The Lie Tree

  The funeral would be the next day, Myrtle had decided.

  ‘Very soon, isn’t it?’ Uncle Miles had protested. ‘Old girl, there is another boat to the mainland in a few days. If he were kept in the ice house, we could take him back with us to Kent and see him settled in the family plot.’

  ‘No.’ Myrtle had been immovable. ‘We bury him here in Vane – and as soon as possible.’ She refused to be drawn further.

  The rush felt indecent, but it was just another indecency. Faith found she could not bear the living. She could not bear the servants’ hard-eyed curiosity, or Uncle Miles’s platitudes and shrugs. Howard’s questions tore her in two. Most of all, she could not bear her mother.

  Somebody needed to take on the duty of the ‘wake’, and sit by the side of her father. Faith was all too willing to volunteer.

  The Reverend had been washed, dressed in his best clothes and laid out on his bed upstairs. One might even imagine that he had passed away there, flanked by loved ones and with the good book in his hand. It was a lie, but a comforting one. There were scented candles all over the room now, and vases of flowers. They made the room seem sacred, even though Faith knew that they were there to mask any smell.

  It was not the first time Faith had been alone with the dead of course. She had watched five younger brothers wane, felt the trusting pressure of their small hands in hers. And later, each time, she had done her part in keeping watch over the body for the wake. There always needed to be somebody watching over the newly dead, just in case they turned out not to be dead after all. It was best to know these things before anyone was actually buried.

  There would be no movement, however. She knew it in her blood. She knew it from the crashing stillness that filled the room. Dead people bled silence.

  On the bedside table lay the great black family Bible. Many times Faith had looked through the family’s births, deaths and marriages scrawled on to the blank pages at the back. Her brothers were there, with the dates of their deaths. And now Erasmus Sunderly would be added to the names, another little human life crushed fly-like between its great pages.

  At least in the flickering candlelight he no longer looked helpless, the way he had down on the blanket in the library. His features might have been carved from marble, unchanging and incorruptible. Here he was his own altar.

  Faith never wanted to leave this stillness. She never wanted to leave him. She did not know what she felt. Her emotions were so large and strange that they seemed to be something outside her, vast cloud patterns roiling and colliding above while she watched.

  Suicide. The great mortal sin.

  ‘I do not believe it,’ she told him. ‘I know you would never do that.’

  But could she be sure of anything any more? How many secrets did her father have? What if he had taken his mysterious opiate again and flung himself to his doom in a fit of drugged melancholia?

  Faith was too tired to think, and too tired not to think. All the while her mind kept picking at what she knew and did not know, numbly dropping the pieces before she could fit them together properly.

  She understood now why her mother had lied about where the body was found. A broken neck in the dell looked like an accident, a misstep in the dark. After all, why would anybody hurl themselves down a small, wooded incline when there was a cliff nearby?

  But he did not even need a cliff. He had a pistol.

  Faith pressed her fists against her temples.

  He had a pistol.

  She remembered his nervous, reflexive reach for the gun, while they were down on the beach. He had been expecting some sort of danger. And now he was dead.

  Why had he insisted that he needed to be back from the boat trip by midnight? And why had he been so desperate to conceal the mysterious plant?

  As she recalled their stealthy journey with the plant in the wheelbarrow, a troublesome sense of wrongness tickled her mind. Again she saw the misty image of the wheelbarrow as she had seen it that morning, lying on its side at the fork in the paths . . .

  But . . . it should not have been there. Father and I left it by the glasshouse.

  The smoky uncertainties in her head began to coalesce, and solidified into a suspicion.

  The mists were starting to lift as Faith walked through the grounds once more, retracing her steps along the path. And there indeed was the wheelbarrow at the fork.

  It might mean nothing. Maybe Prythe rose early and moved it.

  But she continued to walk, this time along the path that led to the cliff-top. It was a rugged climb, and rocky in places. It looked as though the footpath doubled as a temporary stream in wetter weather.

