Crock, on the other hand, flinched whenever a vine stroked his face.
‘Pay no attention to the voices,’ Faith whispered. ‘You get used to them.’ It pleased her to see Crock tense as he noticed the piecemeal murmurs for the first time.
As they progressed, however, the voices grew louder, and began to unnerve Faith as well.
The heart of the Tree was now a vast tortured tangle of trunk-wide wooden vines, buckling and puckering. Staring up at it, Faith could hear her eardrums beating, with a sound like rending paper. With each beat, the pallor of the twisting wood seemed to pulse and glare. In her peripheral vision she thought she saw tender wisps of blackness leaking from the knot to darken and thicken the air.
Agatha laughed, and placed one foot on a thick lower coil. Faith did not know whether the older woman was claiming conquest of it, or about to climb it like a child. Crock stared at it with a suspicious frown.
‘We have seen what we came to see,’ said Crock. ‘Shall we go?’ He glanced across at Faith, and his face saddened. He was already thinking of her dead, she realized. He was readying himself to murder her, and already trying out the regret he would feel. He was thinking of ways to make it quick.
If she gave her captors nothing else to think about, they would think about killing her.
‘Why are you in such a hurry, Mr Crock?’ Faith demanded, with a boldness she did not feel. ‘Are you afraid of it? After everything you have done, and the people you killed to be here? It is only a plant. It eats lies and feeds secrets, but that is easily explained. It forms a bond with one person, and then the rest is just a matter of currents in the magnetic fluid.’
Agatha stiffened and turned to glare. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Animal magnetism,’ Faith continued brightly. ‘It induces trances, unobstructed visions, allows living things to affect each other without touching, causes physical effects—’
‘I know of the theory of animal magnetism!’ snapped Agatha. ‘It is an absurd, exploded notion that nobody of sense now believes! Only charlatan healers still talk of it! How dare you apply such old-fashioned nonsense to my Tree?’ There was a fierce light in her eye that was almost joy.
‘How would you explain it then?’ retorted Faith, wondering how long it had been since Agatha had had the chance to debate anything with anybody.
‘Well, obviously the Tree is some sort of spiritual carnivore.’ Agatha drew closer. ‘I would surmise that it consumes ghosts, and is able to provide answers using the knowledge of the spirits within – like a vegetable medium. My theory is that a powerful lie takes on a life of its own, almost becoming a miniature spirit. The Tree absorbs such lies, and uses their spirit energy to sustain the ghosts inside it.’
She was standing close to Faith now, her eyes shining in the dim lantern-light. She was the same age as Myrtle, Faith realized, but disappointment had scored its grooves deep. There were creases at the corners of her mouth, the marks of too many words bitten back.
‘Thank you,’ said Faith humbly. ‘That was . . . very enlightening.’ Then she struck the lantern from Agatha’s hand, so that it smashed on the cave floor.
There was darkness, and smells of oil and green wood singeing. Faith tried to snatch her arm from Crock’s grip, but his fingers bit into her and held. His other arm grappled her, and tightened about her throat as she struggled.
Faith pulled the pistol out of her pocket, fumbled blindly until the hammer clicked back, then raised the gun so that it was pointing backwards past her head. She fired.
The bang was like a blow to the side of her head. The pistol jerked and jumped out of her grip, its hot metal bumping against her shoulder as it fell. Somebody behind her was screaming, and nobody was holding her any more.
Faith plunged into the pitch black ahead of her, hearing glass crunch under her feet. There were shapes behind her thrashing, rustles and panting like great beasts in the undergrowth. Faith’s own blundering caused just as much noise. Vines slapped her face, tangled about her neck, tripped her feet, hooked her sleeves, trailed into her pockets, reached invisible fingers into her eyes.
She needed to find the cave wall. Once she had it she could follow it and find her way out. But her fingers met dangling vines and more vines and the clammy stickiness of leaves. There came into her head a deep soul-fear that she and her pursuers were no longer in the cave but in a wall-less, endless jungle of the Tree, a private hell where they would hunt each other for eternity.
No, she told herself, no. There is a wall. There is a wall
Amid the fluttering of leaves and the matted strands of foliage, her fingers touched stone.
