The Lie Tree Page 3

  When Faith reached in and stroked its back, she was relieved to see it flinch a little. It was alive at least. She placed the cage on the dresser, away from the chill draught of the window, but not too close to the fire either. It was a cool-weather snake, and too much heat would kill it as surely as too little.

  Mrs Vellet returned, and handed over a bundle of dry rags and a bowl of beef scraps, before departing once more. Faith pushed the rags into the cage to serve as a nest, and filled the snake’s water bowl from the jug by her bed. The snake ignored the meat, but basked and bathed in the water.

  Only when Faith was sure that the snake was not about to slither through death’s door did she remember the ink stain on her glove. She tried to wash it out using the cold water in the ewer by her bed, but in vain. In the end she hid the gloves under the mattress.

  Faith’s clothes were tyrants. She could not step across a dusty road, brave the rain, sit in a wicker chair or lean against a whitewashed wall without something becoming damaged, gathering dirt, wearing smooth or losing its stiffening. Her garments were always one misstep away from becoming a source of guilt. Eliza had to spend hours brushing the mud out of your hem . . .

  Worse, they were traitors. If she slipped outside in secret, or hid in a cupboard, or leaned against a dusty door to listen, her clothes would tell tales on her. Even if her family did not notice, the servants would.

  Faith retired, but found it hard to sleep. Strands of horsehair poked through the mattress cover and sheet. The bed curtains did not close properly and let in a clammy draught. The long day had printed itself on her brain, and when she closed her eyes she saw grey skies and dark, turbulent waves.

  The wind rattled the shutters and bolted door, and sometimes behind its moan she heard a distant, roaring boom, like a sound from an animal throat. She knew that it must be a trick of the wind, but her imagination painted some great black beast out on the headlands, baying amid the storm.

  She wondered whether her father was still self-exiled in the folly. Faith sometimes felt that there was a connection between them, like a hidden root linking a mangrove tree to its little sprouting ‘children’. For a moment she tried to imagine the link, and told herself that perhaps, somehow, he would be able to sense her feelings if she felt them hard enough.

  I believe in you, she told him in her head. Whatever anybody else says, I believe in you.

  Faith was jolted awake by the pounding of rapid footsteps against wood. She opened her eyes and as she took in the unfamiliar canopy above, her memories flooded back.

  She pushed open her bed curtains, half expecting to see somebody running around her room. The footsteps had sounded so close, mere yards from her head. There was nobody there, of course, but as she listened she heard them again, and this time understood the rhythmic creak. It was the sound of somebody running up or down stairs.

  The servants’ stairs! Her room must be close to them, so close that she could hear them through the wall. Faith rose and stalked around the room, pressing her ear to the walls, and felt a frisson of triumph when she found the place where the sounds were clearest. She could even make out the distant murmur of conversation.

  Most people would have been outraged at such a discovery. The whole point of the servants’ stairs was that the servants could come and go without the family being forced to notice them. What good were they if they forced themselves on your attention, and woke you at dawn? For Faith, however, it was not an annoyance; it was chance to listen in on the servants’ invisible world.

  Although, of course, she would not be using it for that.

  The bolts on the mysterious door beyond the dresser were rusty, but she eventually worked them loose. The door stuck, then opened with a judder, and Faith found herself blinking into sunlight.

  It was a little roof garden, its pale stone slabs blotchy with dew. Around its perimeter ran a wrought-iron trellis, heavy with creeper, shielding it from the view of those below. White stone children, pocked by lichen and time, held out stone basins from which purple aubretia tumbled. At the far side she could see a little vine-trammelled gate, and beyond it a set of stone steps, presumably leading down to ground level.

  Faith felt a smile creeping across her face. If she had been of a sneaking temperament, she would now have her own private means of leaving or entering the house unobserved.

  She dressed, and continued her exploration. Walking down the main stairs she reflexively counted the steps, memorizing which ones creaked and which could be trusted to be discreet. Faith caught herself making mental notes of which bolts and latches would need to be discreetly oiled.

