‘Back to work, everyone!’ called out Lambent, flicking at imaginary mosquitoes with his whisk. The labourers stopped watching, and Dr Jacklers, Uncle Miles and Lambent strolled back to the tents. Clay’s head and shoulders disappeared beneath the ‘hood’, the black cloth attached to the back of the camera. From within the camera could be heard the faint clink of bottles.
‘Thank you, Miss Sunderly,’ murmured Agatha Lambent without looking at her.
Faith tightened her grip on her fan, hearing its sandalwood slats creak under the strain. She did not want to be thanked by this woman, particularly not in such a low, sincere tone.
‘Whether you believe it or not,’ continued the magistrate’s wife, ‘I am usually kind. However, I am a good wife first and foremost. My husband is standing for Parliament, and his reputation must be protected at all costs.’
‘Then perhaps you should have stopped him wearing those pantaloons,’ Faith murmured, as she rose from her seat.
‘A wife cannot always rein in her husband’s impulses,’ answered Mrs Lambent gravely, ‘but she must always strive to protect him from the consequences.’
Faith walked away without looking back. She had been insulted, but at least she had not been turned off the site.
She slipped one hand into her pocket and closed it around a small, cold coin. It was a reminder that revenge was possible, even in the enemy’s camp.
The arrival of the Sunderly daughter had not gone unnoticed, and Faith could feel the weight of hard, wondering gazes. She was relieved when Crock approached her once again.
‘Miss, I was thinking you might want to wait until the men stop for lunch before you make any sketches in the tunnel. Until then, if you would care to make some drawings of the best finds, I could move a chair into that tent for you.’ He nodded towards the tent where Faith had seen the ancient bone needle.
‘Yes, thank you, Mr Crock!’ Even though Faith felt like an imposter, it was so refreshing to be treated like a useful member of a team, rather than some kind of strawberry ice that needed to be kept in the shade.
She followed him as he carried a folding chair into the tent, set it up and dusted it down for her.
‘I am sorry for your loss,’ Crock added in a quiet tone.
Faith stared at him, feeling as though somebody had pulled away the ground beneath her feet. It was, she realized, a perfectly natural thing to say in the situation. However, nobody else had said it.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘How is your family?’ he asked.
Faith thought of drenched sobbing on the highway, ransacked drawers, desperate hunts for ghost-killing guns. All the polite answers died on her tongue. She shook her head silently.
‘So . . . you needed to be out of the house for a while.’ Crock nodded slowly. ‘And coming here, you feel closer to your father.’ His gaze was very earnest and very blue. He had outdoor eyes, Faith decided, reflecting the light of countless skies.
His compassion cut Faith to the quick, as she thought of her many ulterior motives. At the same time, she realized that he was partly right. This strange scent of dust, cloven earth and boiled horse hoofs really did make her feel that she was breathing the air of her father’s world.
‘Mr Crock, did anybody ever find out why the mining-basket chain broke?’
‘We haven’t found the broken link yet,’ answered the foreman with a frown. ‘It must have dropped down the shaft after it snapped and fallen down a crack. When we find it, we’ll know. Meanwhile, we’re keeping the guy ropes short, and only lowering folks one at a time.’
‘Could a thief have crept in by night and damaged it?’ asked Faith.
‘Yes, if he had cat’s feet.’ Crock nodded towards the labourers. ‘We have three navvies on the site, and they sleep here in the tents. I pity any thief who broke their rest.’
Faith’s curiosity was sparked by the missing link. Perhaps Crock was right and it had really fallen down a crack. She wondered, however, whether a stealthy hand had hidden it. Perhaps it had not broken through rust or fatigue. Perhaps it had been filed through.
When the labouring men stopped for lunch, Faith was shown to the tunnel and provided with a chair, an easel and a small folding table. A lantern’s yellow light showed her the tunnel’s timber supports and its rugged earth and rock walls.
