Shiverton Hall (4 page)

It took Arthur a second to answer, partly because of his painfully full bladder, but mostly because the girl who stared at him was just about the most beautiful person he’d ever seen. She tilted her blonde head and cracked a smile that left Arthur half-stunned.

He managed to recover himself – just – and stammered, ‘Yes, yup . . . I’m the new . . . I’m the new Arthur.’

‘Hello, the-new-Arthur. I’m Amber,’ she laughed.

‘Amber,’ Arthur repeated gormlessly, letting the syllables roll on his tongue.

Amber, clearly used to having this effect on the male species, pretended not to notice. ‘Well, Arthur,’ she said, ‘lovely to meet you, but I’m now very late.’

‘Hmmm?’ Arthur breathed. ‘What? Oh right, yeah. Sorry.’

‘No problem.’ She grinned, turning towards the doors. ‘See you around.’

Arthur gaped after her for a moment, before sprinting to the loos.

The assembly was already underway when Arthur slipped in through the doors. He crept, embarrassed, towards a beckoning George, with all of the students and parents looking at him in amusement. He could see his mother, hard to miss in her pink suit, sitting with Rob on the other side of the auditorium.

On stage stood the headmistress, Professor Esther Long-Pitt, a woman for whom the word ‘formidable’ could have been created; ‘terrifying’ might also have covered it. At over six feet, with spider-thin limbs and a hooked nose that stood out of a narrow, sallow face, she looked like a spindly shadow puppet that some deranged puppet-master had jerked into life. She paused as a mortified Arthur made his way to his seat, and resumed only once he had sat down.

‘A very warm welcome to those of you who have just joined the school,’ she said in a reedy voice that was neither warm nor welcoming.

As the headmistress went over the previous year’s exam results, the school’s excellent facilities and the sports calendar, Arthur scanned the crowd for Amber. It wasn’t easy since almost all of the Shiverton girls seemed to have long, blonde hair. Arthur glanced over at his mother, who was listening earnestly, and Rob, surreptitiously playing a game on his mobile, and thought how weird it would be, living miles away from them.

Long-Pitt seemed to be reaching the end of her address. ‘May I remind you all,’ she said, peering sternly into the crowd, ‘that although there are a great many enjoyable activities to do here at Shiverton Hall, we are, first and foremost, a place of learning. We have a fine reputation as a school, and I ask all of you here today to help us to uphold that reputation.’

Just as the words left her mouth, the main door of the auditorium slammed open with a bang. The crowd jumped and a few girls squealed with fright. Standing in the doorway, wet and shivering from the rain, was a small, pale, teenage boy, dressed in a pair of grubby pyjamas. He fixed the headmistress with a furious, deranged stare and shouted, ‘LIAR!’

The audience looked to Professor Long-Pitt, shocked but riveted, waiting to see what would happen next.

The headmistress smiled tightly, quickly covering any surprise with an impassive and calm gaze. ‘Tristan,’ she said.

Tristan staggered into the auditorium, his bare feet leaving muddy prints on the stone floor. He pointed a crooked finger at the headmistress. ‘Reputation!’ he spat. ‘What reputation is that, Professor? The reputation for evil and witchcraft? For murder?’ The words rang out over the wide-eyed audience.

Long-Pitt shook her head. ‘You’re not well, Tristan.’

Tristan let out a strangled laugh. ‘That’s what you want them to think, isn’t it? That I’m mad?’

The headmistress didn’t say anything – Tristan’s bedraggled appearance spoke for itself.

He whimpered suddenly, clutching at his hair. ‘I’m not mad, I’m not mad,’ he muttered, pacing in a circle. He turned to where the parents were sitting, his breath coming out in ragged gasps. ‘Please,’ he begged, ‘take your children away. It’s not safe.’

Two burly teachers sprang towards Tristan, but he darted between them, running towards the crowd. The nearest students flinched away from him.

‘Something terrible is about to happen,’ he cried desperately.

The teachers caught him and he struggled against them. ‘Let go of me!’ he sobbed, trying to free himself as they dragged him from the hall. ‘The friends!’ he howled, as he disappeared from sight. ‘The friends are coming!’

The friends are coming
.

It echoed around the hall, over the heads of the bewildered onlookers, dumbfounded by what they had just witnessed.

Professor Long-Pitt hushed the ensuing whispering with a bony finger. ‘I’m terribly sorry about that,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid Tristan was removed from Shiverton Hall last year due to mental difficulties. He’s a very troubled boy, but don’t worry, he will be taken care of. He won’t disrupt us again.’

Chapter Four

Arthur sat in his bed, a rogue spring digging uncomfortably into his thigh, and felt a little homesick. Saying goodbye to his family had been difficult. Even Rob had seemed a bit sad to be leaving his brother; the dead arm he had inflicted on Arthur as he climbed back into the car had been distinctly half-hearted. He wanted to text them, just to make sure they’d got home all right, but Shiverton had a strict ‘no phones policy’, and Arthur had handed his mobile in to Toynbee before bed. George had cunningly brought two with him, one to hand in and one to hide, and Arthur wondered whether he’d be allowed to borrow it. They weren’t even permitted computers at the school because the focus was on ‘good, old-fashioned learning’. Arthur was used to spending hours on the internet every evening, and wasn’t sure he was capable of writing an essay without spell check.