  She reached the grassy top, and the breeze filled her cape. Looking down, she could see the shallow waves drag their foam crescents like fingernails down the beach. Directly below her, halfway down the cliff, the black-barked tree that had caught her father quivered as if beckoning to her.

  Here the path was a muddy track trampled through the grass. Faith stooped to peer. Not far from the brink, she could make out a groove pushed into the mud. It could have been gouged with a stick or the edge of a boot, but it was just wide enough that it might have been left by the wheel of a wheelbarrow.

  When Faith entered the drawing room, Uncle Miles looked up from his book and his furrowed brow smoothed a little.

  ‘How are you faring, Faith?’

  There was nothing good or cheerful that Faith could say.

  ‘Uncle Miles . . . can I ask you something? You said that when my . . . when my father was turned away from the excavation, somebody gave him a letter.’

  ‘Oh.’ Uncle Miles raised his eyebrows ruefully and closed his book. ‘Yes, and it upset him immeasurably. I suppose we shall never know who wrote it.’

  ‘It was unsigned?’ Faith’s interest sharpened to a point.

  ‘It must have been. Your father kept demanding to know who had written it. Suddenly everybody was his enemy and he would not hear otherwise. Ben Crock found it among his day’s papers and handed it over, but said he knew nothing more about it.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  Your father would let nobody see it.’ Uncle Miles shook his head. ‘On the journey home he kept insisting that somebody had spied on him, or betrayed him, or read his papers. And when we reached home . . . he tossed the letter on the fire.’

  ‘There you are, Faith!’ Myrtle was in the drawing room with the dressmaker. ‘There is a black cambric dress that might do for you, if it is taken apart and made up in your size.’

  Faith stared at the black dress draped over a chair. There was wear at the collar and shine at the elbows. It was a dress that had already mourned.

  ‘Mother – can I talk to you?’

  ‘Of course,’ Myrtle said absently, without looking up from a book of plates showing elegant women in a full crêpe dresses. She tapped a picture and passed the book to the dressmaker. ‘This one, with the fashionable cut. I cannot simply throw away my half-crinoline. And you are sure that we cannot work in a little glossy silk? Must it all be lightless and dull?’ There was indeed something deathly about the crêpe. It was a mass of fine threads, rough and scratchy to the touch. It seemed to suck light.

  The dressmaker assured her that there was no help for it, and Myrtle accepted this with poor grace.

  ‘And everything is so expensive,’ Myrtle muttered under her breath. ‘But we must do things decently. Mrs Vellet, surely there must be someone on Vane with old crêpe for sale?’

  ‘I can make enquiries, madam . . . but folk do not like to keep it in the house once mourning is over. Bad luck, they say. Besides, madam, crêpe does not last well. It snags easily, and gets a shabby look, and falls apart if you wash it or get caught in the rain.’

  ‘Mother, please can I speak with you privately?’ Faith could not suppress her impatience.

  ‘Yes, Faith, yes. As soon as you have been measured.’

  Faith had to stand there with gritted teeth as she was draped with bombazine, par
amatta and black ribbons and flicked with a tape measure. She was forced to listen as her mother chose, quibbled and haggled, veering between obstinate extravagance and startling meanness. Yes, she unquestionably needed the black chiffon parasol. But no, black glass jewellery would certainly do instead of jet. Yes, she would certainly need the bonnet with the extra ribbons. But no, the family would not need a wealth of other black clothes, some of theirs could be dyed black to suit.

  At last the dressmaker left the room.

  ‘What is it, Faith?’ Myrtle took a moment to study her. ‘You are quite white! I shall ask Mrs Vellet to bring you a little broth.’

  ‘I want to talk to you about Father – about the cliff . . .’

  Myrtle’s expression of distracted concern slipped away in an instant. She moved quickly to the door, opened it, then closed it again.

  ‘Not another word,’ she said quietly and firmly.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Do not talk about the cliff – not to me, nor to anybody else.’

  ‘I found a mark at the top,’ Faith persisted. ‘I think something terrible happened—’

  ‘It does not matter!’ erupted Myrtle. She closed her eyes and let out a long breath, then continued in a quiet but barely controlled tone. ‘I know it is hard for you to understand, but all that matters is how things appear. We have our story. That is what happened.’

