The Lie Tree Read online

  There was a rush of motion ahead of them. Instead of waiting to follow them out, the congregation was pouring from the pews and surging out through the porch door.

  The Sunderly family emerged into the daylight, and Faith saw that the crowds had not in fact rushed off with rude haste. The churchyard was full of people, standing, squatting, sitting on monuments, all watching the approach of the casket.

  For a moment, Faith could not see the waiting grave. Then she noticed a man with a spade drooping in his hands, his brow creased with conflict and uncertainty. At his feet was the long, dark crease of a hole, but there were four or five people defiantly standing in it, their heads just visible, their elbows resting on the turf edge. Others stood massed in front of the grave, arms folded, a human barrier three rows deep.

  ‘What in the world is all this?’ exclaimed Clay.

  ‘They can’t bury him here,’ said one of the men at the heart of the group. He was tall and strongly built, with dark hair and a pugnacious face. Faith recognized him at once. It was Tom Parris, who had startled her by chance in the woods at Bull Cove. Tom Parris, whose son had been caught in the Reverend’s trap.

  ‘What do you mean, Tom?’ The curate looked flabbergasted. ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘This is holy ground,’ Tom answered curtly. ‘No suicides. That Sunderly threw himself off a cliff, and we don’t care who says different. We know where he was found.’

  Only Faith caught a flicker of Tom’s eyes towards a member of the crowd. She followed his glance, and her gaze lodged upon a familiar figure. Jeanne Bissette the housemaid, meek in her Sunday best and black armband, but with a fierce satisfaction in her eyes.

  She told them where Father was found. She told everybody.

  ‘If they want to bury him,’ Tom continued relentlessly, ‘there’s a crossroads two mile down the road. We’ll even give them a sharpened stick to keep the ghost down. But not here. Not next to our families’ stones.’

  ‘But this is cruel – cruel!’ Myrtle was shaking with feeling, her poise broken for the moment. Faith hardly recognized her mother’s voice.

  There was an uproar of other voices. Uncle Miles and the priest both pushed forward through the crowd, and Faith saw them in earnest debate with Tom, the crowd’s spokesman. After a while she saw Uncle Miles turn, and give his all too familiar resigned shrug. I tried, it said. Howard mewled faintly, and Faith realized that she was gripping his hand too tightly.

  Clay returned to Myrtle and Faith.

  ‘I have never seen our people so adamant!’ he said. ‘But I can promise you, nobody will be staking your husband and burying him at the crossroads!’

  ‘Oh, thank you, thank you!’ exclaimed Myrtle.

  ‘No, that old law was thrown out in my grandfather’s day,’ the curate continued, furrowing his brow. ‘But they are correct that a suicide cannot be buried on holy ground. I am so sorry, Mrs Sunderly, but since the manner of the Reverend’s death has been called into question, I shall have to refer the whole matter to Mr Lambent as magistrate.’

  ‘We cannot bury him?’ A fat, cold raindrop struck Faith on the cheek.

  ‘Do not worry,’ Clay answered hurriedly. ‘I am sure there is some confusion and everything will be settled easily.’

  ‘And if it is not?’ demanded Myrtle.

  ‘Well . . . then . . . there is a meadow not far away where they bury the little babes born out of wedlock. Unconsecrated, but within sight of the church spire—’

  ‘No!’ exploded Faith. Her father eternally cast out, shamed in death and cut off from the Church . . .

  No, not that!’ declared Myrtle, the fervent glitter of her eyes just visible through the heavy veil. ‘It must be holy ground.’ She lowered her voice. ‘These people – they cannot stay here all day. Can we not wait, and bury my husband when they are gone?’

  ‘Mrs Sunderly,’ the curate answered sadly, ‘I have promised them an inquest. If I go back on my word . . . well, we may put him in the ground, but I do not think he would stay there.’

  Uncle Miles remained at the church with the priest and the hearse, to talk to the protesters and see ‘what difference good sense and money will make’. He did not hold out much hope, however. The coffin was moved down into the church crypt ‘for the moment’.

