The Lie Tree (42 page)

Plumes of grey smoke yielded to great, black billows. Beneath her, the Tree was burning.

Faith pulled her feet and ankles away from the hole, covering her mouth to shield it from the smoke. She could do nothing for Ben Crock and Agatha Lambent but fetch help. Unsteadily Faith stood
up, then nearly collapsed again as the world turned carousel, her ears roaring.

She saw the distant spire of the church, and staggered in that direction. Her feet did not seem to be her own, and she could not keep her route straight. Somehow the cliff-edge kept sidling in
on her right and surprising her. Once she caught herself irritably answering a question that nobody had asked her.

Fumes. It must be the fumes.

She glanced over her shoulder, and saw that there was still a glowering column of smoke rising from the hidden entrance. It was spreading as it rose, an unhealthy sallow smudge against the
blue.

Far closer, however, was a figure. A blackened phantasm, soot-stained and relentless, hair drifting on the breeze like a warning flag. Red burns blistered her face and showed through the charred
holes in her mermaid-green dress. Agatha was gaining fast, eyes fixed upon Faith, and only Faith.

Faith’s legs failed her, and she fell to the ground again. Beneath her, one hand scrabbled for something to throw, and closed upon a pebble. A small, perfectly round pebble.

‘Stay back!’ she called, as the figure drew ever nearer. She held up the stone, hoping that Agatha saw nothing but a round, dark shape. ‘This is a fruit – all that is
left of the Tree! Leave me alone . . . or I will throw it into the sea!’

Agatha did not slow.

‘You can still run!’ called Faith, scrabbling backwards over the turf, her hand still raised to throw. ‘Go to the port! Find a boat!’

Agatha looked directly into Faith’s eyes as she strode on. Her look of despair was as flat and empty as her gaze of joy had been.

‘Stop!’ shouted Faith. ‘I mean it!’

Agatha lunged forward, fingers curled to grab at the ‘fruit’, and Faith threw it past her, towards the cliff-drop. It was all she could think of – a distraction to give her
time to get away.

The older woman twisted round and stared after the small, round shape as it bounced and ricocheted towards the edge. She turned and chased it.

It bounced, and the sunlight gleamed on its slate-grey surface. It was a pebble, plainly no more than a pebble. It was bounding away faster than anybody could catch, and still Agatha ran.

‘Stop!’ Faith found herself shouting. ‘Stop! I lied!’

But as the pebble plummeted over the edge, Faith realized that Agatha was no longer even looking at it. Near the brink Agatha accelerated, and then spread her arms as she took her longest stride
into eternity.

Then there was nothing but the heartless blue of the sky, the smoke-scented wind and the crickets gossiping amid the dry grass.

Things might have been different if Dr Jacklers had not survived. Survive he did, however, with a very ill grace but some prospect of regaining the use of his broken leg.

He even presided over the postponed inquest of the late Reverend Erasmus Sunderly, loath to leave the task to a lesser man, and badgered the jury so severely that some of them clearly thought
that they were the ones on trial. He was kinder in speaking of Faith Sunderly, but did upbraid her for failing to share her suspicions with him earlier.

The Reverend was found to have died at the hands of persons known. Ben Crock was found in the cavern, alive but badly singed, powder damage from a pistol marring the vision in his left eye. The
‘navvies’, all men who had worked with Crock under Winterbourne, were rounded up and arrested.

The body of Agatha Lambent was found at the base of a cliff. However, her part in the skulduggery was played down. Faith knew that this delicacy was a kindness to her memory and the feelings of
her husband, who had been devastated to hear of his late wife’s crimes. At the same time, it made Faith feel uncomfortable. Agatha was disappearing. Her cunning, her villainy, her scientific
zeal, her brilliance and her obsessions were melting into air like steam. Soon she would be just another ‘beloved wife’ on a marble headstone.

Faith’s part in events would become invisible as well. If the newspapers mentioned her at all, she would be an artless young girl who had stumbled upon the truth, just as she had once
stumbled upon a valuable fossil. Perhaps they would even use the photograph of her at the age of seven, proudly gripping her find.

No trace was found of the Tree. The fire had consumed it, leaving only blackened cave walls and a singular smell. Faith mourned the loss to science, but could not be entirely sorry that it was
gone.

