Cuckoo Song Page 8

  Triss knew next to nothing about the mysterious ‘he’ whom her parents had discussed, but she did know one thing. He had sent dozens of letters to the family, all of which had somehow found their way into the desk drawer in Sebastian’s room.

  As quietly as possible, Triss rose from her bed. After taking a pair of tweezers from her dresser, she eased open her bedroom door and listened hard.

  Houses breathe in their sleep as people do, and the only noises in the silence were such soft ticks and settling creaks. The rest of the family had long since gone to bed, and Triss could hear no sounds of movement from their rooms. There was nobody else in the house except Cook, whose room was down in the basement. Usually the Crescents’ governess would have a room near the family, but at the moment there was no governess.

  Triss padded carefully across the landing, alert for any sound from the other rooms, any mattress creaks or waking murmurs. Sebastian’s door opened smoothly, and once again Triss crept into the forbidden room.

  She did not dare light the gas, but her eyes had adjusted somewhat to the dark and she made her way to the desk without bumping into anything. Dropping to her knees, she ran her fingers over the front faces of the drawers, their ornate metal handles cold to the touch. Yes, it was this one, and she knew it was full to bursting with letters, so many that some had been visible through the crack at the top of the drawer.

  She found that her tweezers fitted through the gap only if she turned them sideways. Trying to grab the corner of an envelope by touch alone proved difficult and frustrating. Time and again she felt her tweezers tentatively grip a papery edge, only to slide off it again.

  While she was busy with this, she heard the faint, tinny, self-important sound of the mantel clock downstairs counting out twelve chimes. The last note faded, but it seemed to Triss that it continued to hum out into the silence, as a tickle in the ear.

  It was while this silent note was still hanging that Triss heard another sound out in the corridor. She acted reflexively, scooting on all fours back to her previous hiding place under the bed and rolling under it. Only when she was hunched behind the fringe of coverlet did she realize that the sound beyond the door was not a footstep at all.

  It was a dry, wispy flutter-tap, like the noise a dying fly makes against a window, but louder. It drew closer and closer, until Triss was certain that whatever made it must be right outside the door and braced herself for the handle to rattle or turn. It remained motionless, however. Instead the stealthy sound abruptly became much clearer. The door had not opened, but the unseen intruder was no longer out on the landing. It was in the room with Triss.

  Peering from beneath the hanging counterpane, Triss caught glimpses of the intruder, enough to be sure that it was definitely an ‘it’ and not a ‘he’ or a ‘she’. It flitted in heavy, clumsy arcs around the room, grazing the walls with what she thought might be wings, bumping gently against furniture, halting now and then to perch.

  The creature was hard to see, and not just because of the dark. Whenever it paused for a moment and she was able to stare at it directly, it seemed to melt away before her vision. When it flitted to and fro, however, it left dark, fleeting streaks across her sight.

  At last it came to rest on the handle of the drawer full of letters, and Triss heard a papery rustling. From nowhere the creature produced a slim, pale oblong. As Triss squinted, the duskily unseeable something leaned back and smoothly slid the envelope in through the crack at the top of the drawer to join the other letters.

  It glanced around itself once, and Triss thought she glimpsed a tiny pallid face, no bigger than an egg, with sparks for eyes. Then there was a roar of air and rapid flapping, like a flag in the wind, and it was gone.

  Long after the sound of its wings had faded, Triss lay still, carpet rough against her chin. She was seeing the impossible again. But somehow, alone at midnight in her dead brother’s darkened room, the impossible was easier to handle.

  Mouth dry, she crept back to the desk. One corner of the latest delivery was just visible, jutting out of the crack. She pulled it out using the tweezers, then scurried back to her own room, where she ripped it open and pulled out the letter. It bore the date of that very day, and the handwriting was achingly familiar.

