The Book of Lies

by James Moloney

  “You are in a home for orphans and foundlings. From this window, you can see the village of Fallside,” she told him, sweeping aside the curtain with a plump hand. “Such as it is,” she added without enthusiasm as she glanced briefly at the village. Then she tried to reassure him. “Don’t worry. You’re quite safe here.” She helped him sit up, wedging pillows behind him.

  “Orphans and foundlings,” he repeated under his breath. He pushed aside the blankets and tried to stand up.

  “My, you’re almost as tall as I am,” exclaimed the woman. “You won’t be with us for long, that’s for certain. Any farmer in the district would be pleased to have a fine lad like you working his fields.”

  This made no sense to the boy at all. Work in a farmer’s field? He couldn’t remember ever doing any such thing. In fact, he couldn’t remember much at all. Whose hands are these? he thought, looking down at his body. They must be his feet, because he was standing on them.

  A small mirror hung from a hook on the wardrobe. He went closer but he was only certain that this was really his face when a pair of wide blue eyes blinked back at him. What else could he see? There was brown hair, almost black really, and pale skin, as though he had been kept out of the sun for some time. He worried for a moment that he was a ghost, but then wouldn’t this woman have been afraid of him? What had she called herself? Mrs Timmins, wasn’t it? There she was, watching him with friendly amusement. No, he wasn’t a ghost.

  He took another look in the mirror. That mouth drooped a bit. Perhaps it came from feeling so dazed. Now that he’d seen it he decided that, as faces went, it could have been worse, and the thought brought a smile to his lips.

  “Can you tell me your name, then?” Mrs Timmins asked.

  “Name…” the boy murmured. He opened his mouth quickly but no words came out, causing him to frown in confusion. “Name…” he said again. Why was it so hard for him to say it? Wait… he did know, after all. “I think my name is… Robert.”

  “Ah, you do remember,” Mrs Timmins said brightly. “Welcome to my orphanage. There’s always room for one more in this house.”

  She left him alone to dress in the clothes she had brought for him. “Robert,” he said to himself when he was finished. He knew he had been born with that name and he sensed somehow that his mother was dead. Was it… yes, when he was a baby. If he was an orphan then his father must be dead too. Shouldn’t he feel sadness? With a shock, he realised that all he could feel was emptiness and the few things he could remember rattled around inside his head like peas in a kettledrum.

  He was still grappling with these thoughts when Mrs Timmins returned. “It’s time you met the others,” she announced briskly. “Come with me.” She led the way out of the tiny room, along the passage to a flight of stairs. There she paused. “We have few rules in this house, Robert, but one is that you be as quiet as you can just here, outside the entry to the tower,” she said, nodding towards an imposing oak door set into the wall opposite the staircase. He glanced at it, but for now he didn’t give it a second thought.

  “Come on, the girls are rather keen to see you – though they’re meant to be working in the kitchen.” They started down the stairs, but after three steps the boy stopped, startled by the gang of five girls that had gathered at the bottom.

  “It’s a boy,” said a voice rather dismissively.

  “Quiet, Dot,” hissed one of her companions, but Dot wouldn’t be silenced.

  “I wanted it to be another girl,” and with this announcement she led the posse of girls away, disappointed.

  One of them seemed to linger for a moment. Was she smiling at him? It was difficult to tell, because the girl herself seemed no more than a shadow.

  “Am I the only boy, Mrs Timmins?”

  “No, no, the boys are outside, doing their chores.” She looked pointedly towards the girl. Then she led him down the remaining stairs and through a large kitchen. “Come on, Robert,” she called when he lagged behind.

  Robert? Yes, of course, that’s me, he thought. He stepped into the sudden brightness of a cloudless day. The sunshine felt good on his skin and he turned his face towards it, hoping that the sun, at least, would recognise him.

  A tall boy, almost a man, came striding towards them. “This is my son, Albert,” said Mrs Timmins. “He’s in charge of all the outside work that’s usually left to our boys.” Albert was rather proud of his role, judging by the grin that filled his face, a face already crowded with an unsightly rash of pimples. “He’ll give you jobs to do as well, but not today, since you’ve only just joined us.” She glanced at Albert to be sure he had understood.

