The Lie Tree (6 page)

‘Lions,’ she said quickly. ‘Howard has been shooting lions.’

Lambent threw back his head and gave an enormous laugh. ‘Stout fellow! I daresay you are ready to travel the world like your father, eh?’

Howard blinked nervously, staring at Lambent’s blond mane.

‘Crock!’ called Lambent.

A tawny, broad-shouldered young man approached, and touched his forehead. He was almost as tall as Lambent, but kept his head a little ducked to make his height less intimidating. He moved with
the leisurely care of a big man in a flimsy world.

‘This is my foreman, Ben Crock. Crock, please look after the ladies while I show the gentlemen the section.’ He gave a smile and wink to show that the ‘stout fellow’
Howard was included among ‘gentlemen’.

And that was that. A lamp containing a composite candle was fetched, and then Lambent led the way into the tunnel, followed by the Reverend, Uncle Miles and even little Howard, clinging to his
uncle’s sleeve. The ladies were left behind to be looked after. Faith felt as if a door had slammed in her face.

Among the practical canvas tents, a wooden frame had been erected and draped with rich, red tasselled cloths, so that it looked a little like a Bedouin tent with the sides open. Within was a
divan, a small table and several chairs, two of which were hastily brushed down so that Faith and Myrtle could sit. An inch of amber tea lurked at the bottom of a bone china cup on the table, a
relic from another guest. Evidently this was where visiting ladies were stored.

Faith was not ready to sit down yet, however. At long last, she was in an excavation! A real
scientific
excavation. She looked around her, fascinated by everything, even the barrows
piled with rubble.

At the far end of the gorge she could see Clay, fixing a camera to a tripod, while a boy of about Faith’s age held it steady. She recalled that Clay had mentioned having a son.

In the nearest tent Faith could see a long table, covered in shallow, wooden boxes.

‘Mr Crock, can I look?’ She pointed into the tent, too eager to be shy.

‘Faith, you should not bother Mr Crock!’ Myrtle gave her a silencing look, but Faith could not be silenced, not at this moment.

‘Please!’

‘I see no harm in it.’ Crock gave them both a gentle smile, and held aside the tent flap for them to enter. As she drew near the table, Faith found that the boxes were painted with
mysterious number sequences and contained tallow-brown lumps and shards of what looked like bone.

‘Better not to touch them, miss,’ Crock advised quietly. ‘They would make a mess of your gloves. They are still wet from . . .’

‘Seize,’ finished Faith reflexively, and looked up at him. ‘Boiled horses’ hoofs or something like that – to stop the ancient bones crumbling when they dry.’
She had read of ‘seize’ in her father’s books, but this was the first time she had smelt it, and seen it treacle-sticky on bones older than the pyramids.

‘Yes, miss.’ Ben Crock gave a slow blink. His patient brown eyes did not change expression, but Faith sensed him making a quiet mental adjustment.

Faith looked over the shards of bone and noticed one bone sliver that was set apart from the rest. She could not help giving a small gasp. At one end it tapered to a point. The wider end had a
perfectly round hole bored through it.

‘Mr Crock! Is that a needle?’

‘That’s right, miss,’ answered Crock promptly. ‘Chiselled from reindeer antler using a stone tool, so the gentlemen think.’

‘Glacial era?’

‘Dr Jacklers says so.’

Faith realized she was smiling. Being answered simply and without fuss was a relief that felt almost physical.

She thought of the needle being chiselled in the distant age of endless ice, when reindeer hoofs had pounded the snow even in Britain. She
did
wish she could touch it, she realized. She
wanted to reach out across countless aeons and hold it, just as its maker had once held it. That would be like touching a star.

Only as they were walking out of the tent did Myrtle fall into step with her.

‘Faith,’ she hissed, ‘
must
you make yourself so absurd?’

Before long, Lambent bounded out of the tunnel with the ‘gentlemen’. Howard looked dusty and confused.

‘. . . so our tunnel has not broken its way into the cave yet,’ declared Lambent, ‘but that is nothing that a barrel of blasting powder cannot solve. Let me show you how we
have been lowering ourselves into the cave from above!’

