The Lie Tree (10 page)

‘Mother . . . can we go home?’ Faith scanned the crowd, seeing a few surreptitious glances but no friendly faces.

‘No!’ Myrtle pulled her cape around her. ‘After braving that dreadful coast road, I intend to see the best of this meagre little town.’

The milliners was suddenly shut as they approached. The woman at the patisserie was just French enough not to be able to understand Myrtle, but seemed to have no trouble with anybody else. The
little apothecary was so very busy that somehow he never noticed them waiting to be served.

‘
Please
can we go home?’ begged Faith under her breath. She could feel dozens of covert, derisive gazes like dull hail.

‘Faith, must you always whine so?’ hissed Myrtle, who was now pink-faced.

In that moment, Faith almost hated her mother. It was not just Myrtle’s stubborn refusal to retreat in the face of humiliation; it was the utter unfairness of her retort. Faith had spent
her life choking back protests and complaints, and was bitterly aware of all the feelings she swallowed down every day. To be accused of
whining
was so wildly unjust that it left her
feeling slightly weightless, as though she had stepped off the edge of the world.

As they walked, Myrtle’s eye brightened.

‘We shall go to the church,’ she declared. ‘I told Mr Clay that we might visit to choose a box pew.’

The dog-cart took them up the hill, and they alighted outside the little church. It proved to be empty, so Myrtle led the way to the little parsonage, a small, hunched building that was
apparently being slowly crushed by the weight of a marauding honeysuckle bush.

In the largest window a collection of little photographs had been arranged facing outwards, some of them touched with colour. It made the building look suspiciously like a shop. Faith wondered
whether Clay was using his ‘hobby’ to make a little extra money.

As they approached, Clay himself opened the door, and seemed flabbergasted to see them.

‘I . . . Mrs Sunderly – Miss Sunderly . . .’ He looked over his shoulder for a moment as if in search of reinforcements. ‘Would you . . . ah . . . like to come in?’
Faith could not help noticing that Clay looked extremely uncomfortable. ‘Ah . . . this is my son Paul.’

A boy of about fourteen stepped forward and politely took their capes and bonnets. Sure enough, it was the boy Faith had noticed with Clay at the dig. He was dark and slight of build like his
father, with a rather rubbery-looking mouth that Faith thought could become angry or sullen in the wrong circumstances.

‘Do sit down,’ said Clay. ‘Er . . . how can I help you, ladies?’

‘Well, I called to ask about renting a box pew for the family,’ declared Myrtle, ‘but . . . to be candid, Mr Clay, I am here as much in hope of seeing a friendly face as
anything else.’ There was a little break in her voice, and a poignant light in her big, blue eyes. ‘We have been ill-used all over town this morning and I . . . perhaps it is very
stupid of me, but I do not know why. Please be honest with me, Mr Clay – have I done something perfectly dreadful to offend everyone?’

Faith dug her nails into her palms. Outside, Myrtle had been an obstinate martinet, and now, in the company of a gentleman, she had suddenly become a trembling little fawn.

‘Oh, Mrs Sunderly – please do not imagine such a thing!’ Clay had melted. They always melted.

‘Is it because of that dreadful business last night with the poor boy who was hurt on our grounds?’ asked Myrtle.

‘That . . . did not help, Mrs Sunderly. However, my son Paul here tells me that the young fellow is doing better than expected.’

‘He may keep the foot,’ said Paul in an offhand tone. His wide-apart brown eyes had no smile in them. He was about the same age as the injured boy, and Faith wondered whether they
were friends.

‘However, the biggest problem . . .’ Clay faltered to a halt, and gave Faith an uncertain glance.

Myrtle read his hesitation and turned promptly to Faith. ‘Faith – perhaps you would like to look at some of Mr Clay’s photographs?’

‘Indeed!’ Clay leaped at the suggestion. ‘Paul will show you around.’

Faith let herself be led to the far end of the room by a woodenly polite Paul. On the shelves and mantelpiece clustered framed, stiffly posed pictures, most no bigger than a hand’s
palm.

‘This one is a trick photograph.’ Paul pointed out an image where two men faced each other, one seated playing a cello, and the other standing dressed as a conductor, baton raised.
At a second glance, Faith saw that the men were identical, like twins. ‘The same man was photographed twice. You cannot even see the seam where the images were joined.’

