Cuckoo Song

Chapter 29. TRISTA

After a long period of silence, there came a sense that hugging had solved all it could.

‘We need a plan,’ said Violet. She let out a long breath, and stared at the floor between her feet. For a moment she looked somewhat at a loss, then she sniffed hard and straightened again.

‘First of all… we need to decide whether we stay in Ellchester, or leave right now and head to London. It’s a bigger city. People hunting us might not be able to find us there.’

‘London?’ Pen’s jaw dropped. ‘Do you mean… we’re really running away?’ Her face was aghast, and Not-Triss was not sure whether to laugh or cry. Clearly ‘running away’ in Pen’s mind had never previously involved ‘not coming back’.

‘I can’t leave.’ Not-Triss bit her lip hard. ‘I need to stay. I don’t know if there is any way to stop me falling apart, but I can only find that out here. All the secrets are in Ellchester. If I leave, then I know I’ll die. And… And either way, I want to do anything I can to help other me. And… Sebastian.’

Violet sighed again, and rubbed at her temples.

‘Yes,’ she muttered, ‘I was thinking much the same. We stay then. It won’t be easy – we’ll have your parents, Mr Grace and maybe the police looking out for us. And time is against us.’ She gave Not-Triss a brief cloudy frown of concern. ‘Whatever we do, we have to act fast.

‘This mysterious Architect – he seems to be the key to everything. The other Triss’s kidnap, Sebastian’s letters and whatever is happening to you, Triss. We need to discover as much as we can about him – who he knows, where he’s based. Perhaps we can even get some advantage over him.’

Not-Triss glanced at Pen, whose mouth had drooped into a little pout of fear. When she thought of hunting down the Architect, Not-Triss remembered the towering blurry silhouette that had loomed over her strange birth, and her insides felt watery with unease. But what other choice was there?

‘Triss – you understand birds when they talk, don’t you?’ exclaimed Pen. ‘You should ask them where the Architect is. They fly everywhere.’

‘I don’t think I understand real birds,’ admitted Not-Triss. ‘Just the scary ones with people-faces… and they’re working for the Architect.’

‘Let’s try another approach then,’ suggested Violet. ‘What do we know about him?’

‘He’s evil,’ Pen declared helpfully. ‘He tricks and lies and—’

‘He has a black Daimler,’ Not-Triss cut in.

‘Distinctive.’ Violet nodded slowly. ‘I can ask around after that. Anything else? Pen, you’re our best bet.’

Pen did have the good grace to look uncomfortable at the circumstances that had made her ‘the best bet’.

‘I always met him at the park or the cinema,’ she mumbled, ‘and I talked to him on the telephone.’

‘But it’s not through the ordinary operator, is that right?’ Violet grimaced. ‘A pity, or we could ask them to track the call. I can look into that cinema though. Did he ever mention having another base? He must have somewhere. A car means a garage means a house.’

‘No! You don’t understand! He can—’ Pen was brought up short and sat gasping, pink-faced. She met Not-Triss’s eye, and they exchanged a look of helpless frustration.

The Architect was a bricks-and-mortar magician. He could build palaces in broom cupboards, and had already hidden a small town on the underside of a bridge. He could have dozens of bases that were marked on no map and known by no postman. Violet knew none of this, and they could not tell her.

Worse still, they could not tell her about the Underbelly, the pact between Piers Crescent and the Architect, anything the Shrike had said about Sebastian…

‘I hate magic promises!’ exploded Pen.

‘There are things we know about the Architect that we can’t explain to you,’ Not-Triss said miserably. ‘We want to, but we can’t.’

Violet closed her eyes, and muttered something under her breath.

‘Never mind,’ she said at last. ‘Just tell me what you can. I know some people in… interesting places. If the Architect has crooked connections, some of my friends might have heard of him. Any detail might help. Tell me what he looks like – anything that might make him stand out.’

‘I’m not sure he really looks the way he looks.’ Not-Triss remembered the ominous glints of hidden features through the Architect’s glossily handsome facade. ‘But we can try.’

Piecemeal, Pen and Not-Triss described the Architect’s treacherous appearance. Pen had seen him in other fashionable outfits, but always with the same strange grey ruffled coat over the top.

‘Oh! I remember something else!’ Pen bounced. ‘He wore a watch on his wrist – I saw it peeking out from under his sleeve. I noticed it because it didn’t look right with his clothes. It was a funny-looking thing. Old and scratched, with a bulging face.’ Not-Triss remembered that she too had noticed a gleam beneath the Architect’s sleeve. She had entirely forgotten that brief hint of metal.

‘A wristwatch,’ echoed Violet flatly. ‘Old and scratched. With a bulging face.’ The colour had drained from her face, and an angry tension was returning to her jaw. ‘Are you sure about that, Pen?’

