The Lie Tree

by Frances Hardinge

‘At night?’ interrupted Faith. ‘Nobody can do that!’

  ‘I was taking a picture of the moon!’ Paul blurted out. ‘I heard it could be done – pictures clear enough that you can see the shadows and the peaks. Whenever there is a full moon and a clear night . . . I go out and try my luck.’ He looked angry, and Faith realized that he was embarrassed.

  ‘When I saw the boat, I guessed it was you. After my friends told me you “vanished” on the headland last night, I thought maybe you had dropped down into one of the caves. When I saw you disappear into the cliff, I knew which one.’

  Faith chewed hard at her lip. Curiously enough, Paul’s self-consciousness convinced more than his camera.

  ‘So that is how you found me,’ she said more quietly. ‘But why? Why did you follow me down into the cave?’

  Why did you have to come down and see all of this? How can I possibly let you leave now?

  ‘I was curious,’ Paul answered promptly. There was a long pause, during which he lowered his gaze and frowned slightly to himself. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I . . . I don’t know why I climbed down a hole after a crazy woman. It makes no sense. Every time I talk to you, you make me crazy too.

  ‘Everything has gone mad since you and your family came here. Vane never had riots, or people setting fire to houses! And right in the heart of it all, there is you, coming to me for no good reason with your wild tales of murders and wheelbarrows and mining baskets . . . and I can’t help listening. You’re ripe for Bedlam, but somehow I keep believing what you say.’

  ‘I don’t want your trust!’ The darkness settled on Faith again. ‘You do not know me! I am . . . I am poison. Every lie on Vane is my doing.’

  ‘Have you lied to me?’

  Faith realized that she had not. She swallowed and said nothing.

  ‘So your father was murdered,’ Paul said bluntly. ‘And no photograph will make you feel better. And if you never find the killer, there will be a ghost in your head forever. I know how that feels. My mother drowned – no body, no burial, no stone in the churchyard. The only picture of her we have is a hidden-mother photograph. You saw it. It’s the one on our shelf. The little boy in that picture is me. My father – he is good to me, but he smiles at me as if I’m a photograph of her. Sometimes I have the feeling he is waiting for me to leave the room so he can go on talking to her in his mind.’

  Faith flinched. She felt as though tentacles of sympathy were reaching out for her. She wanted to throw them off, shoot them, burn them away.

  ‘Do you want me to weep for you?’ she asked, as coldly as she could.

  ‘I want you to make up your mind!’ erupted Paul. ‘You want my help, you want me to die in a ditch, you tell me secrets, you hide things, you seek me out, you run away, you ask favours, you point a pistol at my head . . .’ He shook his head incredulously. ‘Choose! Trust me or not, but choose! Once and for all!’

  Shoot him. It was a consensus murmur among the floating voices. Paul knew too much. Paul wanted too much. Paul bored his way inside her head and stopped her thinking straight.

  Lowering the pistol pained Faith. As she returned its hammer to the safety notch, she thought she heard the Tree hiss and felt as though she was betraying her father and his secrets. Paul released his breath and let his shoulders slump a little.

  ‘Well . . . it is too late to stop you seeing the Tree,’ Faith said, trying not to sound too shaky. ‘Right now I suppose I must trust you or shoot you – and it would be annoying to have to reload the pistol.’ She had an uncomfortable feeling that this still sounded like an apology.

  Paul advanced a few wary steps.

  ‘I thought you were leaving,’ said Faith tersely.

  ‘I will if you will.’ Paul looked around, and batted vines out of his face with a suspicious air. ‘This is not a good place. Nothing grows this fast. Nothing that was in a box two weeks ago should be this big. And I keep hearing . . .’ He trailed off and shook his head. ‘There is something very wrong with this plant.’

  ‘I don’t fully understand it myself yet,’ admitted Faith, feeling defensive in turn. ‘I can see where it gets its moisture, and maybe it takes minerals and nutrients from the cave rock, but its energy . . .’ She shrugged. ‘It may be carnivorous.’

  ‘Does it eat people?’ Paul did not look reassured.

