The Lie Tree

by Frances Hardinge

  ‘Juggler fights the Devil!’ he demanded, thumping his knees.

  The tiny green-and-yellow jester fought the red-horned devil to and fro. Today Faith let the Devil win, with much roaring, and flipped the Juggler on to his back to show he was ‘dead’. As always, this made Howard laugh, with a wildness that Faith thought owed something to terror.

  ‘Wizard fights the Devil!’

  The Devil fought the Wizard, the Knight and the Sailor, one by one, and killed them all.

  Howard laughed, too high and too loudly. His eyes were round and alarmed, fixed on the grimacing Devil.

  ‘They get up again – all get up – they kill the Devil!’

  ‘But, Howard, they are dead . . .’ Faith stopped herself. She flipped the little paper corpses neatly back on to their feet. They mobbed the Devil, who subsided howling on to his back. There was a silence.

  ‘I want the Wise Man,’ said Howard quietly, as he always did after the fight.

  The Wise Man was a Chinaman, with a limpet-shaped hat and a long moustache. His eyes were lopsided, because Faith had drawn him when she was a lot younger and less skilled with a pen, but he was Howard’s favourite.

  She shuffled him on to the stage.

  ‘Why, it is young Master Howard!’ she trilled, in a high, querulous, little-old-man voice.

  Howard laughed and hugged his knees. It was the same frightened, exhilarated laugh as when the characters ‘died’. By long tradition, the Wise Man was the only puppet clever enough to see past the stage and notice Howard watching.

  Do you have a question for me today?’ Faith asked in her Wise Man voice.

  Howard hesitated, his tongue resting against his lower lip, scratching at the sole of his shoe with one fingernail.

  ‘Yes,’ he said very quietly. ‘Is the Devil dead?’

  ‘Oh yes, quite dead,’ the Wise Man assured him.

  For most of his six years, Howard had looked to Faith to be his oracle, his almanac, his source of all truth. He had believed everything she told him. This tide was changing though. Girls don’t know about sailing, he would say suddenly. Girls don’t know about the moon. There was never any malice or spite in it; he was simply repeating some nugget he had panned from the confident river of adult conversation. There were things that girls did not know, and Faith was a girl. Each time he said such a thing it was a shock, and Faith felt her domain of expertise breaking apart like an ice floe.

  Howard still consulted the Wise Man, however, without shame. The Wise Man was not a girl, and the Wise Man knew everything.

  ‘Will the Devil come back again in the night?’ Howard’s mouth was trembling now. ‘I heard it in the dark. It went into Father’s room. I heard its teeth.’

  Faith held her breath for a moment, her skin tingling. She had thought herself unnoticed as she crept around the house in the dead of night. But Howard had heard her footsteps. He had heard her sawing through the bell rope with a sound like gnawing teeth.

  Howard talked to everybody. He had no guile. He would tell everybody about the steps he had heard, and the sound of teeth. How could she keep him quiet?

  Then again, perhaps she did not need to keep him quiet.

  ‘How did you know it was the Devil?’ asked Faith–Wise-Man. ‘Did it have strange, echoing footsteps?’

  Howard picked at his shoe sole and frowned. Then his brow cleared and he nodded.

  Did everything get colder as it passed?’ persisted Faith-Wise-Man.

  Again Howard hesitated, then gave a small shiver and nodded his head. He was not exactly play-acting, Faith knew. He now believed he had heard the spectral echo and noticed the uncanny cold.

  ‘Oh, then it was probably just a ghost!’ the Wise Man remarked cheerfully.

  Howard did not look reassured. ‘Is it . . . because . . . I trod on a grave?’

  ‘No, no – it won’t have been looking for you, Master Howard. Ghosts won’t come after a good little boy who says his prayers and copies out his scripture right-handed. They only hunt bad people.’ Faith had no desire to terrify him.

  Howard chewed on his knuckle, making his finger shiny with spit. He seemed a little comforted.

  ‘But . . . if I was . . . bad, and the ghost came back,’ persisted Howard, ‘could I shoot it?’

  Faith’s mind leaped back to the image of her father on the beach, jumping at shadows and reaching for his hidden gun. The pistol had been missing from his pocket when his body was brought back. Perhaps it had simply fallen out when he was hurled off the cliff . . . but if she found it somewhere else, perhaps that could tell her where her father had been struck down.

