I met the others downstairs – Nel in a fetching mulberry jacket, Shafeen in night black.
The countess – in a jacket as green as poison – led us out of the door, and the de Warlencourts’ silent chauffeur drove us to the stables, which were not far at all. The huge car nosed its way over Oxford Street and past Marble Arch to another huge expanse of green, this time apparently Hyde Park. The driver dropped us all off at a lovely little mews, where four seemingly massive horses waited for us, their shifting feet clopping on the cobbles. Four cheery grooms greeted the countess respectfully, and she nodded at them in return. Here she seemed to have more authority and I was reminded of Cass at Longcross – she was in her domain here. I only had to watch Caro mounting her horse, unaided, to understand that she was a brilliant horsewoman. Shafeen vaulted onto his glossy black beast like the princeling he was, and Nel, too, seemed to be as comfortable on her horse as if she was sitting on a sofa. As for me, after what seemed like an eternity of bouncing around with one foot in the stirrup, trying to get some purchase on the saddle, while my awkward bastard of a horse moved around, swishing its tail in my face, one of the grooms had to shove me up like a sack of potatoes. I felt like everyone was watching me by that point so I tried desperately to remember what I’d learned all that time ago in Austria, about straightening my back and gripping with my knees, but despite my efforts, when my horse – who was apparently called Snowflake – moved off with a lurch I nearly fell to the cobbles. The mare seemed impossibly high. If I didn’t improve fast, I would be the one who wouldn’t survive the hunt.
I had to admit that riding in Hyde Park was pretty magical. There was obviously a fair bit of muscle memory involved in riding a horse, and once my body had remembered how to walk, trot and canter, and I’d got used to the quite scary distance between me and the friendly floor, I began to enjoy myself. There was snow on the ground, but even with just a velvet jacket I quickly started to warm up with the exercise. The park looked beautiful – hard to believe really, looking at the trees and the vast glassy lake, that we were in London.
‘This is Rotten Row,’ said the countess, waving her crop at the broad sandy track running through the green park. ‘Laid down in the reign of William III as a direct route between Kensington Palace and St James’s Palace.’
‘What’s rotten about it?’ I asked. ‘It looks lovely.’
‘Nothing,’ she smiled. ‘The name is a corruption of route de roi, the way of the king. It became a place for the quality to ride in their finest clothes – to see and be seen.’
Just as we were doing today. We all looked perfectly dressed for riding and undeniably posh – all in hats and boots, with our jackets in varying dark hues of velvet. Shafeen, ramrod straight, looked amazing on horseback, like he’d been born in the saddle. Nel was more relaxed, holding the reins with one hand in a chilled fashion, and I tried subtly, and unsuccessfully, to somehow combine both their styles of riding. I didn’t have to worry though; help was at hand. The countess seemed happy to correct any bad habits I’d picked up in Austria.
‘Sit square, Greer,’ she said. ‘Back straight. Head up. Imagine a string pulling you up from the top of your head. And heels down, that’s right. Hold the reins like you’re holding two china teacups – they should be in a straight line from the bit to your hands – no sagging. Don’t yank them though. Tell the mare where you want to go with your knees.’
There was a lot to remember but I tried my best, and she seemed pleased with me.
‘Very good. We’ll make a proper rider of you yet. Are you ready to gallop?’
She made a little clicking noise with her mouth, and her horse began to go faster. I remembered this from my early lessons, the rush as your mount took off at speed. For an instant I lurched in the saddle until I found my seat – and suddenly the world became smooth. I had a real moment out there in the snowy park, galloping shoulder to shoulder with Shafeen, our eyes sparkling, laughing, gulping the cold air. At last we jogged to a halt, and turned the horses to wait for the others. Caro, following behind us with Nel, eyed me in a pleased fashion. ‘There!’ she cried. ‘Now you remember. Now you understand.’
I was reminded, once again, of Henry; of that last day fishing in Longmere. He’d looked at me just like that when I’d killed the brown trout. Like I was one of them.
She didn’t say a word to the other two. Maybe she could see, with one eye, that they were streets ahead of me (literally) on the riding front. But it felt like there was something else there too – some other purpose. It felt like she was grooming me. Not in a fifty-year-old-man-on-the-Internet way. A Julie-Andrews-in-The-Princess-Diaries way. She was training me – preparing me for something. But for what?
When it was my turn to ride alongside the countess we spoke, inevitably, of Henry. Oddly, on that ride down the sandy track of the park, we were now on a different footing. For the first time I felt a kinship with Lady Longcross. She and I, alone in that company, knew what we knew – that her son was alive. Now, when I spoke to her, she hadn’t changed, I had. But because I had changed, she was now transformed to me. She wasn’t some mad old bat. She was a loving mother. Once again, I wondered what it would be like to have one of those.
As we rode side by side, I wondered how Henry fitted into the foxhunting plan. Was he a part of it? Or was this Rollo’s gig? Or even Louis’s, the temporary heir to the throne? Did Henry even know about the meet? And why was he in hiding? How could he bear to let Louis strut around as Lord de Warlencourt, even for a single second? But I could ask none of these things of Henry’s mother. Instead, I asked the question that had been bothering me ever since her son had shared my bed. What he’d said then, about her, about Rollo, had piqued my interest. ‘What was Henry like as a little boy?’
She smiled. ‘Adorable. Just like an angel. Such an affectionate child. We were so close – still are.’ It was still a jolt to hear him spoken of in the present tense. ‘I think I spoiled him because Rollo was very hard on him, you know. Fathers have to be.’
I wasn’t sure about this. I imagined it was possible for a dad to raise a boy successfully without being a dick.