She followed the wall, tearing her fingers on the vine-knots in her haste. She stumbled on steps and slopes, found footholds, climbed. She clambered, and squeezed, feeling her way by touch. The apertures were narrower than they had been, padded out with sprawling, crawling vines. She lost precious time sawing through her hoop ties and disentangling herself from them, so that she could squeeze through narrower gaps.
But she thanked each desperate cranny, each painful fissure, knowing that if they were hard for her they would be doubly so for the crashers and thrashers behind her. She was the rat in the crack, escaping the terrier’s jaws.
There was something above her, a glimmer that could scarcely be called light. She fought and struggled and wriggled like a fish, striving towards that pale promise. Her fingers found holds and her arms found strength and she hauled herself upward. The tunnel grew lighter and at last there was a triangle of blue sky above. Faith smelt fresh air with a scent of hot grass, and felt soil between her fingers.
But as she tried to haul herself into that light, the vines tightened and held her. They were tangled about her shoulders and waist, her arms and neck, biting and knotting. She had reached the full extent of the Lie Tree’s leash, and felt her fingers rake through earth as she started to slide back down the tunnel.
‘No!’ whispered Faith, but her whisper was not the only noise. The voices thronged about her, and now she knew why they disturbed her. They spoke in her own voice, mangled and maddened into the gargling of a cat.
He was a genius, the voices wailed and growled. He was wronged and misunderstood. He was a good man. We had a special bond . . .
Words that she had never spoken to the Tree. Thoughts that she had whispered to nobody but herself. And lies. Beloved, choking lies.
Faith managed to struggle one hand down into her pocket and pull out her tiny hand mirror. Reaching upward at full stretch, she could just move its glass face into the shaft of sunlight and reflect its light towards herself.
There was a fizzle and flare as the vines binding her burst into flame. She ignored the sudden burning pain and the smell of her hair scorching. Her sap-smeared clothes fizzed, but they were still damp with seawater. As the vines loosed their grip she scrambled upward and heaved herself out of the hole, belly down, like landed fish. She rolled over and over to put out the flames, then lay gasping.
For a few moments she had no breath, no sense of anything but the sky over her head. Then she became aware that a smoke was coming from the hole. She had thought only to singe the tendrils that bound her, but now she imagined fire chasing its way down vine after vine, like the orange flame along the blast-powder fuse.
Plumes of grey smoke yielded to great, black billows. Beneath her, the Tree was burning.
Faith pulled her feet and ankles away from the hole, covering her mouth to shield it from the smoke. She could do nothing for Ben Crock and Agatha Lambent but fetch help. Unsteadily Faith stood up, then nearly collapsed again as the world turned carousel, her ears roaring.
She saw the distant spire of the church, and staggered in that direction. Her feet did not seem to be her own, and she could not keep her route straight. Somehow the cliff-edge kept sidling in on her right and surprising her. Once she caught herself irritably answering a question that nobody had asked her.
Fumes. It must be the fumes.
S
he glanced over her shoulder, and saw that there was still a glowering column of smoke rising from the hidden entrance. It was spreading as it rose, an unhealthy sallow smudge against the blue.
Far closer, however, was a figure. A blackened phantasm, soot-stained and relentless, hair drifting on the breeze like a warning flag. Red burns blistered her face and showed through the charred holes in her mermaid-green dress. Agatha was gaining fast, eyes fixed upon Faith, and only Faith.
Faith’s legs failed her, and she fell to the ground again. Beneath her, one hand scrabbled for something to throw, and closed upon a pebble. A small, perfectly round pebble.
‘Stay back!’ she called, as the figure drew ever nearer. She held up the stone, hoping that Agatha saw nothing but a round, dark shape. ‘This is a fruit – all that is left of the Tree! Leave me alone . . . or I will throw it into the sea!’
Agatha did not slow.
‘You can still run!’ called Faith, scrabbling backwards over the turf, her hand still raised to throw. ‘Go to the port! Find a boat!’
Agatha looked directly into Faith’s eyes as she strode on. Her look of despair was as flat and empty as her gaze of joy had been.