  Dear Father, Mother, Triss, Pen,

  I am writing again, even though I know it is hopeless. I no longer believe that any of these notes are reaching you, let alone that I will ever receive a reply. I cannot stop myself, however. Writing these letters is all that I have, even though now it is just a make-believe game I play to make the cold less bitter.

  Even if I thought that you would actually see this letter, I no longer have the strength to put on a brave face for you. This is a place where all bravery is broken on the rack.

  This winter never ends. I can no longer remember when it started. It seems to me that I have been suffering the same bleak skies and bitter snows for years. Perhaps it is the same day, stretching on and on forever like barbed wire. I have lost track of everything. My friends are all dead. The men who fight alongside me are strangers, always dying before I can learn their names. Their faces are nothing but a smudge in my mind.

  My hands and feet are in agony from the cold, but at least pain is better than thought. I am a shattered thing now, I know it. I can feel my soul sticking out at twisted angles like a broken limb. All I can hope for is numbness and an end.

  Forgive me,

  Sebastian

  Chapter 9

  A STITCH IN TIME

  ‘Sebastian . . .’ Triss was barely aware that she had whispered the name aloud.

  What had she expected? A list of demands from the mysterious ‘him’, perhaps. She had not been ready for this.

  Triss held Sebastian’s letter in unsteady hands, shaken by how much and how little she remembered him. Triss had already known that there had been special days that she had enjoyed with him, such as the birthday when he had helped her dress as an Egyptian queen, and a picnic outing where he had carried her on his shoulders for hours. These were family folklore, recited by her parents in a solemn ritual fashion on the few occasions when they felt it appropriate to mention their lost son. Over the years her parents had herded Triss’s woolly memories into the neat pens of their stories, until she no longer knew what she actually remembered.

  This was different. This was shocking, like the warmth of a teardrop falling on her skin. Suddenly Sebastian was a person, a lost, frightened, desperate person in pain. It caused her a deep pang of sympathetic horror, and she realized that she did feel love for the lost Sebastian, despite the fog of the years.

  But he’s dead.

  Sebastian had died five years before, during a bitter winter. There had been a letter from his commanding officer, talking about a detonation in his side of the trench, his deepest regrets, no possibility that anybody could have survived. There could be no mistake.

  Triss could make no sense of her parents’ behaviour. The drawer was crammed full of envelopes. For months then, or perhaps even years, Sebastian’s messages had been arriving, and her parents had known about it. They had traded solemn words about their long-lost son, and all the while they had been locking his heartfelt letters in a drawer and pretending they did not exist. Their dignified grief was a lie. Everything was a lie.

  Her parents had talked about the letters being sent by ‘that man’, the mysterious ‘he’ who they thought might have attacked Triss. Now that she thought about it though, they had never said that ‘he’ had actually written them. Indeed, her father had said that receiving a letter from ‘the man himself’ would be different from ‘the usual’.

  How could Sebastian still be fighting in a war that had been over for five years, and how could he write letters from beyond the grave? If they were not cruel and clever fakes, and if Sebastian really had written that desperate note, he needed help. Either way, Triss needed to understand the riddle of the letters.

  The beginnings of an idea started to form in Triss’
s mind. The drawer was crammed to bursting. How often had this strange flitting thing been invading the Crescent house to deliver letters? Every month? Every week? Or every night?

  Whatever it is, it’s weird and scary, but it’s also smaller than me. So if it comes again tomorrow night, maybe I can catch it.

  It was raining steadily, and the raindrops fell with a rustle, not a splash. They fell right into the house, settling on the carpet and furniture, and Triss could see that they were actually dead leaves. They landed on the heads and shoulders of the family as they sat at the breakfast table, all trying to pretend that nothing was happening.

  ‘Triss did it!’ Pen was shouting, strident with glee. ‘Look!’ The younger girl pointed towards the ceiling, and when Triss glanced upwards she realized to her horror that great holes had been gnawed in the ceilings and the roof, so that the sky glowered greyly through. Triss could even make out her own teeth-marks on some of the rafters.

