Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

Triss’s recollections stirred. The ‘Donovan girl’ was Miss Donovan, the Crescent daughters’ last governess, who had just been turned away for being ‘flighty’. Triss’s mother had given previous governesses notice for ‘dumb insolence’, for being ‘too confident’ or for taking the girls out to museums or parks where Triss might catch a chill. Triss no longer bothered much with the governesses. If she let herself like them, or care about their lessons, it was a wrench when they left.

‘Celeste,’ Triss’s father murmured in a quiet and deliberately even voice, ‘perhaps first of all you could look to see whether any new letters arrived for us while we were away.’

Triss’s mother cast a puzzled look towards the empty basket where the family’s post was always kept, and then realization seemed to dawn in her spring-blue eyes. She wet her lips, then turned to Triss with a warm, soft smile.

‘Darling, why don’t you run upstairs, unpack your things and then lie down for a while?’

The very picture of meekness, Triss nodded and headed up the stairs. As she stepped out into the landing and passed out of her parents’ view, however, she halted. It was happening again. A conversation was waiting to be had behind her back.

Chewing her lip, she opened the nearest door and then closed it again, so that it would sound as if she had withdrawn into her room. Leaning against the wall she waited, and sure enough was soon rewarded with the sound of voices.

‘Piers, do you mean those letters? I thought we agreed not to read anything else sent by that man—’

‘I know, but right now we need to understand whether he was the one that attacked Triss. If he is trying to bully me, then perhaps there will be a letter from the man himself, instead of the usual. If he has written to us with demands or threats, at least then we will know.’

Hearing steps on the stairs, Triss turned to flee, and felt panic creeping into her soul like cold water into her socks.

Which room is mine?

There was no time to lose, however. The steps were reaching the head of the stairs. Triss jerked open the nearest door and slipped within, closing it quickly but quietly behind her.

The room beyond was dim, illuminated only by the little sunlight soaking through the thick amber curtains. The air smelt tired, like old clothes packed away for a special occasion that had never come.

Triss held her breath and pressed her ear to the door. Outside she could hear footsteps striding along the landing, heavy steps that she easily identified as belonging to her father. Soon she could hear the muffled sounds of him talking in the study, using his loud, careful telephone voice. The telephone was a relatively recent addition to the house, and still jarred with its newness and brashly insistent bell. Sometimes it seemed that Triss’s father felt he had to overbear it with force of personality, in case it had a mind to take over the house.

Triss felt a slow wash of relief. He didn’t hear me. But where am I? This isn’t my room. This is too big to be my room.

Her eyes slowly adjusted to the gloom, and with a wash of alarm she realized how badly she had mistaken her way.

Oh no – not here! I’m not supposed to be here!

She knew the room now, of course. Nothing had changed since she had last seen it. Nothing had been moved.

The bed was made, with clean sheets. The dinted surface of the desk had been dusted and polished. A telescope moped in a corner, its tripod folded in like the legs of a dead crane fly. The top shelf held books on Arctic exploration, astronomy and fighter planes, with a cluster of peeling green-and-yellow detective novels at the end. On the bottom shelf a series of photographs had been carefully arranged edge to edge. As her eye glided across, boy became youth became man, the last photo showing him in a military uniform, his face wearing the slightly tense expression of one who is waiting his moment to ask something very important.

Sebastian.

Occasionally Triss had been brought in to see this room, as if it was a sick relative. Entering without permission, on the other hand, would be the worst kind of trespass, almost a blasphemy.

Triss knew she should leave at once, but found herself overwhelmed by a guilty fascination. She moved further into the room.

The bedroom had a churchy feel. You could tell that this was a sacred place full of rules you might break. Sebastian was a lot like church, with everyone solemnly knowing what they were meant to feel and when.

We will now consider mercy. We will now pity the poor. We will now forgive our enemies.

We all loved Sebastian very much. We are all very sad he has gone. We all remember him daily.

But do I? Triss ran a curious fingertip over the glass of the uniformed photo. It left no smudge of dust on her finger. Do I love him? Am I sad? Do I remember him?

Triss did have a strong but unfocused sense that everything had once been better, and that everyone had once been happier. Sebastian was tied in her mind to that betterness and happiness.

She remembered laughing. Sebastian had said the sort of things nobody else dared say, and it had made her laugh.

Now, however, Sebastian was their other, special sibling, the one who needed his possessions carried for him even more than she did. The one that said nothing during family discussions, but whose absence left eddies and whorls in what other people said.

If Triss were found here, even she would be in trouble. She might have special privileges for loitering near death’s door, but Sebastian had passed through it and so outranked her.

The atmosphere was so overpowering that it took Triss a second to realize that she could now hear her mother’s distinctive, rapid step climbing the stairs. The landing outside creaked, and then to her horror Triss saw the doorknob turn.

Mother’s coming in here!

There was only one place to hide. Triss dropped to the floor and scrambled under the bed even as the door opened.

I don’t do things like this , Triss thought helplessly as she watched her mother’s silk-stockinged ankles and buckled shoes come into view. I don’t sneak into places and hide and spy. And yet she stayed still as a mouse and watched as her mother lit the gas, seated herself at the desk and unlocked the drawer.

Peering from under the tasselled counterpane, Triss could see her mother carefully pull the desk drawer open a mere half an inch. Immediately the crack bristled with paper corners, as if a host of envelopes had been crammed in by force and were in a hurry to burst out. Her mother’s mouth tightened, and her hand made a nervous motion as if the envelopes were hot and she was afraid to touch them. Then she clenched her jaw, tweaked out one envelope and ripped it open.

Nothing happened in her mother’s face. Nothing happened, except that Triss had a feeling that staying expressionless was taking a lot of effort.

Triss was too far away to make out the words on the letter, but she was struck by the whiteness of the paper. It looked clean, crisp and new, in a room where nothing was supposed to be clean, crisp or new.

Her mother’s hands were shaking. At last she made a sound of utter misery, somewhere between a moan and gulp, and crammed both letter and envelope back with its fellows before forcing the drawer shut and shakily locking it.

Letters. Sebastian’s desk was full of recently arrived letters. Her mother had gone to see if any new ones had arrived. But why would they appear in Sebastian’s desk? Who would put them there? And how could they get into the house and sneak themselves into a locked desk?

The scene was like a dream, nonsensical but drenched with ominous and unfathomed meaning, full of the familiar turned alien. All of a sudden the entire world seemed to be the Wrong Kind of Ill.