Evidence inconclusive,
she wrote in her notebook under her own theories and those of her father. And then:
Observations unreliable. Objectivity compromised.

On a quiet morning the Reverend’s grave was cleared and his coffin lowered into its final resting place. Watching the clods thud softly on the wood, and the turf fold over like a
counterpane, Faith felt a wound close at last.

My father will never understand or forgive me. But I can understand him, and forgive him in time. And that is probably enough.

‘There was some good in him,’ Myrtle told Faith later, during a long evening where they talked about everything, over cake that was now an extravagance. ‘You and Howard meant
something to him at least.’

‘What about you?’ asked Faith.

Myrtle shook her head. ‘I told myself that I was lucky,’ she said. ‘Your father never struck me, never drank and if he had mistresses he had the good grace to be discreet. He
provided for me and my children, and yet I tried, year after year, to make myself his companion. The doors never opened, Faith. In the end I lost hope.

‘Ah, but I cannot complain!’ Myrtle swatted away the past with one delicate little hand. ‘It has made me what I am. When every door is closed, one learns to climb through
windows. Human nature, I suppose.’

Anthony Lambent received Myrtle and Faith in his wife’s cabinet of curiosities. He was a wreckage of his erstwhile boisterous self, his gaze roaming disconsolately from
case to case.

‘She was my anchor,’ he said, ‘my port in the world’s storm. I could
sleep
knowing she was there. How will I ever sleep again?’

He looked across at Faith, and she was taken aback at seeing such a big man look so small.

‘I am the magistrate,’ he said miserably. ‘I must enforce the law, and there are laws regarding burial of suicides – you know this better than most. Miss Sunderly . . .
you saw her at the end. Did she . . . ?’ He could not finish the sentence.

Faith remembered Agatha’s bold leap into space. Then she looked into the widower’s face and decided the cosmos would forgive her one more lie.

‘She lost her footing,’ she said.

Lambent closed his eyes and let out a long breath. ‘I should not care,’ he said, ‘but . . . I would have done anything for her. These . . . all of these . . .’ He walked
around case after case. ‘The excavation was for her. All I wanted was to make her happy . . .’ Bright tears oozed out of his eyes, and his lost look reminded Faith of Howard.

Lambent’s mood whiplashed too quickly for anybody to react. He seized the nearest display case, wrenched it from the wall and flung it to the ground. It smashed, scattering glass shards,
labels and birds’ egg fragments across the floor.

He turned to the next case.

‘No!’ Faith threw herself in front of it. At that moment she would have fought to the death to defend the life’s work of her mortal enemy.

‘Please, Mr Lambent!’ Myrtle cried out at the same time. ‘If you wish these things out of your house . . . then let us take them. I am sure that, ah, Howard would greatly
appreciate them once he is older.’

On a grey morning a few days later, an innocent mailboat docked at Vane’s harbour town, unaware that it was about to take away the island’s most notorious
intruders.

Transporting the Sunderly luggage and Agatha’s sizeable natural-history collection to harbour had been a lengthy business. It might have proved impossible without unexpected assistance
from the Clays and Miss Hunter.

Faith rode to the harbour in Miss Hunter’s trap, hearing slithers from the crate in her lap. Her snake had at last shed the dry sheath of its old skin to reveal new colours, vibrant and
unabashed.

Scowls blistered from side streets and doorways, and Faith thought she recognized Jeanne amongst the scowlers. The Reverend’s family had once been a target for mockery, resentment and
suspicion. Now truths and half-truths were spreading across Vane, and hostility had given way to a fear almost superstitious. The night-clad Sunderly women were mistresses of deception and
seduction. It was dangerous to meet their eye.

Miss Hunter, on the other hand, seemed unfazed. When Faith took her courage into her hands and began a stumbled confession, the postmistress cut her short with surprising good humour.

‘We both played the gossip game.’ Miss Hunter wielded the reins with the confidence of practice. ‘After your mother upset Jane Vellet, I was angry and told everyone about that
Intelligencer
article. You spread a rumour in turn, but you were not the one that set fire to my house. A woman like me makes enemies.’

Faith wondered what ‘a woman like me’ meant. Perhaps a wilfully happy spinster with a sharp tongue and a good salary. In Faith’s eyes, Miss Hunter had always seemed icily smug
and unassailable. Now Faith saw glitters of defiance, and a tightrope beneath her feet.

