Frances Hardinge - Cuckoo Song

‘Trista ran away!’ pointed out Pen. ‘Why isn’t she in trouble?’

‘Because it was my fault, not hers,’ Violet answered levelly.

‘How did you find me?’ asked Trista in a small voice.

‘Pen told me what happened,’ Violet explained, ‘so I guessed you would head back to the Crescent house to find something to eat. It’s what I would have done in your shoes. Though that doesn’t mean it was a good idea. Quick – get in. We don’t want to be hanging around this close to Pen’s home.’

When Trista was back in the sidecar, Violet kicked down on the starter viciously, as if it had caused all their troubles.

The Old Docks had not faded gently. They did not look sad, like the primly peeling paint of the Victorian bathing huts you sometimes saw in coastal towns where the tide of luck had gone out. Neglect had given the Old Docks a dangerous air, like a half-starved dog.

Violet drew up on a riverside street where a drab chorus line of three-storey houses stared out across the water. For the last five minutes, the motorcycle’s roar had been punctuated by occasional stutters, and this time as she killed the engine it died fretfully.

‘Fuel’s low,’ she muttered with a frown. ‘And the police may be watching out for me if I try to buy more petroleum.’

‘Why doesn’t Father stop them?’ demanded Pen. ‘Triss – you said he was on our side now! He can’t let them arrest Violet!’

‘He’s not in control any more.’ Trista could not bring herself to explain further. Piers’s harrowed face was still clear in her memory. ‘But perhaps he will try to help.’

‘And he wasn’t angry with me?’ Pen asked.

‘No, Pen,’ Trista answered gently. ‘He wasn’t.’

‘Then I expect it’s a trick,’ Pen declared in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘He’s always angry with me.’

‘You’ve been missing for two days,’ Violet reminded her. ‘Perhaps he’s starting to forget how annoying you are.’

Even now that her hunger had been sated, Trista still shivered at the memory of her last conversation with Pen. The smaller girl, however, seemed to have shrugged off the whole episode.

Both Trista and Pen wore cheap headscarves to cover their hair, in the hope it would make them slightly less recognizable.

Trista was aware of a growing sense of unease as she looked around her. It was not just the down-at-heel area that was gnawing at her instincts, she realized. To her ears the breeze had a faint dry buzz to it. The sky looked like china.

‘Is something wrong?’ Violet asked her quietly, with a frown.

Trista swallowed.

‘There are Besiders here somewhere,’ she whispered back.

‘Are those the boats?’ asked Pen in carrying tones, as she scrambled out of the sidecar and headed towards the water.

Some of the wooden jetties had not yielded to time and the waters, and still jutted out on to the river. Sure enough, moored to them and around them were a number of vessels. By far the largest was a shabby-looking barge, the glass of its portholes fogged with grime. There were some open fishing boats, each with a solitary slender mast, and a number of small rowing boats.

Trista climbed out of the sidecar and hurried to keep pace with Pen, who was running for the nearest jetty.

‘Careful, Pen!’ she called. ‘The boards might be rotten!’

To Trista’s surprise, Pen gave her a shy glance and slowed, waiting to take Trista’s hand. Pen ignoring her, Pen shouting at her – these were easier to deal with than Pen’s matter-of-fact trust.

Somehow the safety of another person, a smaller person, had been thrust into Trista’s hands. It frightened her. She wondered if mothers felt scared at having so much power over their children. Perhaps they did. Perhaps they wished there was somebody to tell them if they were doing things wrong. She felt a sudden, unexpected sting of sympathy for the Crescent parents.

While Violet hid the motorcycle down an alley, Trista and Pen walked stiffly down the jetty, glancing at the boats. Trista tried to read the names painted on the sides, but the peeling paint had obliterated each and every one. One boat appeared to be called the Si—er Wy-m . Next to it nestled the Ch----r and the Wail—g Gh--- .

‘Where are all the people?’ hissed Pen.

‘I don’t know,’ Trista whispered back. The boats all had an abandoned look, like empty peapods. And then, all of sudden, one of them was not so empty after all.

There was an imperceptible moment of shift. It was like that instant where a patch of earth flutters and shows itself to be a brown bird, or a leaf twitches and becomes a lacewing. Somehow, in the jumble of sun-bleached deckchairs, rope coils and old crates painted with curling slogans, there must always have been a man and woman sitting on the barge’s deck in plain view. Now they stood up and became obvious.

Triss swallowed to smother her surprise. Pen gave a short, sharp squeak.

Neither of the strangers was young, but it was hard to be sure how old they were. Their skin was pale and greyish, with a tired, wet-weather look to it. Their hair was the colour of damp sand, and something about their eyes made Trista think of oysters.

Both were wearing floor-length grey-brown coats that set bells ringing in Trista’s memory. After a moment she remembered the coat the Architect had worn in the room behind the cinema, and realized that these coats were made of the same strange dull fabric. The other garments she glimpsed were wrong. The woman wore an old-fashioned plum-coloured dress with a bustle, like the sort Trista had seen a grand lady wearing in a chocolate-box picture. The man had seemingly normal trousers, but there were brown ribbons criss-crossing up them, binding them to his legs.

‘Are we in Ellchester, pretty ladies?’ asked the man. A flock of passing gulls made his voice hard to hear, and Trista had to shake her head to clear it. She felt as if somebody just behind her was whispering in her ear, telling her that the gentleman had actually said something perfectly normal, and that he did not have a smile like a sick wolf.

‘Yes!’ Pen declared with a boldness that told Trista she was frightened.

The woman’s gaze trickled down Trista’s face like cold oil.

‘The little one,’ she breathed, ‘is she yours?’

Again the imaginary whisper was busy at Trista’s ear, or rather inside her mind, telling her how charming and unthreatening the woman was.

‘She’s my sister,’ Trista answered as brightly as she could, while taking step after step backwards. ‘It is so nice to meet you, but we… have to go back to our mother now.’

The two girls turned about and returned to Violet, steps brisk. All the while, the back of Trista’s neck tingled as she listened to sounds from the barge.

‘… such nice shin bones…’ she heard the woman whisper.

Trista and Pen clung silently to Violet’s sleeves as the couple approached them along the jetty, and then walked past, proceeding up the road with a careful, stilted gait. Violet glanced down at the girls with a question in her eyes.

‘They’re Besiders,’ whispered Trista, once she was sure the pair were out of earshot.

Violet’s expression barely changed, aside from a pucker of tension at the corners of her mouth. She did not look over her shoulder at the strangers.

‘How can you tell?’ she murmured very quietly.

Trista stared at her. ‘Can’t you tell?’

‘They’re like bonfire guys come to life!’ hissed Pen. ‘Didn’t you notice?’

Trista dared a glance at the couple, who had come to a halt outside a tea room. The man seemed to be having some trouble working out how to use the door handle.