The Lie Tree (28 page)

Faith was learning that you only had to provide part of a lie. You could rely on other people’s imaginations to fill the gaps.

She chewed her lip, deciding where to leave the note. It should be found, but it should not look as though it had been left to be found. Discovering it should feel like a tantalizing
accident.

Her eye fell upon the glass spill vase on her mantelpiece. Of course! There was a similar vase on every mantelpiece, filled with stick-like rolled paper spills, so that people could light them
from the fire and use them to light pipes or candles. Carefully she rolled her paper until it looked like a spill. Then she unrolled the last few inches again, so that a curl of paper was loose and
the first line of writing just visible.

She crept down to the library and placed it among the other spills in the brass vase on the mantelpiece. Anyone who found it might fancy that it had been sitting there for days and only just
begun to unravel. Faith looked at it, nestling among the other spills, and felt like an artist.

When she checked the library again a couple of hours later, the new spill was gone.

The next morning, Faith found herself stepping out of a Dr Jacklers’s carriage at the excavation site, accompanied by Uncle Miles. For once the sky was clear and the sun
bright, but Faith felt only a turbulence of nerves, gripping her sketchbook so hard that the edge dug into her fingers. She had no idea whether the doctor had persuaded everyone to accept her
presence, or whether she would find herself a bone of contention, chewed by rival dogs.

‘Perhaps we had better ask the driver to wait a few minutes, just in case,’ said Uncle Miles. Evidently he was thinking along similar lines.

Faith was relieved that the first person to approach was Ben Crock, and even more relieved to find that he had been expecting her. As before, his manner was careful and polite. He showed no
signs of ordering her off the site.

‘I am sure the gentlemen will want to greet you properly, Miss Sunderly, but they are busy setting up a photograph right now.’

As she followed the foreman and her uncle down the zigzagging path into the little gorge, Faith felt a little glad that she had not robbed Clay of all his photographic commissions.

Down by the tunnel, a gleaming, dome-headed figure immediately caught her eye. Lambent was dressed in a most peculiar array of garments. A shining white pith helmet was perched on his head. He
wore the top half of a brilliant white linen suit, but with Turkish-style purple pantaloons, gathered at the knee into high boots. He also seemed to be carrying a tropical fly-whisk, and flicking
its plume of horsehair at imaginary flies.

Faith was not sure whether he had deliberately dressed this way, or whether items of his collection had simply fallen on him.

Clay’s camera tripod stood facing the entrance of the tunnel. The cloth-draped ‘Bedouin tent’ structure had been moved, with all its genteel furniture, so that it stood
slightly to one side of the tunnel entrance. On the divan reclined a solitary figure in a dark green dress.

Dr Jacklers was kneeling in front of the tunnel entrance and shuffling this way and that on his knees in response to Clay’s instructions. When he saw Faith and Uncle Miles, however, he
leaped to his feet and came over to greet them.

‘We should find you somewhere in the shade . . .’ He looked over his shoulder at the ‘tent’. ‘Lambent – what about having Miss Sunderly sit next to your wife?
If one lady lends gentility to the picture, why not double the effect?’

Lambent stopped dead and appeared to observe Faith for the first time. His smile faded and he looked away, appearing deeply uncomfortable. Faith wondered whether he had intended to avoid
noticing her.

‘Yes,’ he said, after a pause that was slightly too long. ‘Why not?’ His pained tone told Faith everything she needed to know. She was permitted on the site, but she was
not welcome. Had the doctor made his suggestion in her absence, she suspected that Lambent would probably have given a very different answer. Instead, the magistrate had been put in a situation
where he could not refuse without being incredibly rude.

With deep misgivings, Faith walked forward to the ‘tent’. As she drew closer she could see that it was indeed Agatha Lambent seated in the shadow, dressed in a green dress and bonnet
and swaddled in scarves and lace shawls almost to suffocation. On the table beside her gleamed a silver tea set, and an unhappy glass vase of lilies that threatened to pitch over with every
gust.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Lambent,’ murmured Faith as she sat down, keeping her tone civil with some effort. She remembered the day of the funeral all too clearly.