‘Yes!’ Pen stared at Violet. ‘Why? What does it mean?’

‘Perhaps nothing,’ Violet said grimly, ‘but I have a hunch about that watch, and more questions I need to ask somebody.’ She cast an eye over the both girls, then stooped to scoop up her driving goggles. ‘You both look half dead,’ she said curtly. ‘Get some sleep.’

Not-Triss realized that she was indeed exhausted. Two nights of broken sleep and a day of running on nervous energy had left her shaky and drained.

‘Are your friends racketeers?’ demanded Pen. ‘I’m coming to meet them!’

‘No, you’re not!’ retorted Violet. ‘I don’t like leaving you two alone here, but if there’s a hue and cry out for you, then you’re better off hidden. I’ll be back before dark.’

When Violet had driven away, Not-Triss and Pen gathered mouldy patchwork blankets from the crates and made a nest in which they snuggled down as best they could. In spite of the daylight spilling into the boathouse and wooden doors banging in the wind, Not-Triss soon slipped into sleep.

When she woke, the light seeping in through the door had honeyed into a deeper gold, and she knew that it must be late afternoon, just ebbing into evening. Not-Triss was alone in the nest. She could see Pen sitting cross-legged over by the doorway, with her back to her.

As Not-Triss sat up, her hunger woke and roared, like a dragon in her belly.

She doubled over, wrapping her arms tight around her stomach. Inside her was a hole that felt big enough to swallow the whole warehouse.

She needed to eat. She needed it. Nothing else mattered.

Her desperate fingers clawed her hair and found no ribbons, then raked her pockets and found them empty. With claw-tipped hands she tore off her dress buttons and crammed them into her mouth, but that only sharpened her need. She scrabbled and yanked at the dress, hearing seams pop and threads rip, but haste made her too clumsy to pull it up over her head.

Socks. She pulled them off, repelled only briefly by the mud-spatters and the foot-smell. The first sock went down so easily it barely touched her tongue. It tasted like the smell of wet earth and wild strawberries with the rain on them. The second followed the first.

For a little while afterwards, she hugged herself and shuddered. Her claws had left hasty red scratches on her shins.

As Not-Triss tottered over, Pen looked up and peered at the blanket Not-Triss had draped around herself. ‘Why are you shivering?’

‘I’m cold.’ said Not-Triss, sitting down. She was cold, inside and out. ‘Is Violet back yet?’

Pen shook her head and carried on scribbling in the exercise book in her lap. It had blots of yellow on its pages, and a green cover curling with the damp. Not-Triss assumed that it must have come from inside one of the crates.

‘Maybe she’s found the Architect already,’ Pen suggested with grim relish. ‘Maybe her racketeer friends are shooting him with their guns.’

‘She never said her friends were racketeers, Pen.’

‘She never said they weren’t,’ Pen pronounced with complete confidence, ‘so that must mean they are.’

Not-Triss wished she could share in Pen’s optimism. Her own head was full of fearful images of Violet being apprehended by the police. Now, with the clarity born of a few hours’ sleep, she started to understand how completely Violet had made herself a fugitive. For the first time, she wondered what would happen to Violet if Not-Triss fell into a heap of leaves and sticks and the real Triss was not rescued. ‘Triss’ would last have been seen leaving with Violet – seen by Mr Grace, Violet’s landlady and her ‘ladies’. What if everybody decided she had done something terrible to Triss, and sent her to prison?

‘Violet… doesn’t know what we know.’ Not-Triss felt guilty uttering the words, but they needed to be said. ‘She thinks she has to have a plan because she’s the adult, and she wants to look after us. But we know more than she does, so we have to have our own plans too.’

‘What sort of plan?’ asked Pen suspiciously.

‘You still remember how to call the Architect on the telephone, don’t you?’

Pen’s face became stony. She scowled at the book in her lap.

‘Listen,’ said Not-Triss. ‘The Architect wants to help his people by finding them secret havens. All your father wants is to get Triss back safely. Maybe… Maybe if we can talk to the Architect, we can set up another bargain. He hands back Triss, and your father carries on building places for the Besiders to live.’

‘But that won’t stop you dying!’ exclaimed Pen. ‘Anyway, we can’t trust the Architect! He’s tricky, and sly, and…’ She trailed off, looking very young.

‘Maybe we won’t need to,’ Not-Triss said quickly. ‘It’s just something to try if we run out of other plans. And… I could always call him instead of you.’

‘Don’t be silly!’ Pen rounded on her. ‘I’m not a baby, Trista!’

A few seconds passed before Not-Triss realized what Pen had called her.

‘What?’

Pen scowled at her, clearly readying herself for an argument.

