The Lie Tree (15 page)

‘That is Dr Jacklers! I hear his carriage.’

Myrtle pulled her cut-glass bottle of smelling salts out of her reticule. She uncorked it, and raised it to her nose, flinching away a moment later with a wince and gasp. After she had done this
a second time, her eyes were swimming. She put away the bottle and blinked rapidly. By the time Dr Jacklers was shown into the room, a tear was tracing a gleaming path down Myrtle’s
cheek.

For a long time, Dr Jacklers looked at the patient. Myrtle hovered nearby, twisting her hands and answering his questions, while silver tears slid hypnotically down her
face.

Faith sat nearby, her thoughts churning. Her father on the beach, her father in the dell. Why was her mother so determined to lie?

‘I am so very sorry, Mrs Sunderly,’ the doctor said at last. ‘I cannot advise you to hope. His neck is broken . . .’

Myrtle gave a small, vulnerable noise, somewhere between a gasp and a sob. She turned away and bowed her face over her handkerchief.

‘I wish we had never come here!’ she said, her voice a little muffled. ‘Those trespassers . . . he was convinced they would steal his rare botanic specimens. So he set
gin-traps, and kept rushing to that dreadful dell every time he heard a noise out there. I suppose he must have fallen in the dark and struck his head against something . . .’

‘Your husband was found in the dell?’ The doctor’s eyebrows rose. ‘Madam, I must confess that surprises me, given the nature of his injuries. I am loath to grieve you
with such details—’

‘Please.’ Myrtle turned back to face him, her mouth tremulously resolute. ‘Do not spare me. I must know.’

‘Well . . . I fancy two ribs are cracked, suggesting a longer fall than you could suffer in that dell. The wound on his forehead is deep, but there is another great bump to the back of his
head, under the hair. To me that looks like a longer tumble, with some rolling. Mrs Sunderly – there is no delicate way to ask this – is it possible that he was found somewhere else,
and that your friends have misled you in order to spare your feelings?’

‘My husband is dead,’ Myrtle said softly. ‘What feelings do I have left to spare?’

Faith felt the colour rise to her face. She could brush away her mother’s lie like a cobweb. But how many of her own strands of untruth would she destroy with the same gesture? Besides,
her last experiment with truthfulness had burned her to the core.

‘Well,’ the doctor said under his breath, ‘perhaps the drop was high enough . . . if he managed to pitch forward with some force.’ He sighed. ‘Pardon the question,
but did your husband appear preoccupied yesterday? Out of spirits?’

Myrtle stiffened, her face pale and pained.

‘Dr Jacklers,’ she said with fragile hauteur, ‘what in the world are you trying to say?’

Faith knew exactly what the doctor was trying to say. In a flash, she realized how this must look to him. The disgraced man creeping out of his house by night to plummet to his death, rather
than face a terrible scandal . . .

‘Forgive my clumsiness.’ The doctor looked mortified and out of countenance. ‘I am simply trying to understand . . .’

‘Perhaps,’ Myrtle said with dignity, ‘this is a matter we should discuss in private.’ She turned to her daughter. ‘Faith, will you please go to Mrs Vellet . . . and
have her stop the clocks.’

Faith took her cue and left the room, feigning a few receding steps. Then she stooped and put her ear to the keyhole.

‘. . . a whole decanter before bed?’ Dr Jacklers was asking. ‘Was this usual?’

‘Of late it has become so.’ A sigh. ‘It is not the first time he has suffered a fall. It is just the first we were not able to conceal.’

Faith smothered a gasp of pained indignation. How
dare
her mother say that? How
dare
she paint the Reverend as a blundering drunkard, tripping over his own feet? Then Faith
remembered her father sitting torpid and yellow-eyed, his room filled with the exotic, clammy scent. What if her father really did have yet more secrets?

‘Dr Jacklers, I do not know what to do.’ Myrtle’s voice was low and tearful. ‘I am so used to hiding my husband’s . . . habits . . . and I would wish to hide them
still, to protect his memory. But now you have made me frightened. Did you really think my husband had “pitched himself forward with force”? Will everyone else think that
too?’