  I didn’t, she tried to protest. But it was a lie, and she knew it. She had no voice, only a dry rustling like a forest path underfoot.

  ‘Triss ate the ceilings!’ shouted Pen. ‘Triss ate the walls! There are only four left now! Only four!’

  Triss woke with a jerk and spent a long minute panting and waiting for her heart to slow. A dream, just a dream. She rolled over on to her side, and her cheek pressed against something rough that crackled with the pressure. She sat up with a gasp.

  There were dead leaves on her pillow, several of them. Slowly she raked her fingers through her hair, and her hand came away with a fistful more brown, broken leaves. Her eye crept to the chair she had propped against her door, and her heart sank. Only then did she realize how much she had been hoping that the ever-malicious Pen had been responsible for the mysteriously appearing leaves.

  Triss sat up, carefully, and pulled back the covers. There were more leaves on the sheet around her, some inside her nightdress, and a few tiny twigs and wisps of hay.

  Mouth dry, she cleaned away the debris once again, then moved to the dresser for her hairbrush. To her surprise, she found tiny flakes of dead leaf clinging to the bristles, despite the fact she was certain she had removed from it everything but a few strands of her own hair. As she stared at it, however, a horrible suspicion crept spider-like into her mind.

  No. It can’t be.

  She had to know. After shaking off all the leaf fragments, Triss plucked a few hairs from her own head and trailed them over the brush. Then she forced herself to look away for a time, counting to three hundred under her breath. When she looked back, her spirits plummeted like a stone. There were no hairs draped across the brush’s bristles. Instead there was a piece of a skeleton leaf, moth-wing dry and more frail than any lace.

  The leaves in my hair, the dirt on my floor – I didn’t bring them in from outside. And Pen didn’t scatter them over my room.

  They’re me.

  ‘Triss looks pale. Doesn’t Triss look pale?’ Pen’s voice rang out again and again at the breakfast table. ‘Is Triss all right? What did the doctor say? Does she need to see him again?’

  Triss sat carefully dissecting her egg and found herself almost hating Pen. It was all too close to the dream from which she had struggled. At least she was not ravenously hungry, but it was hard to feel relieved about that when she remembered eating the half-doll. She wanted to cry, but her tears seemed to be trapped in a gluey mass behind her eyes. Her mind was haunted by the leaves on her hairbrush, and the thought of Sebastian’s letter, now hidden beneath her mattress.

  Hazily she managed to follow some of her parents’ conversation. Her father had to work that day after all, and was going into Ellchester. The new station he had designed was nearly finished. It was shaped like a pyramid, following the craze for all things Egyptian that had followed the discovery of the Tutankhamen tomb the year before. Somehow ten years ago was dead history, but anything Ancient Egyptian was now the most modern thing imaginable.

  ‘Holiday over, I’m afraid,’ Triss’s father sighed. ‘They want me at the building site to approve everything, which means that if anything goes wrong afterwards they can blame their handiwork on me. And of course once the main structure is complete, they want me to be present for the Capping Ceremony so that the press can take pictures.’ The ‘Capping Ceremony’ involved using a crane to lower the pointed tip into place at the top of the pyramid, symbolizing the building’s completion.

  ‘More hullabaloo,’ murmured Triss’s mother, in a tone that combined martyrdom and pride.

  ‘I know, I know.’ Triss’s father gave her a quick smile. ‘But it is only four days more. Then it will all be over.’

  Triss flinched violently, and started shaking. The words recalled too vividly those from her nightmare, and for some reason they filled her with an uncontrollable terror.

  ‘Triss! What’s wrong?’ Her mother started to reach out a hand towards her, but Triss recoiled from her.

  ‘Headache!’ she managed to squeak out, and fled from the room.

