Authors: Frances Hardinge
‘I would rather be skinned alive,’ he said.
‘Then help me find my father’s killer,’ said Faith, ‘and you need never see me again. You know the island. You can talk to people. You can find out whether anybody was
out that night for no good reason. You can go where you please—’
‘I have studies!’ protested Paul. ‘I have work, helping my father—’
‘Nobody shuts you in a room with your catechism, or expects to know where you are every moment of the day,’ persisted Faith. ‘You can go for a walk by yourself, or talk to
people in the street. It is not the same.’
Paul’s stare was maddeningly hard to read. He was like his father’s camera, she decided. He barely blinked, and took in every detail without mercy.
‘What do I gain from it?’ he asked after a long pause.
Faith hesitated, then slowly took out her locket. A lock of her father’s distinctive dark auburn hair was curled inside, cut during the wake. It pained her deeply to think of disturbing
it, but she needed an ally.
‘What will your “friends” do if you come back without some of my father’s hair?’ she asked. ‘Will they tease you? Call you a coward?’
Paul reddened, and Faith knew that her barb had struck home. She carefully pulled the little tress free, then prised it in two. One half she tucked back into the locket. The other she held out
between finger and thumb.
‘Come and take it,’ she said.
Paul looked at the hair, then at Faith, clearly conflicted. The sacred, inviolable distance still stretched between them. Then he rose to his feet, nervously stooped so that he could not be seen
from the grounds. The movement disturbed the snake, which drew itself into a muscular zigzag with a faint hiss. Paul flinched and drew back a step, and the sight filled Faith with the same wild
malice she had felt during their first conversation.
‘If you like dares so much, Paul Clay,’ she said, ‘then come.
I dare you.
’
Paul seemed hypnotized by the slow ooze of the snake’s ebony-and-gold body.
‘Don’t look so scared,’ Faith whispered. ‘This breed of snake does not bite.’ She saw one of Paul’s hands twitch, as if he was considering reaching out.
‘It strangles,’ she added helpfully, and saw his recoil with satisfaction. ‘You don’t dare, do you?’
He edged his way forward, and then lunged and snatched the hair from between her fingers. As he did so, she grabbed his sleeve, holding it fast.
‘If you tell
anybody
the secrets I have told you today,’ she whispered fiercely, ‘then I will tell everyone that you were too frightened to cut the hair yourself. I
have the other half of the lock, and I know which part of his head it was cut from, and you do not.’
The snake slithered down past her wrist, its head gliding against the back of Paul’s hand. He yanked himself free and withdrew a few steps, rubbing his hand with his other palm, clearly
mortified and angry.
‘Do
you
take dares?’ he retaliated. ‘There is a ratting at the lookout hut on the coast road every Monday night. Come and find me there – we can talk about your
precious murder.’
Faith had heard of ratting, a ‘sport’ for tavern cellars. Terriers were dropped into a pit of rats and commanded to kill them as quickly as possible. Paul knew she could not be seen
at something of that sort. He was raising the stakes again.
‘Will I see you there then?’ he asked, with a very slight smile. ‘No, I thought not.’
A gust of wind stirred the leaves, making them both jump.
‘I ought to go,’ Paul said, in a quieter, less combative tone. He nodded towards the grounds. ‘Is the coast clear?’
Faith turned to peer out through the mesh of leaves and trellis. There was nobody in sight. She looked back at him and nodded.
Paul trotted across to the creeper-covered gate and vaulted neatly over it, disappearing from her view. She heard a faint patter as he descended the steps.
Faith sat and listened. There was no outcry. He had not been discovered.
They
had not been discovered.
She could not believe that she had held a clandestine conversation alone with a young man. Paul was about her own age, but that was old enough for scandal purposes. Faith felt scalded, sick and
unclean. Her clothes felt itchy. If she looked in the mirror, she feared she might see something broken and used.
Why had she brought this about? What was it about Paul Clay that made her do and say mad, savage things?