Faith’s mouth was dry. To maintain her cover, somehow she would need to create something that could pass for a skilled drawing of rock strata. Somebody had cut grooves into the walls with a trowel to make the strata clear for her, but she could hardly make out the difference between the layers. She could only hope that everybody else around her knew even less about section drawings than she did.
In case anybody was watching, she made a great show of holding her pencil at arm’s length and calculating the slope of the strata, then making confident-looking dots and tiny crosses on the paper.
At one point she was unnerved to realize that Crock was looking over her shoulder at her sketchbook, eyes bright in the lantern-light. Kind as he might be, the foreman was most likely to see through her squiggles and dots. She risked a few faint lines, copying the slope of the trowel grooves.
There was a rustle. A few papers had been placed on the table next to her.
‘Mr Lambent’s draughtsman made a few rough sketches, before he broke his wrist,’ said Crock. ‘I thought you might have a use for them.’ He left again before Faith could thank him.
The sketches were unfinished, but the draughtsman had managed to capture the shape of the hill. Better yet, the drawings had scribbled labels for the strata, such as ‘black cave earth, ‘flint’, ‘shale’, and so forth.
Gratefully Faith corrected her lines and labelled the layers as he had indicated. For some time she had dearly wished that the whole of Vane would sink beneath the grey and turbulent sea. Now she admitted to herself that, should such a calamity occur, she would not be sorry if Ben Crock came upon a boat in time.
Faith’s gratitude to the foreman was not enough, however, to make her reconsider her plans. She was there, after all, to cause confusion and conflict.
She had been discreetly observing the labourers. They were divided into two groups, she realized. Three strongly built men with Irish accents took care of the actual digging inside the cave and emerged with barrows of rubble. Two locals were on hand for the rest of the fetching, carrying, sweeping away underfoot gravel and pushing barrows of rubble to a nearby heap. The two groups barely seemed to speak a word to each other.
Only the local men interested her. If she wanted to infect Vane with an idea, she needed to put it into their heads first.
She found her chance in the mid-afternoon, not long before Uncle Miles was due to take her home. The two men had stepped aside to take a short rest and enjoy their allowance of beer. Their barrow full of rubble was unattended. Out of her pocket she took the coin and dropped it in among the broken rocks, so that it was just peeping out. It was an old Spanish silver piece-of-eight that Faith’s father had brought back from his travels. The blackened tarnish around the edge made it look mysterious.
A little later, Faith saw the labourers return to the barrow. One of them stooped to stare at it intensely, then dug his elbow into his friend’s ribs. Both whispered and glanced about furtively, then one man plucked something out of the barrow and pushed it hastily into his pocket.
The following day, Faith drew fewer stares at the excavation site. She was not precisely accepted, but she was no longer quite so interesting. Her sketches were improving too, thanks to some late night consultation of her father’s books, and everyone seemed happy to leave her to it.
This gave her the chance to do some observing of her own. She soon found that, under cover of sketching, she could set up her folding chair and easel wherever she pleased and eavesdrop to her heart’s content, watching the scene from beneath her lashes.
Very soon, with her deft pencil, she might have drawn a map of the little camaraderies and frictions that ruled th
e excavation.
Dr Jacklers was happier than she had ever seen him. He had commandeered a small tent to house various papers from the Society of Antiquaries and his precious copy of the Reliquiae Aquitaniae, the latest and most exciting book about cave artefacts. He was forever running in to consult it, and became extremely irascible if anybody else dared to approach it. Faith was surprised that he did not chain it to the table like a medieval Bible.
Possessed of this source of cave-hunting lore, the doctor ruled supreme in the tunnel itself. He drove pegs into the cave floor and ran taut ‘datum-line’ strings between them, dividing the area into grid squares so that it could be dug up a square at a time. Crock nodded courteously, agreed to anything suggested, then altered the doctor’s orders slightly when passing them on to his men.
Lambent strode around the site and involved himself in everything. He examined newly excavated items, became excited about them, ran into the house with them, ran out with books from his library and put the artefacts back in the wrong box. Crock quietly followed his rampages, setting everything straight in his wake.
