The Lie Tree (32 page)

‘We know she goes to the dig,’ said Tallow, and sniggered slightly, ‘and we know why.’

‘Why?’ Faith was genuinely curious. Miss Hunter’s visit to the dig had perplexed her. The postmistress was friends with Mrs Lambent, but it would surely have been more
comfortable to have visited her at the Paints.

‘Well, we shouldn’t be talking about that sort of thing in front of a respectable lady like you,’ declared Ginger. ‘Unless . . . you want to make a bargain. We tell you
about Miss Hunter, you tell us about the box. Well?’

Faith slowly nodded.

‘It’s a secret everybody knows,’ said Ginger, with malicious relish. ‘Miss Hunter has a hidden sweetheart. She won’t eat candied violets, but she orders them on
every mailboat. She goes out riding alone in her trap at all times of the day and night, and she takes the north road, away from town. That road don’t run to many places.’

It was true. It led only to Bull Cove, the excavation and the Paints.

‘And sometimes,’ said Tallow with relish, ‘they see a signal from the telegraph tower. A wink of light in the sun.’ He held up an imaginary something and swivelled it in
the air. ‘Mirror,’ he said.

‘They say Mrs Lambent comes to the dig because she knows Miss Hunter drops by,’ added Ginger, with a wink. ‘Keeping an eye on the chicken coop, in case the fox gets
in.’

‘Miss Hunter turned down Dr Jacklers a dozen times,’ added Tallow. ‘Got her eye on a better bargain. Mrs Lambent won’t last forever, they say.’

Faith remembered Lambent, who could not sit still for a minute, breaking off his striding and palaeontology to sit and drink tea when Miss Hunter visited. It was hard to imagine anybody having a
passionate affair with such a plump, snide, moorhen-like woman, but it made sense of both Miss Hunter and Mrs Lambent’s visits to the dig.

Faith’s vision had hinted at two murderers. Now that she thought of it, they might be more than allies. They might be lovers. Behind Lambent’s tempestuous impulses, there might be a
pair of neat, plump female hands pulling his strings.

At the same time, Faith was realizing something new. The sly, sharp Miss Hunter was a force to be reckoned with on the island, but she was not
liked.
There was no mistaking the gleeful
malice in the boys’ tones. Miss Hunter had poisoned the islanders’ minds against the Sunderly family. Now Faith had the chance to return the favour.

‘I never meant to see anything,’ she said in the same numb tone. ‘It was only an old box. And then Miss Hunter went away quickly in her trap.’

The boys exchanged excited glances.

The ground was becoming more hummocky now, and dotted with small bushes. Not far away, Faith recognized the one that hid the entrance to the cavern. She slowed, slowed, stopped, then turned and
stared blank-eyed back down the road.

‘Who is that following us?’ she asked, raising an arm to point.

Both boys started, and peered back into the darkness. At that moment a hazy clot of cloud drifted across the moon, briefly darkening the headland.

Faith ran.

She had cleared the nearest hummock and hidden herself among the low bushes before the confused shouting began. She heard feet pounding the turf this way and that. There were calls and
entreaties. At last the footsteps stopped and she could hear two people panting for breath.

‘I think she ran off the cliff!’

‘Should we go down and look?’

‘What good would that do? If she jumped, we can’t nail her back together! We need to go!’

After the boys had left, Faith emerged, slipped over the quivering grass and pulled back the bushes that concealed the aperture leading back into the cave network. The light from her lantern was
still glimmering below. Guided by its radiance, she slid down inclines and squeezed through crevasses until she found herself again in the great cavern of the Tree.

The Lie Tree was waiting for her.

It had grown even in the few hours since her last visit; Faith was sure of it. She felt drained now, but as if she had come home.

A trailing loop of vines reminded her of a flowery swing she had seen in a painting. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to sit down on it. It creaked, but accepted her weight. Faith
reached out to either side, stroking the backs of her hands against cool, black foliage, then leaned back against the mesh of vines and closed her eyes.

The echoes of the sea were deafening. She could hear many sounds in them: the roaring of the Megalosaurus in her dream, the bellowing in the hut and the hostile whispering in the church.
Sometimes she thought she heard her own name, lisped and mangled, as if an untried tongue was practising it.

She had already chosen her lie.

‘The smugglers’ treasure is no longer at the excavation site,’ she told the plant. ‘Mr Lambent gave it to his lover, Miss Hunter.’