  ‘We must have it settled today!’ Myrtle kept saying, as the coach weaved north along the low coast road. ‘The funeral breakfast – the coach and hearse – the hired mourners – all is arranged for today! We cannot afford . . .’ Her voice trailed off.

  ‘Why can we not go back home to Kent and bury Father there?’ demanded Faith.

  ‘Do you think people would not ask the same questions there?’ snapped Myrtle. ‘A sudden death right after a breaking scandal? Other doctors would be called in to examine him, and they might not be as . . . reasonable as Dr Jacklers. No, by the time we return to the mainland, your father must be decently buried, with a doctor’s testimony that he died of an accident, so that nobody can argue. The burial must be here, and it must be today!’

  When the coach drew up outside the Sunderlys’ house, Myrtle seemed to come to a decision. She called Mrs Vellet over and passed Howard into her care. Then she rapped on the ceiling of the coach.

  ‘Driver – take us to the magistrate’s house!’

  The driver objected – he was not a hansom cab, and had been hired for a funeral, not ‘gadding about’. Myrtle coldly carried her argument through use of coin.

  Faith felt a creeping discomfort. Widows in full mourning were not supposed to make house calls, she knew that. In fact, it was shocking for them to visit anybody or be seen out in public. But what else could Myrtle do?

  ‘They must understand,’ she announced, apparently answering Faith’s unspoken thought. ‘They must see that this is an emergency.’

  Yes, thought Faith. They must.

  With some apprehension, she watched the road wind its way up to the Paints, looking ever more affronted and wind-beleaguered. The little black coach drew up, serenaded by the usual dog barks.

  Faith and Myrtle dismounted, and there was another argument with the driver, who was less than keen on waiting. Another coin persuaded him to stop for a while, but he made it clear that he did not mean to ‘lose his Sunday’.

  He looked frightened. Faith guessed that he was worried about the throng in the churchyard. Perhaps he did not want to be seen nailing his colours to the mast of a sinking ship.

  Mother and daughter climbed the steps and rapped with the great knocker. The wheezing servant they had met before opened the door, and looked surprised as he recognized them.

  ‘We need to speak to Mr Lambent, on a matter of urgency,’ explained Myrtle. ‘As both a friend and a magistrate.’

  The servant was most apologetic. Mr Lambent was out of the house and would not be back for several hours. Mrs Lambent was at home, however. Would Mrs and Miss Sunderly care to wait in the parlour, while he found out whether Mrs Lambent was accepting visitors?

  The parlour was small and smelt of disuse. Myrtle paced, with a sweep and swish of her long black skirts, and Faith clasped her hands so tight they hurt, trying to tame the unruly rookery of her thoughts.

  ‘It is better than nothing,’ Myrtle muttered under her breath. ‘If we can talk her round, then she may win her husband to the cause.’

  Here the clocks were not stopped, and the rose-painted carriage clock showed them all too clearly the creep of time. A quarter of an hour. Half an hour. Three quarters.

  When they had been waiting for nearly an hour, the servant brought them a freshly sealed letter on a silver plate, and left them with it. Faith read it past Myrtle’s shoulder.

  Mrs Sunderly,

  You must pardon me for taking so long to respond, but when I first heard that you were waiting in my parlour, I was not disposed to believe it. Although I appreciate that things are done differently in London, I did not think that the Capital had lost all sense of propriety, decency and good taste.

  I will
confess that I was already surprised at your decision to hold your husband’s funeral on a Sunday. That is all very well for farmhands and factory girls, but there is little excuse for a respectable family to desecrate the Sabbath in that way.

  This visit is another matter. When I buried my first husband, I retreated into mourning like an anchoress into her cell. For that first year, nothing would have persuaded me to sully my husband’s memory by gallivanting around in public. I would sooner have joined him in his grave.

  Thus, with great regret, I cannot in all conscience agree to receive you.

  Your obt servant,

  Agatha Lambent

  Myrtle stood staring at the letter for a while. Her shoulders rose and fell as though she was having trouble breathing, and then wordlessly she walked out of the parlour. The old servant hurried to open doors for them, until Faith and Myrtle were out in the courtyard once more.