  Not exactly.’ Faith reached out, stroking the nearest vine. She felt jealously possessive of her Tree, her father’s secrets. But somehow she had done something irrevocable in lowering her pistol. She had agreed to trust, and torn a big, ugly gash in her own armour.

  ‘It feeds on human lies,’ she said. ‘Human lies that are believed. It’s a symbiote – a species that survives by cooperating with another species. Humans feed it lies, and in return it bears fruit that give visions of secret truths. At least that was what my father believed.’

  ‘Was he right?’ Paul asked bluntly.

  Of course he was right! Faith wanted to shout. My father was a genius, of course he knew what he was doing, of course he would not have destroyed his career and his family’s fortunes for no good reason! Instead she found herself picking over the evidence with a cold, analytical brain. Could the swelling of the fruit be coincidence? What had she really learned from the visions?

  ‘I still cannot be certain,’ she confessed, reluctantly. ‘The fruit seems to open up an extra sight, and show me things I did not know . . . but I cannot tell yet how true they are.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘I will know better if we find the murderer.’

  ‘You have eaten fruit from this thing?’ This seemed to horrify Paul more than the pistol.

  ‘Yes, and I am here to do so again.’ Faith glared at him. ‘I must! If you do not like it, you can leave. Otherwise, you can make yourself useful. The fruit will put me in a trance. I tried tying myself up so I could not wander, but . . . that . . . was not entirely successful. It would help to have somebody watching over. You can make observations at the same time.’

  Paul approached, glancing at the rope looped over her shoulder. He looked less than happy at the suggestion.

  ‘Five minutes ago you would not trust me to move a step. Now you trust me to stand guard over you while you are unconscious?’

  You told me to choose,’ Faith told him tartly.

  The fruit was bitter as ever, and sent her on a dark and twisting downward road echoing with the hoofbeats of her heart.

  Then it was too dark to see, but she knew that she was pushing through jungle. There was no rock floor beneath her feet. She scrambled and climbed, over cat’s cradles of vines strung out like suspension bridges, past mighty trunks of plaited creepers, mounting vast wooden spirals as if they were stairways. All the while the air softly hummed with murmured lies.

  There were kind lies. You still look beautiful. I love you. I forgive you.

  There were frightened lies. Someone else must have taken it. Of course I am Anglican. I never saw that baby before.

  There were predatory lies. Buy this tonic if you want your child to recover. I will look after you. Your secret is safe with me.

  Half-lies, and the tense little silences where a truth should have been. Lies like knives, lies like poultices. The tiger’s stripe, and the fawn’s dusky dapple. And everywhere, everywhere, the lies that people told themselves. Dreams like cut flowers, with no nourishing root. Will-o’-the-wisp lights to make them feel less alone in the dark. Hollow resolutions and empty excuses.

  Faith heeded none of them, but climbed and climbed, because she could smell her father’s pipe smoke.

  She found a great knot of vines, ten foot wide, hanging suspended like a spider’s cocoon. Dull blue smoke eddied out through the cracks and crevices, and Faith’s heart ached at the familiarity of its smell. She tore at the vines with her fingers, wrenching open a gap, then struggled through the hole.

  She found herself standing in a hot, darkened cellar. The tiny specks of swatted mosquitoes could be seen against the whitewashed walls. There was one tiny high window, showing a turb
ulent purple-grey sky and letting in a roar of rain and a scent of warm mud.

  A man lay on the earth-strewn floor, the iron shackle on his leg out of keeping with his gentlemanly clothes. His brown moustache and beard had once been neatly clipped, but neglect had seen them break their banks, flooding his chin and cheeks with stubble. His hair was limp and dark with sweat and grime, and there were bruise-dark shadows under his eyes.

  ‘You must help me,’ he said. ‘You must talk to them, Sunderly. Tell them who I am, why I am here. You have papers from the consul – they will listen to you. You can vouch for me.’

  At first Faith thought he was talking to her. Then another faint gust of blue smoke issued from beside her. She turned her head, and there beside her was her father, the Reverend Erasmus Sunderly, shiny with the heat but otherwise immaculate.

  Faith wanted to throw her arms around him, but the sight of him held her back. She had forgotten how inaccessible he could be. With his cold, unrevealing gaze, his presence was almost as distant as his absence.