  No! Faith was giving up that.

  She was soon to be confirmed, she reminded herself, and felt her usual lurch of fear at the thought. She would be an adult in the eyes of the Church and God. Her sins would be her own. Of course she had always felt immortal judgement swinging above her head, like a vast, deathly pendulum, but her youth had been a frail shield – an excuse. Now she was growing tall enough that the pendulum might strike her down with one mysterious swipe. All her evil habits needed to come to an end.

  Nonetheless, murmured a scurrilous voice in Faith’s head, the house at Bull Cove was showing some potential.

  Entering the murky, wood-panelled dining room, Faith found her mother upbraiding the housemaid, a pretty, spiky, dark-haired girl of about fifteen, with an eternal smirk hovering in the corners of her mouth.

  ‘No, Jeanne, it will not do at all!’ Myrtle gestured to the board in the housemaid’s hands on which lay two outlandish long loaves of a sort Faith had never seen before. ‘When I ask for bread and butter I expect slices cut from a real loaf of bread, so thick.’ Myrtle held up her forefinger and thumb, half an inch apart. ‘See to it, if you please.’

  The maid gave a brief, non-committal pout, a shrug of the face, and departed with the board.

  ‘What a house!’ exclaimed Myrtle. ‘I could barely sleep a wink last night. I am sure that the rooms had not been aired. And what in the world was that frightful noise that boomed and bellowed all night?’

  ‘Apparently that is the Great Black Bull,’ Uncle Miles told her with a twinkle. ‘When the storm is high the beast leaps from the bowels of the earth and bellows at the heavens. Or rather, it is a perfectly natural phenomenon caused by the wind blowing through sea caves.’

  ‘Well, I think it is too bad of the landlord to have leased us the place without mentioning the bellowing spectral cattle,’ Myrtle answered sharply.

  ‘Ah, but according to local superstition, there is barely an inch of this island that does not have its own phantom,’ Uncle Miles rejoined, smiling. ‘Clay recounted some of the tales to me yesterday – wailing women, ghost ships, and so forth. Oh, and apparently Vane was a nest of smugglers during the war with the French. They say that one buried a good deal of treasure before he died, and for fifty years his ghost has been trying in vain to lead people to it.’

  ‘He cannot be very good at charades,’ Faith murmured under her breath as she sat down at the table.

  ‘Well, on a more earthly note, it would seem that two cards were left for us this morning.’ Myrtle glanced at her husband. ‘One is from Dr Jacklers, my dear – he says that he hopes to have the pleasure of calling on us at two this afternoon, and taking you to see the excavation.

  ‘The other is from Mr Lambent saying that the local geology society is meeting at his house at four o’clock, and that they would all be obliged if you would attend as guest of honour. Oh, and the rest of us are invited to afternoon tea. He offers to send his carriage for us.’

  The Reverend gave his wife a brief, cloudy look, inclined his head to show that he had heard, then returned to silent consumption of his breakfast.

  ‘Perhaps we should all go to see the excavation with Dr Jacklers,’ suggested Uncle Miles in hopeful tones. ‘We could make it a family outing.’

  ‘Could we?’ Faith gave her parents a look of excited appeal. In her father’s library at the rectory, she ha
d spent long hours poring over books dedicated to the beasts of prehistory, marvelling at the sketched bones of long-extinct creatures. She was thrilled by the thought of seeing a real, live excavation.

  Myrtle looked to her husband, who gave the table a distracted look and cleared his throat.

  ‘I do not see why not,’ he said.

  Jeanne returned, set down a board gently with an air of studied innocence, and walked out again. The long loaves had been hacked into half-inch slices with aggressive thoroughness, and had not survived the experience. Tatters of bread lay in a heap of crust-shrapnel, glued into clots by dabs of butter.

  ‘Jeanne!’ Myrtle called after the departing and conveniently deaf housemaid. ‘Jeanne! Oh, this is too much! I shall have to take Mrs Vellet to task – indeed I shall!’

