The Lie Tree (3 page)

‘Miss Sunderly?’ Clay was clearly surprised to see Faith climbing out of the carriage, her boots splashing down into a waiting puddle.

‘I have an umbrella,’ she said quickly, ‘and I was hoping for some fresh air.’ The little lie left her with a scrap of dignity.

The driver examined the level of his vehicle again and this time nodded. As the carriage rattled away, Faith avoided her companions’ eyes, her cheeks hot with humiliation despite the chill
wind. She had always known that she was rated less than Howard, the treasured son. Now, however, she knew that she was ranked somewhere below ‘miscellaneous cuttings’.

The cabin was set into the hillside facing out to sea, and was rough-hewn from the dark, glossy local rock, with a slanting slate roof and small, glassless windows. The floor
inside was scattered with earth-coloured puddles. Overhead, the rain’s drumroll was slowing.

Uncle Miles and Clay dragged in the family’s trunks and boxes one by one, while Faith shook out her dripping bonnet, feeling numb and useless. Only when her father’s strongbox landed
with a thump at her feet did Faith’s heart skip. The key had been left in the lock.

The box contained all her father’s private papers. His journals, his research notes and his correspondence. Perhaps it held some clue to the mysterious scandal that had driven them
here.

She cleared her throat.

‘Uncle – Mr Clay – my . . . my kerchief and clothing are very wet. Could I have a little while to . . .’ She trailed off, gesturing towards her sodden collar.

‘Ah – of course!’ Clay looked a little alarmed, as gentlemen often did when something mysterious involving female clothing was in danger of happening.

‘It looks as if the rain is letting up again,’ observed Uncle Miles. ‘Mr Clay, shall we take a little turn on the cliff, so that you can tell me more about the
excavation?’ The two men stepped outside, and after a while their voices receded.

Faith dropped to her knees next to the strongbox. Its leather was slick under her fingers, and she considered peeling off her wet, skintight kid gloves, but she knew that would take too long.
The buckles were stiff, but yielded to her hasty tugging. The key turned. The lid opened, and she saw creamy papers covered in various different hands. Faith was no longer cold. Her face burned and
her hands tingled.

She began opening letters, teasing them out of their envelopes and holding them by their edges so as not to smudge or crumple them. Communications from scientific journals. Letters from the
publisher of his pamphlets. Invitations from museums.

It was a slow, painstaking task, and she lost track of time. At last she came upon a letter whose wording seized her attention.

‘. . . challenging the authenticity of not one but all the fossils which you have brought to the eye of the scientific community and upon which your reputation is based. They claim that
they are at best deliberately altered, and at worst out-and-out fakes. The New Falton find, they say, is two fossils artfully combined, and report traces of glue in the wing joints . . .’

A knock sounded at the door, and Faith jumped.

‘Faith!’ It was her uncle’s voice. ‘The carriage has returned!’

‘One moment!’ she called back, hastily folding the letter.

As she did so, she realized that there was a large, blue stain on her wet, white gloves. With horror she realized that she had smudged the letter, leaving a thumb-shaped smear.

As the carriage rattled along the high route, Faith kept her hands tightly balled to hide the mark on her glove. She was sick with self-hate. If her father looked through his
letters, he would spot the evidence of her crime instantly. Who else had been alone with the strongbox? He would soon deduce that she must be responsible.

She would be caught. She
deserved
to be caught. What was wrong with her?

And yet all the while her mind gnawed at the wording of the letter, simmering with outrage on her father’s behalf. How could anybody believe that any of his finds were fakes, let alone his
famous New Falton fossil?

Everybody had agreed that it was real. Everybody. So many other gentlemen experts had examined it, prodded it, exulted over it, written about it. One journal had named it ‘The New Falton
Nephilim’, though her father never called it that, and declared it ‘the find of the decade’. How could they all be wrong?

He must have enemies. Somebody must be trying to destroy Father.

Dusk was settling as they crested the hill, then zigzagged down a rough and winding road. At last the carriage slowed, and Faith made out the yellow glow from an open doorway.