‘Mrs Sunderly . . .’ The doctor stopped abruptly, with a slight gasp. There was a short silence.

Faith took her ear from the keyhole and peered through instead.

Her mother was standing very close to the doctor. Her ungloved hands were wrapped beseechingly around his, a strange, shocking intimacy. The doctor’s face was brick red.

‘I have
children
,’ Myrtle said. ‘I am desperate. Please, tell me what to do.’

‘I . . .’ The doctor coughed and dropped his gaze. ‘You have my word that I will do everything in my power to . . . to spare you and your family trouble. My solemn promise. The
injuries . . . there are ways that, ah, things can be phrased. Please, please do not distress yourself, Mrs Sunderly.’

He did not, Faith noticed, make any attempt to pull his hands away.

Faith drew back from the keyhole, her face burning. She could not bear to see or hear anything more. A warm, slow anger was filling her bones like thunder, and it had nowhere to go.

Instead, she tiptoed down the hall to the corner, where the grandfather clock swung its pendulum for each monotonous
click.
It mocked her, pretended that time still mattered, that there
was still a day to be told out, that the world was still turning.

The glass front was cold against her skin as she opened it. The pendulum slowed to her touch. The clock’s hands twitched under her fingers, so she gripped them until the ticking stopped.
Her mind calmed as she imagined the earth giving up its giddy spin and drifting untethered through the void.

Faith stood there for a long time with her fingers on the motionless hands. She felt like the murderess of time.

It was a house of the dead now. All the curtains were drawn. Dark cloth was draped over every mirror, like a dull lid drooped over every eye.

The air was heavy, so heavy that Faith thought the whole house might sink into the ground. Voices were hushed, fragile and moth-like. Footsteps were trespassers.

And yet all afternoon people came to visit, on foot and on horseback, even to the despised Sunderly household. For there was death in the house, and death was a business.

One cart rolled in heaped with bundles of cut flowers. A jobmaster dropped by to show off a little black coach and two dark horses. Mrs Vellet was sent out to town, and returned with a
dressmaker and trunks bulging with black cloth.

The funeral would be the next day, Myrtle had decided.

‘Very soon, isn’t it?’ Uncle Miles had protested. ‘Old girl, there is another boat to the mainland in a few days. If he were kept in the ice house, we could take him back
with us to Kent and see him settled in the family plot.’

‘No.’ Myrtle had been immovable. ‘We bury him here in Vane – and as soon as possible.’ She refused to be drawn further.

The rush felt indecent, but it was just another indecency. Faith found she could not bear the living. She could not bear the servants’ hard-eyed curiosity, or Uncle Miles’s
platitudes and shrugs. Howard’s questions tore her in two. Most of all, she could not bear her mother.

Somebody needed to take on the duty of the ‘wake’, and sit by the side of her father. Faith was all too willing to volunteer.

The Reverend had been washed, dressed in his best clothes and laid out on his bed upstairs. One might even imagine that he had passed away there, flanked by loved ones and with
the good book in his hand. It was a lie, but a comforting one. There were scented candles all over the room now, and vases of flowers. They made the room seem sacred, even though Faith knew that
they were there to mask any smell.

It was not the first time Faith had been alone with the dead of course. She had watched five younger brothers wane, felt the trusting pressure of their small hands in hers. And later, each time,
she had done her part in keeping watch over the body for the wake. There always needed to be somebody watching over the newly dead, just in case they turned out not to be dead after all. It was
best to know these things before anyone was actually buried.

There would be no movement, however. She knew it in her blood. She knew it from the crashing stillness that filled the room. Dead people bled silence.

On the bedside table lay the great black family Bible. Many times Faith had looked through the family’s births, deaths and marriages scrawled on to the blank pages at the back. Her
brothers were there, with the dates of their deaths. And now Erasmus Sunderly would be added to the names, another little human life crushed fly-like between its great pages.

At least in the flickering candlelight he no longer looked helpless, the way he had down on the blanket in the library. His features might have been carved from marble, unchanging and
incorruptible. Here he was his own altar.

