The Lie Tree (14 page)

The mist flattened everything and sucked out all colour. Trees became intricate smoke-hued doilies. Buildings were featureless outlines, eiderdown grey.

Faith tiptoed to the sites of the gin-traps, and found nobody sprawled in their toothed maw. There was no one in the glasshouse or the folly. She even edged her way into the dell and called out
among the ghost-trees. Nobody answered. There was no sign of her father on the road that faded as it climbed the hill into the mist.

Sounds were startlingly real in this world of ghosts. Faith could hear her own breath, and the click of stones under her feet as she hobbled down the path to the beach. At the fork in the path
she passed the wheelbarrow, lying on its side, one handle raised as if hailing her as a co-conspirator.

The rough path gave way to pebble beach, and each step became a high-pitched
chhh
of little stones rasping. The night before, the cliffs had been inky and massive. This morning they
were grey paper. She could have thrown a stone and torn them.

She stared down the beach, hoping to find her father’s outline. The far end of the beach melted into mist, and with a jolt she realized that she could not see the little rowing boat.

She broke into an uneven run, skirts hitched. No.
No!
The boat had to be there! He could not have taken it out a second time! It would have been mad to do so, without Faith to hold a
lantern! The idea enslaved her imagination. It was too horrible to be anything but true.

Faith hobbled, almost turning her ankle . . . and then slowed. With calm innocence, the mists thinned just enough for her to make out a gauzy white shape, with a familiar curve of a prow. The
boat
was
there after all. The mist had deceived her.

Faith covered her mouth with both hands, not sure whether to sob or be sick with relief. She turned to walk back to the house.

And it was then, of course, that she saw it.

Halfway up the nearest cliff, slung over a jutting tree, was a black shape. It looked like a horseshoe, ends pointing down so that the luck would drain out.

It was a silhouette and nothing more, but Faith knew what it was. Humans are always looking for one another, and human eyes have a gift for spotting a human shape. With cruel clarity, she knew
she was looking at two legs hanging loosely, two dangling arms, the curve of a back.

It was a man who was draped over the tree. The cold air was a knife in Faith’s throat as she ran back to the house.

Ten minutes later, Faith and Myrtle sat on the parlour’s chaise longue, tea cooling in their cups. Uncle Miles and the manservant Prythe had hastened out to the beach
with stout rope.

Myrtle was bundled in several of her nightgowns, over which was draped a floor-length shawl of yellow Oriental silk. Faith sat gripping her saucer, bargaining with the silent seconds.

Let it be somebody else, or let him be alive,
she begged Fate.
Let him be safe, and you can take my left foot.
The clock callously told out second after second after second
after second, and no news came.
Let him be safe,
she raised her offer,
and you can take my whole left leg.
Tick, tick, tick, and nothing.
Let him be safe, and you can take
both my legs.
The clock was relentless.

Somewhere a door opened and there were hushed voices out in the hall. Then there was a gentle knock, and Uncle Miles put his head around the parlour door.

Faith’s heart was beating so hard she could feel it. Uncle Miles met her desperate gaze, then quickly dropped his own.

‘Myrtle,’ he said very quietly. ‘May I speak with you for a moment?’

And in that second, Faith knew.

She was very aware of herself, of her own lungs filling and emptying. She could feel where the china saucer dented her fingers, and the shapes of her teeth against her dry tongue. Something warm
was spilling from her eyes down her cheeks. Suddenly she was hotly, unbearably alive.

The room was still there. Myrtle was standing up and the clock was ticking and the bald white sky was staring in through the window. But an invisible wave had gone out, and now everything looked
beached and stranded. Faith watched her own hands put down the cup and saucer.

Myrtle joined Uncle Miles at the door, and he murmured and murmured in her ear. One of his hands hovered protectively by her side, not quite cupping her elbow, but ready to support.

‘Where?’ Myrtle’s voice was bruised and unguarded. ‘Where is he?’

‘We’ve put him in the library.’

Myrtle pushed past her brother and out of the room. Uncle Miles followed, and barely seemed to notice Faith taking up the rear.

