Cuckoo Song Read online

  Another thought crossed her mind. If Pen was making any noise at all, then right now she was not suffering from her eerie state of silence. If Not-Triss wished to speak to Pen, this might be her best chance.

  It was risky, given the fragility of the ice beneath her feet, but Not-Triss slipped out of her room anyway and very gently tapped on Pen’s door.

  ‘Pen!’ Not-Triss tried to make her whisper eiderdown-soft. ‘I know you’re awake!’

  There was a short, sharp movement within, as if somebody had started.

  ‘Don’t be scared – I’m not going to hurt you.’ Once more Not-Triss was haunted by the image of the scratched lines in the younger girl’s cheek. ‘I’m sorry about your face. I didn’t mean to. I was just . . . scared. I . . . only meant to slap you.’ Somehow that had sounded better in her head.

  There were no more noises of motion within, though Not-Triss thought she heard the sound of slow, careful breathing.

  ‘Pen, I know you can hear me! We have to talk. Can I come in?’

  No answer. Not-Triss reached for the handle and gently turned it. The door refused to open, however. Evidently Pen had wedged a chair or something against it. Not-Triss wondered if the smaller girl was hunched in a corner of the room, staring hypnotized at the silent, menacing turning of the handle. She sighed, and rested her forehead against the wood.

  ‘Please let me in, Pen! I know you hate me, but you need my help, and I need your help. You have to tell me everything you know about the Architect – what he’s doing, how you got in touch with him, where he lives. Think about Triss – you want to get her back, don’t you? What do you think will happen if we don’t work together?’

  There was an abrupt snuffle, like somebody resolutely sniffing back a sob.

  ‘Go away!’ came the snapped whisper. ‘I . . . I’ve got a gun! Don’t you break this door in, or . . . or I’ll shoot you!’

  ‘You haven’t got a gun.’ Not-Triss fought against all the years of Triss’s frustration and hurt and focused on the memory of Pen standing alone and drenched in the rain. ‘And I’m not going to break into your room. But I can’t keep talking through the door like this – sooner or later I’ll wake everybody up!’ There followed a few seconds of silence while her words were digested.

  ‘Go away,’ hissed the unseen Pen again, this time with venom and more confidence. ‘Get away from me, or I’ll scream.’

  And that threat, more than the menace of imaginary firearms, was enough to drive Not-Triss from the door. She could not afford to be discovered roaming the nocturnal house a second time, not after her first ignominious capture. Once again, holding out a hand to Pen had been about as rewarding as plunging it into a nettle patch.

  Day crept in like a disgraced cat, with a thin, mewling wind and fine, slanting rain. Her face pressed against her window, Not-Triss watched it come. The birdsong sounded hard and metallic.

  Not-Triss was not ready for this day. She hated it. She wanted to send it back. Something inside her was squirming so hard she felt she might burst. Everything was wrong. Everything was going to go wrong.

  Breakfast was left on a tray outside Not-Triss’s room, and she did not know whether to feel relieved or hurt. The eggs were soft-boiled the way she liked them, but with a sense of disorientation she noticed that the fruit juice was not in her favourite, pink-tinted glass.

  She stared at it, as though making sense of the change would help her understand her parents, and allow her to save herself. The pink glass was Triss’s glass. Had they really decided to deprive her of her favourite glass as part of her punishment, or had they instinctively felt that Triss’s glass was no longer rightly hers? Did disobedient Triss no longer count as Triss? Was crazy Triss no longer Triss? Or . . . could they possibly suspect the truth?

  Not-Triss braced herself, and used the fruit juice to wash down a hair slide and two screwed up pages from Triss’s favourite comics, but her stomach continued to growl.

  It was Sunday, so Not-Triss changed carefully into her smart church clothes.

  By the time she went downstairs, she had an explanation rehearsed in her head. It was a good lie, with a fair dollop of the truth in it to stop it curdling. As she meekly sat down beside her father on the sedan, however, she saw his face and her story cooled in her mind. He had clearly slept less than she had. Not-Triss plunged in anyway, but her explanation sounded stilted, her words cold and mechanical as beads on an abacus bar. She was not sure he was even listening.

