The Lie Tree (20 page)

Choose a lie that others wish to believe,
her father had written.

Faith remembered the conversation at the graveside, and Tom’s suggestion that her father be staked ‘to keep the ghost down’. She thought of Howard’s superstitious terror,
the stopped clocks and the cloaked mirrors.

‘I have a lie for you.’ She closed her eyes and whispered, ‘My father’s ghost walks, seeking revenge on those who wronged him.’

Something very gently stroked her face, and Faith pulled back, opening her eyes. There was no sign of motion among the plant’s glossy leaves.

As she slowly retreated from the central cavern, however, it seemed to her baffled ears that the echoes had a new timbre. She almost thought she could hear faint traces of her own words in the
air, swaying and unfurling.

A stake through the heart at the crossroads, so the dead cannot find their way home . . .

Slipping back into the darkened house in her ravaged black dress, Faith herself felt a little like a lost soul returning. She paused to listen, but all was still quiet. Everybody had gone to
sleep. The house was hers.

So what should she do? Where should she start?

Faith narrowed her eyes, then smiled in the darkness as inspiration dawned. She crept into the kitchen, where she was sure she had seen . . . yes.

The careful light of her lantern showed her a bell board on the wall, just above head height. There were seven bells, each dangling at the bottom of a spiral curl of metal, which in turn was
attached to one of the seven wires running horizontally across the wall. Each bell had a different label – Master Bedroom, Second Bedroom, Third Bedroom, Drawing Room, Library, Nursery,
Dining Room. The bell pull in each of these rooms tugged a hidden wire, which zigzagged unseen through floors and walls and rang the corresponding bell in the kitchen.

Squinting in the imperfect light, Faith set about unfastening the wires for the Master Bedroom and Third Bedroom and swapping them over.

She crept to the library, and found her father’s tobacco box on the desk. She took a pinch and fed it to a candle flame, watching it fizzle and blacken, leaking a scented, bluish plume of
smoke. Then, with a letter opener, she slashed a hole in the crêpe covering the mirror, so that a silvery gash was visible through the cloth like a half-open eye.

One last stop. She tiptoed upstairs, listened again for any sign of motion in the bedrooms, then crept into her father’s room, closing the door carefully before uncovering her lantern.

The room was still filled with vases of wilting flowers. There was a long crease in the bed where his remains had rested, but his effects had been tidied away into trunks and boxes. The family
Bible lay closed on the bedside table.

Faith’s mind filled with a thousand angry ideas, but she restrained herself. Too much at once would betray her. She opened the Bible, and hastily leafed through until she found Deuteronomy
32.35.

She left it open on that page, with a single flower petal under the vengeful quotation.

The bell pull by her father’s bed was a red corded rope with a tassel. Faith climbed on a chair and used her father’s razor to saw through the cord at a high point, so that it was
close to snapping. Only then did she leave the room.

If they want a ghost, they will have one.

Faith wakened from a dream of being buried under rubble to find herself still weak and aching. For a while she lay there, trying to work out why her back, shoulders and arms
were so sore.

Then everything returned to her in a cold, dark rush. Loss, the funeral, the journal, the touch of the Lie Tree’s leaves against her face. Her mind spent a few moments in cold, helpless
free fall, before her anger spread its wings and buoyed her up again.

She struggled out of bed. Her arms felt heavy as lead, and manoeuvring them into the sleeves of her spare mourning clothes was a painful process. These muscles had never before been used in
earnest and were shrieking in protest.

Her hair was a mess of tangles, woven by wind and salt. She attacked it with her brush until it recovered some of its smoothness and sheen.

Faith tweaked aside the curtain and peered outside. It was another grey, restless day. The wind fluted in the flues and flattened glossy spirals in the grass, and the trees flung up their boughs
like drowning sailors.

She had a murderer to find, and an island to frighten. Frightened people sometimes made mistakes, and it was a good day to be a ghost.

Faith grasped the blue corded bell pull that hung by her bed and gave it three long, deliberate pulls.

