Brightwood (6 page)

TWELVE

The man was waiting for her at the edge of the Wilderness. While she had been gone, the day had grown hot, and the sky was blue and empty. The man had taken off his jacket. There were wet stains under the arms of his shirt.

“There you are,” he said, with the same pause between his words and smile as before. He had a plastic bag in his hand. It was filled with the tiny strawberries that grew wild all through the walled gardens. “I got them for you,” he said. “A peace offering.”

Daisy hesitated, not moving any closer.

“Who are you?” she said.

His face went still as if he was thinking. “I used to come here,” he said at last. “A long time ago.”

He hadn't answered the question. Daisy wanted to repeat it in a louder voice, but the man was talking again, his words coming fast.

“I upset you. It was the surprise of seeing you here. Why don't we start all over again?” He held out the bag of strawberries. “We could have tea. Do you know how to make tea?”

Daisy nodded. “I can cook a lot of things.”

“Of course you can,” the man said. “Of course you can.”

His voice was kind, and he was careful to keep his distance as they made their way back to the house, not even coming into the kitchen but waiting outside while Daisy boiled water in the kettle. She began to think he wasn't as bad as Frank had said.

Perhaps he wasn't bad at all. Daisy risked a quick glance out the window. The man looked nothing like a rival explorer. Frank was completely wrong about that.

Tar came running up as soon as he heard the kettle whistle. Daisy hustled him into her pocket before he could protest. There were a few leftover crumbs at the bottom that would keep him busy for a while.

She made the tea and put the cups on a tray, together with a bowl for the strawberries, then carried it out carefully. The man was sitting at the little table where she and her mum sometimes had breakfast when the weather was nice. Daisy put the tray down and, after hesitating for a second or two, sat opposite him.

“How nice,” the man said. “I'll pour, shall I?”

Daisy nodded. She had to hold the cup in both hands to stop herself from trembling and spilling the tea. She took a sip without tasting it, the liquid burning her tongue. The man carefully transferred the strawberries from the plastic bag into the bowl and pushed it to the center of the table.

“Please, he said, “help yourself.”

Daisy didn't feel able to eat anything at all. But she managed to smile politely.

“I'm sorry if I seemed rude before,” the man said, taking a sip of his tea, his pale eyes fixed on Daisy's face. “Part of it was the shock of seeing Brightwood Hall in this state. It used to be so different, you see.”

Daisy stared at him blankly.

“All the stuff piled up,” the man explained. “All those boxes . . . in the Marble Hall. What are they?”

“They're just my mum's Day Boxes,” Daisy said.

“The grounds have become so overgrown,” the man continued, as if he hadn't heard. “They used to be really impressive, you know. Now there are more weeds than anything else. And the woods must be full of vermin.”

Daisy didn't know what “vermin” was, although it sounded horrible.

“Oh no,” she said quickly. “It's just rabbits and rats and hedgehogs and a fox.”

“You can't have vermin running all over the place,” the man said as if she hadn't spoken. “You need to do something about that.”

Tar wriggled in Daisy's pocket and then darted out onto the table in search of things to eat. The man flinched when he saw him.

“What's that? Is that your pet?”

Tar wasn't a pet. He was just himself. “He's a friend,” Daisy said.

Tar ran across the table and stopped in front of the man, wrinkling his nose. Then he ran back to Daisy. She caught him and put him back in her pocket, pinching the top of it to keep it closed.

“A friend,” the man said, shaking his head. “I suppose you have a lot of ‘friends' like this. Poor girl. It must be lonely here all by yourself.”

Daisy had never thought she was lonely. But the way he said it made it seem true.

The man breathed out a long sigh and leaned back in his chair. She could hear the creak of the delicate wood as he rested his full weight against it.

“Your mother,” he said, shaking his head again. “She needed help.”

“I
do
help!” Daisy cried. “I help mow the lawn and cook supper and collect trash and . . . a lot of things!”

“I don't mean
that
kind of help,” the man said. His gaze flickered away, roaming over the house behind Daisy.

“Crazy . . . ” he said, as if to himself.

It was the same word he'd used in the Marble Hall when he'd first arrived. Daisy didn't understand what he meant by it. The Crazy had skipped them. Her mum had told her so. The General had The Crazy, not her mum.

The General had been her mum's great-­great-­uncle, and he had caused a thousand men to die somewhere in Africa. The men had been fighting all day and had run out of ammunition. When evening came, the General ordered them to fix bayonets to their empty guns and charge directly into the cannon of the enemy. He sat on his horse and watched them all die. One man had tried to run in the other direction, and the General had taken out his own gun and shot him for being a deserter and a coward.

Everyone knew the General was insane to do this, although it would have caused a great scandal to admit it. Instead they gave him another medal. The king himself presented it to him, and it lay right there on the General's chest in the Portrait Gallery.

Great-­great-­great-­cousin Gracie had The Crazy too. She liked to catch small animals and hurt them and had to be kept locked up in her room. Luckily she had died of the flu when she was only eighteen years old. The Crazy ran through the Fitzjohn family like the boxwood blight. But it hadn't appeared for a great while.

It had been gone for so long, it might never come back, her mum said.

“Mum hasn't got The Crazy,” Daisy told the man. “She's a good person!”

He made a face. Daisy couldn't tell if he was smiling or frowning.

“Let's talk about something else,” he said. “How about you have a strawberry?” He pushed the bowl nearer to her with the tips of his fingers. “The little ones are the sweetest.”