  From above came a muffled thunder, the sound of small, careless feet running, followed by a few experimental door slams. Myrtle winced, and glanced towards her husband, who was frowning at the ceiling with cool disapproval. Howard was not even supposed to be seen at such a time, and definitely not heard.

  ‘Faith,’ Myrtle said in an undertone, ‘would you be a dear and take breakfast with your brother today, then help him with his lessons?’ She did not even look at Faith for a response.

  Faith cast a wistful farewell glance at the kedgeree, bacon, toast and marmalade, and rose from her seat.

  Myrtle had once explained to Faith that there was a right way to give an order to a servant. You phrased it as a question to be polite. Will you fetch the tea? Could you please speak with Cook? But instead of your voice pitch going up at the end, you let it droop downward, to show that it was not really a question, and they were not expected to say no.

  It occurred to Faith that that was the way her mother talked to her.

  Howard had two adjoining rooms assigned to him, a ‘night nursery’ for sleep and a ‘day nursery’ for his games, lessons and meals.

  ‘I hate them,’ he said, sipping his toast-and-water. ‘They have rats in the dark. I can’t sleep without Skordle.’ ‘Skordle’ was Howard’s rushed pronunciation of ‘Miss Caudle’, his nursemaid who usually slept in his room back in Kent. Faith secretly rather liked the name ‘Skordle’ and thought it sounded like a mythical animal.

  Faith did not like the nurseries much either, but for different reasons. For the last year she had felt like a seesaw, clumsily rocking between childhood and adulthood. It was always clearest at mealtimes. Sometimes she would find that she had grown into an adult overnight with magical beanstalk speed and was allowed the honour of eating with her parents in the dining room. And then, without warning, she would find herself back in the nursery with Howard, eating porridge while an undersized chair creaked beneath her weight.

  Nursery food was ‘plain’ and ‘wholesome’, which usually meant tasteless and boiled to the point of surrender. Day nurseries smelt of it, of potatoes and rice milk and twice-boiled mutton. The smell made Faith feel as though she was wearing an old version of herself that was too small for her. It itched.

  ‘Other hand!’ Faith reached out, gently taking Howard’s porridge spoon from his left hand and putting it in his right. It was the usual battle.

  The hard part came after breakfast when she had to wrestle him into his blue jacket. Howard loathed the jacket, which he had to wear for all his lessons. The left sleeve was stitched to his side, trapping his left hand in his pocket so that he could not use it.

  Howard’s wilful persistence in using his left hand was, Myrtle insisted, a ‘fad’ – nothing to worry about, providing it was not encouraged. His pre-Skordle nursemaid, however, had been too indulgent, and Howard had developed some ‘bad habits’.

  ‘You know what Mother says! You have to learn to eat and write properly before you go away to school!’ The plan was to send Howard off to boarding school once he was eight.

  Howard crinkled his face, the way he always did when school was mentioned. Faith swallowed down a little knot of bitterness and envy.

  ‘You are very lucky, How. Some people would be grateful for the chance to go to a good school.’ Faith did not mention that she was one of them. ‘Listen! If you wear your jacket and finish your writing exercises, we can explore the garden afterwards. You can bring your gun!’

  Her bargain was deemed acceptable.

  Outside, Howard ran around and ‘shot’ the upper windows of the house, pointing his little wooden gun and uttering shrill cries of ‘Bang!’ He shot the black crows that hopped stolidly away from his hurried approach and then spread lazy, unflustered wings to outpace him. He shot everything down the muddy, scrubby path towards the sea.

  If his behaviour was noticed, Faith would probably be scolded for letting him ‘wear himself out’. There was always a fear that Howard, the one surviving son, would catch some fatal chill. Faith had already watched five younger brothers lose their grip on life and fold in on themselves like closing daisies. Some had been mere babes, others had eked out a few birthdays. The first two had been Howards, then her parents had tried their hand at a James and two Edwards, with similar poor success. It made the living Howard seem fragile, as if he were holding hands with his namesake brothers through the grim curtain.

