The Lie Tree
Page 33
‘I will write to you,’ she said.
‘Why?’ Paul examined her face, apparently looking for a trap. ‘So that you can tell me that you hate me? Do you think I ever want to hear from you again?’
‘Yes,’ said Faith.
A rain shower was rehearsing. A few experimental droplets filled the silence.
‘I have a confession to make,’ said Faith.
‘Bleeding saints, is there more?’ Paul stared. ‘How much worse can it be?’
This was the hardest part. It was easier to be the witch, the harpy. Being human was dangerous.
‘I . . . am sometimes kind,’ admitted Faith. ‘I . . . love my little brother very much.’
There was a long pause.
‘The first time I saw a ratting,’ Paul said, without looking at her, ‘a dog lost an eye, and I was sick. I go back to prove I can without spewing.’
‘When I was seven, I found a fossil on the beach,’ Faith said quietly, ‘and my father was very proud of me. At least . . . that is what I thought had happened. But it was one of his fake fossils – he thought it would look more convincing if an “innocent child” discovered it. He laid it down for me to find.’
Her golden moment on the beach, her great instant of connection with her father, had been a self-serving lie and fraud. Deep down, her suspicions of the truth had been growing, but only when she found a copy of the infamous Intelligencer had her worst fears been confirmed. In the middle of the page there had been a picture of ‘her’ fossil, with a detailed account of the methods used to forge it.
She bit her lip hard. ‘I . . . think perhaps I went a little mad after he died.’
‘You put your hand into a bag of rats!’ Paul pointed out. ‘You pointed a pistol at me!’
‘Looking back, that . . . does seem a little drastic, yes.’
There was another pause, during which it turned out that nobody needed to apologize.
‘I want to be a photographer,’ said Paul, ‘but not like father. I want to photograph faraway places nobody has ever seen. I want to try new things – find ways to take pictures of birds in flight, and scenes at night.’
His confession was angrily earnest. Faith thought of him standing out on a cold headland for hours, minutely adjusting his camera to track a brilliant, contrary moon.
‘I want to be a natural scientist,’ confessed Faith. The words sounded fragile as soon as they were out in the air.
She glanced at Paul, but he showed no sign of laughing. Instead he was nodding quietly to himself, as if the revelation surprised him not a jot.
The deck moved under Faith’s feet as the mailboat drifted away from the shore. The people shrank, the houses withdrew into ranks. They were preparing to become memories.
Faith felt an unexpected burst of nerves. Her weeks on Vane had been so painfully vivid that it had seemed like the only real place. Her other memories had become a faintly daubed backdrop. Now she was going back to England, and had to face the fact that England really did exist. The scandal about her father would be coming to the boil. The family would lose friends, and their home at the rectory. Compared to the disasters that had threatened not long ago, however, these problems now seemed like a manageable apocalypse.
‘Why is it that the sweet-tempered men never have any money?’ Myrtle said with wry wistfulness as she waved her handkerchief to Clay.
‘He may have even less now,’ said Faith. ‘The whole island just saw him helping the Sunderly witches. He may find himself preaching to an empty church on Sunday.’
He needs a decent living, poor fellow, and I am sure he is too meek to ask for one.’ Myrtle narrowed her eyes, and Faith knew she was making calculations. ‘Oh – I know what I must do! I shall put in a good word for him.’
A good word for him? With a mixture of horror and admiration Faith realized where her mother’s mind had sped. Her father’s living had just fallen open, and nobody else knew it yet. A replacement would be needed quickly. Myrtle knew the local squire in whose gift the living lay, and could put a word in his ear . . .
Or was Myrtle perhaps thinking even further ahead, of the day when her mourning would end and she would be looking for a husband with a large house and a decent income?
‘It would be perfect!’ Myrtle breathed, very softly. ‘We would not even need to redecorate!’
‘Mother!’ hissed Faith, but found she did not feel the utter recoil and outrage she would once have experienced. Myrtle was dreadful, but without such dreadfulness where would the family be in a year’s time?
My mother is not evil, Faith reminded herself. She is just a perfectly sensible snake, protecting her eggs and making her way in the world as best she can.
‘Well,’ Myrtle said, defending herself against the accusation Faith had not made, ‘if you are to continue with these antiquarian enthusiasms of yours, it will not be cheap. You do wish to persist in them, do you not?’
Faith nodded.
‘Then heaven send you a husband with patience and money.’ Myrtle gave Faith an anxious glance.
Faith knew now that her mother was not worried about the embarrassment of having a dull, eccentric bluestocking daughter. Myrtle was concerned for Faith, and rightly so. If Faith pursued natural science, as a female she would probably be mocked, belittled, patronized and ignored her whole life. She might well make herself unmarriageable. How would she live, and find money to pursue her passion?
