Fortunately Nel’s roommate wasn’t in her room.
We bundled in and I locked the door behind us. I even drew the curtains. Then I sat the other two down on Nel’s bed.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Nel, at exactly the same time Shafeen said, ‘Look, what is all this?’
‘Nel,’ I said, breathing heavily, ‘where’s your phone?’
Nel unlocked a drawer and got out the Saros 7S. With one touch it sprang into life with its friendly but futuristic chime.
‘Play me the video,’ I said urgently. ‘Play me Henry’s confession. I just want to check something.’
I hadn’t seen it before, and it was a tough watch. Like watching a tragic movie for the second time around, when you know the ending. Like when I saw The Fault in Our Stars for the second time, and I couldn’t quite believe they were going to let that kid Gus die of cancer, even though I’d seen it before and I knew they did. I watched now, somehow hoping I’d misremembered it all.
I watched myself, soaking and shivering, knee deep in rushing water, talking to Henry at the top of Conrad’s Force. I could hear my own voice, raised above the sound of the water, shouting, ‘Did you get all that?’ I watched Henry’s face, shot from above, as he turned at the sound of Nel’s voice, super-loud, right next to the phone, saying, ‘Oh yes. We got it.’ I watched his expression change as the Saros 7S’s powerful torch was turned on him, the water below him turned to milk and he realised he was being filmed. As he looked directly into the lens I flinched a little. He seemed to be looking right at me, and I was suddenly sure he could see me even now. I shifted uncomfortably on the bed, and watched him extend his dripping hand up to the camera.
‘Give me that thing,’ he said, low and deadly.
Then Nel’s voice, louder and bolshie, saying, ‘Wouldn’t do any good. You could take this phone from me, but the video’s already been uploaded to the Saros Orbit. It’s a satellite storage system, totally secure.’
Shafeen joined in: ‘Isn’t technology wonderful, when you find the right application for it?’
Then came the moment I’d remembered, the creepy moment when Henry drew himself up, more powerful than ever, his eyes shining with that freaky, almost religious light. ‘You can’t win,’ he said. ‘You can’t upset the order.’
‘There!’ I said. ‘Wind it back.’
Nel scrubbed back along the timeline with her manicured index finger. Henry did a little backwards dance in the water, and then spoke again. ‘You can’t win,’ he said. ‘You can’t upset the order.’
This time Nel let the slider run on past her own barnstorming speech about the powers of social media. Henry’s voice said, ‘The order will go on, even without me.’
Then Shafeen’s voice. ‘There’s a new order now.’ Nel stopped the playback, and she and Shafeen looked at me.
‘So?’ said Shafeen. ‘We knew Henry was obsessed with order. Don’t you remember the shooting lunch, when he said the lower orders of nature should be culled? We were the lower orders of nature, and when we got the better of him, he couldn’t take it. He was so obsessed with the concept of natural order that it controlled his life.’
I shook my head. ‘Listen again.’ This time I took the Saros out of Nel’s hand and scrolled it back myself. ‘The order will go on,’ Henry said, ‘even without me.’ I looked from one to the other. ‘Now do you hear? He said, “The order.” Not order. The Order.’
‘I don’t get it,’ admitted Nel.
But Shafeen turned to me, wide-eyed. ‘A religious order. It’s a freaking cult.’
‘The order of the what though?’ asked Nel.
‘What’s this all about?’ I said. ‘St Aidan’s stag. A school called STAGS. Antlers everywhere.’ I raised both hands to my head, fingers spread, thumbs to my temples. ‘The Order of the Stag.’
‘And every one of them is a part of it,’ said Shafeen. ‘All the Medievals.’
‘Not just the Medievals,’ said Nel slowly. ‘The Friars too.’
‘The Friars?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I may not be as clever as you two –’ she waved away our polite protests – ‘but I do know about fashion, and I notice accessories. That ring that Henry wore – the gold signet ring with the antlers? The Friars all wear them, the men and the women.’
Then it was Shafeen’s turn. ‘Come with me,’ he said in his commanding voice. He was in full-on Prince Caspian mode and we got up at once and followed him.
We left Lightfoot and the sun was setting as we walked through the chapel cloister, across Paulinus quad – now empty of Medievals – and over Bede’s Piece in the direction of Honorius. The whole of STAGS, shadowy and looming, surrounded us in a dark embrace. The lighted windows watched us like eyes. We slipped into Honorius and up the stairs to Shafeen’s room. The boys didn’t have to share, as there were four boys’ houses to the girls’ one, so there was no roommate to worry about. Through the heavy oak door there was just an empty room, a room I’d never seen before. It was really nice, all oak panelling and emerald-green curtains, which Shafeen drew.
He unlocked a drawer in the desk and pulled out something heavy and black, and we all sat on the bed together. It was a repeat of how we’d just sat in Nel’s room – although now instead of huddling around a phone, we were huddled over a book.