  Faith felt stifled with frustration and disgust. Why had she even tried to talk to her mother? Why had she expected her to care?

  What more could Faith say anyway? The pistol, her father’s hurry to be back at the house by midnight, his desperation to hide the mysterious plant . . . she could not reveal any of these without breaking her father’s confidence.

  As Faith was leaving the room, she glanced over her shoulder and saw Myrtle trying on a black ribbon choker. In that moment, Faith hated her mother.

  In the late afternoon, Clay arrived with his camera, tripod and case of chemical bottles. His son Paul struggled in behind him with a collection of stands.

  It was to be a memorial photograph, a family photograph. A beloved father at the heart of his family. A picture to show friends and relatives at home, a card to send to close acquaintances.

  Faith remembered Paul Clay showing her the after-death photographs in the shop and watching for her reaction. Now he showed no inclination to meet her gaze, and she did not seek his.

  The Reverend Erasmus Sunderly had been brought down to the drawing room for the photograph, his clothes straightened and his hair artfully brushed to cover the wound in his temple. For so long he had been the centre around which the house revolved. It had made Faith sick to see him moved around and positioned, like a doll at a tea party. Now the Reverend sat in state in his great armchair, his hand resting upon the page of an open Bible.

  Myrtle was meekly placed beside him in a straight-back upholstered chair. The full widow’s gown was still being adjusted to her size, but she had dressed as darkly as she could, in deep blues and a black shawl. She appeared very pretty and mournful, and Faith hated her composure. Howard was hunched at their feet, his wooden lion in his hands to distract him. All Faith could see was of him was his bowed head, and the vulnerable curve of his tensed back. The lion’s jaws clack-clack-clacked, over and over.

  Faith stood immediately behind her father’s chair. She let one hand creep up so that it rested on his sleeve, and felt a little throb of comfort and solidarity at the touch.

  ‘Could you please take a step backwards, miss?’ Paul Clay was behind her, holding a slender stand with sturdy base and a pincer-like attachment at the top.

  Unwillingly Faith stepped back, losing her contact with her father. She felt Paul move her plait to one side, then gently fasten the stand’s clamp on either side of her neck.

  Her eyes stung, and she hated Paul Clay, hated his flat, coldly polite voice. She reached behind her head, found his hand and pinched the flesh of it as hard as she could. She willed him, dared him to cry out and disgrace her, but he did not. When she released him and let her arm return to her side, he returned to his father, face unreadable.

  ‘The stand will help you hold position,’ explained Clay.

  Stand exactly here and do not move, or you will spoil the picture. Say this, and only this, or you will spoil the story.

  The Sunderly family held still, staring into the black eye of the camera. Faith thought of chemicals fizzing, and her image burning its way into the glass negative, indelible, immortal. She wondered whether it would have haunted eyes, thoughts whirling trapped behind them like bats in a turret.

  ‘There,’ said Clay, as tenderly as if he were bringing a baby into the world. ‘We have it.’

  After he had fixed the negative, Myrtle called him over to whisper with her by the fireplace. Faith tried not to overhear, but could not help it.

  ‘. . . I am so friendless on this island, I do not know what I will do if I cannot count on your help.’ Myrtle’s eyes were wide and childlike. ‘If you are clever enough to paint the photograph so that his eyes appear open, surely you can change the picture in other ways? The wound on his temple still shows a little. Can you hide it with paint?’

  And so the photograph, with its lie of a happy family, would have more lies laid over it, and yet more . . .

  Faith could not bear it. She left the drawing room quietly and quickly. The hall was kinder, colder and darker. At least she was alone.

  But then the door creaked open behind her, and she turned to find that Paul Clay had followed her. There he stood, saying nothing, watching her in the same cool, mask-like way as before.

  ‘Did it hurt when I pinched you?’ she demanded. There was something wrong with her lungs. Every breath filled them with pins and needles. ‘Tell me that it hurt!’

