Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

When Violet knelt by the small tiled hearth and started to load it with coal, Not-Triss watched her with a blank, hypnotized fascination. At the first lick of flame, however, she could not help flinching back a step and drawing in a panicky breath. Her skin seemed to tingle with terrible warmth once more, as it had when she had been forced close to the cottage fireplace. Violet cast a surprised glance over her shoulder at Not-Triss, taking stock of her mute, trembling paralysis, and frowned a little. She turned back to the hearth, but shifted her position across so that she blocked Not-Triss’s view of the flames. When Violet put the fireguard in place, Not-Triss felt her pulse slow a little.

Meanwhile, Pen busied herself collecting blankets and cushions from here and there, dropping them in front of the fire to make a sort of nest, with the confidence of practice.

‘Violet!’ Pen whispered loudly, when their reluctant hostess was sitting back, wiping soot from her hands. ‘We need food. We haven’t eaten anything for hours!’

‘So next time perhaps you should wait until after dinner before running away,’ Violet muttered, without obvious sympathy.

‘But I’m starving !’ exclaimed Pen. ‘I haven’t eaten anything all day !’

‘Well, you needn’t sound as if that’s my fault,’ Violet growled, heading over to a wooden box near the wall. ‘I’m not your mother.’

‘Good,’ Pen answered without hesitation. ‘I wouldn’t want you to be my mother. I’d run away from you too.’

Not-Triss listened agape to this exchange, tensing for the inevitable thunderclap. It did not come.

‘Canned cheese and bananas,’ murmured Violet, returning to the hearth and dropping to her haunches. ‘It’s all there is.’

Pen shrugged. ‘I like canned cheese.’

Not-Triss watched as Violet dug her opener into the cheese can and started cutting a jagged hole in the top. Her long face was still jewelled with rain, her nose blue from the cold, and the straps of her motoring cap hung down below her ears. For the first time Not-Triss started to understand why Pen might come here when she ran away. In the Crescent family home you had to be careful all the time, because if you did or said the wrong thing it never went away. It just hung there forever, an invisible black mark that everybody knew was there. Pen had found a place where you could say things that were rude and grumpy, and where the other person would just be rude and grumpy back, and afterwards you could sit eating bananas without an ounce of ill feeling.

The three of them ate the cheese off tea-set saucers. It had a slight metallic taste but nobody seemed to care. The bananas were brown-skinned, but the flesh inside was still mostly pale and firm.

At last Violet stood, fastening the chinstrap of her cap again.

‘I’ll be back in a few hours, and I’ll try not to wake you. Don’t burn down the house while I’m gone unless absolutely necessary. And when I’m back, don’t wake me until at least ten.’

‘Where are you going?’ In spite of everything, a hundred suspicions and fears crowded back into Not-Triss’s head. ‘Why are you going out again? You’re not going to our parents or the police, are you?’

‘Oh, for pity’s sake! No. No, I won’t.’ At the door she paused, her eyes lingering on Not-Triss again, her narrow, painted mouth drooping into its habitual frown. ‘Triss, do you need any… any medicine or anything before you go to bed?’

‘No.’ Not-Triss shook her head, feeling abashed at her outburst, but still only half-reassured. ‘No, thank you. I… I don’t think they really help.’

The door closed behind Violet, and Not-Triss sank down to sit on the cushions near the now-caged fire.

‘It’s all right,’ Pen said, pulling blankets over her own knees. ‘I’ve stayed here before. She always does that. Last time she stayed out until seven in the morning . I know because she woke me up coming in. She sleeps till ten, then gets up and goes to work.’

Work. Again not entirely the ‘high life’ Celeste Crescent had described. Apparently Violet Parish did not spend her whole time sitting around and drinking cocktails at the Crescent family’s expense. Not-Triss had a dozen new thoughts about Violet Parish, and yet these were not the most important things on her mind.

She glanced across at Pen, who was nestling herself in the blankets like a dormouse and refusing to meet her eye.

‘Pen,’ she said gently, ‘I think we need to talk. About everything. About the Architect.’

Pen chewed hard on her upper lip, and for a few seconds Not-Triss thought the younger girl might ignore her, or give vent to one of her fits of temper. Instead she wound the blanket tassels around one finger and shrugged.

‘You have to promise not to get angry,’ she mumbled belligerently, ‘or scratch me with your claws or bite me with your thorn-teeth.’

‘I promise,’ said Not-Triss. ‘And I’m really sorry I hurt your face.’

‘Good,’ answered Pen sullenly.

‘So,’ Not-Triss prompted, as patiently as she could, ‘the Architect. Where did you meet him?’

Pen gave her a sly sideways glance. Perhaps she was weighing up a lie, like a snowball in her hand, seeing if it would hold together. Or perhaps she was trying to judge whether Not-Triss might become a screaming thorn-monster at a moment’s notice if she said the wrong thing.

‘He just turned up one day. Three weeks ago. The day after my birthday. And Mother and Father promised we would all go to Bowgate’s Picture House, because they were showing Peril on Park Avenue . But then when we were about to go, you said – I mean, real Triss said that she had a headache and a fever. She did it on purpose , so we couldn’t go, I know it, I saw her looking at me, I know it. So I called her a liar and a rat, and then everybody shouted at me and I wasn’t allowed to go to the cinema at all.’

Not-Triss said nothing. She could vaguely remember the incident, could recall a sense of outrage at being yelled at while she was ill. Had there been a certain hint of spiteful satisfaction as well at seeing Pen robbed of her birthday treat? Perhaps there had.

‘I ran away again,’ Pen whispered. ‘I hated you all . I went and sat on the seesaw on Gramhill Park, and it was raining, and I hated you all so much I wished I had a gun . Or a gang, so I could go home and you’d all be scared. But then I thought I didn’t want to make Mother and Father scared, just you, because it was all your fault, and you made them like that. And when I was thinking that, a big black car stopped by the park, and a man got out and came right up to me. He called me “Miss Penelope Crescent” and held his umbrella over me, and said no gentleman should let a lady sit in the rain.’

‘And that was the Architect?’ asked Not-Triss, trying to untangle her thoughts. She had wondered how Pen had managed to contact the Architect in the first place.

Pen nodded. ‘I was a bit scared of him at first, particularly when he said he’d been watching us for some time. But then he said he didn’t like the way everybody else treated me, that it wasn’t fair, and he wanted to help me. He said sometimes families are like fruit bowls, and if one of the pieces of fruit is rotten it makes everything rotten. So you have to take that fruit out of the bowl, and that makes everything better. And I said that you – I mean, the real Triss – was rotten and made everybody unhappy. And he agreed.’

Not-Triss could feel some of her previous anger and hurt stirring in her, but the misery was so vivid in Pen’s face that she forced herself to rein it in.