In the library, the manservant Prythe stood by the wall, cap in one hand, looking miserably uncomfortable. The two chairs in which Faith and her father had sat still faced each other in mute
conference, but now they had been moved to one side to make room.

There was a blanket spread on the floor. There was somebody on the blanket. Faith looked and looked and could not look away, but her brain decided not to see. Only when she blinked was there an
image imprinted on her mind’s eye, a half-mask of dark blood, open eyes and pale, slack hands. A thousand hopes blew out like candles.

Faith stood in the doorway, leaning on the door frame. Her arm shook.

I should have bargained better,
said a stupid, pointless voice in her mind.
I should have offered all my arms and legs, right from the start.

Myrtle stared down at her husband’s shape on the blanket, her eyes bright but empty. The colour and expression slowly drained out of her face.

‘We will send for a doctor,’ Uncle Miles said quietly, ‘but . . . we have held a mirror over his mouth and there is no sign of breath. We have pricked him with a pin, and there
is no reaction.’ He glanced across and looked appalled as he noticed Faith in the room. He said nothing though; it was too late to spare her.

Myrtle did not seem to hear him. She drifted away from her brother and Prythe, both of whom seemed to be tensed to catch her if she fell, and came to a halt near Faith, facing the mirror on the
wall.

One of her blonde ringlets hung down beside her cheek, and shivered in a draught. It had a childlike poignancy, and Faith felt a pang of tortured tenderness. She reached out to her mother
impulsively, but her fingers halted against the cool silk of the yellow shawl. She could not throw her arms around her mother after all. If she did, something inside her would break.

Myrtle gave Faith’s hand a brief squeeze, but continued staring into the glass, her eyes starry and distant. Slowly her ungloved hands rose and started making small adjustments to her
hair, tucking away stray tresses and teasing crushed locks back into shape. She rubbed hard at her lower lip, and watched as the blood rushed back to give it a rosier hue. Her gaze dropped to her
own Oriental shawl, and her brow creased slightly.

‘I am too pale for yellow,’ Myrtle muttered under her breath. The words were very quiet, but Faith was close and she caught them.

‘Myrtle,’ prompted Uncle Miles.

‘You found him in the dell,’ said Myrtle, without turning around.

‘No, old girl – I told you, he was at the beach, halfway down the cliff. He must have fallen from the top . . .’

‘How many people know that?’ Myrtle asked sharply.

Uncle Miles looked taken aback. ‘Only the four of us in this room,’ he replied, after a moment’s thought.

‘Then you found him in the dell.’ Myrtle turned to meet her brother’s eye. ‘Miles – you said yourself, there is a steep slope where anybody might fall and break
their neck.’

‘But—’

‘Miles, please!’ Myrtle exclaimed. ‘It
must
be done this way. Think of how it will
look
if he fell from the cliff-top. Think of what that would mean for
us.
’

Faith felt the words like a blow. What did it matter how
anything
looked, ever again? But Myrtle was already turning to the manservant.

‘Prythe . . . my family are indebted to you for the service you have done my husband this morning. You must allow us to show our gratitude. If we can count upon your discretion in this
matter, then we shall be even more grateful.’

With that she walked forward with a rigid calm and dropped to sit on her heels beside the prone figure on the blanket. Faith watched her mother’s pink, carefully groomed hands pull open
the jacket and slide into the inside pockets, pulling out her father’s pocket-book and purse. Myrtle stood, and turned to Prythe, placing a coin in his hand.

‘Thank you, Prythe. May we count on you?’

Prythe stared down at the sovereign in his palm, and the colour drained from his face. ‘Ma’am.’ He looked shocked, almost stricken, but his eyes were bright as he looked at the
coin. ‘I can hold my tongue in the general way, but . . . if the constable should ask, I would not wish to mislead him. And if I am asked to swear on the Bible I cannot lie.’
Hesitantly, and with obvious reluctance, he offered the coin back.

‘I would not ask such a thing of an honest man,’ said Myrtle, making no move to take the money. ‘There should be no need for constables or Bibles. All I ask is your
silence.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ whispered Prythe.

A faint sound caught Faith’s ear, a slither of sole on tiles.

‘Someone is outside,’ she said reflexively.