She imagined the servants below staring agog at the bell board as the bell for the empty master bedroom impossibly twitched and chimed. Minutes passed, and nothing happened. Then she heard
uncertain steps ascend the servants’ stairs and walk along the landing. Faith knelt by her bedroom door and pressed her eye to the keyhole.

Jeanne was hovering outside the Reverend’s room, eyes wide, twisting her hands nervously together. As Faith watched, she grasped the door handle and entered the room. Faith was fairly sure
she heard a muffled gasp.

Creak. Creak. Faint, cautious footsteps from inside the room. Then there was a short squeal of surprise. Jeanne burst on to the landing in disarray, the red corded bell pull in one hand, and
sprinted from view.

Faith smiled to herself as the other girl’s steps thundered down the servants’ stairs. She had guessed that somebody would give the haunted bell pull an experimental tug. If she had
left it un-sawn it would have caused the bell for
her
room to ring, and perhaps somebody could have deduced the truth.

Pressing her ear to the wall, she could hear muted conversation taking place somewhere on the servants’ stairway.

‘You
broke
it?’ Prythe was asking, incredulously.

‘I only pulled gently!’ Jeanne could be heard exclaiming, her voice defiant but shaken. ‘It came away in my hand! There’s all manner of things amiss in that room . .
.’

Faith stroked her hand down the bell pull, feeling its roughness under her fingers, tempted to pull it again. No, that would be too much, too fast. Her victims needed time to wonder, to whisper,
to tell each other frightened stories.

An hour later, when Jeanne brought the breakfast tray to the day nursery for Faith and Howard, she seemed to have lost her usual self-possession. The cups rattled as she set
down the tray, and she barely spared Faith a glance, bobbing the briefest distracted curtsy as she left. Whatever she thought of the mysterious bell, she evidently did not suspect the prim, shy
daughter of the house.

Faith could hardly concentrate on her breakfast as she sat at the little wooden table with Howard.

What did she know about the murderer? Almost anybody on Vane
could
have been in Bull Cove that night. However, her father had talked as though he had an appointment at midnight. This
had to be somebody that he was willing to meet, though not without a pistol. If he expected danger from this enemy, though, why meet them at all, let alone secretly and unaccompanied in the dead of
night?

Then there was the mystery of the pistol. He had gone out armed, but for some reason this had not saved him. And when his body had been laid out, the pistol had been missing from his pocket.

‘Other hands, How,’ she said reflexively, noticing her brother had quietly swapped his cutlery again.

‘No!’ Howard shouted, in a sudden fit of rebellion. He was shiny-faced and breathless, his face locked in an expression of slightly frantic discontent. Faith could see that he had
slept badly, and once again felt a soul-bruise that was not quite guilt.

‘Howard . . .’

‘No, no, no, no!’ Howard shrieked more loudly, pushing away his plate so that it nearly knocked Faith’s breakfast into her lap.

She tried to stay calm, but felt her temper fraying. He was clawing for attention, and it actually felt as though his small, clumsy fingernails were scraping at her mind.

‘Behave yourself!’ she snapped, losing control. ‘Or I will put you in the blue jacket!’

It was an ill-judged threat. Howard’s mouth fell open and he started to bawl.

‘I ha-a-ate you!’ he wailed, his words broken and thick with sobs.

The jacket was not supposed to be used as a general punishment. Howard liked to understand how things worked, and needed to know that the world was fair. Unfortunately the world was
not
fair, and every time he collided with this fact he lost control completely. If Faith did nothing, he would scream himself sick.

No, the world was not fair. Faith jumped from her chair and stalked across the room, looking for something to kick.

When she glanced back at Howard, he looked very small in his miniature wooden chair. None of this was his fault. He had every reason to be miserable.

Relenting, Faith sat down with a rustle of black skirts. She reached into the trunk of Howard’s toys and pulled out his model theatre.

The theatre was box-shaped, its card and paper intricately painted in reds, golds and greens, with crests, swirls and angels. The front frame had painted curtains, and you could look through it
into the stage itself, which tapered and receded to a tiny backdrop of blue sky, hills and a castle.