  Faith felt sick with anger, mortification and misery. They had been kept waiting on purpose and then dismissed as cruelly as possible.

  ‘That poisonous, hateful hypocrite!’ Myrtle was bristling. ‘How dare she preach at us! An “invalid”, is she? I caught a scent of her “medicine”, and I know gin when I smell it!’

  There was no sign of the coach in the courtyard, nor in the stable block or on the road. The driver had held true to his threats and had left.

  ‘Oh, I cannot bear to beg that woman for use of their carriage!’ exclaimed Myrtle. But there was no help for it, so she returned to knock on the door once more.

  Nobody answered.

  They knocked and knocked, but there was no response. Once Faith glanced up at a first-floor window and glimpsed a face, peering between the curtains. She thought it looked a little like Miss Hunter.

  ‘How far is the house?’ asked Myrtle at last.

  ‘Four miles,’ said Faith, remembering the map.

  ‘Then we shall have to walk quickly,’ said Myrtle in a tight, small voice, ‘if we are to outpace the rain.’

  They failed. The rain caught up with them halfway. First it menaced them with freak patters that left individual dark splashes on their clothes. Then the patter became a rattle, then a rush, that filled their ears and whitened the air. The road turned to mud under their feet, jumping and frothing as if it was boiling.

  Myrtle’s little chiffon parasol could not contend with the weather. Soon it was slick and slack, water forcing its way through and running in rivulets down its handle. Their bonnets became sodden, sagging under the weight of the moisture.

  With unwilling pity, Faith saw Myrtle’s beautiful mourning outfit ravaged by the weather. Her black skirts and stockings were soon thick with mud. Worse, the crêpe of her dress began to come apart, the glue that bound the silk fibres melting away.

  As they stumbled, Myrtle began to cry. Not with pretty, artificial, smelling-salt tears, but like a little child, with great, racking sobs. Mother and daughter stopped under a tree for shelter, but it provided little defence. Myrtle cried and cried, each sob cutting a ragged line through Faith’s heart.

  ‘We are nearly home,’ Faith heard herself saying, in the tone she might have used with Howard. ‘We are nearly there. It is not so bad.’

  She ran out into the rain, looking for a cottage or hut, anywhere they could take cover. In the middle of a leafy crop-field she thought she saw a figure and called out, only to realize that the distant shape was a scarecrow.

  Myrtle barely looked up when Faith returned with the scarecrow’s coat. Faith put it around her mother’s shoulders, covering the worst holes in the disintegrating dress.

  It was a long walk back, and by the time they reached the house both were shivering violently. Mrs Vellet looked appalled, and sent for hot water to be boiled for baths. Somewhere around the corner, however, Faith heard a small, stifled shriek of laughter. It sounded like Jeanne.

  Even when she was alone, all Faith could think of, all she could hear, was that laugh, that squeal of incredulous, delighted mirth. It stuck in her like a knife.

  Faith stood alone in her room, drenched to the skin, and wondered where her tears had gone. There had been some earlier; she remembered them, hot and helpless. Now she felt as if all the weeping had been scoured out of her.

  She thought of the laugh. Jeanne laughing. Then she remembered the stereoscope image of the murdered woman, and imagined her with Jeanne’s face.

  She imagined the church burning with all the people inside. She saw herself standing outside with a flaming brand, watching the door jump and rattle as they tried to get out.

  There was a long mirror in Faith’s room, decently cloaked in crêpe.

  When there’s death in the house, mirrors are hungry, her nursemaid had told her long ago. If we don’t cover them, they suck in the poor dead soul and trap it. And if a living person looks in one, sometimes they see the dead one staring back, and get pulled into death too.

  In a house of death, anything might be waiting there in the mirror. Waiting to steal your soul.

  She reached out and took hold of the crêpe, feeling its rasping roughness. With one tug she pulled it down.