The older woman did not look at her, but continued nursing a small glass of clear liquid in her shaky, lace-gloved hands. A caprice of the breeze left Faith downwind of Mrs Lambent for a moment,
and a strong smell seared her nostrils. Myrtle had been right, Faith realized. Mrs Lambent’s ‘medicine’ was indeed strong liquor.

‘We should be shown discovering something!’ declared Lambent, recovering his composure. ‘Where is the aurochs horn?’ The four gentlemen hastened away to the tents,
debating the matter.

Agatha Lambent stirred herself and moved forward on the divan, so that she partially emerged from the shade. Faith realized that the older woman must be doing so to make herself clearly visible
to the camera. She moved to do likewise, but was brought up short by a sharp cough from Mrs Lambent.

‘Miss Sunderly.’ Mrs Lambent spoke quietly, hardly moving her mouth. ‘If you have any sense of consideration and decency you will stay with your face in shadow. This photograph
is to be a
carte de visite
, for circulation among our acquaintance, perhaps even for publication. Your name will
not
be among those written beneath it. We cannot have the name of
Sunderly linked to this endeavour.’

Faith felt warmth stealing up from the little cauldron of anger she kept at her core.

‘I know that you did not ask to appear in this photograph,’ Agatha Lambent conceded. ‘Dr Jacklers and my husband have put us both in an impossible position. For my
husband’s part in that, I apologize.’

Faith found that she was trembling from head to foot. Suddenly meek silence was impossible.

‘If you want to apologize, Mrs Lambert,’ she said under her breath, ‘you can apologize for shutting us out of your house on the day of my father’s funeral, and forcing my mother
to walk miles in the pouring rain.’

Agatha Lambent narrowed her eyes and sniffed.

‘I see that you have your mother’s manners,’ she murmured coldly.

‘
You
cannot talk to
me
about manners,’ answered Faith, just as icily. ‘Do not worry – I shall stay in the shadows. I have no more wish to be seen with
you than you have to be seen with me.’

Before she could say anything else, the gentlemen returned. Clay positioned himself behind his camera, and Dr Jacklers and Lambent knelt before the tunnel entrance. Lambent held a curling horn,
discoloured and honey-sticky with seize and varnish. Both men stared at it with pantomimish solemnity.

‘Where shall
I
stand?’ called out Uncle Miles. There was an uncomfortable silence.

‘Erm . . .’ Dr Jacklers cleared his throat. ‘Actually, Cattistock, you would be of great service if you were to stand just
behind
the ladies’ tent, and hold the
cloth down to stop it billowing and spoiling the photograph.’

With a rather stony look on his round, pleasant face, Uncle Miles walked past, presumably to station himself behind the tent.

Clay fiddled with his camera, adjusting the accordion-like ‘bellows’ so that the front of it slid forward.

‘Hold position!’ he said, and removed the lid from the lens.

The seconds crawled by. Faith gritted her teeth. She was glad of the shadows, she told herself. She was pleased that she did not have to sit with the sun in her eyes for over a minute.

After what felt like five minutes, Clay covered the lens with the lid once more. ‘Thank you – it is quite safe to move now!’

‘Back to work, everyone!’ called out Lambent, flicking at imaginary mosquitoes with his whisk. The labourers stopped watching, and Dr Jacklers, Uncle Miles and Lambent strolled back
to the tents. Clay’s head and shoulders disappeared beneath the ‘hood’, the black cloth attached to the back of the camera. From within the camera could be heard the faint clink
of bottles.

‘Thank you, Miss Sunderly,’ murmured Agatha Lambent without looking at her.

Faith tightened her grip on her fan, hearing its sandalwood slats creak under the strain. She did not want to be thanked by this woman, particularly not in such a low, sincere tone.

‘Whether you believe it or not,’ continued the magistrate’s wife, ‘I am usually kind. However, I am a good wife first and foremost. My husband is standing for Parliament,
and his reputation must be protected at all costs.’

‘Then perhaps you should have stopped him wearing those pantaloons,’ Faith murmured, as she rose from her seat.

‘A wife cannot always rein in her husband’s impulses,’ answered Mrs Lambent gravely, ‘but she must always strive to protect him from the consequences.’

Faith walked away without looking back. She had been insulted, but at least she had not been turned off the site.