‘Stop!’ shouted Faith. ‘I mean it!’
Agatha lunged forward, fingers curled to grab at the ‘fruit’, and Faith threw it past her, towards the cliff-drop. It was all she could think of – a distraction to give her time to get away.
The older woman twisted round and stared after the small, round shape as it bounced and ricocheted towards the edge. She turned and chased it.
It bounced, and the sunlight gleamed on its slate-grey surface. It was a pebble, plainly no more than a pebble. It was bounding away faster than anybody could catch, and still Agatha ran.
‘Stop!’ Faith found herself shouting. ‘Stop! I lied!’
But as the pebble plummeted over the edge, Faith realized that Agatha was no longer even looking at it. Near the brink Agatha accelerated, and then spread her arms as she took her longest stride into eternity.
Then there was nothing but the heartless blue of the sky, the smoke-scented wind and the crickets gossiping amid the dry grass.
CHAPTER 36:
EVOLUTION
Things might have been different if Dr Jacklers had not survived. Survive he did, however, with a very ill grace but some prospect of regaining the use of his broken leg.
He even presided over the postponed inquest of the late Reverend Erasmus Sunderly, loath to leave the task to a lesser man, and badgered the jury so severely that some of them clearly thought that they were the ones on trial. He was kinder in speaking of Faith Sunderly, but did upbraid her for failing to share her suspicions with him earlier.
The Reverend was found to have died at the hands of persons known. Ben Crock was found in the cavern, alive but badly singed, powder damage from a pistol marring the vision in his left eye. The ‘navvies’, all men who had worked with Crock under Winterbourne, were rounded up and arrested.
The body of Agatha Lambent was found at the base of a cliff. However, her part in the skulduggery was played down. Faith knew that this delicacy was a kindness to her memory and the feelings of her husband, who had been devastated to hear of his late wife’s crimes. At the same time, it made Faith feel uncomfortable. Agatha was disappearing. Her cunning, her villainy, her scientific zeal, her brilliance and her obsessions were melting into air like steam. Soon she would be just another ‘beloved wife’ on a marble headstone.
Faith’s part in events would become invisible as well. If the newspapers mentioned her at all, she would be an artless young girl who had stumbled upon the truth, just as she had once stumbled upon a valuable fossil. Perhaps they would even use the photograph of her at the age of seven, proudly gripping her find.
No trace was found of the Tree. The fire had consumed it, leaving only blackened cave walls and a singular smell. Faith mourned the loss to science, but could not be entirely sorry that it was gone.
Evidence inconclusive, she wrote in her notebook under her own theories and those of her father. And then: Observations unreliable. Objectivity compromised.
On a quiet morning the Reverend’s grave was cleared and his coffin lowered into its final resting place. Watching the clods thud softly on the wood, and the turf fold over like a counterpane, Faith felt a wound close at last.
My father will never understand or forgive me. But I can understand him, and forgive him in time. And that is probably enough.
‘There was some good in him,’ Myrtle told Faith later, during a long evening where they talked about everything, over cake that was now an extravagance. ‘You and Howard meant something to him at least.’
‘What about you?’ asked Faith.
Myrtle shook her head. ‘I told myself that I was lucky,’ she said. ‘Your father never struck me, never drank and if he had mistresses he had the good grace to be discreet. He provided for me and my children, and yet I tried, year after year, to make myself his companion. The doors never opened, Faith. In the end I lost hope.
‘Ah, but I cannot complain!’ Myrtle swatted away the past with one delicate little hand. ‘It has made me what I am. When every door is closed, one learns to climb through windows. Human nature, I suppose.’
Anthony Lambent received Myrtle and Faith in his wife’s cabinet of curiosities. He was a wreckage of his erstwhile boisterous self, his gaze roaming disconsolately from case to case.
‘She was my anchor,’ he said, ‘my port in the world’s storm. I could sleep knowing she was there. How will I ever sleep again?’
He looked across at Faith, and she was taken aback at seeing such a big man look so small.
