Cuckoo Song

Chapter 9. A STITCH IN TIME

‘Sebastian…’ Triss was barely aware that she had whispered the name aloud.

What had she expected? A list of demands from the mysterious ‘him’, perhaps. She had not been ready for this.

Triss held Sebastian’s letter in unsteady hands, shaken by how much and how little she remembered him. Triss had already known that there had been special days that she had enjoyed with him, such as the birthday when he had helped her dress as an Egyptian queen, and a picnic outing where he had carried her on his shoulders for hours. These were family folklore, recited by her parents in a solemn ritual fashion on the few occasions when they felt it appropriate to mention their lost son. Over the years her parents had herded Triss’s woolly memories into the neat pens of their stories, until she no longer knew what she actually remembered.

This was different. This was shocking, like the warmth of a teardrop falling on her skin. Suddenly Sebastian was a person, a lost, frightened, desperate person in pain. It caused her a deep pang of sympathetic horror, and she realized that she did feel love for the lost Sebastian, despite the fog of the years.

But he’s dead.

Sebastian had died five years before, during a bitter winter. There had been a letter from his commanding officer, talking about a detonation in his side of the trench, his deepest regrets, no possibility that anybody could have survived. There could be no mistake.

Triss could make no sense of her parents’ behaviour. The drawer was crammed full of envelopes. For months then, or perhaps even years, Sebastian’s messages had been arriving, and her parents had known about it. They had traded solemn words about their long-lost son, and all the while they had been locking his heartfelt letters in a drawer and pretending they did not exist. Their dignified grief was a lie. Everything was a lie.

Her parents had talked about the letters being sent by ‘that man’, the mysterious ‘he’ who they thought might have attacked Triss. Now that she thought about it though, they had never said that ‘he’ had actually written them. Indeed, her father had said that receiving a letter from ‘the man himself’ would be different from ‘the usual’.

How could Sebastian still be fighting in a war that had been over for five years, and how could he write letters from beyond the grave? If they were not cruel and clever fakes, and if Sebastian really had written that desperate note, he needed help. Either way, Triss needed to understand the riddle of the letters.

The beginnings of an idea started to form in Triss’s mind. The drawer was crammed to bursting. How often had this strange flitting thing been invading the Crescent house to deliver letters? Every month? Every week? Or every night?

Whatever it is, it’s weird and scary, but it’s also smaller than me. So if it comes again tomorrow night, maybe I can catch it.

It was raining steadily, and the raindrops fell with a rustle, not a splash. They fell right into the house, settling on the carpet and furniture, and Triss could see that they were actually dead leaves. They landed on the heads and shoulders of the family as they sat at the breakfast table, all trying to pretend that nothing was happening.

‘Triss did it!’ Pen was shouting, strident with glee. ‘Look!’ The younger girl pointed towards the ceiling, and when Triss glanced upwards she realized to her horror that great holes had been gnawed in the ceilings and the roof, so that the sky glowered greyly through. Triss could even make out her own teeth-marks on some of the rafters.

I didn’t, she tried to protest. But it was a lie, and she knew it. She had no voice, only a dry rustling like a forest path underfoot.

‘Triss ate the ceilings!’ shouted Pen. ‘Triss ate the walls! There are only four left now! Only four!’

Triss woke with a jerk and spent a long minute panting and waiting for her heart to slow. A dream, just a dream. She rolled over on to her side, and her cheek pressed against something rough that crackled with the pressure. She sat up with a gasp.

There were dead leaves on her pillow, several of them. Slowly she raked her fingers through her hair, and her hand came away with a fistful more brown, broken leaves. Her eye crept to the chair she had propped against her door, and her heart sank. Only then did she realize how much she had been hoping that the ever-malicious Pen had been responsible for the mysteriously appearing leaves.

Triss sat up, carefully, and pulled back the covers. There were more leaves on the sheet around her, some inside her nightdress, and a few tiny twigs and wisps of hay.