  Her father said nothing when she had finished, but gently laid a hand on her head. He was looking at her face, she knew it, and still she dared not meet his eye. If she did so, the spine of her story would break and the beads clatter to the floor.

  ‘All right, Triss.’ She could not tell from his tone whether he had accepted her story, or merely accepted that it would be the only story forthcoming.

  Not-Triss became aware of her mother having a hushed conversation in the hall with Miss Soames, a young woman who sometimes came to babysit when the Crescent parents went out to parties.

  ‘Thank you for coming at such short notice. We should be back tomorrow, so we only need you to stay over the one night. It’s just a matter of looking after Penelope this time. She will need to be taken to church, and you will need to consult Mrs Basset about meals.’

  We should be back tomorrow.

  It’s just a matter of looking after Penelope.

  ‘Are we going away somewhere?’ Not-Triss asked. She kept her eyes fixed on her father’s shoes, so that they would not stray to his face. His feet moved slightly, perhaps uncomfortably.

  ‘It’s going to be rather a long day, I’m afraid.’ His hand settled over one of hers. It was warm, but did not squeeze. Perhaps he was afraid of breaking her. ‘We’re going to drive out on a trip to Wenwick – you, me and your mother. We’re going to talk to one or two people, to see if they know . . . ways to help you get over these . . . night troubles. Most of them are friends of friends. Kind people. You’ll like them.’

  Not-Triss gnawed at her lip, her small, scattered fears becoming large, specific fears, like raindrops merging on a window pane.

  No pink glass for crazy Triss.

  ‘I don’t want to!’ she blurted out, still fixing the innocent shoes with a stare that might have kindled wood. ‘I don’t want to talk to them! I don’t want to go away! Not . . . Not now!’

  I can’t go away now, I can’t! I need to find the Shrike! I need to talk to Pen!

  ‘And you’re busy right now!’ she went on, scrabbling for arguments. ‘You have lots of work – getting ready for the Capping Ceremony in three days’ time – you said so! So we can’t! Why don’t we talk to them next week?’

  ‘Triss.’ He put his arms around her, as carefully as if he was hugging a child of smoke. ‘I love you very much, you know that?’

  Not-Triss nodded, sick with panic. ‘Don’t make me go! Please, please let me stay here!’ She clenched her eyes shut, willing him to feel her desperation even if he could not understand it.

  ‘I love you,’ he continued, tenderly relentless, ‘and that’s why we have to go.’

  As Not-Triss stepped out through the front door and heard it click shut behind her, she felt a sudden superstitious pang. Into her head came an unreasonable fear that she would never see it open again. She felt as if it had closed like scissor-blades, snipping away her past and everything she knew.

  The little travel case in her hand she had crammed to bursting, for she knew she would be away for at least one night. It was filled with treasured trinkets, comics and hair ribbons. Not-Triss could only hope these provisions would be enough to stop her becoming feral.

  Before her, the world wore a grey veil of rain. The air was clammy and unseasonably cold. There were grains of something in Not-Triss’s socks, and she guessed that they must be earth-crumbs that had broken away from her soles. The gutters tutted, and the Sunbeam was slick as new paint.

  Her mother had a yellow scarf around her head and
hesitated on the step under her umbrella while Triss’s father readied the car.

  Not-Triss could hear the cool, solemn chiming of church bells over the growl and gossip of the traffic, and could see other people stepping stiffly out into the drizzle in their best clothes. The raindrops glistened on straw hats and buttoned gloves. But Not-Triss was not going to church, and it made her feel all the more out of step with the world.

  Not-Triss stared up at the windows of the house, but the one face she expected to see did not stare down at her. Somehow she had been certain that she would be confronted with Pen’s coal-hard gaze. With triumph in her eyes, perhaps? Or fear, or resentment? But perhaps Pen was still given to flashes of silver, and would not be coming out of hiding for a while.

  To her surprise, Not-Triss found that she was disappointed. In spite of the way the younger girl hated her, she realized that she had counted on that exchanged look to strengthen her nerve. They shared secrets, if nothing else, and a mutual interest in keeping them. That made Pen the nearest thing she had to a co-conspirator.