Uncle Miles tweaked open the door and peered into the hall.

‘Did anyone overhear us?’ demanded Myrtle.

‘I am not sure,’ answered her brother. ‘I did see somebody, passing towards the servants’ stairs. Jeanne, I think.’

‘Jeanne.’ Myrtle was carefully, absently leafing through banknotes in the pocket-book. ‘Someone must tell the girl that we have decided to keep her on after all.’

Uncle Miles departed to talk to Jeanne and the other servants, and Prythe left to fetch Dr Jacklers.

Myrtle looked around the room and then hurried to her husband’s desk, where she began hastily leafing through the papers. Faith’s stomach turned over at the sight of her
mother’s neat pink fingers carelessly handling the sketches and notes over which he had been so fiercely protective.

‘What is it?’ Faith asked, fighting the urge to snatch the papers out of her mother’s hands. ‘What are you trying to find?’

‘There may be a letter,’ Myrtle said without looking up. ‘A . . . private letter that we would not wish others to see.’

‘Let me look,’ Faith said through her teeth. She swallowed, and forced calm into her voice. ‘Leave it to me.’

Myrtle hesitated. ‘That would give me a chance to change my clothes,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘Very well. But be quick! We do not have much time.’

Faith nodded.

‘Good girl,’ Myrtle said hurriedly. As she hastened from the room, she patted Faith’s cheek. Faith flinched from the touch. The words burned.

As soon as the door closed behind Myrtle, Faith hurried to the desk and made a pile of the loose papers, then hastily searched the desk drawers, the writing box and the strongbox in the corner.
There were a couple of envelopes stuck within the pages of books, so she snatched those too.

Everything else was lost, but she could still protect her father’s secrets. Faith’s hands shook as she glimpsed her father’s handwriting between her fingers. Her face was hot.
But she was helping him in the only way she could. She could hide his papers where nobody else would find them.

With the bundle of papers wrapped in an antimacassar from one of the chairs, Faith sneaked out of the library.

As she crept along the hall and up the stairs her sharp ears caught the sound of conversation in the kitchen, where it seemed all the servants were holed up. The voices were hushed and a little
hysterical, but with a hard, excited, curious edge. To judge by the smell, everybody was being ‘fortified’ with hot cider.

Outside her father’s room, she hesitated, then turned the handle and entered. His room would be searched soon enough, so it was best if she did so first. The darkness smelt of book must,
varnish and his tobacco. His dinner coat glowered darkly from its hook on the back of the door.

She snatched up a couple of letters and a ledger from his bedside table and filched two notebooks from jacket pockets. Then, on impulse, she ran a hand under the bed. Her fingers brushed a rough
corner, and she drew out a thin, leather-bound book.

Adding this to her finds, she slipped into her own room, which was lit only by the pale daylight from the window.

When Faith pulled the cloth off the snake’s cage, it flinched into a coil, then raised its head curiously, mouth slightly open to let its dull pink tongue flicker. She hushed it, matching
its motions for slow grace, and let it slide up her arm.

Faith pulled out all the rags that the snake had been using as a nest. She divided the bundle of papers into two piles and placed them on the floor of the cage, then covered them with rags so
that they did not show.

‘Guard them for me,’ she whispered to the snake, and eased it back into its cage.

When Faith returned to the library, Myrtle had returned.

‘Where have you been?’ Myrtle demanded without preamble, but did not wait for answer. ‘Stay with me – the doctor will be here soon.’

Myrtle was wearing her blue dress with the demure high collar and the pearl buttons, but a few of them were undone, showing her white throat. Her hair was brushed to a golden gleam, and
carefully arranged, but one girlish curl was loose at her temple. She was still pale, but powder had made the paleness even and comely. She looked dishevelled, distressed, vulnerable and very
pretty.

There was a strong smell in the room, something dark brown and spirited. Looking across at her father’s desk, Faith saw the glass sherry decanter that usually stood in the dining room. A
little sherry lurked at the bottom of a large glass. Had those been there before? Faith had not noticed them, but perhaps she had been in too much of a hurry.

Myrtle stiffened, holding up a hand to bid Faith be still.