It was a big book, bound in morocco leather, with no title but just a date.
It was the Longcross game book from the 1960s.
‘You brought it with you?’ I exclaimed.
‘I said I would.’ He clicked on the bedside lamp and for a moment we all looked at the book in his hands, bathed in a circle of golden light, like it was some sort of holy text.
1960–1969
A decade of huntin’ shootin’ fishin’. A decade when the rest of the world was changing. Swinging London and the Beatles and England winning the World Cup and Vidal Sassoon haircuts and the moon landings. And all the while, at Longcross, things were fossilised, as they had been for centuries, and dead creatures were written down in ink on paper in books. Shafeen ran his long fingers over the spine almost tenderly, his fingertips caressing the gold-stamped date, as if he was stalling, afraid of what he might find. Then he got all businesslike. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘let’s see just how far back this goes.’
He opened the book on his lap and we all crowded around it.
He turned the yellowing paper and our eyes scanned the pages and pages of handwritten inky scrawl. I gave a long, low whistle. There were hundreds of entries. Each one represented a bird, a fish or a deer who had died on that day. It was literally a book of the dead. And, in among them, were names; names of people, of kids who had been tricked and tracked as we had been. And at the top of each page, at the very head of the hierarchy, more names – the hunters who had chased them; broken, injured or even killed them.
Shafeen turned the pages forward until he came to the year he was looking for. ‘1969,’ he said under his breath. ‘Michaelmas Justitium.’
He ran his finger down the page, and I could see, over his shoulder, the entry we’d seen that night in the library, when Perfect had almost caught us. The name of an Indian boy whose long-ago fate, even more than Nel’s or Shafeen’s, had made me risk my life to catch Henry.
‘Aadhish Jadeja,’ I said, pointing. ‘There.’
Shafeen shook his head slightly, not looking up. ‘I’m not looking for Dad,’ he said. His finger travelled up the page, to the very top. ‘Jesus,’ he breathed.
I read over his shoulder. ‘Proceedings of the Order of the Stag, Longcross Hall, Michaelmas Justitium 1969.’
‘So it’s true,’ Nel said.
‘Not that,’ said Shafeen impatiently. ‘The names.’
I followed his finger and read the names of the hunters, of those in attendance on that fateful weekend in 1969.
‘The Grand Master, Rollo de Warlencourt.’ Henry’s dad. No surprise there. But then I read on. ‘Charles Skelton, Miranda Petrie, Serena Styles, Francesca Mowbray.
The Friars. All Friars.
Friar Skelton, the ancient-history master who’d taught us about the battle of Hattin and was so picky about punctuation that we called him the Punctuation Police. Friar Mowbray, the classics mistress, who’d taught us about Actaeon being torn to pieces by fifty hounds. Friar Styles, who taught modern history (which at STAGS included everything after the Dark Ages) and had told us about Gian Maria Visconti hunting men instead of beasts.
And at the head of them all, Rollo de Warlencourt, the Grand Master.
‘Five of them,’ I said. ‘All the same age, all ex-pupils. They are all in on it. They’ve all been huntin’ shootin’ fishin’ themselves. They were Medievals when they were at school here, and they all went on to become Friars when they grew up, all except Henry’s dad. And the whole cycle keeps on going, the Order sustains itself, and Henry’s good old days continue.’
Shafeen looked at me. ‘How far did the game books go back, can you remember?’
I considered. ‘Middle Ages, easy.’
‘Christ,’ he said. ‘It started when the Medievals were actually medieval.’
He was still looking through the book. ‘Look.’ He turned to random pages. ‘Proceedings of the Order of the Stag, Michaelmas Justitium, 1962, Baddesley Manor. Hilary Justitium, 1967, Polesden Cross. Trinity Justitium, 1965, Derbyshire House.’ He looked up. ‘It goes much wider than Longcross.’
‘It had to, didn’t it?’ I said. ‘There wouldn’t always have been a de Warlencourt in the upper school for a thousand years. There must have been gaps. Other leaders of the Medievals, other stately homes hosting the blood sports.’
‘But all connected by one thing,’ said Shafeen.
‘STAGS,’ Nel finished.
‘The cult is running the school,’ I said, ‘and the school is running the cult.’
‘And now,’ Shafeen said, ‘there’s a new leader: Cookson. Henry said it himself – the Order will go on, even without him.’
‘No, it won’t.’ I stood up. ‘Shafeen, bring the game book. Nel, bring the phone.’
‘Where are we going?’
I was already at the door. ‘It’s time to tell the Abbot.’ Then I froze with my fingers on the handle. ‘No, wait, what if he’s in on it too?’
‘He’s not in the book,’ said Shafeen.
‘No signet ring either,’ said Nel.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Come on.’