  Not-Triss approached the car feeling betrayed. The rear seat was covered in luggage, and she was offered a place in the front, between her parents. Usually this would have been a treat, and even the crush would have made her feel warm and protected. Today she wondered whether they wanted to keep an eye on her.

  The Sunbeam’s engine stuttered its objections to the rain, then found its voice. Not-Triss smudged herself a spyhole in the clouded windscreen and watched mutely as Ellchester slid damply by and then was left behind.

  Wenwick was fifty miles’ drive away, an old-fashioned resort with long, arcing streets of wide-windowed, staring houses. Even though the Wenwick baths were no longer considered to cure everything from gout to toothache, the place still bristled with doctors, like a crust of barnacles marking a high water point after the tide had gone out.

  Each doctor the Crescents visited spent half an hour talking to Triss’s parents, and then ten minutes or so talking to Not-Triss herself in private, ‘so they could get to know each other’.

  The first one was a very kindly, elderly man who talked to her about the ‘rest cure’, in a conservatory that looked out on to a garden. Sometimes people had too many worries and needed rest. Even wonderful things like families and friends could be too tiring sometimes. So you needed a rest from them, so that your mind had a chance to calm down. A few weeks of lovely bed rest, perhaps. And sometimes it was best to avoid other excitements, just for a while. Reading, writing, talking . . .

  The second doctor was much younger, and believed in the ‘talking cure’. He told Not-Triss that he was there to help her defeat her secret ‘monsters’. Sometimes you had monsters that frightened you, and so you pretended they weren’t there and didn’t look at them. But the strange and magical thing was, if you did look at the monsters they just vanished away, and you were perfectly safe. The young doctor had the clear, earnest eyes of a man who had never seen a monster in his life.

  The third doctor was really a nurse, a big, boisterous woman with a voice that could have drowned out a foghorn.

  ‘Fresh air!’ she explained in tones that might have been heard as far as Denmark. ‘We move the beds outside, so they have fresh air all the time. And they can see the sea. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  Each time, something about Not-Triss’s spiny stillness and strangeness infected the room, draining the certainty from the doctor’s voice. As she left each doctor, Not-Triss clung to her father’s arm and buried her face in his coat.

  ‘I don’t want to go to this place – I hate it. I don’t need to come here. I want to go home!’

  She could hear that she was whining like a six-year-old. However, she could not help it. Every moment wasted here was a precious grain of sand slipping through the hourglass of her life.

  After they left the ‘fresh air’ woman, they drove out of Wenwick along the narrow coast road. Not-Triss’s spirits rose a little when she saw a signpost promising Ellchester in nineteen miles, then dropped away as they drove past it in the wrong direction.

  ‘Why aren’t we going home?’ she exclaimed, alarmed.

  ‘We’re staying at a little seaside cottage, just for tonight,’ her mother answered promptly. Her eyes were shiny, and Not-Triss wondered if she had brought some of her tonic with her. ‘Think of it as a tiny holiday, to make up for the one that was cut short. We thought a change and some sea air might do you good.’

  ‘I don’t believe you!’ The panic that Not-Triss had been fighting down exploded from her. ‘It’s a trick! You’re going to take me to a rest-cure place and leave me there!’

  ‘Triss!’ The tone of exhaustion in her father’s voice silenced her. ‘It’s just a cottage that was recommended to us. It sounded . . . quiet. Peaceful. No doctors, I promise.’

  He sounded as though he had been carrying a great weight for miles and had just realized that the road ahead of him wound its way up a mountain. Not-Triss felt a pained pity, but also confusion.

  ‘And . . . And we’re going home tomorrow?’ she could not help asking in a whisper.

  There was a pause as her father manoeuvred the car around a corner on to a narrow, sloping driveway.

  ‘Yes. First thing tomorrow.’

  The drive twisted down through a little wood of dripping silver birches, the black crusts on their white barks like healing cuts. The woods had a rich, energetic smell of rot, and the thirsty scent of moss. At the bottom a grey-stone cottage lurked at the base of a small cliff, as if trying to shelter from the rain. Beyond it the ground sloped downward to a beach, where the sea pawed at loose pebbles, hushing and hushing the scene to an ever-deeper quiet.