Faith never wanted to leave this stillness. She never wanted to leave him. She did not know what she felt. Her emotions were so large and strange that they seemed to be something outside her,
vast cloud patterns roiling and colliding above while she watched.

Suicide. The great mortal sin.

‘I do not believe it,’ she told him. ‘I
know
you would never do that.’

But could she be sure of anything any more? How many secrets
did
her father have? What if he had taken his mysterious opiate again and flung himself to his doom in a fit of drugged
melancholia?

Faith was too tired to think, and too tired not to think. All the while her mind kept picking at what she knew and did not know, numbly dropping the pieces before she could fit them together
properly.

She understood now why her mother had lied about where the body was found. A broken neck in the dell looked like an accident, a misstep in the dark. After all, why would anybody hurl themselves
down a small, wooded incline when there was a cliff nearby?

But he did not even need a cliff. He had a pistol.

Faith pressed her fists against her temples.

He had a pistol.

She remembered his nervous, reflexive reach for the gun, while they were down on the beach. He had been expecting some sort of danger. And now he was dead.

Why had he insisted that he needed to be back from the boat trip by midnight? And why had he been so desperate to conceal the mysterious plant?

As she recalled their stealthy journey with the plant in the wheelbarrow, a troublesome sense of wrongness tickled her mind. Again she saw the misty image of the wheelbarrow as she had seen it
that morning, lying on its side at the fork in the paths . . .

But . . . it should not have been there. Father and I left it by the glasshouse.

The smoky uncertainties in her head began to coalesce, and solidified into a suspicion.

The mists were starting to lift as Faith walked through the grounds once more, retracing her steps along the path. And there indeed was the wheelbarrow at the fork.

It might mean nothing. Maybe Prythe rose early and moved it.

But she continued to walk, this time along the path that led to the cliff-top. It was a rugged climb, and rocky in places. It looked as though the footpath doubled as a temporary stream in
wetter weather.

She reached the grassy top, and the breeze filled her cape. Looking down, she could see the shallow waves drag their foam crescents like fingernails down the beach. Directly below her, halfway
down the cliff, the black-barked tree that had caught her father quivered as if beckoning to her.

Here the path was a muddy track trampled through the grass. Faith stooped to peer. Not far from the brink, she could make out a groove pushed into the mud. It could have been gouged with a stick
or the edge of a boot, but it was just wide enough that it might have been left by the wheel of a wheelbarrow.

When Faith entered the drawing room, Uncle Miles looked up from his book and his furrowed brow smoothed a little.

‘How are you faring, Faith?’

There was nothing good or cheerful that Faith could say.

‘Uncle Miles . . . can I ask you something? You said that when my . . . when my father was turned away from the excavation, somebody gave him a letter.’

‘Oh.’ Uncle Miles raised his eyebrows ruefully and closed his book. ‘Yes, and it upset him immeasurably. I suppose we shall never know who wrote it.’

‘It was unsigned?’ Faith’s interest sharpened to a point.

‘It must have been. Your father kept demanding to know who had written it. Suddenly everybody was his enemy and he would not hear otherwise. Ben Crock found it among his day’s papers
and handed it over, but said he knew nothing more about it.’

‘What did it say?’

Your father would let nobody see it.’ Uncle Miles shook his head. ‘On the journey home he kept insisting that somebody had spied on him, or betrayed him, or read his papers. And when
we reached home . . . he tossed the letter on the fire.’

‘There you are, Faith!’ Myrtle was in the drawing room with the dressmaker. ‘There is a black cambric dress that might do for you, if it is taken apart and
made up in your size.’

Faith stared at the black dress draped over a chair. There was wear at the collar and shine at the elbows. It was a dress that had already mourned.

‘Mother – can I talk to you?’

‘Of course,’ Myrtle said absently, without looking up from a book of plates showing elegant women in a full crêpe dresses. She tapped a picture and passed the book to the
dressmaker. ‘This one, with the fashionable cut. I cannot simply throw away my half-crinoline. And you are sure that we cannot work in a little glossy silk? Must it all be lightless and
dull?’ There was indeed something deathly about the crêpe. It was a mass of fine threads, rough and scratchy to the touch. It seemed to suck light.