It felt pretty special just swanning in to the Houses of Parliament.
After getting past security – Rollo’s name was obviously enough to snowplough through any obstacles – we’d passed through a vast room decorated with giant paintings. One of them depicted the Battle of Trafalgar and – whaddya know? – there was old Captain Hardy at the centre of it all, cradling a dying Lord Nelson in his arms and giving him that farewell kiss. Funny how someone tells you something and then that’s all you see.
Just past the painting were these huge doors into the chamber itself. We were settled in a gallery under an impossibly high gilded ceiling, painted with Tudor roses and Scottish thistles like some sort of expensive inverted garden. Below us were long benches of oxblood leather, crowded with England’s nobility talking to each other in a polite murmur. I half expected the Lords to be dressed in robes and ermine like you see on the TV.
They weren’t, of course. They were in suits and ties and the women were in sort of smart ladies-who-lunch gear.
The chamber, though, was stunning. At the far end of the room sat a carved golden chair, empty, under an ornate gilded canopy.
There were quite a few other people in the public gallery. Some, I think, were Muggles like us, but others – well, I got a very strong feeling they were journalists. They didn’t exactly have notebooks out or PRESS signs stuck into the brims of their hats like in Bugsy Malone, but they sort of had an air of being journalists, if that makes sense. There was a buzz about the place, like something was about to happen.
I looked down at the chamber. It too was packed, like when two teams everyone cares about are playing a football match. I was on one side of Shafeen, and Nel was on the other, so I could only really talk to him. ‘So who are all that lot?’ I asked out the side of my mouth.
‘The Lords? Oh, you know, earls, dukes and the odd viscount.’
I didn’t know the difference but it sounded like Shafeen did. So while we were waiting for something to happen I whispered, ‘I’m still not totally down with this whole titles thing.’
‘What’s messing you up?’
‘So, Caro is the Countess of Longcross.’
‘Yes.’
‘So why is Rollo not a count?’
‘Because he’s an earl.’
‘Aaargh. So an earl is married to a countess?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not a count?’
‘No.’
‘But there are counts.’
‘Only abroad. We have viscounts here.’
‘And where do they come in?’
‘Above barons.’
‘Is Rollo a baron?’
‘No. He’s an earl.’
‘And you call him Earl to his face?’
‘No. You call him Lord Longcross. And Caro’s Lady Longcross.’
‘I’ve been calling her Lady de Warlencourt.’
‘I know.’
‘Thanks for the heads-up.’
‘Consider this the heads-up.’
I thought for a moment. ‘Why isn’t Rollo Lord de Warlencourt?’
‘Because that’s Louis. As the heir apparent, he takes the subsidiary title of the earl.’
‘I give up.’
I went back to watching the proceedings below. Something was happening at last. A man dressed in black came into the chamber carrying a long golden sceptre thingy. Then a grey-haired bloke who resembled a heron processed into the room, wearing a long black robe. You could just tell by his bearing that he was the boss, so I expected him to sit in the golden carved chair, but he bypassed that and sat on a huge overstuffed red cushiony thing. The golden sceptre was laid there too. I bent to Shafeen’s ear. ‘Why’s he on the sofa?’
‘The Woolsack,’ he corrected. ‘That’s the Lord Speaker’s ceremonial seat.’
‘Doesn’t he sit in the fancy chair?’
He looked amused. ‘That’s not a chair. That’s a throne.’
I gulped. ‘The queen’s coming?’
He smiled. ‘Not today, sorry. Only on ceremonial occasions.’
I stared at the throne. I was in a room where the queen had sat. Me, Greer MacDonald. This definitely wasn’t Kansas any more.
Even sans Queenie there was plenty of pomp and ceremony and arcane language going on, and something about the gathering, the grown-up-ness and tradition and ceremony of it, recalled my trial to me in a sweaty, damp-palmed panic. I clasped my branded thumb in my other hand as a horrid thought jolted me. Had Rollo, sitting calmly in his place somewhere far below, been in that ghastly circle of red-cowled Grand Stags? If he had invited the Abbot and the Friars to Longcross in 1969, along with ‘Hardy’, and if the Old Abbot had been the one to try me, had Rollo de Warlencourt been there too? And even if he hadn’t been there, as part of the Dark Order he would know that I was guilty, and if that was so, why was he treating his son’s manslayer as an honoured guest and why was his wife treating me as ‘practically part of the family’?
But I couldn’t say anything to the others right then. The Lord Speaker was getting to his feet, and everyone shut up to listen.
His elderly but carrying voice floated up to us. ‘My Lords. The proposition to put to the House to vote, in this, our last session before the Christmas recess, is as follows: that any gathering of hounds with the intent to hunt a living animal or follow an artificially laid trail shall be absolutely prohibited.’ He consulted the notes in his hand over his half-moon specs. ‘This proposition, entitled the Hunting with Hounds Bill, is on its third reading, and if carried this day will duly pass into law, and be written into the statute books, to be followed on the pain of prosecution.’ He looked out at the gathered peers. ‘Before we put the proposition to the vote, we will hear the Honourable Members debate the bill for the final time. First, the Honourable Lord Longcross, Rollo de Warlencourt.’