  Chapter 18

  EGGSHELLS

  Getting out of the car, Not-Triss was struck by the chill of the down-beach wind, and the wet, salt smells of weed and rock pools. She felt as if the tide of the year had gone out unexpectedly and left them in autumn. The light was ebbing, the cloud-smothered sun spreading dull white wings above the horizon.

  Then, quite unexpectedly, the door of the little cottage opened, and a homely orange light bloomed in the doorway. A young woman with tousled hair stood there, holding up an oil lamp.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Crescent?’ It was so strange to hear such a warm, human sound in this grey scene. ‘Thought I heard the car coming down. I just put the kettle on – come on in!’

  While Not-Triss’s father hauled at the family’s cases, Not-Triss and her mother scampered for the bright doorway, then stood dripping in a narrow hall. Now that she was closer, Not-Triss could see that the ‘woman’ at the door was younger than she had thought, perhaps no more then sixteen.

  ‘I’m Dot,’ declared the oil-lamp girl, as if this explained everything. Her face was skinny but vital, with large dark eyes and a pointed, mischievous chin. ‘Come through – I’ve stoked up the fire.’ She led them into a small sitting room with faded curtains and walls panelled in dark wood. There was a low, scratched table, and five large, saggy brocade chairs that smelt of dogs. ‘If you give me your over-things, I’ll hang ’em up to dry.’

  Dot was dressed in a plain, practical blue frock with an apron over the top rather than a proper servant’s uniform. Her manner was surprisingly friendly too, and this confused Not-Triss. She seemed too bold for a maid, but her Ellshire countryside accent was thick as custard, and her knees grubby from scrubbing floors. Not-Triss expected her mother to stiffen and give clipped, disapproving responses to put the girl in her place. To her surprise, however, she simply gave a faint murmur of consent, surrendered her coat and allowed herself to be shown to a chair.

  The room was lit by the blaze from the hearth and a series of small candles and lanterns arranged along the mantel and the table. Glancing around her, Not-Triss realized that she could see no gas-fittings.

  ‘Where are the gaslights?’

  ‘Oh, there’s no gas in the cottage,’ Dot declared cheerfully. ‘Wasn’t worth their while, building the pipes down the hil
l just for this place. But there’s good hearths in most of the rooms, and a decent stock of candles.’

  By the time Not-Triss’s father had heaved the cases into the house, both Not-Triss and her mother were sipping hot cocoa and watching their coats dry.

  ‘Look at that! The rain’s letting up. Always the way. Stops as soon as you’re indoors . . .’ Dot continued her warm, effortless prattle, and Not-Triss found herself feeling profoundly grateful to her, as bridge after bridge of Dot’s words were strung out over the gaping chasms of the waiting silences.

  ‘I expect you’d like to see your rooms?’

  The staircase was dark, cramped and narrow, the stairs dipping smoothly in the centre where they had been worn by centuries of feet. The bedroom door frames were short and irregular, and her father had to stoop to pass through them. ‘Sir, ma’am, this is your room. There’s a family of house martins in the eaves by the window, and they chirrup something frightful of a morning, but if you close the shutter it cuts out the sound. This little room is yours, miss. You can look out and see the lighthouse of Wellweather Island.’ The chamber was small, low-ceilinged and wood-panelled, half-comforting, half-claustrophobic. The only light came from another oil lamp on the table. ‘I’ll leave you to get settled. If you need anything, I’ll be in the kitchen preparing dinner.’

  At the word ‘dinner’ Not-Triss felt her terrible hunger stir once more, like a great mastiff rousing itself from slumber.

  Left alone in her room to ‘refresh’, Not-Triss waited for a few seconds, listening to the creaks of her parents edging their way back down the stairs. Only when these sounds faded did she unlatch her case and fling its contents on to her bed. She snatched up and swallowed an embroidered handkerchief, a bundle of postcards and a pair of gloves, then leaned against the wall, trying to rally her mental forces.

  The fire in the hearth was only just gathering life, and the air was cold enough that each breath summoned a brief flicker of vapour.