Despite her famous ill health, Agatha Lambent came by again. She spent her visit sitting like an invalid queen in her billowing shelter, spectating with regal distance. Ben Crock could frequently be seen stopping before her divan throne to make solicitous enquiries, his cap in his hand. Perhaps he was afraid that, without regular attention, she would fall over in the wind and break.
To Faith’s surprise, Miss Hunter also visited. She showed no interest in the actual dig, but was content to drink tea with Mrs Lambent. Her arrival had a magical effect upon both Dr Jacklers and Lambent. The former stormed off to the furthest corner of the site and stared moodily at mammoth teeth. The latter appeared to lose all interest in the dig and joined the tea-drinking in the ‘Bedouin tent’.
As Faith had suspected, Crock was the glue that held everything together. He kept the site under control, without raising his voice or drawing attention to himself. He appeared to have eyes and ears everywhere, and an uncanny ability to detect problems in the bud and nip them. In short, Faith quickly deduced that if she wanted to spy, steal, connive or do anything else underhand, then Crock was likely to be her biggest problem.
The two local men, on the other hand, had changed their manner since the incident with the coin. They looked more alert and hungry, and were given to secretive, animated conversations in corners. Several times Faith noticed them surreptitiously searching through the rubble in their barrow, and wandering into parts of the site where they did not usually work.
‘Maybe something in it after all,’ she heard one of them say, failing to notice her inside the nearby tent. ‘Maybe old Sunderly wasn’t happy with his share.’
‘Or perhaps the others wanted a larger share, and he knew too much,’ suggested the other. ‘They left out the doctor, didn’t they?’
Faith’s jaw ached with trying not to smile. Whoever had found her half-rolled paper spill had clearly read it, and shared its contents with others. If word had reached these men, it was probably gossip all over the island. Her plan was working.
In spite of everything, there was real pleasure in the thought of her lie sending tremors through Vane, knocking her self-important enemies off balance and making them fight like cats. She was filled with pride and a sense of power. She was good at this . . . and getting better.
CHAPTER 24:
TREMORS
On Sunday, of course, there was no work at the excavation, nor any possibility of Faith visiting the site. On Myrtle’s insistence, the whole Sunderly family, dressed in their night-hued best, braced themselves and went to church.
As they entered all conversation died among the waiting congregation. Faith felt sick. It was too much like the funeral day a week before. As the family trooped up the aisle, however, the whispers sounded nervous, not venomous. When they arrived at the box pew in which they had rented space, those already seated in it moved out without a word, taking pains to avoid passing too close to them.
Clay, who had seemed so lost and ineffectual during the funeral, now stamped up into his pulpit with a purpose. His sermon was about the dead, respect for the dead, kindness to those they left behind. What sort of people were they if they mocked the deceased? Were they inviting vengeance from the unseen powers?
Halfway through this sermon there was a muffled squawk from somewhere in the main body of the church, followed by concerned cries.
‘. . . fainted!’ somebody called out.
Trapped in her box pew, Faith could not look round. From the noises behind her she could tell that somebody was being carried out. After a pause, the sermon continued.
After the service, as the Sunderly family were leaving the churchyard, Clay hurried after them, his brow creased with concern.
‘Mrs Sunderly, Mr Cattistock – I am very sorry to tell you this, but I am afraid your maid Jeanne Bissette was taken ill during the service. She is recovering now . . . but she refuses to leave the church.’
‘Why ever not?’ demanded Myrtle.
‘I am afraid a rather grotesque fancy has taken possession of her imagination. I shall try to dissuade her from it, but she believes herself cursed. Haunted. She absolutely refuses to leave holy ground.’
Myrtle’s face was invisible under her veil, but she was silent a moment and seemed to be taking his words on board.
‘I have heard some of the rumours,’ she said softly. ‘How widely believed are these stories? Will all our servants use them as an excuse to abandon us?’
Clay opened his mouth, then closed it again, looking pained.
