Shafeen looked at me and nodded, and like a couple of zombies, we drifted back down the stairs.
Outside the door of the great hall, Shafeen stopped.
‘Are you OK?’ I asked him. He looked far from OK.
He shook his head. ‘I feel like I need an M on my thumb.’
I clutched my own brand. ‘But … why?’
He started pacing. ‘I led him to Acre Wood. I did. I told Rollo to go there. Then he was ambushed and had the accident. Greer –’ he nodded upstairs to the room of death – ‘did I do that?’
‘No,’ I said, very definitely. ‘You heard Doctor Morand. He was poisoned.’
‘But who would do that?’
I actually thought there were quite a few candidates, the same Usual Suspects I had in the frame for the Guy Fawkes figure.
I caught his hand. ‘Let’s not do this now. We’ve got to put on a show.’
We heard the clashing of cutlery and crystal and the rising laughter of the guests. It seemed impossible to walk back in there like nothing had happened. But it suddenly seemed very important that we should. I squeezed Shafeen’s hand and plastered on a smile. Together we walked through the great doors and behind the lines of chairs, and no one even noticed us but Nel, who leaned back in her seat with a quizzical look. With the coded communication we’d perfected during the last extraordinary year, I shook my head a tiny amount. She rocked back into her place, watching us guardedly, but asked no questions.
Mechanically, I parried Piers’s increasingly drunken conversation. ‘Hear you’ve been in town,’ he slurred. ‘What d’ye get up to?’
I could have boasted about the STAGS Club, or the House of Lords, or even the London Oratory. But I didn’t care any more for Piers’s good opinion, so instead I said, ‘We went to the Isle of Dogs.’
He barked with laughter. ‘Ah, the Îles des chiens. The Canine Islands.’
‘You been?’ I asked.
‘God, no,’ he said, and I turned away from him. The food was gravel in my mouth, the wine vinegar. I couldn’t look at Shafeen, couldn’t look at the countess, as the minutes crawled by. I assumed Ty had come down by now, but I couldn’t check. I couldn’t look left or right. Where was Doctor Morand? What was he doing up there? Why was he not coming down to give the dreadful news to the countess? Was he informing an unseen Henry that he was now the Earl of Longcross and ensuring the succession? The king is dead, long live the king. I couldn’t think about Henry or Ty or anybody else but Rollo. What crimes he and Aadhish committed in 1969 that needed to be forgiven?
The snow fell politely outside as the guests inside got more and more raucous. The whole thing was so Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap it wasn’t even funny. It was post-modern as hell. We were even snowed in inside a country house on Boxing Day. Actually, it was more like a giant game of Cluedo. We had three clues – the earl in the bedroom with the poison. But whodunnit?
This was awful. Shafeen and I knew and no one else in this room did, and to cap it all, the countess leaped to her feet and clapped her hands. Now I had to look at her, and her happiness was devastating. ‘Bates,’ she called, ‘I think it’s time for the Veuve Clicquot ’84. We’ll go ahead with the speeches and the toasts as planned, and of course drink to dear Rollo’s health.’ I swallowed miserably. How ironic to call for her husband’s favourite champagne when he was already dead. How awful that I would actually get to taste it for the first time once there was nothing to celebrate. How dreadful that, while Rollo was lifeless in his bed upstairs, the faithful Bates was to be sent scuttling to the cellars for the legendary vintage his master would never taste again.
The cellars.
The champagne that didn’t exist.
The hundreds of bottles swaddled in straw.
‘If you were to shake it – disaster.’
The cellars of the Houses of Parliament.
Guy Fawkes and his lantern.
Remember, Remember …
I got to my feet. ‘Get out,’ I said.
Everyone was chatting and laughing – no one heard me. I shouted it. ‘GET OUT!’
Now the people close to me started to hear. Dear Shafeen, dear Nel, the twins and the Medievals. Shafeen started to his feet and took hold of me. For the second time that day, I shook him off. I climbed up on the chair, and then onto the table. China cracked under my feet, glasses overturned, cutlery crashed. I shouted it again. ‘GET OUT! EVERYBODY, GET OUT!’
Now there was a proper torrent of reaction – and above the hubbub I could hear, over and again, the same comment: ‘The girl’s drunk.’
I had been, but I wasn’t any longer. ‘No,’ I yelled. ‘I’m not drunk. We all have to get out now!’
A couple of footmen approached, Josh and another guy – white gloved hands reaching up to pull me down. There wasn’t much time.
I took a deep breath and shouted as loudly as I could, projecting like an actor. ‘In the name of Henry de Warlencourt and the Dark Order of the Grand Stag, I charge you all to leave this place at once!’
I don’t know where that came from – maybe the ghost of Ben Jonson. And I didn’t know whether it was the archaic form of words, or the fact that I’d invoked the name of their cult, but it certainly shut everyone up. In the brief silence I looked desperately at the countess. I met those blue eyes, so like Henry’s, and knew at once what had convinced her. It was the name of her son.
She gave a single, regal nod and everybody moved as one. Everyone got up with a scrape of chairs and a flurry of napkins, flying and falling like doves. ‘Out of the house,’ I shouted above this new row. ‘Into the driveway and just keep going.’ Now I took Shafeen’s proffered hand and jumped down. ‘GO!’
Everyone flowed through the double doors into the great hall, then out of the front doors into the shock of the night air. In the doorway I bumped against Josh and I clutched his liveried arm. This couldn’t just be an exodus of the affluent. ‘Get everybody from downstairs out of the house immediately,’ I said, emphasising every word. ‘You got that?’
‘Yes,’ he said, and ran.