Rollo got to his feet and I looked down at him objectively, as others must see him. He cut an impressive figure – tall and slim, in his impeccably cut navy suit, the silver-blond hair brushed back from the noble brow. He had a slim book in his hands, and as all eyes turned to him I wondered what on earth was coming. The whole chamber fell quiet, and there was a huge air of expectation among that little group I’d already identified as ‘press’.
But if I’d thought pretty hard with every brain cell I had for a million years, I could never have accurately guessed what Rollo de Warlencourt was going to say.
The meet was at ‘The Cock and Pye
By Charles and Martha Enderby,’
The grey, three-hundred-year-old inn
Long since the haunt of Benjamin
The highwayman, who rode the bay.
The tavern fronts the coaching way,
The mail changed horses there of old.
It has a strip of grassy mould
In front of it, a broad green strip.
A trough, where horses’ muzzles dip,
Stands opposite the tavern front,
And there that morning came the hunt,
To fill that quiet width of road
As full of men as Framilode
Is full of sea when tide is in.
There was a murmur around the chamber, and Shafeen, Nel and I exchanged a look. What the hell?
Rollo was clearly reciting some sort of poem from the book that he held, but why? Was he trying to make some comment about hunting, and his right to continue? I waited for him to stop quoting and explain his point. But the earl didn’t stop.
Of horses’ stables and the savour
Of saddle-paste and polish spirit
Which put the gleam on flap and tirrit.
The grooms in shirts with rolled-up sleeves,
Belted by girths of coloured weaves,
Groomed the clipped hunters in their stalls.
He just went on. And on. Not hurrying; in fact, quite the opposite – he was, if anything, talking deliberately slowly. Five minutes, ten minutes. The poem was naming every kind of person that had ever been on a hunt – a soldier, a doctor, a parson, a farmer on his big-boned shire – everyone was described in minute detail. Fifteen minutes, and some distant parliamentary clock chimed the quarter. Twenty minutes. I started to think that he wasn’t just reading a poem from the book; he was reading out the whole thing. People started shuffling in their seats. My mind wandering, I let my eyes wander too, from the church-like stained-glass windows, with the night falling outside of them, to the incredible lit interior of the golden ceiling. Thirty minutes, and the earl was still going. I had never been so bored in my life. I turned to Shafeen and mimed a discreet yawn, and he gave a little nod. Looking at the age of some of the Members of the House, I thought there was a very real risk that some of them would go to sleep. I reckoned that even the queen, had she been there, would have dropped off too, on her gilded throne.
Wind-bitten beech with badger barrows,
Where brocks eat wasp-grubs with their marrows,
And foxes lie on short-grassed turf …
Suddenly I sat up. Had I imagined it or had Rollo just said foxes? I started paying closer attention.
Nose between paws, to hear the surf
Of wind in the beeches drowsily.
There was our fox bred lustily
Three years before, and there he berthed
Under the beech-roots snugly earthed.
Still the earl talked. But now I was spellbound. I couldn’t have slept if someone had knocked me out with a frying pan. I wanted to know what happened to the fox. Just as in my dream, I kept pace with the creature’s every footstep, as Rollo narrated how the horses and hounds chased him relentlessly across the English countryside.
The taint of fox was rank on the air,
He knew, as he ran, there were foxes there.
His strength was broken, his heart was bursting,
His bones were rotten, his throat was thirsting,
His feet were reeling, his brush was thick
From dragging the mud, and his brain was sick.
Go on, I willed the fox, as I had once tried to will a stag to safety. Run. Get Away.
He thought as he ran of his old delight
In the wood in the moon in an April night,
His happy hunting, his winter loving,
The smells of things in the midnight roving;
The look of his dainty-nosing, red
Clean-felled dam with her footpad’s tread,
Of his sire, so swift, so game, so cunning
With craft in his brain and power of running,
Their fights of old when his teeth drew blood.
Now he was sick, with his coat all mud.
I felt the sickness too, the sick dread of the fox’s inevitable end. And when it came, Rollo had everyone’s attention. The dozing peers woke, the press leaned forward, the speaker turned his heron’s head.
The beech wood grey rose dim in the night
With moonlight fallen in pools of light,
The long-dead leaves on the ground were rimed.
A clock struck twelve and the church bells chimed.
And, incredibly, it was over. Rollo stopped speaking for the first time in God knew how long, and into the silence, the clock, nestled somewhere in those stone spires and pinnacles above, chimed the hour. As in Cinderella, the slipper fell and the world was changed. The winter meadows disappeared and I was back in the gold-and-scarlet chamber. The two peers either side of Rollo leaned forward, looked at each other and gave a very definite nod. I was just wondering what they were signalling about when the Lord Speaker rose, and the Earl of Longcross, clearly exhausted, almost fell back into his seat.
‘My Lords,’ said the Speaker, with this strange tone to his voice, half amused, half exasperated, ‘I thank the noble lord for his –’ he raised one grey eyebrow – ‘remarks. Sadly, our time has run out and our session is at an end. The Hunting with Hounds Bill will be suspended until we may take a vote at our first session in the New Year. We now recess for Christmas, and I wish you all the compliments of the season. All rise.’