Arthur tried to read his book, a collection of ghost stories by M.R. James, but looking round his shadowy room, he wished he had brought something more cheerful with him. He was so used to the sounds of London traffic outside his window that the silence of the countryside made him uneasy, and he jumped every time an owl hooted or a tree creaked. When there was a knock on his door he nearly dropped his book in fright.

George poked his head around the door. ‘You awake?’ he asked. ‘I thought I’d check that you’re settling in.’

Without waiting to be invited in, George walked over to Arthur’s chair and sat down. Arthur realised that he might as well give up on attempting to read.

‘So, are you going to tell me?’ Arthur said.

‘Tell you what?’ George answered, bemused.

‘About what on earth happened in assembly tonight.’

‘Oh,’ George said, raising his eyebrows, ‘that.’

‘Yes,
that
. You’re not going to say that happens at the beginning of every term, are you?’

‘No, not quite.’ George chuckled. ‘That was Tristan Maynard, the boy I was telling you about earlier.’ He put on a spooky voice. ‘He saw something nasty in the library.’

‘You said they put him in a mental hospital.’

‘They did, but it looks like he escaped.’

‘Poor guy.’

‘Yes, it was very weird,’ George said, getting up to look out of Arthur’s window. ‘Of course, everyone’s already started saying it’s the curse.’

‘The curse?’ Arthur laughed.

George looked offended. ‘Don’t laugh. It’s true.’

‘Come off it, George! One poor nutter isn’t going to make me believe that this whole school has some hex on it.’

‘Oh, there’s been more than one,’ George said darkly.

‘Well, go on then,’ Arthur said, sitting up.

‘Are you sure?’ George asked with a half-smile. ‘You might have to sleep with the light on.’

The Curse

Frederick, Lord Shiverton was only thirteen when his father, the first Baron Shiverton, fell off his horse and broke his neck. The first baron was the son of a minor landowner, and had acquired his fortune and his title by importing slaves from West Africa. He liked to whip his slaves as brutally as he whipped his horses, but the horse he had been riding on the day of his death, a chestnut stallion, had had enough of his master’s sharp spurs and stinging whip, and bucked him head first into a stream.

Even though the first baron was a brutal and violent man, it was his son whom everyone feared. Frederick was only just out of childhood, but his capacity for cruelty was already well honed. He lived in a large house in Bristol with his mother, a frail, consumptive woman who tried to keep out of his way as much as she could, and a huddle of terrified servants. A fearsomely clever and unscrupulous boy, he transformed his father’s business in a few short years, becoming England’s largest importer of slaves, and one of the richest men in the country. Much to Frederick’s relief, his mother succumbed to one of her many ailments in the winter of 1756. To celebrate he decided to build a house, away from the city, where he would have the privacy to do as he pleased.

Lord Shiverton wanted his house to be a masterpiece, a symbol of his wealth and status. He bought an enormous stretch of land, ensuring that his home would have no prying neighbours for miles around, and employed one of the leading architects of the day. As he had an endless supply of slaves, and no interest at all in their welfare, the house was completed in record time, shortly before his eighteenth birthday.

Alone and unsupervised, Lord Shiverton turned his house into a centre of wickedness. His friends, rich young gentlemen with a taste for more unusual diversions, would travel from London and Oxford to Shiverton Hall, where they knew that they could do whatever they wished, with no one else around, and no parents to stop them. It became one of the most popular destinations for the meetings of the Hellfire Club, whose motto was carved above the hall’s enormous front door,
Fac quod vis (Do what thou wilt)
,
and which became part of the Shiverton family crest. The club members stuck true to the motto – they did what they pleased, how they pleased, no matter how immoral – with the shadowy figure of Lord Shiverton watching over them with silent approval. To the outside world, Lord Shiverton showed a respectable – indeed, very handsome – face, but cloistered in the stone walls of his house, the monstrousness of his true self was set free.

As the years wore on, as is often the case with such men, Lord Shiverton became increasingly solitary and strange. His Hellfire Club friends had grown up and put their years of vice behind them, they had married and become upstanding gentlemen, some of them even members of the clergy. Rumours had begun to spread around Bath and London that Lord Shiverton was a practitioner of dark magic. The only men who still frequented Shiverton Hall were the blackest of the lot, tricksters, criminals and reprobates, and even they had begun to keep their distance.

Lord Shiverton’s business interests were disintegrating, and because of his complete disregard for the health and well-being of the people he was trafficking, his ships were hotbeds of disease. One ship had sailed into harbour with only a few slaves still alive, the corpses of the rest having been tipped overboard. Once this news had circulated, people were unwilling to buy Shiverton’s slaves – not because they had an ounce of pity for the poor souls who had perished on his ships, but because they didn’t want their own households exposed to infection.

Alone in his enormous house, his wealth and status leaking away, Lord Shiverton’s already twisted mind became increasingly disturbed. His fingernails grew to yellow talons and his greying hair curled down his back in greasy tendrils. He drank, and beat his slaves so savagely that they could barely walk.