She slipped one hand into her pocket and closed it around a small, cold coin. It was a reminder that revenge was possible, even in the enemy’s camp.

The arrival of the Sunderly daughter had not gone unnoticed, and Faith could feel the weight of hard, wondering gazes. She was relieved when Crock approached her once
again.

‘Miss, I was thinking you might want to wait until the men stop for lunch before you make any sketches in the tunnel. Until then, if you would care to make some drawings of the best finds,
I could move a chair into that tent for you.’ He nodded towards the tent where Faith had seen the ancient bone needle.

‘Yes, thank you, Mr Crock!’ Even though Faith felt like an imposter, it was so refreshing to be treated like a useful member of a team, rather than some kind of strawberry ice that
needed to be kept in the shade.

She followed him as he carried a folding chair into the tent, set it up and dusted it down for her.

‘I am sorry for your loss,’ Crock added in a quiet tone.

Faith stared at him, feeling as though somebody had pulled away the ground beneath her feet. It was, she realized, a perfectly natural thing to say in the situation. However, nobody else had
said it.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘How is your family?’ he asked.

Faith thought of drenched sobbing on the highway, ransacked drawers, desperate hunts for ghost-killing guns. All the polite answers died on her tongue. She shook her head silently.

‘So . . . you needed to be out of the house for a while.’ Crock nodded slowly. ‘And coming here, you feel closer to your father.’ His gaze was very earnest and very blue.
He had outdoor eyes, Faith decided, reflecting the light of countless skies.

His compassion cut Faith to the quick, as she thought of her many ulterior motives. At the same time, she realized that he was partly right. This strange scent of dust, cloven earth and boiled
horse hoofs really did make her feel that she was breathing the air of her father’s world.

‘Mr Crock, did anybody ever find out why the mining-basket chain broke?’

‘We haven’t found the broken link yet,’ answered the foreman with a frown. ‘It must have dropped down the shaft after it snapped and fallen down a crack. When we find it,
we’ll know. Meanwhile, we’re keeping the guy ropes short, and only lowering folks one at a time.’

‘Could a thief have crept in by night and damaged it?’ asked Faith.

‘Yes, if he had cat’s feet.’ Crock nodded towards the labourers. ‘We have three navvies on the site, and they sleep here in the tents. I pity any thief who broke
their
rest.’

Faith’s curiosity was sparked by the missing link. Perhaps Crock was right and it had really fallen down a crack. She wondered, however, whether a stealthy hand had hidden it. Perhaps it
had not broken through rust or fatigue. Perhaps it had been filed through.

When the labouring men stopped for lunch, Faith was shown to the tunnel and provided with a chair, an easel and a small folding table. A lantern’s yellow light showed her
the tunnel’s timber supports and its rugged earth and rock walls.

Faith’s mouth was dry. To maintain her cover, somehow she would need to create something that could pass for a skilled drawing of rock strata. Somebody had cut grooves into the walls with
a trowel to make the strata clear for her, but she could hardly make out the difference between the layers. She could only hope that everybody else around her knew even less about section drawings
than she did.

In case anybody was watching, she made a great show of holding her pencil at arm’s length and calculating the slope of the strata, then making confident-looking dots and tiny crosses on
the paper.

At one point she was unnerved to realize that Crock was looking over her shoulder at her sketchbook, eyes bright in the lantern-light. Kind as he might be, the foreman was most likely to see
through her squiggles and dots. She risked a few faint lines, copying the slope of the trowel grooves.

There was a rustle. A few papers had been placed on the table next to her.

‘Mr Lambent’s draughtsman made a few rough sketches, before he broke his wrist,’ said Crock. ‘I thought you might have a use for them.’ He left again before Faith
could thank him.

The sketches were unfinished, but the draughtsman had managed to capture the shape of the hill. Better yet, the drawings had scribbled labels for the strata, such as ‘black cave earth,
‘flint’, ‘shale’, and so forth.

Gratefully Faith corrected her lines and labelled the layers as he had indicated. For some time she had dearly wished that the whole of Vane would sink beneath the grey and turbulent sea. Now
she admitted to herself that, should such a calamity occur, she would not be sorry if Ben Crock came upon a boat in time.