People were animals, and animals were nothing but teeth. You bit first, and you bit often. That was the only way to survive.

Faith woke in, or rather on, her own bed. She was still dressed in her funeral clothes, and once again she felt sick and exhausted. Groggily she recalled rowing back from the
cave, tottering up the stairs in the dark and falling on to her bed.

The memory of her night’s adventures slowly unrolled itself, like some macabre tapestry. It seemed a phantasmagoria. Riding dinosaurs, being attacked by a Pterodactyl, attending a ratting,
plunging her hand into a bag of rats . . .

Her attention was drawn by a pain in her hand. At the base of her thumb she found two deep, ominously purple gouges, the skin around them a startled yellow-white. Staring at it, she remembered
the pain of the rat’s bite and the sting of washing it in salt water later.

Faith really
had
gone to the ratting. She had been seen there, a lone girl in a crowd of men. She had felt so sure and clear-headed under the stars, but now her stomach churned at the
thought of the risks she had taken. Gossip would surely be spreading. Her treasured invisibility would be in tatters. Again Faith’s mind was darting, rat-like, looking for corners and
escapes. She would have to deny everything outright, or say that she had gone for a walk and become lost.

She was parched. She was just draining the water from her bottle, when a terrible thought occurred to her. Suddenly she could not remember when she had last refilled the snake’s water
bowl.

Hastily she pulled the cloth from the cage. The snake was coiled among the rags as usual, but the gold and white flashes on its ebony scales looked dull and waxy.

‘No!’ Faith opened the cage door, poured water hastily into its bowl and gently stroked its coils. To her relief, it moved. When its head emerged, however, she saw that its eyes were
covered by a translucent cloudy crust. ‘Don’t die! Don’t leave me! I am so sorry!’ As it slid up her arm to recline across her shoulders, its scales felt papery against her
skin.

There was a faint knock on the door.

‘Excuse me, miss,’ came Mrs Vellet’s quiet voice. ‘If you would like to join your brother for breakfast in the nursery—’

‘Mrs Vellet!’ With an impulse born of panic, Faith threw open the door. ‘The mouse you gave me for the snake a few days ago – how did it die? Could it have swallowed
poison?’

Mrs Vellet was a little taken aback by Faith’s sudden snake-bedecked appearance at the door, but rallied well.

‘The mouse was in a trap.’ The housekeeper looked uncertainly at the snake. ‘It does not seem likely that it was poisoned – but I suppose it is possible.’

‘Something is wrong with her – look!’ Faith lifted the snake’s foremost loop so that the housekeeper could see the milky eyes. ‘Is there anything in the medicine
cabinet that might make her vomit?’

Mrs Vellet was peering with a frown. ‘Miss – what happened to your hand?’

In her concern for the snake, Faith had completely forgotten to hide the bite. ‘There was a rat behind the barn!’ she explained hastily. ‘It . . . It does not matter right
now!’

‘That wound needs more care than your pet does,’ Mrs Vellet said, with surprising firmness.

‘But—’

‘Your snake is sloughing, miss,’ the housekeeper said patiently. ‘Nothing more.’

Faith’s mouth fell open. She felt like an idiot. Of course she knew that snakes shed their skin. However, it had not even crossed her mind as an explanation. She had only been able to
think that the snake was dying and leaving her. Faith felt almost sick with relief. She had not killed the snake.

Fifteen minutes later, snakeless and dressed in her day clothes, Faith found herself sitting in the parlour while Mrs Vellet unlocked the medicine cabinet.

The housekeeper held Faith’s hand firmly but gently, and swabbed at the wound with a cloth dipped in something that stung. An acrid smell of alcohol filled the air. Faith tried not to
flinch and looked away from the bite into the cabinet, which seemed to be full of bottles.

‘It looks like a wine cupboard,’ she said aloud.

‘That was the way the invalid ladies liked it.’ Mrs Vellet glanced over her shoulder at the bottles. ‘You would be surprised at the cures they could find in it. Brandy to
stimulate the heart. Cherry liqueur for fatigue. Oh, and anything mixed with tonic water is medicine against malaria, I am told.’

‘Is there a lot of malaria here?’ asked Faith doubtfully.

‘I never heard of any, miss, but I am sure the invalid ladies knew what they were about.’ The housekeeper’s face was deadpan, but there was a slight wry curl to her voice.

Then Mrs Vellet frowned. She was staring past Faith and out through the window.

‘Heaven save us,’ she murmured. ‘What is that?’