  ‘Winterbourne, sir,’ he said, in his usual detached tone, ‘you are asking me to testify to your character – to give my word as a gentleman. I barely know you. We first met less than two weeks ago. I know only what you and your party have told me, and that was fantastical and incredible.’

  ‘Please!’ Winterbourne looked desperate. ‘Consider that I am not alone here – I am not the only person who will suffer! Have some compassion!’

  ‘If you can give me proof of your story,’ said the Reverend, ‘then you will convince me, and will give me means to convince the authorities. Tell me where I may find this Mendacity Tree. If it matches your description, I shall place my faith in you.’

  The chained man looked astonished, then briefly angry and mulish. Winterbourne met the Reverend’s gaze for a few seconds, then wilted before it, his face desolate. ‘I have no choice but to trust you,’ he said bitterly. ‘Before I was seized, I found some of Kikkert’s notes. If I have understood his map, there is a building three miles due north of his house, on the edge of a river that runs through the bamboo forest. I believe that is where the plant is hidden. But hurry, Sunderly!’

  The Reverend gave him a curt, formal inclination of the head, then turned and walked away, giving a sharp rap at the door in the wall. It opened, and he stepped through, casting a glance back into the room. For a moment he seemed to look straight into Faith’s gaze. His eyes were cool as slate. Then he closed the door between them.

  Faith ran to it, felt the rough grain under her hands and heard the clunk of a heavy bar dropping to fasten the door on the other side. She placed her ear against the wood and could just make out her father’s voice.

  ‘No.’ His voice was precise and cold as a scalpel. ‘If the gentleman believes that he knows me, he is mistaken or delirious. I have never seen his face before.’

  The rain became deafening applause. Darkness closed like a fist.

  Faith woke, feeling cold inside and out. She had never felt so cold.

  She remembered her father’s account of his conversation with Winterbourne.

  I promised to do all I could to secure his freedom, and he confided in me his latest suspicions about the location of the Mendacity Tree, begging me to find it if he could not.

  I was unable to save him. His fever killed him in his cell before I could arrange his release.

  Now she wondered whether she had always sensed something false in those words, a shimmer of deeper water. Winterbourne had not fallen over himself to divulge the location of Kikkert’s precious plant; Faith’s father had forced it from him. And the Reverend had not striven to save Winterbourne. He had lied to keep him in his malaria-infested cell, and seized his chance to find the Tree.

  And Winterbourne had died.

  She stirred a little. This time the rope around her middle was still secure. Opening her eyes she saw Paul sitting at some distance, with his back to her. His obvious indifference made her feel even more alone, until she looked down and found an unfamiliar handkerchief draped over her arm.

  Faith put up one hand, and found that her cheeks were wet. She had been weeping, and she did not know how long. She dried her face quickly, took a minute or two to calm herself, then cleared her throat so that Paul knew that it was safe to look. He turned immediately and came back to her, placing her water bottle in her hand. As usual, his face was carefully unemotional.

  ‘How long has it been?’ she asked, her voice creaking like old bellows.

  ‘An hour perhaps,’ said Paul. ‘Can you see me now?’

  Faith nodded. ‘The vision is over. How do my eyes appear?’

  Paul raised the lantern and peered, then flinched back as if stung.

  ‘Like molten butter in a pan,’ he said. ‘I never saw anything like that. What does it mean?’

  ‘It means I am still affected by the fruit.’ Faith picked numbly at her bonds. ‘I . . . do not feel as if I am, but I did not last time either. Do not let me grab any rats.’

  Paul nodded, evidently putting pieces together. ‘Did you find out what you wanted this time?’

  ‘I think so.’ With difficulty, Faith succeeded in tugging loose the rope, and stood shakily. ‘But I need to look at the parish register to be certain. Where is it kept?’

  ‘In the vestry. But should you not be resting?’

  ‘No.’ Faith shook her head and steadied herself against the pillar. ‘The inquest is tomorrow. I need a plan by the morning. I must see those records tonight.’

  ‘You never ask much, do you?’ said Paul grimly. Slightly to Faith’s surprise, however, he did not refuse.

