Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

‘Are you nearly ready?’ Her father wore his coat and driving gloves.

Triss nodded mutely.

He glanced towards the window. ‘Birds have been making quite a racket this morning, haven’t they?’

Out in the sunshine, waiting while Father cranked the car, Triss kept her hands stuffed deep in her pockets so nobody would see them shaking.

She was surrounded by love on all sides, and she had never felt so utterly alone. She could tell nobody what had just happened. Indeed, the longer she stayed silent, the harder it was to speak. And what could she have said anyway?

Angelina moved and spoke and screamed. And I killed her.

That didn’t happen that didn’t happen that didn’t happen…

But if it didn’t… then it was all in my head. Which means there’s something wrong with me. It means I’m really, badly ill.

Ordinary ill was fine, comforting even. But this was the wrong kind of ill. She didn’t want to be ill in her mind. Even thinking about it was like gazing down into dark water with no bottom. If she ran to her parents with a sick brain, they would not react with kindness and comics and new pills and ‘don’t overstrain yourself till you’re stronger’. They would be solemn and worried and let doctors tell them what to do. I don’t want to be taken away and hypnotized or have holes drilled in my head…

So Triss stood in silence by the car, hunched in the golden light of the morning, and felt like a monster. Every time her parents went into the house to retrieve one last thing, she tensed. Please don’t look in the log basket. Please let’s go, let’s just go…

She jumped out of her skin when a loud screaming became audible inside the house.

‘I’ve found her!’ It was her father’s voice, sounding strained and at his temper’s edge. Triss’s heart lurched. But it was not Angelina that her father carried out into the daylight. It was Pen, sobbing, roaring and doing her best to stamp her heels into his kneecaps. ‘She tried to hide in the attic.’

‘I’m not coming!’ It was hard to make out Pen’s words. Her tantrums were seldom a matter of pouting and foot-stamping. Instead she screamed herself hoarse, a few half-comprehensible words lost in the tornado of her rage. ‘… see she’s lying… can’t make me sit with her… hate you all!’

Triss slipped into the back seat through one door, and Pen was bundled in next to her through the opposite door. Once there, Pen curled herself into a tight, hostile ball, flinched up against the door so as to be as far from Triss as possible.

She thinks I’m pretending to be ill , thought Triss limply. Pretending, so I can get everybody’s attention. The attention that she wants. I wish she was right. Triss’s father climbed into the driver’s seat, and pressed the starter motor button. There was a whine, then the main engine chuckled and purred. At last, at long last, they were on their way.

The family car was a mint-green Sunbeam with a wet-leaf glossiness, a purr of an engine and headlights that looked like round, expectant eyes. The day was bright, so the hood was pulled down, leaving the whole family exposed to sun and sky. With a relief almost painful, Triss saw the cottage recede behind them, and then they were buzzing down lane after lane at a giddy thirty miles an hour. Triss’s hair whipped around her face, and as the scene of her crime receded behind her the knots in her stomach started to loosen. Perhaps illnesses could be left behind, just like small, badly concealed china corpses.

Hills reared under them like bad-tempered beach donkeys, and the road twisted as if trying to throw them. Drystone walls wriggled, rose and fell on either side. Then a white-painted sign tore past. Oxford that way, 85 miles, Ellchester this way, 20 miles.

Triss leaned her cheek against the cool wooden panelling inside the car door, clinging to the sense of familiarity.

I’m safe. I’m going home to Ellchester.

The first thing anybody noticed on the approach to Ellchester was the Three Maidens.

The most impressive of the trio of bridges spanned the width of the Ell estuary in one long elegant stride, its smooth arc and sandy-gold paint visible for miles against the glittering blue of the water. The second bridge cut a lofty line across and over the city itself, supported by three of Ellchester’s eight hills, one of which was now capped with a pyramid-shaped building in dull pink stone, the city’s soon-to-be-completed railway station. The last stretched out to join the rising slope of the valley on the other side. Between them, they held aloft the recently constructed railway line.

Everyone agreed that before the Three Maidens were built, Ellchester had been ‘in a decline’, which seemed to mean a slow, sorry sort of collapse like a sandcastle in the rain.

Then Piers Crescent had come forward with his plans for the Three Maidens, and shown that, in spite of the intervening estuary and awkward hills, the railway could be brought to Ellchester. Everybody called the bridges ‘a miracle of engineering’. They had changed everything and brought money to the city, and now his was one of the best-known and most popular names in Ellchester.

Triss never saw the Three Maidens hove into view without feeling a surge of pride. As the Sunbeam turned on to the broad highway that ran alongside the gleaming expanse of the Ell towards the hunchbacked, grey-tiled mass of Ellchester, she craned forward until she could see the river-bridge’s arch. Today, however, the surge of warmth was followed by a bitter aftertaste, as she remembered the overheard conversation and the newspaper article. If somebody was trying to frighten her father, did it have anything to do with his work?

Triss’s father did not steer into the busy, hillocky heart of Ellchester, with its maze of bridges and zigzag steps. Instead he drove into the quieter districts, where grand three-storey houses were arranged in squares, each with a little park in the centre. The Sunbeam pulled up in one such square in front of one such house, and on the back seat Triss let out her breath slowly. Home.

As she followed the rest of her family through the front door Triss felt her heart sink. She had expected everything to click back into place once she was home. The crowded hatstand, the waxed parquet floor and the twilight-yellow Chinese-style wallpaper were familiar, or felt as if they should be, but the click did not come.

‘Oh, now, who did that?’ Triss’s mother pointed at at some little flakes of earth on the smooth, clean floor. ‘Which one of you forgot to brush their feet? Pen?’

‘Why are you looking at me?’ exploded Pen. Her glance of incandescent rage, however, was darted at Triss, not her mother. ‘Why does everybody always think it’s me?’ She thundered away up the stairs and a door could be heard slamming with shattering force.

Their mother sighed. ‘Because it always is, Pen,’ she muttered wearily, pinching at the bridge of her nose.

‘Margaret will take care of the floors when she comes in tomorrow,’ said her husband, placing a reassuring hand on his wife’s shoulder. Margaret was the ‘woman who did’ for the Crescents, coming in to clean for a few hours each morning.

‘Oh – I must warn Margaret that we have returned early,’ their mother said with an exhausted air. ‘And find Cook and tell her that we are home after all and will need her. I had told her that she could take a few days off while we were away – if she has gone to see her sister in Chesterfield, I do not know what we will do. I must make sure that Donovan girl has moved out, and send letters to the recruitment agency, asking them for another governess. And if I do not send word to the butcher and baker, there will be no deliveries tomorrow.’