifle you used today to bag that stag.’ God – did people have to keep reminding me? ‘Every gun cartridge has a ton of those little pellets inside. When you discharge the shotgun, the pellets go out in a wide arc.’ He described their trajectory with his two hands, parting them in a wide cone. ‘Gives you the best chance of baggin’ something. Little buggers get everywhere.’ He took a drink. ‘You’ll see tomorrow.’
I didn’t know then how true his words were.
After my blooper I kept my head down for a bit and listened to the general conversation. I expected the chat to be all about Chanel and what had happened on the hillside. But here’s the weird thing: no one mentioned it at all, to the point where I wondered if it was a manners thing. Perhaps it was ill-bred to refer, in front of your host, to the fact that said host’s stag hunt had turned into a man hunt. Not wanting to be Savage, I didn’t mention the incident either, until Cookson got stuck into the wine and eventually brought it up.
‘Pretty rotten luck for your friend,’ he said.
‘I wouldn’t say she was my friend,’ I said pleasantly. ‘I only met her properly yesterday.’
‘Thing about hounds,’ Cookson went on as if he hadn’t heard me, ‘is they follow their nature. They are creatures of instinct.’
Then he leaned in close enough for me to smell his sour wine breath and said one of the most unpleasant things that had ever been whispered in my ear in all my seventeen years.
‘Ask your chum if she was on her period,’ he said. ‘They sniff it out, the old hounds. It’s the blood they’re after.’
Gross. It had been a Day of Blood: black pudding, deer murder, liver all round, a handbag full of guts, a red dress and now this lovely little factoid. After that choice piece of female biology, from the lips of Cookson of all people, I pretty much lost my appetite, as well as my capacity for making small talk. I was relieved when the sirens went off to the drawing room and I could excuse myself and go to bed.
I was so tired I could barely climb the Wayne Manor stairs. They seemed, with their thick scarlet carpets and massive oppressive paintings, suddenly higher than the hills we’d been trudging up and down all day. When I finally reached the top, all I had to do was to turn right to Lowther, shed the red dress like a snakeskin and get into my lovely bed.
I hesitated for just a moment, deliberating, swaying with tiredness.
Then the sisterhood won.
Shit, I said under my breath, and turned left towards Chanel’s room.