  Another thought slipped into Faith’s head. She imagined her father’s pistol snugly in her hand, its ivory warmed by her grasp. She could not picture her father’s murderer – in her mind the enemy was a person-shaped abyss, a roiling storm cloud crackling with malice. Faith thought of levelling the pistol to point at the dark shape’s head, and squeezing the trigger . . .

  ‘Yes, Master Howard,’ she creaked, in her Wise Man voice. ‘But you need a special ghost gun for that, just as you need an elephant gun for elephants.’ The little paper figure tottered and shuffled conspiratorially. ‘Why don’t you ask that lazy sister of yours to take you for a walk and see if you can find one?’

  Ten minutes later, when Faith led Howard downstairs in his new black outdoor clothes, she found the house quiet. Uncle Miles had departed early to visit Lambent, and Myrtle was still indisposed in her room.

  ‘Goodbye, Mrs Vellet,’ Howard called out politely as Faith led him past the drawing room. ‘I am going out to find a gun to shoot the ghost!’

  Mrs Vellet, who had been watering the flowers, flinched and spilt water over the tablecloth. Jeanne, kneeling in the hearth, dropped her dustpan with a clatter, scattering ash.

  Howard!’ protested Faith, casting the housekeeper an embarrassed, apologetic look. ‘I am so sorry, Mrs Vellet,’ she added in a loud whisper. ‘I do not know where Howard gets these ideas.’

  ‘But there is a ghost!’ declared Howard, with bell-like clarity. ‘I heard it walking around last night—’

  ‘Why don’t we go out for a nice walk?’ Faith interrupted quickly, taking Howard’s hand and guiding him out through the front door. She managed not to smirk as feverish whispers broke out behind them.

  She knew that if you wanted somebody to believe something, there was no point forcing it down their throat. Far better to give them a hint, a glimpse, a taste, then snatch it away from them. The faster you ran, the more they would give chase, and the more likely to believe the hard-won information when they caught it.

  ‘Let us go down and search on the beach, shall we?’

  As they walked along the path, Faith kept an eye out for any glint of metal or ivory among the long grass, just in case the pistol had fallen out of her father’s pocket while he was being carried back to the house. She saw nothing but the wavering grass and the purple-headed nodding of thistles.

  On the beach, Howard scrambled over shingle and boulders, rivalling the gulls with his whoops. He was not exactly an image of mourning, but Faith thought that she understood. He was tumbling through feelings that he did not understand, and only knew that he wanted to run and scream.

  Faith searched among the boulders, at first directly beneath the crooked tree where her father had lain, then in wider circles, prying into crevices, combing the pebbles with her fingers. The pistol could only have bounced so far.

  ‘I cannot find it!’ called Howard.

  ‘No,’ said Faith thoughtfully. ‘I do not think it is here.’

  If her father had not lost his pistol in his fall, then where? Perhaps when he was attacked? The true scene of the crime had to be close by. Even with a wheelbarrow, transporting a body could only be difficult and tiring.

  They walked back towards the house, and Faith took a detour into the wooded dell. Now and then unseen birds broke the uneasy peace with a stutter of wings, or called their cut-glass questions to the
grey sky. Ferns stroked gently at Faith’s skirts.

  After ten minutes of searching, Faith gave up. A dozen pistols might be nestling among the undergrowth and she would never find them.

  Just as they were leaving, they chanced upon a clearing where emerald-green moss was thick as fur. Howard was fascinated, and began jabbing his heel into it, laughing as it broke away in chunks and revealed the black earth.

  ‘Faith, look!’ he shouted, as his heel mashed and tore the green. ‘Stamp!’

  Something caught Faith’s eye, a narrow strip of darkness against the green. She walked over and stooped to peer.

  ‘Faith!’ called Howard from a little distance. ‘Faith, look! Look at this!’ The little impacts of his heels thudded and squeaked, growing closer and closer. ‘You’re not looking, Faith! Faith!’

  The dark strip was not a shadow. It was an indentation. Faith reached out, and her gloved finger traced a narrow groove.

  ‘Stamp!’ Howard’s small heel stamped on to the mark, obliterating it and nearly catching her fingers.