Faith had always told herself that she was not like other ladies. But neither, it seemed, were other ladies.

As they passed Dr Jacklers’s house, Miss Hunter raised her hand in a salute. A hand waved curtly back from a top window.

‘Why do you tease Dr Jacklers for being short?’ It was Faith’s last chance to ask the question.

‘Ah.’ Miss Hunter gave her small, cool smirk. ‘Well, at one point he grew very impatient with my refusal to marry him, so he explained to me that women lacked the intelligence
to look after their own affairs. He tried to prove it by showing me his patients’ skull measurements. On average, male skulls
are
bigger than female skulls.

‘Unfortunately for the doctor, his records included his patients’ other measurements as well. After which I told him that I was quite convinced by his evidence, and would do my best
to marry the very tallest man I could find. You see, the taller men usually had larger skulls. And the doctor could not say that this was
not
a sign that they were cleverer than him, since
that would tear apart his claim to be cleverer than me.

‘Large people tend to have large heads. Men are no cleverer than we are, Miss Sunderly. Just taller.’

On the quay, Faith stood beside Paul Clay, watching the mailboat’s crew loading the boxes on to the boat. It was strange to be standing next to him by daylight, without
secrecy. She felt too self-conscious to look at him. The arguments had been easier, theatre-vivid, full of stage lighting and dramatic gestures. Now there was a chance that their little time would
run out without anybody speaking at all.

‘I will write to you,’ she said.

‘Why?’ Paul examined her face, apparently looking for a trap. ‘So that you can tell me that you hate me? Do you think I ever want to hear from you again?’

‘Yes,’ said Faith.

A rain shower was rehearsing. A few experimental droplets filled the silence.

‘I have a confession to make,’ said Faith.

‘Bleeding saints, is there
more
?’ Paul stared. ‘How much worse can it be?’

This was the hardest part. It was easier to be the witch, the harpy. Being human was dangerous.

‘I . . . am sometimes kind,’ admitted Faith. ‘I . . . love my little brother very much.’

There was a long pause.

‘The first time I saw a ratting,’ Paul said, without looking at her, ‘a dog lost an eye, and I was sick. I go back to prove I can without spewing.’

‘When I was seven, I found a fossil on the beach,’ Faith said quietly, ‘and my father was very proud of me. At least . . . that is what I thought had happened. But it was one
of his fake fossils – he thought it would look more convincing if an “innocent child” discovered it. He laid it down for me to find.’

Her golden moment on the beach, her great instant of connection with her father, had been a self-serving lie and fraud. Deep down, her suspicions of the truth had been growing, but only when she
found a copy of the infamous
Intelligencer
had her worst fears been confirmed. In the middle of the page there had been a picture of ‘her’ fossil, with a detailed account of
the methods used to forge it.

She bit her lip hard. ‘I . . . think perhaps I went a little mad after he died.’

‘You put your hand into a bag of rats!’ Paul pointed out. ‘You pointed a pistol at me!’

‘Looking back, that . . . does seem a little drastic, yes.’

There was another pause, during which it turned out that nobody needed to apologize.

‘I want to be a photographer,’ said Paul, ‘but not like father. I want to photograph faraway places nobody has ever seen. I want to try
new
things – find ways to
take pictures of birds in flight, and scenes at night.’

His confession was angrily earnest. Faith thought of him standing out on a cold headland for hours, minutely adjusting his camera to track a brilliant, contrary moon.

‘I want to be a natural scientist,’ confessed Faith. The words sounded fragile as soon as they were out in the air.

She glanced at Paul, but he showed no sign of laughing. Instead he was nodding quietly to himself, as if the revelation surprised him not a jot.

The deck moved under Faith’s feet as the mailboat drifted away from the shore. The people shrank, the houses withdrew into ranks. They were preparing to become
memories.

Faith felt an unexpected burst of nerves. Her weeks on Vane had been so painfully vivid that it had seemed like the only real place. Her other memories had become a faintly daubed backdrop. Now
she was going back to England, and had to face the fact that England really did exist. The scandal about her father would be coming to the boil. The family would lose friends, and their home at the
rectory. Compared to the disasters that had threatened not long ago, however, these problems now seemed like a manageable apocalypse.