Another caught Faith’s eye. In the foreground sat a little boy about two years old, but looming behind him was a human shape shrouded in a dark cloth, so that it was almost invisible
against the dark background.

‘Sometimes the little children squirm or cry if we sit them down alone, and that blurs the picture.’ Paul pointed to the dark shape. ‘So we seat the mother behind them to
comfort them, but hide her under a cloth.’

Glancing towards the other side of the room, Faith saw Clay hand Myrtle a newspaper, and point out a particular headline. Myrtle read and read. The paper trembled in her hands.

The
Intelligencer.
In truth, Faith had already guessed what must have changed everything. The scandal surrounding her father had arrived on Vane, formally and in print.

‘Perhaps you would like to look in here.’ Paul’s voice interrupted her thoughts. He was gesturing towards a small wooden box with binocular-like eyepieces. Faith recognized it
immediately as a stereoscope, a clever device that showed each eye a slightly different photograph, so that the view seemed to be in three dimensions. Reflexively, she raised it to her eyes and
peered in.

As the picture swam into focus, she felt sheer shock, like a jolt in her chest. It was a murder scene in an alley, the culprit brandishing a blade over the prone red-daubed body of a woman.
There was a long wound visible from her solar plexus down her belly.

Faith lowered the stereoscope slowly, feeling a little shaky. Until now, the stereoscope images she had seen had been exotic landscapes, or whimsical images such as fairies pouring sweet dreams
into the heads of sleeping children. This gruesome image was not one that ought to be shown to ‘ladies’.

Paul met her eye a little too steadily and coldly. He
was
angry, Faith was sure of that now, angry with her whole family on his injured friend’s behalf. So he had decided to vent
his feelings by scaring the easiest mark – the dull, prim, shy Sunderly daughter. It was a reckless, stupid piece of malice, and he knew he would get into trouble. His eyes
dared
her
to get him into trouble.

Suddenly Faith was angry too – wildly angry with Vane, with the stupidity of the gin-trap, with her mother, with snubs and snickers and whispers and secrets and lies. What made her most
angry was knowing that if she gasped, or stormed off, or made a fuss to get Paul into trouble, then in some way he would have won. She would have proven that he was right – that she really
was just the dull, prim, shy Sunderly daughter, and nothing more.

And so she did none of these things. Instead she smiled.

‘I once helped my father with the taxidermy of an iguana,’ she said quietly. ‘We had to make a cut just like that before we pulled out the innards.’ The passing seconds
became dangerous and spacious. The rules tinkled silently as they broke.

It was hard to tell whether Paul was taken aback by her response. Certainly he did not speak for a few moments.

‘I am accustomed to handling something a mite bigger than a lizard,’ he said at last. He moved to another shelf, and Faith followed.

The first card on the shelf caught her attention. It displayed two photos, both showing the same pretty young girl, her hair carefully combed. One showed her with her eyes closed, under a label
‘Fast Asleep’. The other was marked ‘Wide Awake’, and showed her gazing out of the photograph.

‘My father paints in the eyes,’ said Paul, ‘if the family wants them to look natural.’ It took Faith a second or two to process his words and realize what she was looking
at.

The little girl in the picture was dead and had been photographed as a memento. She had been carefully positioned by her loving relatives to look as if she were just resting.

The other pictures on that shelf were of the same breed, Faith realized, now that she knew what to look for. Many of them were family groupings, where one member lolled a little more than the
rest, or had to be propped with cushions, chair backs or supporting arms.

No such photographs had been taken of Faith’s little departed brothers. They were remembered through other mementos, their baby bottles carefully preserved, or their hair sewn into
samplers. However, she had seen a memorial picture of this type once, of a woman apparently sleeping peacefully in a chair, a book on her knee.

‘I help position them,’ said Paul. ‘You have to pick the right time – when they are not too stiff.’ Again his expression was blandly courteous.
Your turn
,
said his eyes.

‘How did you position that one?’ Faith pointed to a little picture of a small boy sitting alone and unsupported in a playroom, a toy soldier in one hand.