It was an old farmhouse, slate-roofed and built of jagged brown stone that looked like shattered caramel. On the other side of the cobbled courtyard stood a stables and barn. Behind them rose a
domed glasshouse, its panes milky in the half-light. Beyond lay a lawn, then the edge of a dark, ragged copse, and a dim outline that might have been another building.

The carriage splashed its way through the puddles and came to a halt. Clay leaped out and handed Faith out of the carriage while Uncle Miles tipped the driver.

‘Good evening!’ The curate gave Faith and Uncle Miles a hasty bow. ‘I shall not keep you in the rain!’

A manservant ran out and started unloading the luggage. Under the cover of the umbrella, Uncle Miles and Faith ran to the open door. A gaunt, middle-aged woman stood aside to let them enter.

‘Mr Miles Cattistock and Miss Sunderly? I am Jane Vellet – the housekeeper.’ She had a deep, mannish voice, and small, shrewd, unforgiving eyes. Her dress was striped in shades
of dark green and buttoned high at the throat.

The hall was darker than expected, the only light coming from two lanterns perched on sills. There were black timber beams in the ceiling. Faith could taste paraffin on the air, and a host of
other smells that told her the house was old, and had settled into its own way of being, and was not her home.

Soon Faith was sitting in front of a blazing hearth next to Uncle Miles and Myrtle, with a bowl of hot soup in her hands. If Myrtle felt any remorse at having left her daughter by the roadside,
she hid it well. She was pink and purposeful, and had apparently reconnoitred the family’s new abode and found it grievously wanting.

‘They have
no gas at all
,’ she informed Faith, in a stage whisper. ‘They say that there is some to be had in the town, but out here we shall be surviving on lamps and
dips. There is
no cook
, only a housekeeper, a housemaid and a manservant. They all worked for the last tenants – two old invalid ladies – and were kept on. Apparently the
housekeeper and maid “managed” the cooking between them. But how shall they manage for a family of five? And there is no nurse for Howard – you must take care of him, Faith, until
we can find someone.’

‘Where is Father?’ asked Faith when her mother paused for breath.

‘He went out to find a home for a botanic specimen as soon as he arrived,’ Myrtle answered wearily. ‘Apparently the glasshouse will not suffice. Instead he has been out in the
folly for an age, fussing over his plant.’

‘The folly?’

‘An old tower, apparently.’ Myrtle cleared her throat as the housekeeper passed through the room. ‘Mrs Vellet, what
is
the folly?’

‘It was intended to be a spotting tower, madam,’ Mrs Vellet answered promptly, ‘looking for Napoleon’s ships. They never built forts here on Vane the way they did on
Alderney. The gentleman who owned the house back then decided he should build his own defences, like a good Englishman.’

‘Was it of any use?’ asked Myrtle.

‘He ran out of money before it was finished, madam, and then the war ended,’ answered Mrs Vellet. ‘It was used as an apple store for a while . . . but it leaked.’

‘Peculiar place to put a plant,’ mused Myrtle. She sighed. ‘In any case, nobody is permitted to interrupt him or go anywhere near the folly. Apparently the plant is frightfully
delicate and exotic, and an untrained gaze will cause all its leaves to fall off, or something of the sort.’

Faith wondered whether her father had retreated into the forsaken tower because it was the only place he could be alone. Her heart ached. She knew some great animals retreated from their pack
when they were wounded.

Even Myrtle’s ever-ready conversation was waning. A long journey leaves one depleted, like a paintbrush that has been drawn across a broad stretch of canvas. When it was noticed that
Faith’s head was drooping, she was told to go to bed.

‘You have the smallest room, darling,’ Myrtle told her, ‘but there was no help for it. You do not mind, do you?’

Mrs Vellet took up a candle and offered to show her to her room. As they passed through the hall, Faith glanced through a door and saw that a small parlour had been conquered by her
father’s menagerie. The lizards stared through the glass. The elderly wombat snuffled and twitched in its sleep, which was virtually all it did these days. Faith frowned as she realized that
she could not see the snake.

There was a stack of the family’s trunks and boxes against one wall of the hall. With disbelief, she recognized the snake crate near the bottom of the stack. It had been abandoned in the
cold hall as if it were just a hatbox.