  “No, not today,” he agreed readily enough. “Come on, I’ll gather all the boys to meet you.” He walked to the well in the middle of the courtyard and shouted, “Boys, boys, come here!” Before long, half a dozen boys had joined them in the courtyard.

  “This is Robert, everyone,” called Mrs Timmins. “I hope you’ll make him feel at home.” She picked out two of the older boys. “Hugh and Dominic, I’ll leave him in your hands, so you can show him around.”

  After an awkward moment or two, a boy stepped forward. One of his legs was shorter than the other, making him limp noticeably as he moved. “I’m Dominic,” he said, offering his bony hand like a man. The boy shook it warily, but the hand was warm and the gesture friendly.

  He relaxed a little as a second orphan introduced himself. “My name’s Hugh.” He put his hand to his mouth to stifle a sickly cough. Hugh didn’t have a limp but he didn’t have much else either. His arms and neck were skinny, the bones visible beneath the skin. His face was painfully narrow too.

  “Do you want to join them, Fergus?” Mrs Timmins added, bringing a sterner tone to her voice. “It’s not so long ago that you were the new boy.”

  This Fergus was a head taller than the rest and broad-shouldered. He nodded politely to Mrs Timmins but then turned to the younger boys around him, rolling his eyes in mockery. They sniggered uncertainly. “What’s your name again?” he asked bluntly.

  The new boy hesitated, as though even this simple question were too much for him.

  “You do know your name, don’t you?” Fergus urged him.

  “Robert,” he answered finally, not sounding quite convinced.

  “Of course it is,” said Mrs Timmins a little too eagerly. “Well, come on, Dominic, introduce the others. I have work to do if you lot expect to be fed.” She bustled off towards the kitchen. Albert lingered a moment, but he didn’t seem one for words and soon he had disappeared as well.

  Dominic turned to the waiting circle and fired off names faster than they could be matched to faces: Watkin, Oliver, Jonathan…

  “Where do you come from?” asked Hugh.

  Where do I come from? he asked himself. He wished he could remember.

  Hugh tried again. “What happened to your mother and father?”

  “I’m not sure. I think my mother’s…” Something held him back. It was in his mind, yes, as hard as a stone. His mother was dead, but still he didn’t feel it.

  When he said nothing further, Fergus wandered away, uninterested, and the younger boys went with him, leaving only Dominic and Hugh.

  “I suppose we’d better start showing you around,” Hugh said. “That’s the stables over there.” An arm waved vaguely towards the low, ramshackle building that faced them across the courtyard. “Old Belch lives in there, in one of the stalls.”

  “A horse?”

  “No, a man,” Dominic said with a laugh, “but he smells like a horse. Worse, really.”

  “Why’s he called Old Belch?”

  They glanced at each other, smirking. “You’ll find out when you meet him,” said Hugh.

  While they were talking, a tall girl had walked past them to the well in the middle of the yard, where she filled a bucket with water. Now she sloshed that water heedlessly over the sides as she returned to the kitchen. She was much older than the girls he had seen near the stairs – older than
he was, he guessed. She was brushing the end of her long ponytail with her free hand as she went, paying more attention to this than the bucket. He said hello, but she didn’t even look at him.

  “What’s she being so high and mighty for?” he asked.

  “She’s always like that,” said Hugh. “Did you see the way she was spilling the water? She’ll have to go back for another load.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Nicola. Only been here a few weeks. No one likes her much.”

  “She was sent back,” said Dominic. There was something about the way he said this that made the newcomer raise his eyebrows, puzzled.

  Hugh tried to explain. “A family in Fallside wanted someone, a bit like a servant, but more like a daughter really.”

  “Except she was hopeless. Too proud to do anything useful so they sent her back,” Dominic continued bitterly.

  Hugh dropped his voice to a whisper. “It’s a terrible thing to be sent back.”