  He took a breath, then held it for a second or two before speaking.

  ‘It should be a good picture,’ he said at last. ‘Dignified. Not all of our customers . . . That is to say, he makes a good . . .’

  ‘A good what?’ Faith’s blood felt like magma. ‘A good corpse?’

  ‘Why are you spitting fire at me?’ Paul snapped back, raising his voice for the first time. ‘I didn’t make him so!’

  ‘No? Well, somebody did.’

  The words were out, and Faith’s breathing became faster, easier.

  She no longer believed that her father had tumbled off the cliff in a drugged frenzy. Instead she imagined a nocturnal figure struggling up the path with a laden wheelbarrow, halting at the very top to tip its burden over the edge. A falling body, bouncing cruelly off the rocky face and lodging in a tree. And then the other figure creeping away, abandoning the wheelbarrow where the path forked.

  ‘You all hated him – everybody on this filthy, stupid, miserable island. And one of you killed him.’ She turned and ran upstairs, because death would be better than letting Paul Clay see her cry.

  Not an accident. Not suicide. Murder.

  CHAPTER 14:

  THE FUNERAL

  The day of the funeral was a numb, exhausted grey. The black-clad bearers muttered as they manoeuvred the coffin down the stairs. Their boots left mud on the carpet. The front door was opened, and the coffin carried out ‘feet first’. Faith had heard that this was to stop the dead looking back into the house and calling one of the living to join them.

  I wish he would, she thought.

  One cold coach ride later, the Sunderlys dismounted and paraded towards the church porch, Howard and Uncle Miles walking behind the coffin as ‘men of the family’. The ‘mutes’ walked beside them with long poles swathed in crêpe, like sinister butterfly nets.

  When the family entered the church, it took a moment for Faith’s eyes to adjust.

  She had thought that she might find the church empty except for the priest, all Myrtle’s set-dressing prepared for a performance with no audience. She had been mistaken.

  Nearly every pew was crammed with figures, all turning to watch the Sunderly family’s entry. Most were
complete strangers.

  The box pews, on the other hand, were all but empty. Dr Jacklers sat at the far end of one, looking extremely uncomfortable. The respectable families, the great and the good of Vane, were nowhere to be seen.

  As they walked to their box pew, Faith could feel gazes like a trickle of cold water down the back of her neck. Myrtle raised her chin and glided in like a dark queen, the candles glittering on her black glass jewellery, the gold of her hair just visible beneath her heavy veil. The whispering hushed as her black skirts brushed over the floor’s marble memorial slabs. Faith felt a moment’s unwilling admiration for her mother’s defiant poise. It was somewhat daring for females to attend a funeral service at all, but Myrtle had been adamant that she would not ‘hide away’.

  The Sunderly family settled themselves in their pew, Faith wishing that its walls were seven feet high. Some of the comments had caught her ear as they walked to the front.

  ‘What does “the trap re-baited” mean?’ she could not help asking quietly.

  ‘It means,’ Myrtle murmured from beneath her veil, ‘that there are some envious old hags in this church. And that I have chosen the right dress.’

  ‘I told you it was a mistake to hold this on a Sunday,’ muttered Uncle Miles. ‘Everybody’s day off – leisure aplenty to come and goggle.’

  Clay looked so frail in his surplice, dwarfed by his oversized pulpit. His voice was earnest but faint, as though tired of fighting the shadows that hung from the vaulted ceiling.

  ‘We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can take nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord . . .’

  A rustle of hymnbooks. A familiar psalm, sung to an unfamiliar tune. And then Clay was talking and talking again, of falling and rising and sleep and redemption. His words were lifeless pebbles on an endless beach, and Faith wanted it all to be over, over, over. She wanted her father to be safe under the clod, away from this chill, hostile darkness and the bushfire crackle of whispers.

  At last the curate’s voice came to a soft stop and there was a thunder of shoe-shuffles and shifting pews. Myrtle nudged Faith, and she realized with passionate relief that the service was done. She stood, and with the rest of her family paraded out towards the grey daylight, so that they could follow the coffin to the grave.