At the same time she felt painfully awake, and as if a weight had been taken from her. She had thrown her dice wildly, but perhaps she had an ally now. Not a friend, but it was better than
nothing.
Faith kept remembering Paul floating neatly over the gate. It had looked so easy. It had looked like flying. She wondered how it felt.
Only later did it cross her mind that Paul had been very quick to trust her word that the coast was clear. After all, she could have sent him right into the arms of capture, then fled into her
room and feigned ignorance of his trespass. Strangely it had not occurred to her to do so, not for one moment.
Paul Clay was not a friend. He had, however, given Faith a precious glimpse of the rest of the island, and one important fact. Her lie was taking hold.
Even now, everybody on Vane was talking of the Reverend’s ghost. Was this enough? Could a fruit be swelling on the Lie Tree? Faith needed to visit the sea cave again. She needed to see the
Tree, to know whether she was wasting her time.
This time, however, she would prepare properly.
Secluding herself in her room on pretence of faintness, Faith returned to her father’s notes to study them in more detail. When she recalled her first encounter with the plant, Faith felt
a little embarrassed. She had approached it like an altar and whispered to it like a confidante. Her actions had all been shockingly bereft of scientific method.
She was a
scientist
, she reminded herself. Scientists did not give in to awe and superstition. Scientists asked questions, and answered them through observation and logic.
The plant had no ears. How could it know when it had been told a lie? It had no brain. How could it know the secrets of the world? It hailed from exotic climes, so how could it understand the
Queen’s English? How could secrets be contained within a fruit, and how could knowledge be eaten?
If her father was wrong about the Lie Tree, she needed to know. If he was right, then these questions needed answers. ‘Magic’ was not an answer; it was an excuse to avoid looking for
one.
Faith leafed through the crammed journal pages, deciphering her father’s notes and comments.
A great puzzle – the plant’s ability to live, grow and purify the air without the benign radiance of the sun. Energy must be acquired from another source in
order to enact its necessary chemical processes.
Warmth absorbed from the air? Improbable, since the plant appears to thrive in cold, damp environments. Insectivorous like the sundews? If plant is cave-dwelling, powerful wintry scent
may convince lost creatures that an opening to the outside is nearby. No such predation observed, though prey may be imperceptibly small and borne in by air currents. Could glutinous sap entrap
them?
Faith recalled the sticky moistness that had covered her fingers when she touched the plant and felt a sudden desire to wash her hands.
A new theory: the plant may be a symbiote. It remains dormant until it establishes a psychical connection with an intelligent member of another species, after which is
able to sustain itself through the flow of invisible energies not unlike those described in the now derided theories of Animal Magnetism. Could lies transmit nourishment through ripples in the
Magnetic Fluid? Could consumption of the fruit strengthen the connection, triggering a Crisis and an incidence of Unobstructed Vision?
Faith vaguely remembered reading about ‘animal magnetism’ in her father’s library back at the rectory. It was an old theory that everything and everyone
existed in a sort of invisible spirit soup, with currents running to, from and through every animal and person. Blockages in the flow made you ill. If you learned to channel and direct it, you
could affect other beings, sometimes heal them. If all your blockages were destroyed, you went into a trance called ‘the crisis’, where it was said that sometimes you could see right
through solid objects. Faith had never heard of plants generating ‘animal magnetism’, but the Tree was no ordinary plant.
It may be that I reach in vain for rational explanations. I have wondered whether the Tree may date from the Earliest Days, its lightless leaves, useless flowers and
seedless fruit souvenirs of a more Fortunate Age, now lost.
The last words made Faith uncomfortable. They hinted at the inexplicable and brought back the memory of the whispering cave. She felt a lurking fear that her bridge of science might fail her and
come to an uncanny halt, leaving only a drop to dark and secret waters . . .
She would not succumb to superstition. She would be governed by her mind, not her fears.