  “She lost her chance,” said Dominic, and suddenly the new boy understood why he spoke so savagely. Dominic’s limp meant he would never be offered a home.

  After Nicola had disappeared haughtily through the kitchen door, the tour continued. They headed for the back of the house, past a vegetable garden, and beyond it a field with two well-fed cows. They rounded a pond where ducks quarrelled and a family of geese strutted proudly at the water’s edge.

  “This is the orchard,” Dominic said as they walked between rows of apple trees that ran all the way to the stone wall bordering the orphanage. “Albert and Mrs Timmins sell the fruit in the village. That’s how we buy the food we need.”

  They showed him the rope they swung on and their favourite climbing tree among the oaks on the other side of the house. But since the conversation about Nicola the new arrival had sunk into a reverie, and no matter how hard Hugh and Dominic worked to make him feel at home, he remained distant.

  “Will we show him the waterfall?” asked Hugh.

  “We’re not supposed to cross the wall,” Dominic replied cautiously.

  “Oh, come on, Albert’s not watching,” Hugh insisted. The gleam in his eye showed a spirit far stronger than his withered body. It was enough to carry Dominic along.

  The three boys clambered over the waist-high stone fence and a minute later arrived at the cliff’s edge, or at least, as close to it as any of them dared go.

  “It’s massive,” the newcomer breathed in awe, becoming more enthusiastic now. From the waterfall at his right, the craggy cliff continued as far as his eye could see. He inched closer to the edge, feeling the fine spray from the plummeting water, cold against his face.

  “It’s straight down, all the way,” said Hugh. “How far, do you think?”

  “A thousand feet.”

  “More like two thousand,” Hugh corrected him. “It’s like the earth broke itself in two and pushed one half straight up into the sky to make these highlands.”

  The boy looked out over the cliff’s edge to the enormous plains below. They seemed to flow in a shimmer of midday heat all the way to the horizon. “Perhaps I come from down there,” he whispered, too softly for his companions to hear. Then he asked, more loudly, “How do you get down into the valley?”

  “There are paths down the rock face in places,” said Hugh.

  “Or you can jump!” Dominic laughed at his own little joke but a shudder ran through each of the boys all the same.

  They headed back through the stand of oaks and then Hugh and Dominic left him so they could catch up on their chores. The boy drifted aimlessly through the orchard to a place where the ground disappeared under a wild mess of brambles and blackberry canes. There was a well-worn path at the edge and an opening large enough to crawl through. He dropped to his hands and knees and found himself under a tightly woven archway of thorny vines that formed a sort of cave. The ground had been hollowed out, except for a few small boulders, to form a snug hideaway. Best of all, it was peaceful and he could be alone. He found a seat on a rounded granite boulder.

  “You can’t remember, can you?” said a voice.

  The boy stood up sharply, bumping his head on the thick canes that formed the roof. He looked around him but he couldn’t see anyone. “Who said that?”

  “You’ve lost your memory,” the voice said again.

  “Who is it? I can’t see you!” He whirled around frantically, stopping to stare at the place where the voice seemed to come from. To his amazement, a figure emerged from the shadows where it had been standing unnoticed even as he gazed at it. It was one of the little girls, the one who had smiled at him.

  Her face was bordered by swirls and ropes of brown hair growing wild, like creepers around a statue. Her skin was dark, which helped her stay unseen in the shadows. Perhaps she kept her dress dull and dusty for the same reason. But she wanted to tell him something, and while the eagerness gripped her, her eyes sparkled and he could see her clearly.

  “Who are you? And why were you hiding there?”

  “I wasn’t hiding,” she said defiantly. “Not on purpose, anyway.” She hesitated a moment then seemed to make up her mind. “Your name,” she said softly. “It’s not Robert at all.”

  “What do you mean, not my name? But Mrs Timmins, she called me…” He didn’t say it. “If my name’s not Robert, what is it, then?”

  The girl hesitated.

  “Tell me, please!”

  At last she spoke. “Your name is Marcel.”

  “What did you call me?”

