Free The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge Page B

the evening? Thank goodness
– I must speak with him.’
    ‘No!’ Faith reflexively put her back to the door.
    She could not make sense of what she had just seen, but she knew he wanted to keep it a secret. Faith remembered tales of strange opiates smoked in secret, with fumes that entranced
gentlemen’s wills and enslaved their minds. What if her father’s troubles had driven him to become an opium eater? She could not expose him. He was facing enough scorn and scandal
already.
    ‘I . . . I went in to tell him about the boy in the gin-trap,’ Faith said quickly.
    ‘What did he say?’
    Faith hesitated. The only safe answer was to say that she had been ordered out of the room and given no answer. It was true besides.
    ‘We should send for a doctor,’ she heard herself say.
    Myrtle hurried away to give orders to Mrs Vellet, relief visible on her pretty, rounded features.
    Faith was flabbergasted by her own nerve. Her lie would inevitably be exposed. Her mind mouse-scampered with the agility of practice, trying to find a way out, but she could think of no excuse
or explanation. She could not imagine facing her father and telling him that she had given false orders in his name.
    Father has to understand,
she told herself
If I had not, he might have been discovered, or blamed for letting the boy bleed. I am protecting him.
    At the same time, the thought that she had claimed a tiny part in one of her father’s mysterious secrets filled her with a small, quiet glow.
    A few minutes later, Faith looked out through the window and saw Uncle Miles, the household manservant and Mrs Vellet helping a shorter figure towards the house. When they drew
close enough for the window’s light to fall on them, she could make out the face of the boy, who looked about fourteen years old. He was alarmingly pale, cheeks shiny with tears, face
crumpled with pain. The cloth clumsily tied around his ankle was blotched with dark. The sight of it filled her stomach with an animal, sympathetic tingle.
    Faith was not allowed into the kitchen. Sitting in the nearby dining room, however, she could easily hear the boy’s high sobs of pain, and the panicky conversations within.
    ‘. . . No, hold the pad steady!’
    ‘Mrs Vellet – it’s soaked! It’s leaking through my fingers!’
    The manservant Prythe arrived with more makeshift bandages. As he opened the kitchen door, Faith caught a fleeting glimpse of the wounded boy lying on the hearthrug, Jeanne clamping a red-soaked
cloth to his ankle. The boy was cursing through clenched teeth, his eyes tightly shut.
    ‘I won’t have language like that in my kitchen,’ Mrs Vellet could be heard to declare, as the door shut. ‘What would you do if you bled to death right now, and got
dragged down to hell for having a wicked tongue?’
    Dr Jacklers’s carriage arrived within the hour. He bowed to Mrs Sunderly and Faith, but had a businesslike frown rather than his sociable smile.
    ‘How is the boy?’ he asked immediately. ‘Serious, you say? Well, I would hope so – I have just left a good mug of spiced cider cooling on my dresser, and I would hate it
to be wasted for nothing.’ He asked for a tot of laudanum to numb the patient’s pain, and a hot cup of tea to help himself recover from the cold of his journey. ‘I never like to
work with numb fingers, and a man is best warmed from the inside out.’
    The house became a little calmer after the doctor’s arrival. After an hour he emerged, his hands washed and his bag packed once more.
    ‘How is the poor child?’ Myrtle asked meekly.
    ‘Well, the teeth of the trap missed the bone, thank goodness, but they spiked two holes into the meat of his calf. I have washed the rust and dirt out of them as best I can, and swabbed
the wounds with carbolic acid.’ The doctor seemed to become aware that Myrtle was blanching at his words, and changed the subject. ‘He is bandaged and made watertight now, so I might as
well take him home – I