The Book of Lies (3 page)

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.”

M
ARCEL 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.

She might be careless with a bucket, but not with her appearance, he noticed. Her long tresses, now loosened from their ponytail, stretched almost to her waist and she had stroked them to a brassy sheen. Pale freckles from working in
the sun dotted her nose and cheeks, but they couldn’t hide what a pretty girl she was. How much prettier she would be if she didn’t spend so much time scowling.

Meanwhile, Mrs Timmins began listing names around the table. “I don’t think you met the girls before. That’s Sarah and beside her is Dorothy. We call her Dot because she’s small and round.”

“I am not,” the girl retorted, but the others only laughed. They seemed to do that a lot around this table.

More girls’ names followed, Kate and Lizzy. When it was her turn, Marcel was officially introduced to Nicola. She offered him a stiff smile, said, “How do you do,” and went back to her delicate eating.

He barely noticed her rudeness, because he was looking for a particular face, and so far he hadn’t found it.