‘You’re Trista now,’ she declared. ‘I decided while you were asleep. I saved your life, so I decide who you are, and you’re Trista.’

It hardly seemed worth retorting that the life Pen had saved was unlikely to last the week. Instead Not-Triss sat in silence, hugging her knees.

Trista.

She was not sure what she thought about a name that meant ‘sad’ in French, but it was a name, a name of her own. It did not give her a little sting of guilt and pain, the way it did each time Pen called her ‘Triss’. And it was a good deal better than ‘Fake Triss’.

‘All right,’ she said quietly. ‘I like Trista. I can be Trista.’

‘Well… good.’ Pen looked grudgingly satisfied. ‘If… If you behave, maybe I’ll let you keep that name.’

‘What are you doing?’ asked the newly named Trista, trying to peer at the exercise book.

‘I’m making us disguises.’ Pen showed her the front cover. Across it was written ‘Ruby Wiles’ and below that ‘St Rainbow School for Girls’. ‘That man who wants to burn you will try to catch us again. But he’s not Father, so he has to prove we’re us, so we need to prove we’re not. We need things marked with our names, to show we’re somebody else.

‘I’m Ruby now. And look at this!’ Proudly she opened the book to show scrawled squiggles and additions. ‘I even put some sums in this one, with red-pen crosses for the teacher. Now if I say I’m Ruby and show people this, they’ll believe me. We need to get something for you too though.’

She hesitated, then from her lap she pulled a fragile-looking necklace of little wooden beads strung on to a length of cotton. She spent a few minutes scribbling on the beads with her pen.

‘There! Put this on.’ The necklace was placed in Trista’s hand. In careful, clumsy letters the name T-R-I-S-T-A was spelt out across the middle six beads, one letter per bead.

‘Thank you,’ said Trista, and felt herself warm very slightly to her sad, awkward, made-up name.

To Trista’s great relief, Violet returned just as the sun was descending towards the foothills on the other side of the Ell. She took Trista’s renaming in her stride and launched into her own report.

‘The bad news is that nobody I’ve spoken to seems to know of the Architect, or anybody matching his description. The cinema that nearly ate Pen is closed and boarded up now, so that looks like a cold trail. Some friends of mine are looking out for his Daimler, but that’s a long shot.

‘There’s good news as well though. I had a look at all the evening newspapers – the Crier, the Ell, the Custodian, even the Wetherhill Herald – and there’s nothing in them about the two of you. I dropped into the library to check the morning papers too. Nothing. I don’t know whether your father’s gone to the police, but he hasn’t gone to the press. At least we won’t have half the city looking for you. I can probably risk driving you through town, if we’re careful.

‘The even better news is that I’ve tracked down a friend who owes me a favour. We should be able to hide out at his tonight. And… there’s more that I want to talk to him about. Get ready – we’re going out.’

Violet glanced at Trista, then performed a double take. ‘Trista, what happened to your socks – and your legs?’

Trista was searingly aware of her dress’s ravaged seams and missing buttons, and the fresh scratches on her bare shins. She dropped her gaze and hugged herself in haunted, guilty silence.

‘Oh.’ For all the softness of that syllable, there was a world of realization in it.

‘I’m sorry,’ whispered Trista.

‘No,’ said Violet quietly. ‘It’s… It’s not your fault. I should have… never mind.’ Trista dared to look up and found Violet regarding her with a small, grim, weary smile. ‘I suppose this is likely to keep happening?’

Trista shook her head miserably. ‘I don’t have anything else that belongs to the real Triss, except my dress. The underwear’s too new—’

‘You can’t eat underwear!’ exclaimed Pen in horror.

‘After the dress is gone,’ Trista finished quietly, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

Violet chewed her lip and frowned, as if thinking hard.

‘We’ll come up with something,’ she said at last. ‘But next time you start to feel hungry, let me know.’

They found Violet’s friend standing on a corner in Dressmaker’s Lane, a dingy thoroughfare not far from the river. There was something middle-aged about his stoop, and the aimlessness of his stride. When they drew nearer, however, Trista realized that he was not much older than Violet. He wore a dark brown flat cap, and a dun-coloured jacket over his shirt and grey wool waistcoat. His hair had been cut recently and badly.

Looking at him, Trista knew that something had gone wrong with him, though she could not tell what it was. He had a good sort of a face, broad-jawed with wide-spaced eyes, but something had been knocked out of kilter. His gaze went everywhere. His mouth was tense and very slightly open, as if he was waiting for the right moment to say something important.

He gave Violet a nice smile. It came and went like a flash of winter sunshine. A moment later it was quite gone, and his face looked lost without it.

‘The Belle of the Ell,’ he said. His tone was odd. He didn’t sound as if he was flirting or being gallant. It was almost as if he was introducing her to somebody else.

‘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.