While Myrtle remained in the ‘Bedouin tent’, Lambent led the rest of the Sunderly family up a much longer zigzag path. At the crest, Faith found herself staring at a dimpled, grassy
plateau, tufted with low bushes.

‘Tread carefully!’ Lambent advised cheerfully. ‘This is where our curate’s dog found an unexpected drop, and there may be more!’

Ahead, in the biggest dimple, was a large, freshly hewn timber platform. Faith realized that there was an oblong hole in the middle. Over the hole was a sturdy frame supporting a great spindle
with a thick chain around it, a little like the mechanism for lowering a bucket into a well. Instead of a bucket, however, there hung a sort of roofless cage, with a square metal base and sides
three feet high.

‘I had this old mechanism moved from an abandoned mine on the other side of the island,’ Lambent explained. ‘The hauling is all done by
that
fellow.’ He pointed
towards a sturdy-looking horse to whose halter the loose end of the chain had been attached. ‘We needed something of the sort – the drop is a good thirty feet.’

Gripping Faith’s hand, Howard stood on tiptoes to peer at the top of the shaft.

‘Ah!’ exclaimed Lambent. ‘Our young sportsman is sizing up the basket! Would you like a short ride in it, sir?’ He glanced at the Reverend. ‘What do you think,
Reverend? Would he like to be one of the very first people since the Stone Age to see those caves? We can lower him a dozen feet with one of the men and a lantern, just low enough that he can look
down into the cavern.’

A quiet light kindled in the Reverend’s eye. He looked at Howard, and she knew that the idea was taking hold.
His son
, seeing a prehistoric cavern while it still wore its
mysteries. It would be a kind of baptism. He gave a barely perceptible nod of consent, and Faith felt an ache of loss and jealousy.

Faith was vaguely aware that an unhappy-looking Ben Crock was whispering into Lambent’s ear. She caught the words ‘child and ‘risk. But whatever his arguments were, they were
waved away.

Lambent beckoned, but Howard clung to Faith’s sleeve. His jaw was working again, his face reddening with frustration at his own trapped words.

‘He will go down if
I
do,’ Faith whispered to her father, on impulse. She could not resist. Of course she would have preferred it if her father had turned to her and said,
Faith, I want you to see this, I want you to be part of this.
But if all she could do was ride her little brother’s coat-tails, it was better than nothing.

And the Reverend did not quell her with a look. Perhaps he had noticed that Howard was looking a little less scared by the thought of Faith coming with him.

He gave a nod. Faith flushed with excitement as the men readied the basket, attaching an oil lamp to a hook on the frame. At Ben Crock’s insistence they also hooked ropes on to the sides,
as guy ropes to keep it from twisting.

One of the sides of the cage-basket was hinged like a door, and was held open so that Faith and Howard could enter.

‘Sit down – that will be safer,’ called Crock, and they obeyed. At the sight of his furrowed brow Faith’s stomach gave a little fizz of fear, but the excitement was
stronger.

Faith wrapped her arms around Howard as the chain was let out and their basket started to descend. They passed below the timber frame, and now they were flanked by red-brown rock, rippling and
pocked. Howard’s eyes were bright in the lantern-light.

‘This is our adventure, Howard!’ whispered Faith. ‘We are going back in time! Far, far back, to when this was a mountain tip, not an island. No sea, just land, covered in snow
deeper than houses. Mammoths stamping around, making the ground shudder. Huge herds of reindeer, shaking their antlers. Shaggy rhinos big as shire horses. Sabre-toothed cats.’

The past was all around her. She could smell it. It did not feel dead. It felt alive, and as curious about her as she was about it.

The shaft was widening, as if they were descending through the neck of a bottle. The light from the lantern threw into relief the jagged walls of the shaft, and directly below there was
darkness.

The metal chain told out with a tooth-tingling
clang-clang-clang
that echoed down the shaft. Then amid this monotonous music there was a faint
chink
, then a loud, dull
crack.

The basket fell.

There was a second of utter weightlessness, and perfect lightheaded despair. Then the basket was rattling against the rock walls, and Howard was screaming. Good honest terror hit Faith like a
brick.