  The medical cabinet was raided for all its emergency troops. Now there were rows of bottles lined up on Triss’s bedside. Lying muffled to the chin in her bedclothes, Triss surveyed their ranks, without feeling much reassurance. Would any of those bottles prevent her falling into leaves? Would syrup of figs rescue Sebastian? She didn’t think so. Nor did she hold out much hope for the effectiveness of the camphor in the bowl of hot water by her bed, or the moistened flannel across her forehead.

  She was to spend the day in bed. She knew that once she would have accepted this. Now watching the hours roll by was torture. What was she doing – waiting to fall apart or go mad? Four days, four days, four days . . . Why did those words keep going through her head? She could not understand how she had ever been able to bear just lying there in bed, getting paler and frailer while the world went on without her.

  Triss heard the clocks strike two, and kicked off the covers, feeling too hot to stand them. When she pressed her face against the window, the coolness gave her some relief. Her room smelt stale, and the grey, impatient energy of the wind outside drew her, making her want to fling open her window.

  Triss heard a car door slam. There was a small, blue Morris parked on the other side of the square, she realized, and somebody had just got out, his figure somewhat obscured by the trees on the central green.

  As he drew closer, Triss recognized him. It was Mr Grace, the tailor who had played her jazz and told her to eat cake the day before. As she watched, he walked up to the Crescents’ front door, and a moment later she heard the bell sound.

  Triss’s initial fizz of joyful recognition turned a moment later to confusion. Why was he here? What if her parents met him, and found out that he was a jazz sort of a person? Perhaps she would not be allowed to go back to his shop.

  What was he doing here?

  With a stealth that was becoming second nature, Triss slipped out of her room and to the head of the stairs. Since Margaret had departed for the day, it was her mother who had answered the door. Cook was notoriously deaf and claimed that she could never hear the bell. Triss did not dare peer around the corner for fear of being seen, but remained where she was, listening.

  ‘. . . so sorry to disturb you.’ The tailor’s voice was just audible. ‘Mrs Piers Crescent? My name is Jacob Grace of Grace & Scarp – your husband and daughter visited our establishment yesterday.’

  ‘Oh – you’re from the dressmakers’?’ Triss’s mother sounded perplexed and a bit flustered. ‘But . . . I understood the first fitting appointment was set for next week . . .’

  ‘Yes, indeed. But it seems your daughter left her gloves in our VIP room, and since I was passing by I thought I would drop them off.’

  ‘Oh, I see! How very kind.’ Pause. ‘Er . . . I am sorry, Mr Grace, but these do not actually belong to Triss.’

  ‘Really?’ The tailor sounded taken aback. ‘Oh. Well, how very stupid of me! They were so small I thought they must be hers. In that case, my sincere ap
ologies for bothering you.’

  ‘I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted journey.’ Her mother’s tone had thawed a little.

  ‘Oh, not at all, I was glad of a chance to ask how the young lady was faring today in any case.’

  ‘Theresa is . . . well, I think that she has recovered from the shock she received in your shop, if that is what you are asking.’

  ‘Actually, that was not what I was asking.’ For the first time Mr Grace sounded serious and somewhat hesitant. ‘Mrs Crescent, I had the good fortune to spend some time with your daughter while she was visiting our shop, and I noticed certain . . . symptoms. Symptoms that concerned me because they . . . reminded me of another case. But if your daughter is doing well today and is quite herself again, then that is a weight off my mind.’

  ‘Mr Grace,’ asked Triss’s mother with a nervous sharpness, ‘what do you mean?’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Please accept my apologies,’ came the response, so softly that Triss had difficulty making out the words. ‘I am so very sorry, Mrs Crescent. I had no place offering comments on your daughter’s health. You are obviously both loving parents and no doubt are arranging the best of medical help for her. I am not a doctor, nor even a friend of the family. Please excuse me, and pass on my good wishes to young Theresa.’

  ‘Stop! Wait!’ Her mother’s voice became slightly more distant and less echoing, as if she had followed the departing tailor a step or two out through the front door. ‘My daughter . . . is not completely well yet. If you recognize her symptoms, and have any idea what might be causing them . . .’