Faith tiptoed her father’s room, fairly confident that she was now unlikely to be interrupted in the ‘haunted’ chamber. There she found a case holding her father’s field
kit. It contained his little brass field microscope, corked jars for trapping insects, a tin box or ‘vasculum’ for botanic samples, bottles of different acids for testing rocks, a
little compass clinometer, a goniometer and calipers. Another box held a niche where his pistol should have been, some lead shot, a bag of copper percussion caps, a dismounting key and small powder
flask. She also scavenged a small metal ruler, a battered old pocket watch and a folding knife.
Low tide was an hour later than it had been two days before. She made her compromise with the light and tide, heading a little later than before, but not the full hour, for she did not dare face
the journey in the full dark.
It was in the darker twilight that she crept out of the house in her ruined funeral clothes, flitted between the outhouses and hastened down the path to the beach.
The current was stronger than it had been on Faith’s last little voyage, but for now it was with her. Her aggrieved muscles were grateful for this as they strained at the
oars.
The strange boom of the breakers echoing within the cliff was welcoming to her, like the deep-throated bark of a guard dog that knew her. This time the lurching wave that drove her boat into the
cave mouth filled her with a fizz of excitement instead of fear.
She tethered the boat and clambered back to the Lie Tree’s cavern, taking care not to jolt her lantern or the field case. The split seams around her shoulders let her move her arms more
freely, making it easier to climb.
Before entering the cavern with the Tree, she stopped to drape her shawl over the lantern. Too much radiance would injure the plant, but her father had succeeded in sketching it, so it must be
able to endure
some
light. The lantern now gave off a much duller glow, but just enough to light her way.
As Faith entered the cavern, she thought she heard a welcoming rush of sighs, a susurration of recognition. She could just make out the outline of the Tree, a blot of blackness that seemed
larger than before.
‘I have returned,’ Faith whispered to it, then stopped herself. She was talking to botanic specimens again.
As she drew closer, her eyes adjusting to the dark, she could no longer delude herself. It was not a trick of the shadows. The plant
had
grown.
Reaching out, she could feel that its bristling creeper-like tendrils were now spilling over the side of the pot. She followed them by touch as they splayed out across the stone shelf like
octopus tentacles, some drooping down over the edge towards the cavern floor. Beneath the leaves the undulating vine was thick and woody, as if it had been growing for some time.
‘That is
impossible
’, breathed Faith. She had never seen a plant grow so fast, let alone without sunlight. ‘That . . . is
not obeying the laws.
’
Her voice sounded absurd even to her. Was she expecting the plant to apologize and become obediently rational?
She swallowed and took out her father’s folding knife. ‘I am sorry about this,’ she whispered, ‘but I am here to study you.’
While the soft cacophony of wave-roars and rock-sighs billowed about her ears, Faith began examining the plant. There was too little light for her to take measurements with her ruler and
calipers, but she managed to take rubbings of the leaf veins using pencil and paper. She cut samples of forked leaves, spines and pieces of bark, then scraped away a blob of oozing sap, putting
each specimen into a separate jar. It was an unnerving task, and Faith felt as though she were trimming the toenails of a dragon. She even waved the compass around the Tree, squinting at the dial
to see whether she could detect magnetic fields.
All the while, as she stroked her fingers through the leaves, she was searching for a flower, a bud, anything. In her father’s sketches the flowers had been white, so she hoped they might
show up even in the darkness. She squinted at the plant from all sides, at first slowly and methodically, then with increasingly desperation.
There was nothing. Perhaps there never could be anything. Perhaps the Lie Tree was itself a lie.
She felt utterly crushed and foolish. Only now did she realize how certain she had been that the plant would not betray her, and that she would find
something.
Then, as she gave the foliage one more despairing pat, something small and round fell from one of the tendrils. It bounced off the rim of the pot, landed on her skirt and rolled down the slope
of the fabric.
Faith gave a squawk of panic. She snatched at it, and was just fast enough to catch it between two of her knuckles. She let out a long breath. If it had bounced away into the darkness, she would
probably never have found it again.