‘I am the magistrate,’ he said miserably. ‘I must enforce the law, and there are laws regarding burial of suicides – you know this better than most. Miss Sunderly . . . you saw her at the end. Did she . . . ?’ He could not finish the sentence.
Faith remembered Agatha’s bold leap into space. Then she looked into the widower’s face and decided the cosmos would forgive her one more lie.
‘She lost her footing,’ she said.
Lambent closed his eyes and let out a long breath. ‘I should not care,’ he said, ‘but . . . I would have done anything for her. These . . . all of these . . .’ He walked around case after case. ‘The excavation was for her. All I wanted was to make her happy . . .’ Bright tears oozed out of his eyes, and his lost look reminded Faith of Howard.
Lambent’s mood whiplashed too quickly for anybody to react. He seized the nearest display case, wrenched it from the wall and flung it to the ground. It smashed, scattering glass shards, labels and birds’ egg fragments across the floor.
He turned to the next case.
‘No!’ Faith threw herself in front of it. At that moment she would have fought to the death to defend the life’s work of her mortal enemy.
‘Please, Mr Lambent!’ Myrtle cried out at the same time. ‘If you wish these things out of your house . . . then let us take them. I am sure that, ah, Howard would greatly appreciate them once he is older.’
On a grey morning a few days later, an innocent mailboat docked at Vane’s harbour town, unaware that it was about to take away the island’s most notorious intruders.
Transporting the Sunderly luggage and Agatha’s sizeable natural-history collection to harbour had been a lengthy business. It might have proved impossible without unexpected assistance from the Clays and Miss Hunter.
Faith rode to the harbour in Miss Hunter’s trap, hearing slithers from the crate in her lap. Her snake had at last shed the dry sheath of its old skin to reveal new colours, vibrant and unabashed.
Scowls blistered from side streets and doorways, and Faith thought she recognized Jeanne amongst the scowlers. The Reverend’s family had once been a target for mockery, resentment and suspicion. Now truths and half-truths were spreading across Vane, and hostility had given way to a fear almost superstitious. The night-clad Sunderly women were mistresses of deception and seduction. It wa
s dangerous to meet their eye.
Miss Hunter, on the other hand, seemed unfazed. When Faith took her courage into her hands and began a stumbled confession, the postmistress cut her short with surprising good humour.
‘We both played the gossip game.’ Miss Hunter wielded the reins with the confidence of practice. ‘After your mother upset Jane Vellet, I was angry and told everyone about that Intelligencer article. You spread a rumour in turn, but you were not the one that set fire to my house. A woman like me makes enemies.’
Faith wondered what ‘a woman like me’ meant. Perhaps a wilfully happy spinster with a sharp tongue and a good salary. In Faith’s eyes, Miss Hunter had always seemed icily smug and unassailable. Now Faith saw glitters of defiance, and a tightrope beneath her feet.
Faith had always told herself that she was not like other ladies. But neither, it seemed, were other ladies.
As they passed Dr Jacklers’s house, Miss Hunter raised her hand in a salute. A hand waved curtly back from a top window.
‘Why do you tease Dr Jacklers for being short?’ It was Faith’s last chance to ask the question.
‘Ah.’ Miss Hunter gave her small, cool smirk. ‘Well, at one point he grew very impatient with my refusal to marry him, so he explained to me that women lacked the intelligence to look after their own affairs. He tried to prove it by showing me his patients’ skull measurements. On average, male skulls are bigger than female skulls.
‘Unfortunately for the doctor, his records included his patients’ other measurements as well. After which I told him that I was quite convinced by his evidence, and would do my best to marry the very tallest man I could find. You see, the taller men usually had larger skulls. And the doctor could not say that this was not a sign that they were cleverer than him, since that would tear apart his claim to be cleverer than me.
‘Large people tend to have large heads. Men are no cleverer than we are, Miss Sunderly. Just taller.’
On the quay, Faith stood beside Paul Clay, watching the mailboat’s crew loading the boxes on to the boat. It was strange to be standing next to him by daylight, without secrecy. She felt too self-conscious to look at him. The arguments had been easier, theatre-vivid, full of stage lighting and dramatic gestures. Now there was a chance that their little time would run out without anybody speaking at all.