The butler led us to a part of the house I’d never seen before, a wing guarded by knights in shining armour, visors closed for business – a part even more ancient, it seemed, than the rest of the house.
Bates opened the door into a dark room, all chocolate-brown oak panels, and a magnificent bed in the centre of the space hung with swags and swathes of old gold tapestry. In the middle of that bed, even a man of Rollo de Warlencourt’s stature seemed very small. The ancient doctor – the Doctor Morand who had patched up Shafeen’s shotgun wound the previous year – was attending the earl, white head bent over the bed. He gestured impatiently to Shafeen. ‘Come in, my boy. There’s not much time, I fear.’
Not much time. My brain, slow as slime, could not quite understand what this meant. Shafeen, suddenly very serious, walked forward to the bed like a man in a dream. I was not required in this peculiarly male moment, so I hung back. But even from the doorway I could see how Rollo looked. I don’t know what I’d expected the effects of mild concussion to look like, but it wasn’t this. The earl looked awful – somehow shrunken. His breathing was laboured and his face a sickly yellowy green. His skin seemed almost stretched across his cheeks and the fine bones of his nose. He fixed watery blue eyes on Shafeen as the younger man knelt beside the bed, almost as if he were praying. The earl reached out and clasped Shafeen’s brown hand, his own pale knuckles knotted with the blue snakes of his veins.
‘Hardy,’ he croaked.
Shafeen said, softly but a little coldly, ‘It’s not Aadhish. It’s Shafeen. His son.’
The doctor, straightening up, stood over them both, shaking his head. ‘He’s confused. I’ve seen this before, very near the end.’
Shafeen looked at the doctor for a long moment. Then he looked back to Rollo and did the sweetest thing. He squeezed the hand that held his. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s me, old friend. It’s Hardy.’
‘Hardy,’ said Rollo, a smile stretching his pale blue lips. ‘We had some gay old times, didn’t we?’
Shafeen lifted the papery hand to his cheek so the earl could feel him smile. ‘That we did.’
‘Hardy. I’ve wanted to contact you for ever so long. I wanted to say I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what happened that Justitium weekend, in 1969. What we did to you.’
There was nothing Shafeen could say to this, so he said nothing.
‘But I’m not sorry for what we did together,’ gasped the earl breathlessly. ‘Never that.’ There was a silence. ‘Hardy. Can you ever understand?’
‘Of course I can,’ said Shafeen. ‘I do.’
The earl’s face seemed to slacken with relief and release. The hand relaxed and fell back on the coverlet.
A figure loomed from the darkness behind me, and my heart leaped for one stupid moment – was it the man from the woods, the Guy Fawkes character come to claim his victim? But no – the one shape and colour I could see in the gloom was a white dog collar.
A priest.
The doctor clocked him. ‘Stand back now, my boy,’ he said to Shafeen. ‘Let Father Wright do his work.’
Numb, I watched as the priest kissed his ceremonial sash and placed it round his neck, and then began, very methodically (how many of these had he done?) to arrange his oils and his candles and his silver vials and begin the process of an ending. As this holy man dabbed holy oil onto Rollo’s forehead and chest, I didn’t have to wonder what he was doing. I knew about this from Brideshead Revisited. These are the last rites, I thought, as the mumbled Latin prayers hit my ear. The priest was giving the last rites. This was how Catholics checked out.
There was no drama, no big end-of-life speech, no final cross sketched by the quaking hand over the failing heart. But when the ritual was over Rollo held out his hand to the doorway, looking past the priest and the doctor. They could no longer help him. He reached out to Shafeen. ‘Kiss me, Hardy,’ he said.
I looked at Shafeen, as he looked at Rollo. I could see him doing battle with himself. Suddenly that Lion in Winter thing that Rollo had said the very first time we’d met made sense to me.
When the fall’s all that’s left, it matters a great deal.
I stared at Shafeen until my vision blurred. Do it. I willed him. Just do it. Whatever Rollo had done, whatever kind of monster he was, give him this one last gift. Then Shafeen walked forward, bent and tenderly kissed the hectic cheek of the Earl of Longcross.
I’d never seen anyone die before, but I can tell you it is a moment of real clarity. There is absolutely no mistaking it – it is very binary. One moment the earl was there on the bed, the next moment he was gone.
If I had been drunk when I came into the room, I was now absolutely stone-cold sober.
We watched, numb with shock, as the priest finished his work – he snuffed out the candles with absolute finality. Then, as he knelt to pray with the body, the doctor ushered us out of the room. He closed the door behind him and there were just three of us in that passageway, but a million questions crowded in there with us. ‘But … but …’ I began, but I didn’t know how to finish. But he couldn’t just check out like that. But he had a roomful of guests downstairs. But what about Henry? He never got to say goodbye. Eventually my brain zoned in not on a question, but a statement – something I’d heard Louis say less than an hour ago, before the world had changed. ‘But no one ever died of mild concussion.’
The doctor pushed his half-moon glasses up his nose and now his hand was shaking. He cleared his throat. ‘I’ve been practising medicine for fifty years and I can tell you that one can never account for the vagaries of chance. Sadly, the concussion must have been the manifestation of some sort of head trauma. These things happen.’
‘These things happen?’ Shafeen found his voice. ‘These things happen?’ He moved closer to the doctor – he towered over him. His eyes were full of contempt. I remembered what he’d said on the day he’d been shot in the arm – that this Doctor Morand had been covering up the injuries that ensued from the Order of the Stag’s death hunts for years. Shafeen got right in his face until the older man was backed up against the panelling.
‘I’ve been practising medicine for exactly no years,’ said Shafeen bitingly, ‘but even I know that what I saw on that bed wasn’t just concussion. How do you account for the jaundice of the skin? The high temperature but the cold extremities? The cyanosis of the lips?’
I was proud of Shafeen and scared of him in equal measure. How did he know this stuff? He was a badass. The doctor began to shake his head, the loose skin of his chins shivering like a turkey’s wattle.
‘I think you’d better start talking,’ said Shafeen in a steely voice. ‘Your protector has gone now, and as far as we are concerned, you did your very best to save him. But there is a different version of events: that you were incompetent. That you were unable to diagnose a secondary condition. That you let the Earl of Longcross die.’
The doctor looked from Shafeen to me, and back again.
‘I happen to know Lord Fenton of the General Medical Council,’ said Shafeen. He wasn’t lying either – I remembered the bow-tied guy at the STAGS Club. ‘Perhaps I should discuss the earl’s cause of death with him?’
That did it. The doctor began to bluster. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘without a post-mortem I couldn’t possibly say with any certainty …’
‘… but …’ prompted Shafeen.
‘… but if I was a betting man,’ whispered the doctor, ‘I’d say poison.’
The shock of that word, toxic and potent, percolated through my own veins. It didn’t make any sense to me – I could barely process what had just been whispered in this ancient passageway. I could think only of what would happen next. ‘What shall we do now?’
Sweating, Doctor Morand ran a finger inside his collar. ‘Go back down,’ he croaked, ‘and act as if nothing is amiss. Don’t say a word until I’ve had a chance to tell the countess privately.’