Mouth dry, she cleaned away the debris once again, then moved to the dresser for her hairbrush. To her surprise, she found tiny flakes of dead leaf clinging to the bristles, despite the fact she was certain she had removed from it everything but a few strands of her own hair. As she stared at it, however, a horrible suspicion crept spider-like into her mind.

No. It can’t be.

She had to know. After shaking off all the leaf fragments, Triss plucked a few hairs from her own head and trailed them over the brush. Then she forced herself to look away for a time, counting to three hundred under her breath. When she looked back, her spirits plummeted like a stone. There were no hairs draped across the brush’s bristles. Instead there was a piece of a skeleton leaf, moth-wing dry and more frail than any lace.

The leaves in my hair, the dirt on my floor – I didn’t bring them in from outside. And Pen didn’t scatter them over my room.

They’re me.

‘Triss looks pale. Doesn’t Triss look pale?’ Pen’s voice rang out again and again at the breakfast table. ‘Is Triss all right? What did the doctor say? Does she need to see him again?’

Triss sat carefully dissecting her egg and found herself almost hating Pen. It was all too close to the dream from which she had struggled. At least she was not ravenously hungry, but it was hard to feel relieved about that when she remembered eating the half-doll. She wanted to cry, but her tears seemed to be trapped in a gluey mass behind her eyes. Her mind was haunted by the leaves on her hairbrush, and the thought of Sebastian’s letter, now hidden beneath her mattress.

Hazily she managed to follow some of her parents’ conversation. Her father had to work that day after all, and was going into Ellchester. The new station he had designed was nearly finished. It was shaped like a pyramid, following the craze for all things Egyptian that had followed the discovery of the Tutankhamen tomb the year before. Somehow ten years ago was dead history, but anything Ancient Egyptian was now the most modern thing imaginable.

‘Holiday over, I’m afraid,’ Triss’s father sighed. ‘They want me at the building site to approve everything, which means that if anything goes wrong afterwards they can blame their handiwork on me. And of course once the main structure is complete, they want me to be present for the Capping Ceremony so that the press can take pictures.’ The ‘Capping Ceremony’ involved using a crane to lower the pointed tip into place at the top of the pyramid, symbolizing the building’s completion.

‘More hullabaloo,’ murmured Triss’s mother, in a tone that combined martyrdom and pride.

‘I know, I know.’ Triss’s father gave her a quick smile. ‘But it is only four days more. Then it will all be over.’

Triss flinched violently, and started shaking. The words recalled too vividly those from her nightmare, and for some reason they filled her with an uncontrollable terror.

‘Triss! What’s wrong?’ Her mother started to reach out a hand towards her, but Triss recoiled from her.

‘Headache!’ she managed to squeak out, and fled from the room.

The medical cabinet was raided for all its emergency troops. Now there were rows of bottles lined up on Triss’s bedside. Lying muffled to the chin in her bedclothes, Triss surveyed their ranks, without feeling much reassurance. Would any of those bottles prevent her falling into leaves? Would syrup of figs rescue Sebastian? She didn’t think so. Nor did she hold out much hope for the effectiveness of the camphor in the bowl of hot water by her bed, or the moistened flannel across her forehead.

She was to spend the day in bed. She knew that once she would have accepted this. Now watching the hours roll by was torture. What was she doing – waiting to fall apart or go mad? Four days, four days, four days… Why did those words keep going through her head? She could not understand how she had ever been able to bear just lying there in bed, getting paler and frailer while the world went on without her.

Triss heard the clocks strike two, and kicked off the covers, feeling too hot to stand them. When she pressed her face against the window, the coolness gave her some relief. Her room smelt stale, and the grey, impatient energy of the wind outside drew her, making her want to fling open her window.

Triss heard a car door slam. There was a small, blue Morris parked on the other side of the square, she realized, and somebody had just got out, his figure somewhat obscured by the trees on the central green.

