I stayed in my room a lot those first weeks of Hilary Term.
The shock of the fire still burned in my mind, a flame that wouldn’t be doused. According to the traumatised twins, the damage to Longcross Hall was considerable, so at the moment no one could live there, not even a ghost. As there had been no big Henry reveal on the night of the fire, Louis was, as far as he knew, the Earl of Longcross. As such he had thrown himself into a grand rebuilding and restoration programme of his ancestral home. The twins both treated me like a heroine; there had been no bodies found inside, except for their already deceased uncle, and the shell of the house had been saved. Only Bates, the faithful family butler, hadn’t been seen since the fire. I thought of what Henry had said – that a faithful old family retainer would never betray the family. How wrong he’d been. Bates had waited until the countess had ordered the champagne to detonate the fuses in the cellars, certain in the knowledge that everyone would be seated for the speeches and toasts, and perhaps even for the Return of the King – Henry de Warlencourt. I couldn’t avoid the sickening conclusion that, as Bates had been so close to the blast, he’d been as good as vaporised by the explosives. Had his ashes drifted on those thermals, high above the house he’d served for so long?
Even though my hand hadn’t been the one to light the fuses, I felt like the villain of the piece. If only I had figured it out earlier. If only I had realised what Bates was up to with the champagne. If only I had realised that the big conspiracy that we’d been trying to uncover wasn’t by the Order of the Stag, but against them. Perhaps, then, everyone could have been saved.
We talked, quite a lot, about the champagne that didn’t exist. It was Nel who came up with the best theory, possibly because, when we’d first got to Cumberland Place, she’d felt very much like a spare part and was able to observe everything closely. One evening when we were all leaning on the Paulinus well, our old haunt, she cracked what Sherlock Holmes might have called ‘The Champagne Problem’.
‘How come Rollo asked Bates for the Veuve Clicquot ’84,’ I mused, ‘when both of them knew it didn’t exist? And how come Bates just obediently went to get it every time?’
‘My question,’ said Shafeen, ‘would be, how did those non-existent champagne bottles turn up in the cellars of Longcross Hall, full of explosives.’
‘I’ve been thinking about this,’ said Nel. ‘Do you remember, when we first got to Cumberland Place, every time Caro tried to talk about Henry being alive, her mother, Lady Whitehaven, rang her up? And then it turned out she wasn’t on the phone at all – it was just a ruse to get Caro out of the room.’
I picked a frill of lichen off the well and flicked it from my fingernail. ‘Yes …’
‘Well, I began to notice,’ Nel went on, ‘that when Rollo sent Bates for the Veuve Clicquot ’84, as soon as Bates was out of the room Rollo started to talk about some big family secret. Once he talked about Henry. Once he talked about the plan to block the fox-hunting bill. And once, Shafeen, he talked about your dad and Longcross in 1969. All things he wouldn’t necessarily want a servant to hear.’
Shafeen frowned. ‘But Bates would know. Bates would know the wine he was being sent to get didn’t exist.’
Nel nodded. ‘That was weird to me too. But try this on for size: what if it was some sort of agreed de Warlencourt code to clear the servants from the room? Bates accepts it, and obeys it, because he’s a servant and has been faithful to the family for about a hundred years.’
‘But he wasn’t faithful to the family,’ I said. ‘Not in the end.’
‘Well, that’s exactly it.’ She got all animated, pointing her finger in my face. ‘When the time came for Bates to put his gunpowder plot into action, what better way to get explosives into a cellar than to disguise them as wine? Wine lives in a cellar anyway.’
I straightened up. ‘That’s exactly what the original gunpowder plotters did. Guy Fawkes pretended the barrels of gunpowder that he stored under Parliament were wine.’
‘There you go,’ said Nel. ‘And what better name for this mythical wine than the one that had been used for years to keep the servants out of the room, to exclude the lower classes, to keep the kids away from the big boys’ table? Calling the explosive “Veuve Clicquot 1984” was pure social justice on a wine label. It literally said it on the tin.’