‘He was our only one, you see, our son and heir. We never had any more.’ She said this very matter-of-factly, with a stiff upper lip. I didn’t feel I knew her well enough to ask if they’d wanted more kids. But she carried on. ‘We married late, you know – well, Rollo did. He was quite the stud – busy playing the field – until he met the right girl of course,’ she said archly. Caro didn’t seem at all bothered by her husband’s womanising past; if anything, she sounded kind of proud. ‘He was over fifty when we had Henry. And once he had his heir, well …’ She paused delicately. ‘He thought he was a little too old to have the spare.’ It was hard to tell from her voice whether or not she minded. ‘Henry was at home with us until he was eight, with his nanny, you see. Then he went to STAGS prep.’
‘At eight?’
‘Yes, of course.’ She said it as if it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘So Rollo’s notion was that he only had until eight to discipline him – you know, to really whip him into shape.’
The phrase sat uncomfortably with me. I wondered just what shape that discipline took. But then something else claimed my attention. There was a crowd gathering under a little knot of trees at the corner of the park. They caught my eye for a particular reason – they were all wearing red hooded onesies, just like the mysterious figure I’d chased through Westminster Abbey. I reined Snowflake in. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Speaker’s Corner,’ said the countess with disdain in her voice. ‘A designated space where any crackpot can say anything at all to any other crackpot who will listen.’
There was indeed a person in red standing on a kind of stepladder making some sort of shouty speech, and another, taller person – also in red – at the front, seemingly firing up the scarlet crowd. They were not passive spectators, not a quiet assembly, but an edgy, noisy mob, buzzing like a hive of bees. That wasn’t the strange thing about them though. The strangest thing was that, as well as having the same clothes, they all had the same face.
It was vaguely nightmarish. They were all wearing the same distinctive mask. It was white, and oval, and had a smiling face on it, with holes cut out for the eyes. Above the eyeholes were quizzical raised eyebrows, and over the smiling mouth was an old-fashioned, Errol-Flynn-in-Robin-Hood-style black moustache. The grin was broad, there were hectic pink highlights on each cheek, and the expression as a whole spelled mischief. Something about it struck a chord in my memory. The mask was vaguely familiar.
As we passed, the crowd’s general hubbub began to crystallise into a chant. I couldn’t quite hear it at first, then I figured it out. They were chanting: ‘Beat the Elite. Beat the Elite.’
I began to feel uneasy. We couldn’t have been in a worse place at a worse time in all our pristine riding gear. The horses started dancing around a bit. Shafeen gathered his reins. ‘Let’s go back.’
But it was too late. We’d been seen and the shouting began to be directed towards us. It was creepy, all those red-hooded figures, all those white faces with smiling mouths, and the angry, incoherent shouts coming from behind the masks. Then something detached itself from the crowd and came flying – directly towards me. It was a balled-up piece of paper, probably a leaflet or something, and it didn’t hurt at all. But it was enough to spook Snowflake and she reared like a statue.
I very nearly toppled off, and my panicky brain dredged up the thought, Two hooves up – died in battle. I wasn’t about to die in this one. I gripped with my knees, hauling on the reins, and Snowflake, amazingly, dropped down to all fours.
Shafeen and Nel were still reaching out to me, shouting to see if I was all right, when Caro reacted completely differently. She gathered her reins and rode directly at the red-clad protesters, crop raised high. The imagery was uncomfortable. I was reminded of those YouTubes I’d seen of Masters of Foxhounds thrashing hunt saboteurs with their whips. In that moment the countess looked scary – transformed from the gentle, slightly spacey aristocrat to an angry harpy. I thought of little Henry being ‘whipped into shape’. A masked figure cowered beneath her, then Shafeen blocked her with his stallion. He caught her wrist in one gloved hand. ‘No,’ he said. Then, more gently, ‘Let’s go back to the stables.’
It was the upper-class equivalent of those people in British gangster movies who stop fights with the immortal line: Leave it, ee’s not wurf it. For a moment Caro held Shafeen’s eye and he held hers. I was back at Longcross, with Henry and Shafeen having their stare-out contest after Shafeen had told his tiger story. Now, as then, the de Warlencourt broke first. Caro freed her hand and turned her mount away. The tall man who seemed to be the ringleader of the protesters grabbed his paper-chucking friend and pulled him away.
As we rode off, I looked back nervously. The crowd had turned back to their speaker, all except the tallest guy in the gathering, the ringleader. He stood slightly apart from the other scarlet figures and watched us go. Then he did this odd thing. Looking at me the whole time, he tilted his head slightly to one side like a dog. It was truly creepy. I kept my eyes on him until they streamed in the cold. As we turned onto the sandy path, just before they were lost to view, was I imagining it or did the tall figure in red raise his hand to give me a thumbs-up?
I didn’t really have time to process this because the countess was raging. ‘Dreadful people. How dare they? I’ve got half a mind to call the police.’ She gathered her reins tighter in disgust. ‘But they’ll do nothing. It’s not like the old days. They used to hang people here, you know,’ she said, with obvious approval.
‘Good times,’ said Shafeen wryly, disapproving just as obviously.
Nel seemed shocked. ‘Did they?’ she exclaimed, looking about her. And in this lovely corner of London it did seem unbelievable.
But I could believe it. Suddenly it all came back to me: the trial, the beeswax of the candle in my nose, the fear that that would be the last scent I ever smelled. ‘Ben Jonson,’ I said, with a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the weather. ‘It was here.’ Here, in this green and pleasant land, on this very spot, he’d had a noose placed around his neck, and here he’d spoken the neck verse, just as I had, to set himself free. Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.
‘Yes,’ said Caro. ‘The gallows of Tyburn were on this spot. This is where they hanged the criminals. And if you ask me,’ she sniffed, ‘they still should.’