As he drew closer, Triss recognized him. It was Mr Grace, the tailor who had played her jazz and told her to eat cake the day before. As she watched, he walked up to the Crescents’ front door, and a moment later she heard the bell sound.

Triss’s initial fizz of joyful recognition turned a moment later to confusion. Why was he here? What if her parents met him, and found out that he was a jazz sort of a person? Perhaps she would not be allowed to go back to his shop.

What was he doing here?

With a stealth that was becoming second nature, Triss slipped out of her room and to the head of the stairs. Since Margaret had departed for the day, it was her mother who had answered the door. Cook was notoriously deaf and claimed that she could never hear the bell. Triss did not dare peer around the corner for fear of being seen, but remained where she was, listening.

‘… so sorry to disturb you.’ The tailor’s voice was just audible. ‘Mrs Piers Crescent? My name is Jacob Grace of Grace & Scarp – your husband and daughter visited our establishment yesterday.’

‘Oh – you’re from the dressmakers’?’ Triss’s mother sounded perplexed and a bit flustered. ‘But… I understood the first fitting appointment was set for next week…’

‘Yes, indeed. But it seems your daughter left her gloves in our VIP room, and since I was passing by I thought I would drop them off.’

‘Oh, I see! How very kind.’ Pause. ‘Er… I am sorry, Mr Grace, but these do not actually belong to Triss.’

‘Really?’ The tailor sounded taken aback. ‘Oh. Well, how very stupid of me! They were so small I thought they must be hers. In that case, my sincere apologies for bothering you.’

‘I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted journey.’ Her mother’s tone had thawed a little.

‘Oh, not at all, I was glad of a chance to ask how the young lady was faring today in any case.’

‘Theresa is… well, I think that she has recovered from the shock she received in your shop, if that is what you are asking.’

‘Actually, that was not what I was asking.’ For the first time Mr Grace sounded serious and somewhat hesitant. ‘Mrs Crescent, I had the good fortune to spend some time with your daughter while she was visiting our shop, and I noticed certain… symptoms. Symptoms that concerned me because they… reminded me of another case. But if your daughter is doing well today and is quite herself again, then that is a weight off my mind.’

‘Mr Grace,’ asked Triss’s mother with a nervous sharpness, ‘what do you mean?’

There was a long pause.

‘Please accept my apologies,’ came the response, so softly that Triss had difficulty making out the words. ‘I am so very sorry, Mrs Crescent. I had no place offering comments on your daughter’s health. You are obviously both loving parents and no doubt are arranging the best of medical help for her. I am not a doctor, nor even a friend of the family. Please excuse me, and pass on my good wishes to young Theresa.’

‘Stop! Wait!’ Her mother’s voice became slightly more distant and less echoing, as if she had followed the departing tailor a step or two out through the front door. ‘My daughter… is not completely well yet. If you recognize her symptoms, and have any idea what might be causing them…’

‘You would not thank me, Mrs Crescent.’ A sigh, and then another pause, during which Triss thought she heard the faint scritch of pen on paper. ‘Here. The shop has a telephone – if you or your husband need me, call this number and ask for me by name. But, Mrs Crescent? Contact me only when you are desperate. Not before.’

Clipped steps receded, and a few moments later Triss heard the front door close. She crept back to her room, her mind in a helpless tumult.

What did any of this mean? What was Mr Grace doing here? He must have seen her put on her own gloves when she left. Had he pretended to think the stray gloves were hers so he had an excuse to drop by?

He wanted to talk to Mother about me. Her first feeling was a sense of betrayal. She had been so sure that she and Mr Grace had a bond of secrecy, and that he would not say anything about the six plates of cakes. What other symptom could he be talking about? But sometimes adults were like that. They decided that promises to a child didn’t matter, as long as they thought they were doing something for the child’s own good.

Triss’s second feeling was a small, tremulous snowdrop of hope. What if Mr Grace really did know what was wrong with her? What if he could do something to make it better?