Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

Triss’s mother came down with a slight crinkle of exasperation on her brow.

‘Now, that is wilful, even for Pen. I have never known her turn down food before.’ She looked at Triss and gave a weary little smile. ‘Well, at least you don’t have her stubborn streak.’

It turned out that Triss could more than ‘manage a little’. As soon as she saw the first bowl of soup arrive, great crusty rolls on the side of the tray, her hands started to shake. The room around her ceased to matter. Once the tray was on her lap, she could not control herself but tore open the rolls, scattering crumbs, and pushing them into her mouth where the wad of bread rolled drily against her tongue and champing teeth. The soup was gone as quickly as she could scoop it up, and she barely noticed it scalding her mouth. Pie, potatoes and carrots were demolished in a frenzy, closely followed by jelly, pears and a thick slice of almond cake. Only when she was reaching for the rest of the cake did her mother catch her wrist.

‘Triss, Triss! Love, I’m so glad you have your appetite back so soon, but you’ll make yourself sick!’

Triss stared back at her with bright, bewildered eyes, and gradually the room around her came back into focus. She did not feel sick. She felt as if she could have eaten a hippopotamus-sized slice of cake. Her crumb-covered hands were still shaking, but she made herself wipe them on her napkin and clasped them in her lap to stop them snatching at anything more. As she was doing so, her father put his head around the door and caught her mother’s eye.

‘Celeste.’ His voice deliberately calm and soft. ‘Can I speak to you a moment?’ He flicked a glance towards Triss and gave her a small, tender smile.

Mother tucked Triss into bed, took up the tray and left the room to follow Father, taking her warmth, reassurance and smell of face powder with her. Within seconds of the door closing, Triss felt twinges of creeping panic return. Something in her father’s tone had stirred her instincts.

Can I speak to you a moment? Outside the room where Triss can’t hear you?

Triss swallowed and pulled the covers aside, then slid herself out of bed. Her legs felt stiff but not as weak as she had expected, and she crept as quietly as she could to her bedroom door and eased it open. From there she could just about make out voices in the parlour.

‘… and the inspector promised to ask some questions in the village, in case anybody saw how she came to fall into the water.’ Her father had a deep and pleasant voice, with a touch of hoarseness that made Triss think of rough animal fur. ‘He dropped by just now to speak to me. Apparently a couple of the local hands were passing near the village green at sunset last night. They didn’t see any sign of Triss near the Grimmer, but they did catch sight of two men down at the water’s edge. A short man in a bowler, and a taller man in a grey coat. And on the road near the green there was a car parked, Celeste.’

‘What kind of a car?’ Her mother spoke with the hushed tone of one who already knows the answer.

‘A big black Daimler.’

There was a long pause.

‘It can’t be him.’ Her mother’s voice was high and rapid now, as if her cloth scissors had clipped her words until they were short and frightened. ‘Perhaps it’s just a coincidence – there’s more than one Daimler in the world—’

‘Out here? There are barely two cars in the village. Who could afford a Daimler?’

‘You said it was all over!’ There were warning sounds in the rising pitch of Mother’s voice, like a the whistle of a kettle coming to the boil. ‘You said you were severing all ties with him—’

‘I said that I was finished with him , and he’ll know that by now if he’s read this week’s paper. But perhaps he is not finished with me.’

Hearing motion in the parlour, Triss carefully closed the door and scampered back to her bed, mind whirling like a propeller.

They think somebody attacked me. Is that what happened? Again she tried to force her memory back to the Grimmer, and again there was nothing, just an inner shuddering and flinching.

Who was this ‘he’ her parents had mentioned, the one that Father was ‘finished with’? If ‘he’ was so terrible, why would Father have had ‘ties’ with him anyway?

It all sounded like something from one of the crime films Pen loved so much, the sort where good honest men became entangled with hoodlums and gangsters. But surely Father could not be involved in anything like that! Triss felt her chest grow tight at the very thought. More than anything else, she was proud of her father. She loved the impressed way everybody’s eyebrows rose when they were introduced to him.

Mr Piers Crescent? The civil engineer who designed the Three Maidens and Station Mount? It’s an honour to meet you, sir – you’ve done wonderful things for our city.

Having a great civil engineer as a father meant seeing maps of planned roads at the breakfast table. It meant watching her father open letters from the mayor’s office about bridge construction and locations for new public buildings. Her father’s designs were changing the face of Ellchester.

Triss jumped slightly when the door opened, and her mother entered the room. There was a touch more powder on her cheeks, a sure sign that she had stepped aside to calm herself and set her appearance straight.

‘I’ve just been talking to your father,’ her mother declared with calm nonchalance, ‘and we think we should cut the holiday short and go home first thing tomorrow. Familiar surroundings – that’s what you need to sort you out.’

‘Mummy…’ Triss hesitated, unwilling to admit to eavesdropping, then went for a compromise. ‘You left the door open, and it was draughty so I went to shut it, and when I was there I… overheard Daddy telling you that there was somebody else down at the Grimmer yesterday evening.’ Triss caught at her mother’s sleeve. ‘Who was it?’

Her mother’s hands halted for a second, then continued calming the creases out of the pillow.

‘Oh, nobody, darling! Just some gypsies. Nothing for you to worry about.’

Gypsies? In a bowler hat and a Daimler?

Perhaps some of her distress showed in Triss’s face, for her mother sat down on the edge of her bed, took her by both hands and met her eye at last.

‘Nobody could want to harm you, froglet,’ she said very seriously, ‘and even if somebody did, your father and I would never, never let anything bad happen to you.’

And this would have been reassuring if the crystal-blue eyes were not a little too bright. Every time she saw that fragile intensity in her mother’s face, Triss knew she was thinking of Sebastian.

He had been called up in February of 1918, not long after Triss’s sixth birthday. When the War ended later that year, Triss remembered all the celebrations with the flags and big hats, and not really knowing how it would change everything, except that it meant Sebastian would be coming back home. Then the news had come that Sebastian would not be coming back, and she had thought for a while, in a foggy, confused way, that the first news had been wrong, that the War was not over.

In a way she had been right. The War had ended, but it was not gone. Somehow it was still everywhere. Sebastian was the same. He had ended but he was not gone. His death had left invisible wreckage. His absence was a great hole tugging at everything. Even Pen, who barely remembered him, walked carefully round the edge of that hole.

Triss had started getting ill not long after the War ended, and in a hazy way she understood that this was something to do with Sebastian. It was her job to be ill. It was her job to be protected. And right now it was her job to nod.