Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

‘Jack,’ she said. ‘It took me a while to find where they’d put you. New corner?’

‘Yes.’ Smile. Gone. ‘It’s the usual game. Everybody tells the police to cut down on gambling, so they had to “find” the old corner. Now they’ll pretend they don’t know about this one for a few weeks. You’re not looking for a flutter though, are you?’

‘Not my sort of gamble.’ Violet didn’t smile at Jack; Trista noticed that. She talked more quietly than usual, however. Listening to them, Trista had a peculiar feeling. It was like watching two people walking around a room full of fragile things, avoiding them without even looking at them. ‘Listen, Jack. Your corner can spare you for half an hour. Come and walk by the river with us.’

Jack looked towards Trista and Pen, then back at Violet.

‘Sebastian’s sisters,’ she said, in answer to the silent question.

He dropped his gaze, then he nodded slowly.

The foursome strolled by the river along a short concrete promenade, watching the sunset turn the Ell to copper. Other families were abroad in the late light, mothers pushing perambulators, and the occasional governess leading a bored string of children.

Jack said nothing. He waited. Trista started to get the feeling that he was always waiting, like a pebble beach braced for the next wave, and resigned to it.

When Violet finally spoke, her voice was unusually hesitant.

‘There are letters, Jack. Letters in his handwriting. They’ve been arriving for a while, and they always have that day’s date.’

‘Letters to you?’ Jack gave her a glance.

‘No,’ answered Violet. ‘His family.’

‘Tell them to call the police,’ Jack answered promptly. ‘It’s a hoax. I’ll wager the letters are asking for money?’

Violet sucked in her cheeks, then took the sentence at a run. ‘I suppose there’s no chance—’

‘No.’ Jack cut her short, with sad, quiet finality, like a coffin lid settling on its velvet rest. ‘No, Violet. I’m sorry. I was there.’ He glanced across at Trista and Pen. ‘Do you really want to talk about this… now?’

It was only at this point that Trista realized what Violet and Jack were talking about, and what his last comment had meant.

‘You knew Sebastian in the War!’ exclaimed Pen, who had clearly come to the same conclusion. ‘Were you his friend?’

Jack looked as though he would have done anything to escape this conversation, even if it meant jumping out of an aeroplane hatch without a parachute.

‘Yes, Pen.’ Violet answered for him. ‘Jack was a good friend to Sebastian, when they were serving as soldiers together.’

‘He was brave, wasn’t he?’ Pen demanded, trying to catch Jack’s eye.

Jack did not seem able to look directly at either Trista or Pen.

‘Yes,’ he told their shoes, and tried to smile. ‘Like in the stories.’

‘Jack was the one who wrote to me,’ Violet added, cutting off Pen before she could ask more questions. ‘With the news about Sebastian. He wrote to your father too, and sent home some of Sebastian’s things – his cigarette case and service watch.’

There it was again, the old bone of contention. Sebastian’s possessions, the ones that he had left to Violet, and which the Crescents had refused to hand over.

‘Jack.’ Violet’s voice hardened slightly. ‘What did his service watch look like? Could you describe it to the girls?’

‘It was a wristlet,’ answered Jack, and actually managed to look Pen and Trista in the face now that the conversation was on safer ground. ‘Worn on the wrist. You might be too young to remember, but before the War, wearing watches on your wrist was… well… only women did it. Men had pocket watches – wearing a wristlet would be like… wearing earrings or a bracelet.

‘But during the War the services started giving some of the officers and men wristwatches. It kept your hands free, you see. You didn’t have to fumble in your pocket. The air force started using them first, then the army. But the ones we had still looked like pocket watches, only with a strap. Big, bulging things, about so wide and this thick, not like the sort you see now.’

‘Does that sound like the watch you saw the Architect wearing?’ asked Violet.

Pen nodded, and Violet’s face darkened into a scowl.

‘I knew it!’ she said through her teeth. ‘I knew your father was stringing me along! That high-and-mighty talk about keeping Sebastian’s possessions… and all the time he’d given that man Sebastian’s watch!’

Trista felt a building excitement. The Shrike had told them that Piers had given the Architect one of Sebastian’s possessions. If Violet was right, they now knew what it was.

‘Hold hard!’ Jack advised gently. ‘Maybe this Architect of yours served in Europe himself and came by the watch honestly.’

‘Do you want to give me odds on that, Jack?’ snapped Violet. ‘No, this all smells to high heaven. Jack – was there anything special about Sebastian’s watch, to tell it apart from others?’

‘He replaced the strap,’ came the answer. ‘It wasn’t black – it was blue.’

‘Yes, that’s right!’ exclaimed Pen.

‘Oh, and the time on it was wrong! It must have stopped, and he hadn’t wound it up again.’

A strange, dark flower of an idea tried to bloom in Trista’s mind.

‘What time did it say?’ she asked.

Pen crinkled her brow as she thought.

‘Teatime,’ she said, after a moment. ‘It was just after lunch, but the watch said it was half past four.’

‘Half past four.’ Jack repeated Pen’s words in little more than a whisper. Then he dropped his gaze and cleared his throat. ‘Violet,’ he said quietly, ‘half past four… That was the time when…’

The sentence slipped into silence, like a hearse turning a corner in the street. Everybody knew where it was heading, however.

That was the time when Sebastian died.

‘Was it… ?’ Violet stopped, wet her lips and continued. ‘Was the watch broken then, when… it happened?’

The question made Trista feel sick. It changed Sebastian’s death into something real and physical. It wasn’t slipping away beyond a grey curtain; it was a bullet or an explosion or collapsing tunnels, something that could twist metal or shatter a clock’s innards.

But Jack was shaking his head.

‘No. When I sent it back it was still working.’

Trista remembered the way the Shrike had spoken of Sebastian.

He is not gone , but he is not alive either.

He is just… stopped.

At half-past four, somewhere in the bleak and distant neverland of War, Sebastian had ‘stopped’. On the Architect’s wrist, Pen had seen a watch that had also stopped, at exactly the hour of Sebastian’s death. Trista did not believe this was a coincidence. She did not know how these two facts were connected, but she could sense the link between them swaying in the darkness, like a submerged mooring chain.

As hoped, Jack agreed to let the three fugitives stay at his place, a dark-bricked terrace building in a set of ‘back-to-backs’ within reach of the river’s reek. As it turned out, ‘his’ house also contained his mother, his three sisters, his brother-in-law, his aunt and his older sister’s flock of children. His father was absent, and this had apparently been the case for years. His sisters, aged about fourteen, sixteen and twenty-six, were dark-eyed and angular, with broad grins and voices that bounced around the faded walls, bruising some life into them.

His mother did not seem particularly surprised to see him bringing home unannounced visitors.