Faith pulled out the landscape backdrop. There were three others to choose from, one showing the same hillside scene by moonlight, one depicting an indoor scene with pictures and a chandelier,
and one with a green-tinted woodland scene. With a deliberate air of absorption, Faith slotted the nocturnal scene into place.

Very quickly Howard stopped screaming. He wandered over and dropped himself heavily beside her to sit cross-legged. Howard was always captivated by her ‘shows’.

‘I want Juggler,’ he said. ‘And . . . Wizard. And the Devil.’

The actors were tiny paper figures, glued to slender sticks so that they could be moved around the stage. Most of them had been created by Faith, carefully drawn, coloured and cut out.

There were slots in the side of the stage, so that Faith could slide the figures in from the wings, and move them from side to side across the stage. They could not move forward or backwards
though. This frustrated Howard, and several puppet sticks had been broken as a result of this frustration.

Today, as usual, Howard wanted fighting.

‘Juggler fights the Devil!’ he demanded, thumping his knees.

The tiny green-and-yellow jester fought the red-horned devil to and fro. Today Faith let the Devil win, with much roaring, and flipped the Juggler on to his back to show he was
‘dead’. As always, this made Howard laugh, with a wildness that Faith thought owed something to terror.

‘Wizard fights the Devil!’

The Devil fought the Wizard, the Knight and the Sailor, one by one, and killed them all.

Howard laughed, too high and too loudly. His eyes were round and alarmed, fixed on the grimacing Devil.

‘They get up again – all get up – they kill the Devil!’

‘But, Howard, they are dead . . .’ Faith stopped herself. She flipped the little paper corpses neatly back on to their feet. They mobbed the Devil, who subsided howling on to his
back. There was a silence.

‘I want the Wise Man,’ said Howard quietly, as he always did after the fight.

The Wise Man was a Chinaman, with a limpet-shaped hat and a long moustache. His eyes were lopsided, because Faith had drawn him when she was a lot younger and less skilled with a pen, but he was
Howard’s favourite.

She shuffled him on to the stage.

‘Why, it is young Master Howard!’ she trilled, in a high, querulous, little-old-man voice.

Howard laughed and hugged his knees. It was the same frightened, exhilarated laugh as when the characters ‘died’. By long tradition, the Wise Man was the only puppet clever enough to
see past the stage and notice Howard watching.

Do you have a question for me today?’ Faith asked in her Wise Man voice.

Howard hesitated, his tongue resting against his lower lip, scratching at the sole of his shoe with one fingernail.

‘Yes,’ he said very quietly. ‘Is the Devil dead?’

‘Oh yes, quite dead,’ the Wise Man assured him.

For most of his six years, Howard had looked to Faith to be his oracle, his almanac, his source of all truth. He had believed everything she told him. This tide was changing though.
Girls
don’t know about sailing,
he would say suddenly.
Girls don’t know about the moon.
There was never any malice or spite in it; he was simply repeating some nugget he had
panned from the confident river of adult conversation. There were things that girls did not know, and Faith was a girl. Each time he said such a thing it was a shock, and Faith felt her domain of
expertise breaking apart like an ice floe.

Howard still consulted the Wise Man, however, without shame. The Wise Man was not a girl, and the Wise Man knew everything.

‘Will the Devil come back again in the night?’ Howard’s mouth was trembling now. ‘I heard it in the dark. It went into Father’s room. I heard its teeth.’

Faith held her breath for a moment, her skin tingling. She had thought herself unnoticed as she crept around the house in the dead of night. But Howard had heard her footsteps. He had heard her
sawing through the bell rope with a sound like gnawing teeth.

Howard talked to everybody. He had no guile. He would tell everybody about the steps he had heard, and the sound of teeth. How could she keep him quiet?

Then again, perhaps she did not
need
to keep him quiet.

‘How did you know it was the Devil?’ asked Faith–Wise-Man. ‘Did it have strange, echoing footsteps?’

Howard picked at his shoe sole and frowned. Then his brow cleared and he nodded.

Did everything get colder as it passed?’ persisted Faith-Wise-Man.