Free The Book of Lies by James Moloney Page A

if Lord Alwyn had stolen away her life too?
    “Where are you from?” he asked her. “How did you come to live here with Mrs Timmins?”
    “I don’t know where I come from.”
    “You mean you’re like me? Did you come here in the middle of the night as well?” he pressed hopefully.
    “You think my life is hidden in the Book too,” Bea guessed.
    “If you are, then we can soon prove it.” Marcel was excited now.
    “No,” she said sharply. “I don’t want the Book to hear my story”
    Marcel couldn’t work out her reluctance. Why wouldn’t she want to know the truth, just as he did? “Are you afraid of something?”
    She nodded miserably, and suddenly he understood. “You’re not afraid that it will find you are like me and Nicola, you’re afraid that it won’t .”
    Bea looked up, her eyes glistening in the candlelight and clearer than ever before. “If I’m not like you, then I’m truly a foundling after all.”
    Marcel slipped her hand into his. “There’s only one way to know for sure, isn’t there? You have to tell your story.”
    She shifted herself closer to the Book, and with a last glance at Marcel, she began.
    “A baby girl…” Her mouth had become dry and her throat suddenly hoarse. “Abandoned,” she tried to say, but she needed a moment to calm herself.
    “As a baby girl I was abandoned on the steps of a church. The priest found me there in the morning, blue with the cold and almost starved.”
    The pages hadn’t moved, but she wouldn’t give up now. “He took me to a convent where the nuns fed me and kept me warm. They named me Beatrice after their patron saint. I could grow up and become one of them, they said, and they took good care of me. I liked it there.”
    Still no response from the Book. Bea closed her eyes and Marcel guessed her story was about to change. “But after a year or two, when I could walk and talk, the nuns became afraid of me. If I stood perfectly still in the shade of a tree, it was like I’d vanished into thin air. They thought I was bewitched and complained to the priest about the child he had brought them. The priest had no answer for their questions, but it was clear the nuns didn’t want me among them, so he brought me to Mrs Timmins.”
    Now that she was finished, she dared to open her eyes and look at the Book. It cast a golden glow into the kitchen’s dim light. Her story was not in Lord Alwyn’s Book of Lies. It hadn’t given her this life to replace her own. What she had just spoken aloud was the truth.
    Bea sat before the silent, unmoving Book and the hope seemed slowly to leave her body. “I’m not like you,” she sighed.
    They could not delay any longer. It would soon be light, and they had to return the Book. Bea shook herself free of her sadness and ventured out into the damp night air, making her way to the far side of the house. Marcel followed Bea as best he could, using his ears more than his eyes. Then she disappeared altogether into the overgrown shrubs beside the house.
    He waited anxiously, scouring the darkness, expecting to see Termagant at any moment, until suddenly Bea was back beside him and he could breathe again. Then they crept noiselessly into the house once more, up the stairs and into their beds.

Chapter 6

Whispers in the Orchard
    A S EACH DAY PASSED quickly on to the next, Marcel soon found he had been with Mrs Timmins for a week and the routine of life in the orphanage had begun to settle around him. That was the strange thing about routines. After seven, or was it eight days – he wasn’t sure – he felt as though he had been there for a year.
    Nicola wouldn’t speak to him the morning after they had huddled together over the Book of Lies, and she seemed even more wary of Bea. Marcel could hardly blame her, and in fact he was quietly pleased. It seemed to have brought her down a peg or two. She might have gone back to her haughty ways, but he detected an uncertainty behind her sullen glares.
    “She’s