‘I am sorry, Mrs Sunderly. I fear the tales are commonly regarded as fact. Every day people visit the parsonage, demanding to know why I have not “done something about the ghost”.’
‘Then . . . if you told them that burying my husband would lay the ghost . . .’ suggested Myrtle.
‘Alas, decisions regarding his place of burial are no longer in their hands or mine. The law must decide.’ Clay looked uncomfortable. ‘And . . . I could not in conscience encourage their superstitions, which are too far entrenched already. Some claim to have seen the ghost, walking the cliff-paths near your house. Just yesterday, a sizeable donation was left on the church altar, with an unsigned note asking me to say prayers for the, er, unquiet spirit.
‘As for Jeanne Bissette, her fear appears quite genuine. Indeed, she seems to be in a dangerously nervous state.’
It was only later that evening that one of Clay’s chance remarks struck Faith with new force. Somebody had anonymously paid a ‘sizeable’ amount for prayers to lay the ghost. They had also left an unsigned note, like the one that had lured Faith’s father to his death.
Somebody out there was desperately afraid of the Reverend’s spectre, and just as desperate to hide their identity. Perhaps Faith’s ‘ghost’ had done more than feed the Lie Tree. Perhaps she had frightened the murderer.
CHAPTER 25:
RIDING THE BEAST
A lie was like a fire, Faith was discovering. At first it needed to be nursed and fed, but carefully and gently. A slight breath would fan the new-born flames, but too vigorous a huff would blow it out. Some lies took hold and spread, crackling with excitement, and no longer needed to be fed. But then these were no longer your lies. They had a life and shape of their own, and there was no controlling them.
Some ideas caught more easily than others, of course, and there is no spark quite like the promise of treasure.
As she rode with her uncle in the doctor’s carriage on the third morning, Faith could not help noticing that along the lonely road to the dig there were now a few idlers, leaning against the breakwater with their hands in pockets, or chatting in the shadow of the cliff. There was something lazily purposeful about them, like gulls with an instinct for scraps gathering over a boat’s wake.
As they neared the site, the carriage passed the pile of broken rubble from the excavation. Three of the local children were picking over the
broken stones with hungry zeal.
At the site itself there was an air of tension. Spotting Lambent in earnest conversation with Dr Jacklers and Ben Crock, Faith set up her easel within discreet eavesdropping distance.
‘Some bee has flown into their bonnet,’ the doctor was saying, ‘and unless we know the species of bee and where it sits in the bonnet, we cannot shake it out.’
‘I have asked them what they mean by it,’ said Crock. As usual he was slightly bowed, so that he did not rival Lambent for height. ‘They made sour faces at me, and slouched away without giving proper answer. One of them called me a “dog in the manger”, and said he supposed I was “getting my portion”.’
‘Your portion?’ The doctor’s face darkened. ‘What, are those fellows turning scientist? What interest can these oafs possibly have in fossils and bones? Unless . . . Can it be that somebody has been offering them money for specimens?’
‘There is worse, sir,’ interjected Crock. ‘The navvies tell me they chased two intruders from the site last night.’
‘Vagrants?’ suggested Dr Jacklers.
‘Vagrants would head to the tunnel for shelter,’ said Crock, ‘or the tents for easy pickings. These men were at the top of the shaft, cranking up the mining basket.’
‘Museums!’ Lambent struck his palm with his fist. ‘I knew this would happen! Some museum must have got wind of our discoveries. You know how they are, always ready to steal glory and specimens from the gentleman scientist! They must have agents on Vane! Fossil-thieves! Mammoth-snatchers!’
‘The navvies recognized one of the men,’ Crock continued. ‘They say it was Stoke.’ Peter Stoke was one of the two local men who worked on the site.
‘Stoke!’ Lambent glanced towards the man in question. ‘Are they sure? Do you believe them?’
‘They seem certain, sir, and I cannot imagine why they would lie.’
‘Will you excuse me, gentlemen?’ said Lambent, who had been swelling with annoyance throughout Crock’s explanation. ‘It seems I must have a discreet word with Stoke.’