‘That picture is different.’ Paul hesitated. ‘My father photographed that little boy . . . then cut out the head, really careful, and glued it on to an old photograph of me. He
has always taken lots of pictures of me, so that he can turn them into portraits of dead customers when he needs them.’

‘Do you have your own copies of the original photographs?’ asked Faith.

‘Of course not.’ Paul gave a short shrug. ‘Why waste albumen paper if it isn’t for a customer?’

‘How does it feel,’ whispered Faith, ‘to come back to your memories and find yourself missing and a dead person in your place? I would feel as if I were
disappearing.
I would wonder if my father wanted to remember me at all. Do you ever have nightmares where you wake up and find that there is nothing of you left, just a dead person sitting up and wearing
somebody else’s face?’

She saw Paul flinch. She had touched a nerve, and that knowledge made her fiercely happy.

In silence, Myrtle and Faith rode back to Bull Cove. As they alighted from the dog-cart, both noticed a solitary figure standing by the corner of the house, sheltered from the
wind. It was Uncle Miles, his brow creased and his pipe protectively cupped in one hand. He gestured to gain their attention, then beckoned with furtive eagerness.

‘Miles!’ exclaimed Myrtle, as she approached him. ‘I thought that you would be at the excavation by now! Did my husband leave without you?’

‘Oh no, we have been to the site already, more’s the pity.’ Uncle Miles spoke in hushed tones. ‘I thought I should try to catch you before you trotted into the house. There has
been the
deuce
of a row, and now we are all treading on eggshells.’ He raised his eyebrows in a meaningful way. ‘Certain people came back from the dig in a foul temper, and
heaven help the rest of us if we
think
too loudly.’

Faith felt her neck and shoulders tense. When her father was in his darker moods, his path needed to be smoothed with the greatest care. He was not a violent man, but if he made a decision in a
cold rage, he would keep to it ever after.

Myrtle stepped forward and took her brother’s arm.

‘Let us take a little turn in the grounds, Miles,’ she murmured.

Faith followed her uncle and mother on to the lawns, remaining just close enough to overhear and just far enough that they might assume that she could not. The trio promenaded away from the
house.

‘Myrtle, old girl,’ Uncle Miles said at last. ‘I think most people would say that I am a patient man. But today has truly tried my patience. Our dear Reverend has tried me to
the fraying point.’

‘What happened at the excavation? Why are you both back so early?’ Myrtle’s tone was a little flat, as if she already guessed at the answer.

‘No carriage came for us this morning. In the end we had to pay some fellow to give us a ride in his cart. And when we arrived, nobody would allow us on the site! After all their letters
declaring that they
must
have the great Reverend Erasmus Sunderly, they turned us away from their precious excavation! Worse, our path was blocked by a line of hired hands and the foreman,
Crock. Lambent did not even come down to talk to us.’

‘Could it have been a misunderstanding?’ asked Myrtle, without much air of hope.

‘Well, that is what I tried to suggest, but the Reverend was having none of it. At the excavation site he was given a letter, and after he read it there was no reasoning with him. He
insisted on marching up to the Paints, knocking a dent into their door and then leaving a message so curt it would not surprise me if Lambent set a lawyer on him for defamation. Myrtle, you know
that I always do my best, but every time I find some oil for troubled waters, your husband snatches it from me and uses it to burn a bridge.’

Following silently behind, Faith burned with rage at the way her father had been treated. One day a guest of honour, lionized and courted. The next day, barred from the grounds like a
disreputable tinker.

‘There are copies of the
Intelligencer
on the island,’ Myrtle murmured.

‘That explains it.’ Uncle Miles sighed. ‘Still, to pass judgement on a fellow without hearing his side of the story . . .’ He shook his head. ‘You had better tell
Erasmus about the
Intelligencer
– at the moment he has it in his head that the story got out through the servants snooping and gossiping. How many people have heard about
it?’

‘Everyone.’ Myrtle’s voice trembled slightly. ‘This morning we were snubbed all over town.’

‘It would have been a hundred times worse in Kent,’ Uncle Miles insisted, a little defensively. ‘Your husband does not see it that way, of course. I have done my best to help
your family escape your woes, Myrtle, but to hear Erasmus talk, you would think that I had lured you to this island with malicious intent.’