  “Marcel,” she said again, more confident now.

  He felt his heart leap at the sound of this name and he braced himself to remember who he was and all that had happened in his life to this day.

  Nothing came.

  “You’ve told me my name, but… but who am I?”

  She shook her head sadly. It was a simple thing to tell him his name, but the rest…

  “You must know. Why did I think I was called Robert?”

  “It came from a book.”

  “A book?”

  The girl told him then of all that she had witnessed the night before, of the old man in the dark robes and the heavy book he had brought to the room at the end of the hall, of the voice and its story and how it couldn’t be stopped. He listened, wide-eyed. Finally she told him how she had plugged his ears with wax.

  “You saved me,” said Marcel, for he had no doubt now that this was his name. “You’re much braver than girls are supposed to be. How can I thank you? If there is anything I can do for you, you only have to ask. That’s a promise,” he added slowly. But the girl just smiled uncomfortably.

  A hundred questions were swirling through his head. “Do you think my real life is still inside that book? If I could get hold of it, maybe my life would be in there for me to find.”

  The emptiness he felt round his heart was swept aside by a sudden fury. “Who was this man? Where did he come from?”

  “I’ve heard them call him Lord Alwyn, but I can’t tell you any more than that. He just arrived one night, while we were all asleep, like you did. He lives in the tower above us. There’s a door across the stairwell now. It has no lock, not even a doorknob.”

  Marcel’s eyes widened. “Mrs Timmins pointed the door out to me, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. Have the other children seen him?”

  “No, he never comes out. But we… hear things.”

  Marcel didn’t like the sound of that, especially the way she had said it. What things? he was about to ask, when a voice echoed faintly through the little hideaway. “Robert, Robert! Come and eat.”

  It was Dominic, calling him by a name that meant nothing to him any more.

  “I have to go,” said the girl. “It’s my turn to set the table.” She was already on the move and again so hard to see that if he hadn’t known she was there he would have missed her.

  “Quickly, tell me your name.”

  She spoke a single word, softly, so softly that he could barely make it
out. It sounded like “bee”. Had he heard right? But before he could ask her to repeat it, she had disappeared altogether.

  He crawled under the archway of thick vines and out into the light. As he blinked and straightened up, he found himself facing the house. There was the tower, brooding and ominous, staring down at him. For an instant he thought he saw a hand and part of a face at one of the windows, but when he looked again, they had gone.

  “A book,” he murmured to himself. “A sorcerer’s book.”

  Chapter 2

  Lord Alwyn

  MARCEL WAS STILL THINKING about the strange little girl when he entered the kitchen with Dominic, and even after Mrs Timmins had given him his first job. “Robert, would you take those jugs of milk into the dining room?” she asked.

  Hearing that false name made him hesitate, but he wasn’t sure what to do about it yet. Dominic was carrying a tray laden with freshly baked bread and the aroma reminded him of how hungry he was. He followed Dominic into the dining hall, where other children were already busy setting out plates and arranging a motley assortment of chairs around the long table. He looked for the girl among them but couldn’t see her. Had he imagined the whole thing?

  The dining room was dark and cool after the sunny courtyard. A fireplace, freshly cleared of last night’s ash, was built into the far wall. Its homely scent of wood-smoke hung in the air. The high ceiling and bare stone floor made the room rather noisy, but it was the happy noise of children eager to fill their growling bellies.

  All the children seemed to have their own place to sit around the table and Marcel was left out until Hugh and Dominic made room between them. Mrs Timmins took her place at one end of the table and Albert at the other. They all lowered their heads and recited a simple prayer, but as soon as the last word died on their lips, hands shot out to the plates of bread.

  Marcel wasn’t the only one to hold back. The tall girl he had seen spilling the water watched the snatching hands all round her. There was something proud about her, as though she were waiting to be offered the plate. Finally she took a piece and bit into it delicately. No wonder she had been sent back by the family in the village, Marcel thought. He watched her for a moment and saw with a grin that hunger made her dainty bites come a little too rapidly for good manners.