I looked down into the blackness of the well as I thought about this, another door into the dark, just as the cellar door had been at Longcross that day. ‘But wasn’t that risky? What if someone had walked past?’
‘Someone did,’ said Nel. ‘Us. And we only happened to go past the cellar door because we came in the tradesmens’ entrance. All the other hoity-toity guests went in the front door. They wouldn’t dream of poking around in the cellars.’ She shrugged. ‘We saw Bates unloading the bottles. Greer, you even picked one up.’ The thought made me shiver, knowing what I now knew. ‘But we didn’t know there was anything odd about them. Who would?’
‘Rollo,’ said Shafeen. ‘If Rollo had seen, he would have known there was something afoot.’
‘But Rollo wouldn’t go to the cellars. He has servants for that.’ Nel smoothed the facings of her Tudor coat, like she was a barrister, before delivering her closing argument. ‘Rollo was strictly upstairs. Bates was downstairs. That’s the point.’
Ty was off school for a bit – it was her turn to be in Alnwick Cottage Hospital as a precaution against smoke inhalation – but as soon as she was back, I tracked her down in Lightfoot.
We hugged for a long, long time, sat on her bed and talked about the fire. ‘Where were you during the hunt dinner?’ I asked. ‘You weren’t just doing your hair, were you? Not for all that time.’
She looked down, pleating the bedspread between her fingers. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘I was making a new acquaintance.’ Then she looked up.
‘Henry,’ I said. It was a statement, not a question.
She nodded.
‘So he was actually with you when the blast happened?’
‘I guess. He came to find me in my room and we talked – for ages. Then there was a noise and a flash and I don’t remember anything else except being carried out by him to you.’ She bit her lip, as if it cost her to say what she had to say. ‘He saved my life, for sure.’
There was much, much more to ask. I desperately wanted to know why Henry had sought her out, what they’d talked about. But there was one more urgent question. ‘Ty,’ I said, tracing the tiny flowers on her bedspread, ‘what were you doing in the covert that day? Who told you to lead Rollo to Acre Wood?’ A thought occurred to me. ‘You know he’s dead, I suppose?’
She didn’t quite meet my eyes. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. She sounded wretched.
‘Please tell me you didn’t have anything to do with that.’
‘Oh God, Greer, I don’t know.’ She was close to tears. ‘He was only supposed to fall off his horse. You have to believe that. Not … not this.’
I thought again of my first conversation with Rollo at Cumberland place, about The Lion in Winter and the fall of a king. ‘But the fall wasn’t all there was,’ I said. The fall hadn’t killed Henry and it hadn’t killed his father. ‘Rollo was poisoned.’
Ty looked as if she’d won the lottery. ‘He was?’
‘According to the family doc.’ I took her hand and spoke sternly. ’Ty. You’d better tell me everything. You said Rollo was only supposed to fall off his horse. But it got much bigger than that. The explosion at Longcross … that was … that was …’ I searched for the right word. ‘Terrorism. It was attempted mass murder. Who planned that? Are you … are you working with them?’
The shutters came down again, and she pulled her hand away. ‘I can’t tell you.’
‘Can’t?’
‘All right, I won’t.’ It sounded pretty final.
I said carefully, choosing my words, ‘You won’t tell anyone? Or especially me?’
‘Especially you.’ There was no hostility; Ty just sounded matter of fact.
‘Why especially me?’
She said bluntly, ‘Because I don’t know which side you’re on.’ Now she looked at me very directly. ‘Do you know?’
I got up from the bed and walked to the window, looking down into the White Quad. It was peopled by students in blood-red stockings huddled down into their black Tudor coats against the mean January wind. I said, very softly, ‘He did save your life.’
‘And took how many others?’ She got up and pointedly opened her door for me. ‘You can’t run with the fox and hunt with the hounds, Greer.’