  CHAPTER 32:

  AN EXORCISM

  As they walked, Faith noticed that Paul kept himself between her and the cliffs, perhaps afraid that she would dance over the edge in a fit of fruit-induced madness. They barely spoke until they approached the lean, black finger of the church spire.

  ‘We will need to be quiet,’ whispered Paul as they drew near to the church’s brass-bound doors. ‘Jeanne Bissette will be asleep on one of the pews. Wait here – I need to fetch the parish-chest keys.’ He disappeared in the direction of the parsonage.

  Faith stood alone in the churchyard, still aching from the inside out with the cold. The bright moonlight gave the tiny panes of the windows a lizard-scale glitter.

  Over to one side she could see the grave that had been dug for her father. The earth was still piled to one side, but with admirable pragmatism sacks of something had been heaped in the hole, presumably to stop people falling in.

  If it had not been for Jeanne’s spiteful gossip, Faith’s father would be lying deep and safe in that grave beneath a blanket of turf, instead of in the church crypt awaiting an unknown fate.

  Faith reached out and took hold of the great metal ring on the front of the church door. It turned, and slightly to her surprise the door pulled open. After a moment’s reflection she realized that Clay probably did not want to leave a young woman helplessly locked in the building.

  She walked in. The church seemed much larger without people and light. The moon shone through the stained-glass window, spilling watery colours over the nearest pew. It was cold within, and Faith’s breath steamed.

  Faith found Jeanne Bissette near the front of the nave, huddled in one of the gentry’s box pews with a blanket over her. She was asleep, and she breathed with a worrying wheeze. Her skin looked pale and waxen, reminding Faith of her snake’s dull, crusted scales.

  I can do nothing to help her now, Faith told herself. One more day, that is all I need. Then it will not matter how my stories unravel.

  But the shadows under Jeanne’s eyes were dark as plum-skin, and they reminded her of Winterbourne in her vision. Perhaps her father had told himself the same thing. All I need is one day, to look for the Tree. Winterbourne can survive in that prison a little while longer. Once I have the plant, I can arrange his release.

  Faith wondered what people would do if they found Jeanne Bissette cold and
blue on the pew one morning. They might pull the sacks out of the hole outside and lower her into it. There was a ghastly poetry to that idea. Once again, Faith was trembling on the brink of the impossible, just as when she had stood outside her father’s library door, willing herself to knock and confess.

  ‘Oh, why must I always do this for you?’ she hissed under her breath. ‘I do not even like you!’

  Her hissed words were startlingly loud in the stillness. Jeanne’s eyelids fluttered, and she woke. She started violently at seeing a black cloaked figure leaning over her, but then she blinked and her eyes seemed to focus.

  ‘Miss Sunderly?’ she asked, her tone incredulous.

  ‘Do you have anywhere else to go?’ Faith demanded in a whisper.

  ‘Anywhere else?’ Jeanne hauled herself into a sitting position, her hair drooping unchecked over half her face. ‘I cannot! I cannot leave here!’

  ‘But . . . if you could? Do you have family or friends on the island?’

  ‘An uncle . . .’ The other girl was clearly still groggy, and trying to work out whether Faith was a dream or apparition. ‘But—’

  ‘There is no ghost!’ Faith spat it out quickly, like an insult or accusation.

  Jeanne shook her head wordlessly, her face drooping with misery and exhaustion.

  ‘There is no ghost,’ repeated Faith. ‘There is only . . . me. I am the ghost. I exchanged the wires of the servants’ bells. I stopped the clocks, and burned my father’s tobacco in the library, and moved things around the house. I left the skull in your bed.’

  As Faith spoke, Jeanne’s grogginess melted away. By the end she was fully alert, her eyes widening, growing darker and more dangerous.

  ‘You? Why?’

  ‘I hated you,’ Faith answered simply. ‘You told everybody my father was a suicide. You left him graveless.’

  Jeanne struggled to her feet, staring at Faith as if snakes were tumbling out of her mouth. Her jaw set, and her breath became quick and angry. Tears of mortification and rage shone in her eyes.

  ‘You . . . you witch!’ Jeanne’s voice broke. ‘I hope they do drive a stake through your precious father’s heart! I hope they do it in front of you! I hope your whole family ends up in the workhouse!’