  In the dull light of the room, the mirror might have been a gilt-edged doorway. On the other side of the portal Faith saw a young witch with eyes like fierce stars. Her hair snaked in loose, slick tendrils over her shoulders. Rainwater glistened on her cheeks. Her simple, high-collared dress was a hungry black, mineshaft black. She sucked the light from the room.

  Was this Faith, the good girl?

  The girl in the mirror was capable of anything. And she was anything but good, that much could be seen at a glance.

  I am not good. Something in Faith’s head broke free, beating black wings into the sky. Nobody good could feel what I feel. I am wicked and deceitful and full of rage. I cannot be saved.

  She did not feel hot or helpless any more. She felt the way snakes looked when they moved.

  CHAPTER 15:

  LIES AND THE TREE

  ‘Shhhhh . . .’

  The trinket snake flinched when she opened its cage. It tugged itself into a tighter coil, then calmed as it tasted Faith’s scent on the air. They were kin. It slid up her arm with the lazy beauty of ink flourishes in water. Its scales were dry silk and leather, evening cool. The flicker of its tongue tickled her cheek.

  Faith’s fingers crept under the cloth and bedding and closed upon her father’s papers. Instead of a guilty sense of sacrilege, she felt only excitement.

  I am all that you have left, Father. I am your only chance of justice and revenge. And I need answers from you.

  She stiffened as she heard rapid steps outside and the faint echoing slop of water in a metal vessel. But it was only a servant fetching water for her mother’s bath. They would not bother her.

  Faith had dropped out of the household’s thoughts like a coin into the lining of a coat. Quiet people often do. And nobody would be surprised that she had retired to her room. After the trials of the day, everybody would expect her to need to lie down. Exhaustion was the natural, the ladylike, response.

  For now, they could think what they liked if it bought her some privacy.

  She pushed her travel trunk against the door so that she could not be surprised. Her sodden outer clothes she removed and hung up. Then she fed and stoked the fire and settled down in a chair with the papers, so close that the heat seared the skin of her cheeks and hands. She could see her skirts start to steam. It made her feel like a salamander, or some misty female monster of myth. Her hair was drying into stiff tentacles.

  By the ruddy light of the hearth, she began to examine her father’s papers.

  There were a great number of them. Many were letters from other scientists, filled with wordy compliments, clever jokes in Greek, reminiscences and introductions. There were invitations to give lectures, debates about the age of certain teeth or the best recipe for ‘seize’ to preserve bones. Some papers appeared to be bills of sale, accounts or receipts. There were even some tattered and staine
d sheets with royal crests and swirling calligraphy in a mix of English and French. Faith realized these last must be passports and visas from the Reverend’s travels.

  As hours passed, and her clothes dried on the guard, Faith leafed through delicate sketches of poisonous plants and tropical birds, maps of excavations and meticulous observations. There followed the scrawled sketches she had glimpsed before, after her father’s strange, yellow-eyed episode. Again she was struck by how different they were from the other drawings, how feverish and crude.

  Finally her fingers rested on the leather book she had found under his pillow. She had left it until last because it looked so much like a journal or private diary. But she could no longer allow him secrecy.

  She opened it, and began to read the words carefully inscribed in her father’s precise, elegant hand.

  A Study of the Alleged Virtues of the ‘Mendacity’ Tree

  I first heard of the so-called Mendacity Tree when on a visit to southern China in 1860. My visit proved ill-timed, and as I was travelling through the Yunnan region I heard rumours of the fresh conflict between British and Chinese forces. Uncertain where I might meet hostility, I sought accommodation in a riverside village and waited for further news.

  There by chance I made the acquaintance of one Mr Hector Winterbourne, a fellow natural scientist. He was a veteran of many excavations and a fanatical collector, with a passion for monstrosity and oddity of all sorts. Pleased at the chance of an educated conversation with one of my countrymen, I spoke with him for the greater part of the night.

  He waxed fervent about his latest obsession, a plant he had encountered in an obscure legend three years before. This tree was said to resemble a creeper, but to bear citrus-like fruit possessed of extraordinary properties. The plant thrived in darkness or muted light, and would only flower or bear fruit if it was fed lies.