Turning to look, Faith could just make out a brownish-grey smear across the sky, some distance to the south.

‘It looks like smoke!’ said Faith. It was too close to come from the town. Only a few things lay in that direction – the church, the parsonage, the telegraph tower, the post
office and Miss Hunter’s abode. A dark suspicion started to gnaw at her mind.

Mrs Vellet stared out at the smoke, brow furrowed, apparently making the same calculations.

‘You go to back to bed, Miss Sunderly,’ she said at last, without looking at Faith. ‘You need sleep, or you will make yourself ill. Prythe is taking letters to the post office
this morning – he will find out if anything is amiss.’

Yielding to exhaustion and the housekeeper’s insistence, Faith tottered back to bed. She was sure that she could not sleep, and fell into slumber almost immediately. She dreamed that she
was in a parlour drinking tea, and trying to hide the vines that crept out of her cuffs and collar. Miss Hunter sat opposite in a rocking chair, her skin papery, and her eyes frightened behind
their crusted white shells.

Faith was next woken by the sound of murmurs, which sounded so close that they might have been in the room with her. It took her a few moments to realize that the muted
conversation was taking place on the servants’ stairs. She struggled out of bed and scampered over to place her ear against the wall.

‘. . . preys on a man’s mind.’ It sounded like Prythe, choosing his words carefully and solemnly as usual. ‘Do
you
think there is a curse?’

‘I think there are as many curses in this house as unicorns,’ Mrs Vellet answered drily.

‘Jeanne thinks she is cursed.’ There was a long pause.

‘How does she fare?’ asked the housekeeper.

‘Ill, and getting worse, even in the church. She cannot eat or sleep. She has nightmares, and is chilled to the bone. Some folk are saying that she is dying.’

‘Some folk say a lot of foolish things, and I hope they do not say it in Jeanne’s hearing. I would not want that idea taking hold of her . . .’

The voices moved away.

Jeanne was not dying, Faith told herself. Of course she was not. There was no curse. It was nothing but Jeanne’s imagination playing tricks on her. Nothing but the effects of continual
fear, and sleeplessness, and lack of appetite, and sleeping in a cold church night after night . . .

There was a creeping sensation under Faith’s skin. Just for a moment she wished that she could shed herself like a snake’s skin, and slide away to be somebody new.

It was the middle of the afternoon. Faith had missed lunch, but a meal tray had been left outside her room, presumably by Mrs Vellet.

Heading downstairs, she encountered Myrtle pacing the hall, fretful and intolerant of everything.

‘Faith! Where in the world have you been?’ She did not wait for an answer, which was just as well. ‘You need to look after your brother. He has been running wild this
morning!’

‘But I need to go to the excavation with Uncle Miles and make sketches!’ exclaimed Faith.

‘That dreadful place where chains snap and people throw rocks? No, Faith – I should never have allowed you to go there in the first place. Besides, your uncle left for the dig first
thing this morning. Apparently they are close to breaking through into the lower chamber, and he did not wish to miss anything.’

This was a blow. Now more than ever Faith wanted to be watching the members of the dig.

‘Besides, I need you here to keep an eye on Howard. He has been writing – there is ink all over the nursery – and he has not been wearing his blue jacket! You know he must wear
that whenever he is writing! He is going to school in a few years . . .’ She paused and raised a hand to her forehead. ‘School,’ she murmured, as if the thought pained her.

‘I am sorry,’ Faith began, ‘but the last time I put the jacket on him he cried so much—’

‘Then let him cry!’ exploded Myrtle. ‘It is for his own good! It will be far worse for him if we indulge this phase of his! He will be teased at school, and have his knuckles
caned. And it will make a difference when he is making his way in the world – nobody will invite him anywhere if he grips his cutlery in the wrong hands! Howard’s future is at stake!
His future . . .’ She trailed off, looking distracted.

Faith bit her lip. ‘What if it is not a phase?’ she asked.

‘Faith, your brother is
not
left-handed,’ Myrtle said firmly, as if Faith had made an unfair accusation. ‘What is wrong with you today?’ She frowned, and looked
at Faith properly. ‘You are a mess! When did you last comb your hair properly? And why do you smell of lemons?’ She looked around her at the hall. ‘Everything is a mess! And Dr
Jacklers will be arriving at any moment.’ She glanced at the clock. ‘Where
is
he? Two hours late and not a word – something is wrong; I can feel it.’