  ‘Howard!’ Faith jumped to her feet. Howard beamed up at her, and for a moment she wanted to slap his proud little face.

  Seeing her expression, Howard’s smile wavered, then wilted into a downturned pout.

  ‘I was talking to you!’ he retorted. ‘You didn’t look when I told you to!’

  Faith turned away, biting her lip hard and fighting to compose herself. The damage had been done, and done innocently enough.

  ‘Never mind,’ she forced herself to say. ‘It does not matter.’ They walked out of the dell, Howard lashing at ferns with a stick and Faith fighting back her frustration.

  It had been there; she had seen it! A narrow rut, just wide enough to have been made by a barrow wheel. And now it was gone.

  Faith’s mother had been right after all. The Reverend Erasmus Sunderly really had met his fate in the dell.

  When they returned to the house, Jeanne was ready to claim Faith’s bonnet and cape.

  ‘Faith, I want to search for the ghost!’ declared Howard.

  ‘Oh, Master Howard, you will wear out Miss Faith!’ exclaimed Jeanne. ‘Miss – you do look tired, and you are not yet recovered. Why not let me look after Master Howard for a while?’ In spite of the polite words, her tone was briskly insistent and she had already taken Howard’s hand. Jeanne was overstepping her place, and clearly knew it, but she had the hard-eyed confidence of a strong personality confronting a weaker one.

  And Faith played her part. She looked confused and distressed, but too shy to object as Jeanne led Howard away.

  ‘Now, tell me about your ghost!’ she heard the housemaid whisper as they turned the corner.

  Faith tried to control her expression. She had filled Howard with her lies like a tiny Trojan Horse, and now he was being wheeled into the enemy camp.

  At one in the afternoon, a tinker stopped his cart at the back of the house. He seemed well-known to Prythe and Jeanne, who came out to chat to him.

  Crouched in her rooftop-garden eyrie, Faith watched them unseen through the creeper-draped railings.

  ‘Don’t worry about old Vellet,’ Jeanne was saying. ‘She won’t be back from her afternoon walk for a bit. Same thing each day. She says she’s inspecting the grounds to see that all is well. I think she goes somewhere quiet and smokes a pipe.’ There was a ripple of laughter.

  ‘So . . . the cord just broke?’

  ‘Mrs Vellet says it’s rats in the joists, nibbling the wires,’ said Prythe. ‘Well, that was a good, strong pull for a rat. If it gets much bigger, we can fasten a cart to it.’

  ‘That’s not all.’ Jeanne was warming to her theme. ‘You can smell him in the house, like he’s just brushed past you. The house is cold as a tomb. And sometimes things are moved about, aren’t they?’

  ‘There’s a pot missing from the glasshouse,’ agreed Prythe.

  Faith was learning something interesting about ghosts. They were like snowballs – once you set them rolling their legend grew without your help.

  ‘No surprise, I say.’ Jeanne gave the upper windows of the house a wary glance. ‘He murdered himself, poor damned thing. No wonder he can’t rest, with a mortal sin on his soul.’

  The tinker said something else, of which Faith only caught the words ‘in her scarecrow coat’. He nudged Jeanne, who laughed so loudly she had to cover her mouth.

  Faith withdrew into the house once more, seething with vengeful thoughts. For the moment, none of the servants was in the house. She might never have another opportunity like this.

  In the library, she plundered the crates of her father’s stuffed exhibits. The black vulture, glistening raven and screaming parrot she lined up on the desk, so that anybody entering would be confronted by three gaping, black-tongued beaks and six cold glass eyes.

  Most of the clocks had been set in motion again. She halted each one as she passed. The dead man had left the house but had not gone to his rest. Nobody had the right to feel safe, or to let life restart.

  On the dining-room mantel she left a stuffed lizard, tucked behind a candlestick and nestled amid the billows of crêpe.

  When she reached the door to the servants’ stairs, she hesitated. Each time she trespassed, there was a moment where the seal broke, the threshold was crossed. This felt like something more, however. She was stepping into a forbidden world, one that she usually had to pretend did not exist.

  Faith opened the door. The stairs beyond were far plainer, narrower and steeper than the main ones, and were lit only by little windows. There were no banisters. She climbed as quickly as she dared, knowing that at any moment the servants might return inside.