The basket came to a sudden halt, with a jolt that made it tip. As Howard pitched forward Faith flung an arm around him, grabbing the cage barrier with her free hand. Something heavy hit her
hard in the back with a metallic rattle. It was a loose end of the chain fastened to the basket. The guy ropes were taut, Faith realized, groaning as the basket swung and tipped over the dark
abyss. These ropes alone had halted their plummet. There was shouting above, but the echoes muddied the words.

Clumsily, in jolts, the basket started to ascend again. Looking up she could just see a cleft of sky with heads silhouetted against it. As the basket swayed, Faith could see the slender ropes
scraping against the rock and starting to fray.

‘Hush Howard hush Howard hush Howard . . .’ It was an incantation. Howard’s sobs were the only real thing in the world.

The cleft grew closer. Arms were reaching down towards the basket. Faith grabbed Howard under his armpits and heaved him as high as she could. Her arms ached and weakened under his weight, and
then the burden was lifted away. Howard’s legs flailed as he rose, nearly kicking her in the head.

Then the basket started to ascend more quickly, and the arms were reaching down again, and this time they were clutching her hands, her arms. They had her. They heaved her up and out, and then
she was sitting on the grass, scarcely believing she had survived.

Afterwards there was a lot of shouting, most of it from Lambent, who was thunderstruck and incandescent. He was the local magistrate and would have the law on somebody, but it soon became clear
that it would probably not be anybody present. The fellow who had sold him the old mining mechanism was the main target of his ire.

Howard was wailing. He needed to be examined for injuries, wiped with handkerchiefs, petted, comforted and offered toffees. The Reverend was icily furious, but gradually relented in the face of
apologies. After all, who could have expected such a thick chain to snap? And with the guy ropes in place there had been no real danger.

Unsteadily Faith walked over to Ben Crock, who was sitting on the grass, recovering his breath. There were raw, red rope burns on both his palms.

‘Thank you,’ she said quietly, casting a pointed glance at his hands.

‘No lady should have a scare like that while in my charge,’ was all he said. ‘I hope you can forgive me, miss.’

The Sunderly family went home to change their clothes, and to argue about what had just happened. For a while it seemed that Myrtle would refuse to attend the Lambents’
afternoon tea out of indignation. Only when she had been assured a dozen times that her children had never been in any real danger did she finally relent.

Faith said nothing. She still remembered her lurching horror when Howard had seemed about to fall out of the basket. The peril had certainly felt pretty mortal at the time.

Myrtle was not at all sure whether Faith was included in the invitation to ‘ladies of the family’. Had it been a dinner invitation, she would have been left behind with Howard as a
matter of course. Afternoon tea, however, was a slightly different matter. In the end Myrtle decided Faith could attend, though Faith suspected that her mother simply wanted somebody to accompany
her as an unofficial lady’s maid.

Because of the importance of the occasion, Myrtle agreed to tighten Faith’s ‘training corset’ an inch more than usual. However, she quashed Faith’s suggestion that she
wear a longer skirt in an adult style. Faith knew a few girls of her own age, and over the last year she had watched their hems creep downwards. Most of them had also just graduated to proper
grown-up corsets, leaving Faith feeling self-conscious about her clumsy, loose, childish one. She sometimes wondered if Myrtle was keeping her a child for vanity’s sake, rather than admit to
being old enough to have a nearly adult daughter.

As they were about to leave, Myrtle noticed the crochet gloves on Faith’s hands.

‘Where are your kid gloves?’ she demanded.

‘I . . . do not know.’ Faith reddened. ‘I am sure I had them on the boat . . .’ A tremulous hint that the unfortunate gloves had fallen overboard.

‘Oh,
Faith
!’ Myrtle’s mouth tightened with impatience and annoyance.

Lambent’s house stood on the top of a headland, less than a mile from the excavation. According to the battered wooden sign, the house was called ‘The
Paints’. It braced its four red-brick storeys against the weather, but the fences and little trees around it had surrendered to the wind, bowing and skulking close to the long grass. There
was a large stables and coach house. Beagles barked in their kennels.

There were the usual delays, as Myrtle was manoeuvred out of Lambent’s carriage. Her crinoline, the bird’s cage of whalebone and linen that bulked out the back of her skirts, creaked
and shivered, tipping to reveal her dainty, bow-covered shoes.

The Sunderly family had barely entered the hallway before they were intercepted by Lambent.