  However, Faith knew Howard far better than her parents did. She understood that he needed to wheel and race crazily until he tired, just as he needed his toy gun. He ‘shot’ things that frightened him. Right now he was trying to make a whole strange new world feel safe.

  Her gaze was drawn by the stubby tower, over by the edge of a copse. By daylight, she could see that the folly was nothing but a one-storey stump, its chink-windows clogged with mortar and ivy, its stonework tea-stain brown.

  It tugged at Faith’s curiosity, but she had more pressing worries. Her incriminating gloves were balled up in her pocket. She needed to rid herself of them before they could be found by one of the servants.

  The path forked as it approached the sea. The left-hand path climbed up to the cliff-top. Faith and Howard took the right-hand route, which weaved its way down to the pebble beach. There Howard ran amok, shooting nervous-stepping oystercatchers, the mud-brown cliffs that rose on either side and his own reflection in the wet sand.

  There was a little boathouse on the beach with a rowing boat inside, and behind it a scramble of boulders. As Howard raced over the shingle, Faith slipped behind the boathouse and pushed the gloves into a narrow dark crack between two boulders. At once she felt lighter. Somehow the sting of guilt was always more acute when there was a risk that she might get caught.

  Faith returned to the beach. She rather liked it, she decided, for all its dour colours and grey scud of clouds. In her head her father’s books of natural history unfurled, and she found the words for what she saw. Fleet, sharp-winged terns skimming the grey air. A snub black-and-white razorbill preening its plumage on a crag. Samphire, trembling its white flowers among the rocks.

  Staring out at the distant headlands, Faith could see waves plume white as they chafed against the rocks. Here and there she could make out black cracks and triangular fissures at the base of the cliffs.

  ‘Look, How!’ she called against the wind, and pointed. ‘Sea caves!’

  Howard ran over and squinted in the direction of her pointing finger, then sighted at the caves down his gun.

  ‘Are there monsters inside?’ he asked thoughtfully.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Can we go there in the boat and look?’

  Faith glanced back at the little rowboat in the boathouse, then peered speculatively at the fraught sea. The dark openings tugged at her curiosity.

  ‘Perhaps another day,’ she said, half to herself, ‘but we will have to ask Father and Mother.’

  When Howard had tired himself out she led him back up the slope towards the house. Seeing the dun-coloured folly once again, she paused.

  The night before, her father had spent hours in the folly, tending to some mysterious plant. At the time she had thought he just wanted to be alone, but now sh
e found herself remembering the crate of ‘miscellaneous cuttings’ that had robbed her of a seat in the carriage. It was a strangely vague label, come to think of it. Her father was usually so precise.

  ‘Howard, shall we look for lions around the folly?’

  Faith had to circle around the building to the side nearest the trees before she found its heavy wooden door. She could not be seen from the house, and the temptation was too great. She lifted the aged latch and opened the door.

  Inside lay darkness. A strange smell reached her nose, with a coldness like mint that stung her eyes.

  She looked upward and saw murky rafters, grey with spider-cities. The roof was intact, she realized with surprise, blocking out the daylight. Why would her father put a precious specimen somewhere that the sun could not reach?

  Faith took a careful footstep into the folly, her boot sliding slightly against the slimy dankness of the stone floor. She peered into the shadows of the little, round room.

  There was something huddled against the far wall, a domed shape shrouded in an oilskin cloth, the rounded base of a plant pot just visible beneath the fabric. It was two foot high, small enough to have fitted in the crate.

  Just as she was edging towards the strange shape, she realized that the cries of ‘Bang!’ behind her were becoming louder and more excitable. In guilty panic she fled back into daylight, and quickly fastened the folly door behind her. She looked around, fearing to see her father returning from some walk.

  Instead she saw Howard aiming his gun into the thicket. A strange man was tramping through the bracken.

  He was not one of the servants; Faith could see that at a glance. His clothes were worn, his hair uncombed, his beard shaggy. A wooden pail hung from one of his hands. A trespasser, then. His strangeness screamed threat in Faith’s head. She felt every hair rise, as if she were an animal smelling another species.