Faith ran over and crouched beside it, pressing her ear against it. She could hear nothing from within.

‘Mrs Vellet – could you please have this box brought up to my room?’

Faith’s room turned out to be tiny, less than half the size of her bedroom at home. The vigorous fire in the hearth cast light on a hand washstand with a chipped marble top, an elderly
dresser and a four-poster with curtains that had probably known another monarch. In the shadows beyond the dresser she could just make out another door, with great bolts on it.

‘Would you like a posset brought up before you sleep?’ asked the housekeeper.

‘Do you have any dead mice?’ As soon as the words were out of Faith’s mouth, she became aware that this was perhaps not the best response. ‘My father has a Mandarin
trinket snake!’ she explained hastily, and watched Mrs Vellet’s eyebrows rise another fraction of an inch. ‘Meat . . . tiny scraps of fresh meat will do,’ she stammered,
suspecting that she was not making the best first impression. ‘And some rags. And . . . a posset would be most agreeable, thank you.’

Only when she was alone in the room did she open the crate and lift out the cage within. The trinket snake was a disconsolate figure eight in the bottom, sleek black except for the flares of
gold and white. The patterning always made Faith think of a candlelight procession through an ink-black wood. Back at the rectory she had spent a lot of time with her father’s little
menagerie, and even taken on their care during his absences, but the snake had always been her favourite. He had brought it back from China eight years before.

When Faith reached in and stroked its back, she was relieved to see it flinch a little. It was alive at least. She placed the cage on the dresser, away from the chill draught of the window, but
not too close to the fire either. It was a cool-weather snake, and too much heat would kill it as surely as too little.

Mrs Vellet returned, and handed over a bundle of dry rags and a bowl of beef scraps, before departing once more. Faith pushed the rags into the cage to serve as a nest, and filled the
snake’s water bowl from the jug by her bed. The snake ignored the meat, but basked and bathed in the water.

Only when Faith was sure that the snake was not about to slither through death’s door did she remember the ink stain on her glove. She tried to wash it out using the cold water in the ewer
by her bed, but in vain. In the end she hid the gloves under the mattress.

Faith’s clothes were tyrants. She could not step across a dusty road, brave the rain, sit in a wicker chair or lean against a whitewashed wall without something becoming damaged, gathering
dirt, wearing smooth or losing its stiffening. Her garments were always one misstep away from becoming a source of guilt.
Eliza had to spend hours brushing the mud out of your hem . .
.

Worse, they were traitors. If she slipped outside in secret, or hid in a cupboard, or leaned against a dusty door to listen, her clothes would tell tales on her. Even if her family did not
notice, the servants would.

Faith retired, but found it hard to sleep. Strands of horsehair poked through the mattress cover and sheet. The bed curtains did not close properly and let in a clammy draught. The long day had
printed itself on her brain, and when she closed her eyes she saw grey skies and dark, turbulent waves.

The wind rattled the shutters and bolted door, and sometimes behind its moan she heard a distant, roaring boom, like a sound from an animal throat. She knew that it must be a trick of the wind,
but her imagination painted some great black beast out on the headlands, baying amid the storm.

She wondered whether her father was still self-exiled in the folly. Faith sometimes felt that there was a connection between them, like a hidden root linking a mangrove tree to its little
sprouting ‘children’. For a moment she tried to imagine the link, and told herself that perhaps, somehow, he would be able to sense her feelings if she felt them hard enough.

I believe in you
, she told him in her head.
Whatever anybody else says, I believe in you.

Faith was jolted awake by the pounding of rapid footsteps against wood. She opened her eyes and as she took in the unfamiliar canopy above, her memories flooded back.

She pushed open her bed curtains, half expecting to see somebody running around her room. The footsteps had sounded so close, mere yards from her head. There was nobody there, of course, but as
she listened she heard them again, and this time understood the rhythmic creak. It was the sound of somebody running up or down stairs.

The servants’ stairs! Her room must be close to them, so close that she could hear them through the wall. Faith rose and stalked around the room, pressing her ear to the walls, and felt a
frisson of triumph when she found the place where the sounds were clearest. She could even make out the distant murmur of conversation.