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.
CHAPTER 12:
TIME STOPS
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.
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.
‘That is Dr Jacklers! I hear his carriage.’
Myrtle pulled her cut-glass bottle of smelling salts out of her reticule. She uncorked it, and raised it to her nose, flinching away a moment later with a wince and gasp. After she had done this a second time, her eyes were swimming. She put away the bottle and blinked rapidly. By the time Dr Jacklers was shown into the room, a tear was tracing a gleaming path down Myrtle’s cheek.
For a long time, Dr Jacklers looked at the patient. Myrtle hovered nearby, twisting her hands and answering his questions, while silver tears slid hypnotically down her face.
Faith sat nearby, her thoughts churning. Her father on the beach, her father in the dell. Why was her mother so determined to lie?
‘I am so very sorry, Mrs Sunderly,’ the doctor said at last. ‘I cannot advise you to hope. His neck is broken . . .’
Myrtle gave a small, vulnerable noise, somewhere between a gasp and a sob. She turned away and bowed her face over her handkerchief.
‘I wish we had never come here!’ she said, her voice a little muffled. ‘Those trespassers . . . he was convinced they would steal his rare botanic specimens. So he set gin-traps, and kept rushing to that dreadful dell every time he heard a noise out there. I suppose he must have fallen in the dark and struck his head against something . . .’
‘Your husband was found in the dell?’ The doctor’s eyebrows rose. ‘Madam, I must confess that surprises me, given the nature of his injuries. I am loath to grieve you with such details—’
‘Please.’ Myrtle turned back to face him, her mouth tremulously resolute. ‘Do not spare me. I must know.’
‘Well . . . I fancy two ribs are cracked, suggesting a longer fall than you could suffer in that dell. The wound on his forehead is deep, but there is another great bump to the back of his head, under the hair. To me that looks like a longer tumble, with some rolling. Mrs Sunderly – there is no delicate way to ask this – is it possible that he was found somewhere else, and that your friends have misled you in order to spare your feelings?’
‘My husband is dead,’ Myrtle said softly. ‘What feelings do I have left to spare?’
Faith felt the colour rise to her face. She could brush away her mother’s lie like a cobweb. But how many of her own strands of untruth would she destroy with the same gesture? Besides, her last experiment with truthfulness had burned her to the core.
‘Well,’ the doctor said under his breath, ‘perhaps the drop was high enough . . . if he managed to pitch forward with some force.’ He sighed. ‘Pardon the question, but did your husband appear preoccupied yesterday? Out of spirits?’
Myrtle stiffened, her face pale and pained.
‘Dr Jacklers,’ she said with fragile hauteur, ‘what in the world are you trying to say?’
Faith knew exactly what the doctor was trying to say. In a flash, she realized how this must look to him. The disgraced man creeping out of his house by night to plummet to his death, rather than face a terrible scandal . . .
‘Forgive my clumsiness.’ The doctor looked mortified and out of countenance. ‘I am simply trying to understand . . .’
‘Perhaps,’ Myrtle said with dignity, ‘this is a matter we should discuss in private.’ She turned to her daughter. ‘Faith, will you please go to Mrs Vellet . . . and have her stop the clocks.’
Faith took her cue and left the room, feigning a few receding steps. Then she stooped and put her ear to the keyhole.
‘. . . a whole decanter before bed?’ Dr Jacklers was asking. ‘Was this usual?’
‘Of late it has become so.’ A sigh. ‘It is not the first time he has suffered a fall. It is just the first we were not able to conceal.’
Faith smothered a gasp of pained indignation. How dare her mother say that? How dare she paint the Reverend as a blundering drunkard, tripping over his own feet? Then Faith remembered her father sitting torpid and yellow-eyed, his room filled with the exotic, clammy scent. What if her father really did have yet more secrets?
‘Dr Jacklers, I do not know what to do.’ Myrtle’s voice was low and tearful. ‘I am so used to hiding my husband’s . . . habits . . . and I would wish to hide them still, to protect his memory. But now you have made me frightened. Did you really think my husband had “pitched himself forward with force”? Will everyone else think that too?’
‘Mrs Sunderly . . .’ The doctor stopped abruptly, with a slight gasp. There was a short silence.
Faith took her ear from the keyhole and peered through instead.
Her mother was standing very close to the doctor. Her ungloved hands were wrapped beseechingly around his, a strange, shocking intimacy. The doctor’s face was brick red.
‘I have children,’ Myrtle said. ‘I am desperate. Please, tell m
e what to do.’
‘I . . .’ The doctor coughed and dropped his gaze. ‘You have my word that I will do everything in my power to . . . to spare you and your family trouble. My solemn promise. The injuries . . . there are ways that, ah, things can be phrased. Please, please do not distress yourself, Mrs Sunderly.’
He did not, Faith noticed, make any attempt to pull his hands away.
Faith drew back from the keyhole, her face burning. She could not bear to see or hear anything more. A warm, slow anger was filling her bones like thunder, and it had nowhere to go.
Instead, she tiptoed down the hall to the corner, where the grandfather clock swung its pendulum for each monotonous click. It mocked her, pretended that time still mattered, that there was still a day to be told out, that the world was still turning.
The glass front was cold against her skin as she opened it. The pendulum slowed to her touch. The clock’s hands twitched under her fingers, so she gripped them until the ticking stopped. Her mind calmed as she imagined the earth giving up its giddy spin and drifting untethered through the void.
Faith stood there for a long time with her fingers on the motionless hands. She felt like the murderess of time.
CHAPTER 13:
FALSE PICTURE
It was a house of the dead now. All the curtains were drawn. Dark cloth was draped over every mirror, like a dull lid drooped over every eye.
The air was heavy, so heavy that Faith thought the whole house might sink into the ground. Voices were hushed, fragile and moth-like. Footsteps were trespassers.
And yet all afternoon people came to visit, on foot and on horseback, even to the despised Sunderly household. For there was death in the house, and death was a business.
One cart rolled in heaped with bundles of cut flowers. A jobmaster dropped by to show off a little black coach and two dark horses. Mrs Vellet was sent out to town, and returned with a dressmaker and trunks bulging with black cloth.
The Lie Tree Page 11