Perhaps she would go abroad to visit excavations, and be despised as a scandalous woman travelling alone. Perhaps she would marry, and have all her work attributed to her husband, like Agatha. Perhaps she would end up a penniless old maid, with only a coral collection for company.
And perhaps some other later girl, leafing through her father’s library, would come across a footnote in an academic journal and read the name ‘Faith Sunderly’. Faith? she would think. That is a female name. A woman did this. If that is so . . . then so can I. And the little fire of hope, self-belief and determination would pass to another heart.
‘I am tired of lies,’ said Faith. ‘I do not want to hide, the way Agatha did.’
‘So what do you want?’ asked Myrtle.
‘I want to help evolution.’
Evolution did not fill Faith with the same horror her father had felt. Why should she weep to hear that nothing was set in stone? Everything could change. Everything could get better. Everything was getting better, inch by inch, so slowly that she could not see it, but knowing it gave her strength.
‘My dearest girl, I have not the faintest idea what you are talking about.’
Faith thought about the best way to rephrase her resolution.
‘I want to be a bad example,’ she said.
‘I see.’ Myrtle stirred herself, ready to walk to the prow. ‘Well, my dear, I think you have made an excellent start.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my agent Nancy Miles; my editor Rachel Petty; Rhiannon Lassiter for her support and robustly clear-sighted critiques; my boyfriend Martin for remaining patient even through my welter of all-nighters; Plot on the Landscape; Dr Ruth Charles for all the fascinating and entertaining information about nineteenth-century archaeology and paleontology; Heather Kilgour for introducing me to the Crystal Palace Park dinosaurs; Sandra Lawrence for taking me to the excellent seminar ‘Creepy Victorians: After-Death Photography’ at The Old Operating Theatre Museum; Sarah Blake for information on geology; The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould; Victorian Religion: Faith and Life in Britain by Julie Melnyk; The Victorian Celebration of Death by James Stevens Curl; Crinolines and Crimping Irons: Victorian Clothes: How They Were Cleaned and Cared For by Christina Walkley and Vanda Foster; The Victorian Undertaker by Trevor May; Food and Cooking in Victorian England: A History by Andrea Broomfield; Cave Hunting: Researches on the Evidence of Caves Respecting the Early Inhabitants of Europe by William Boyd Dawkins; The Idea of Prehistory by Glyn Daniel.
The first things to shift were the doll’s e
yes, the beautiful grey-green glass eyes. Slowly they swivelled, until their gaze was resting on Triss’s face. Then the tiny mouth moved, opened to speak.
‘Who do you think you are? This is my family.’
When Triss wakes up after an accident, she knows that something is very wrong. She is insatiably hungry; she keeps waking up with leaves in her hair, and her sister seems terrified of her. When it all gets too much and she starts to cry, her tears are like cobwebs . . .
Soon Triss discovers that what happened to her is more strange and terrible than she could ever have imagined, and that she is quite literally not herself. In a quest to find the truth she must travel into the terrifying Underbelly of the city to meet a twisted architect who has dark designs on her family – before it’s too late . . .
‘The Lie Tree is brilliant: dark, thrilling, utterly original. Everyone should read Frances Hardinge. Everyone. Right now’
Patrick Ness
‘One of our finest children’s writers’
Nicolette Jones
Frances Hardinge’s first book, Fly By Night, won the Branford Boase Award for outstanding debut novel. Fly By Night was also, along with many of her following books, shortlisted for several other awards, including the Guardian Fiction Prize. All her books are now published in many languages around the world.
Frances spent her childhood in a huge, isolated old house on a hilltop in Kent that ‘wuthered’ when the wind blew and inspired her to write strange, magical stories from an early age. Now she lives in London with her boyfriend.
Also by Frances Hardinge
Fly By Night
‘Remarkable and captivating, masterfully written and with a wealth of unexpected ideas . . . Full of marvels’
Sunday Times
Verdigris Deep
‘Hardinge writes with energy and verve’
The Times
Gullstruck Island
‘Hardinge is a hugely talented writer of tireless invention and prose’
Guardian
Twilight Robbery
‘Twilight Robbery has everything: fabulous characters . . . richly evocative world-building and writing so viscerally good you want to wrap yourself up in it’
Sunday Telegraph
A Face Like Glass
‘Sophisticated, multi-layered and elegantly written’
Booktrust
To my father
For quiet wisdom and integrity,
and for respecting me as an adult long before I was one
First published 2015 by Macmillan Children’s Books
This electronic edition published 2015 by Macmillan Children’s Books
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ISBN 978-1-4472-6411-8
Copyright © Frances Hardinge 2015
Cover design by James Fraser
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