  At the top, the stair opened into a long, dim room with a high wall on the right-hand side and a sloping ceiling that came down to a few feet above the floor on the left. Evidently the attic had been divided into two rooms. Through a door on the right, Faith could look into the other room, which contained a small four-poster, a green rug and a pretty but battered little dresser. Faith guessed that it must be the housekeeper’s room.

  Near the entrance to the nearest room was a simple bed. There were two heavy boots beneath it, and Faith guessed that it must belong to Prythe. Beyond it a thick curtain cut off her view of the rest of the room, acting as a decorous makeshift wall. Faith advanced into the room and pulled back the curtain. Behind it lay another simple bed, which could only belong to Jeanne.

  There was something in the plainness that shocked Faith. She stepped towards Jeanne’s bed, seeing the little treasures tucked in the box beneath it and scattered on the nearby shelf. A wooden comb, a darning egg, a couple of coils of ribbon and a muslin bag with ‘JB’ embroidered on to it. She touched the bag, and it made her feel like a thief in a way that handling velvet or satin never had.

  Faith was prepared to be cruel. However, she had not expected to feel mean.

  Then she remembered Jeanne smirking as Faith’s father was denied a grave, and laughing at Myrtle’s humiliation and misery. Out of her pocket Faith drew an object that she had taken from one of her father’s trunks. It was parchment-yellow, smooth and cool. It clicked like knitting needles as she turned it over.

  Faith carefully slid the cat skull into Jeanne’s bed, then patted the blanket back into place. As she crept back down the stairs she kept thinking of it, staring empty-eyed into darkness in its little cloth cave.

  CHAPTER 18:

  A SIBLING QUARREL

  By the time Uncle Miles returned from his visit to the magistrate’s house it was three o’clock, and Myrtle agreed to receive him in her bedroom. Wrapped up and propped on cushions, she was still looking unusually waxen-cheeked, and red around the eyes and nose. She was, however, well enough to maintain a shell of her usual manner and insist on Faith’s presence.

  When Uncle Miles entered, Myrtle sat up.

  ‘Well?’ she demanded. ‘Did you speak to the magistrate? What did he say?’

  Uncle Miles glanced over his shoulder, then very ca
refully closed the door behind him. He sat down in an armchair and let out a long breath.

  ‘He was very pleasant.’ Uncle Miles frowned at his gloves as he pulled them off. ‘He was very polite. And I fear he was quite adamant that there must be an inquest. If members of the public are asking for one—’

  ‘Pish-tosh!’ exclaimed Myrtle. ‘He is the magistrate! It is his choice!’

  ‘What does an inquest mean?’ asked Faith, bubbles of apprehension rising within her. ‘What will happen?’

  ‘I am very sorry,’ Uncle Miles explained, ‘but it means that your father cannot be buried yet. I fear we cannot even take him elsewhere to be buried until this has been settled. There has to be an investigation, and then . . . a hearing. A little trial to decide the cause of death.’

  Faith was torn. On the one hand, she wanted her father’s death to be investigated, so that his murderer could be caught. On the other, everyone on Vane seemed convinced that he had killed himself. Once it was clear that the Reverend really had been found dangling from the cliff tree, they would probably take that as proof of his suicide.

  ‘When?’ Faith asked. ‘When is this trial?’ Her only hope was to find enough evidence of his murder before the ‘hearing’.

  ‘They have not set the date yet, but it could happen any day.’ Uncle Miles looked extremely uncomfortable. ‘My dears, it is all very legal and complicated, and there is no point distressing yourselves over the details—’

  ‘Please, Uncle Miles!’ Faith interrupted. ‘I do want to know the details!’

  Uncle Miles looked surprised at her outburst, but gave a small shrug of surrender. ‘Sometimes when there is a sudden death . . . and things do not look quite natural . . . the magistrate gives the parish constable permission to summon a coroner, who investigates. At the inquest the coroner decides upon the cause of death, with the help of a jury of twenty-three local men. In this case, the coroner will be Dr Jacklers.’

  ‘So Dr Jacklers will be investigating, and will be the final judge,’ said Myrtle, her eyes narrowed. ‘Do you know, Miles, I believe I am really quite ill. I shall need to send for the doctor tomorrow – when I am looking a little better.’