He was right. The little strawberries tasted the best, and it was just the right time of year for them. Daisy, however, had no appetite.

“I'll eat them later,” she said.

“Promise?”

She nodded.

He stared at her in silence for a moment and then pushed back his chair.

“Well,” he said, “I noticed some tools in the gardening shed. I might as well get started on those weeds.”

Daisy wanted to tell him to leave the weeds alone. They weren't
his
weeds. And this wasn't his house, although he was acting as if he lived here. But he looked so big when he stood up, big enough to blot out the sun, and Daisy was afraid.

He's only trying to be nice,
she told herself.

She took the bowl of strawberries and went inside, making sure to lock the kitchen door.

THIRTEEN

Daisy watched the man from the window of her grand­father's old study for nearly an hour. He spent the whole time in the front part of the grounds, slicing at the meadowsweet and nettles with a pair of shears. If Frank had been there to comment, she might have said he was hacking his way through deepest jungle, although Daisy thought the man's behavior was more random than that. His attack on the vegetation didn't seem to have any method. He simply moved from one place to another, choosing plants as if by whim. And she couldn't help feeling that he took a kind of glee in the deadly snip of the shears, beheading the tall thistles with a flourish of his arms, demolishing the trailing honeysuckle at a single stroke.

Daisy turned away from the window, her hands clenched.

When she looked again, the man was gone. Daisy went up to her bedroom and saw him rowing back across the lake to the boathouse. She waited until she felt fairly sure he wasn't coming back, then made her way outside to the topiary.

She sat in the middle, with her back against True.

“He wasn't weeding at all,” she told the horse. “He was just cutting.”

Daisy looked at the skeletal forms of the long-­dead bushes. The creeping stems of a morning glory plant had wound their way up one of the legs of the smallest elephant and produced a single flower, a blue star with faded, curling petals. The flower was right in the place where the elephant's eye used to be, and for a moment, Daisy thought the animal was looking at her.

“If nobody knows you exist, how do
you
know you exist?” she asked True.

She felt his leaves brushing her cheek.

“How do you know if you're real?” she said.

“You feel the wind,” he suggested. “You see the clouds passing overhead. You hear the hum of the earth turning.”

“But how can you be sure?” Daisy said. “How can you be sure you're not imagining it? Or somebody else is. What if someone is just imagining me? Like a character in a book. Do characters in books know they're only made-­up?”

She felt the start of tears.

“Close your eyes,” True told her. “Are they closed?”

Daisy nodded.

“Be still. Listen. Deep inside you, deeper than your mind and deeper than your heart, something lies hidden. Nothing can touch it, not the gardener's shears, not rain or storm, not even the boxwood blight. Can you feel it?”

Daisy felt the slow surge of her breath and the beating of her heart.

“I . . . don't know.”

“Concentrate,” True said.

She opened her eyes and stared up at the calm, endless sky until something unfurled within her that was just as calm and just as endless.

“That's your Shape,” True told her. “That's how you know you exist. And you have to keep your Shape, Daisy. No matter what happens.”

“I will,” she said. “I promise I will.”

She sat for a while in silence, with the sun on her face. Then she took out her knife to practice her throwing. Frank was right. It was far better to use a chopping action. Her knife still mostly landed far from her target, but sometimes it hit and then the knife bit deep into the wood and stayed there, the handle quivering from the force of the impact.

After a short time, Daisy felt better. She stood up and brushed herself off and started back towards the house. It was getting late. She would make something to eat. Some soup perhaps and the strawberries that the man had picked for her. She trotted down the path that led to the kitchen door.

But well before she got there, her worry came back. She had just remembered something odd that the man had said over tea. He had been talking about her mum.

She needed help,
he had said.

Her mum was missing. The man had said he didn't know where she was or what had happened to her.

So why had he spoken about her in the past tense?

FOURTEEN

“I thought I was hungry, but I'm not,” Daisy told Tar. “I'm too worried about Mum to be hungry.”

“There's no such thing as not hungry,” Tar commented, eyeing the bowl of strawberries on the table. “There's only
peckish, starving, ravenous,
and
ready-­to-­eat-­your-­own-­leg.
I've eaten three breakfasts and four lunches today, and I'm still at the starving level.”

Daisy turned and opened the fridge. There was an unopened carton of cream at the back. It would go nicely with the straw­berries and might tempt her appetite. She heard the sound of claws skittering across wood.

“Tar?”

She whirled around. The rat's nose was buried in the strawberries.

“I was just going to eat those!” Daisy cried. She picked up the bowl. “Did you lick them?”

Tar didn't say anything, although he had a guilty look.

“I can't take the chance,” Daisy said. “What a waste.” She took the strawberries and emptied them into the bin. “I don't want to be mean, Tar, but humans can get sick from rats.”

She rinsed the bowl in the sink and put it on the side to dry.

“Tar?”

He was on the floor, moving slowly, his head held low.

“What's the matter?”

Tar shivered and stopped moving. His front paws jerked. Daisy fell to her knees beside him.

“Are you okay?”

He opened his mouth to say something, yet no sound came out. He gave her a piteous look. She scooped him up with both hands and spun around, looking for a place to put him. Then she took off her cardigan and made a nest with it in the corner of the kitchen. She placed him gently in its folds.

“Is that better?”

He didn't move. His eyes were closed. Daisy stroked his fur.

“You had too many meals today. You've eaten yourself sick.”

She lowered her head and listened to his breathing. It sounded raspy.

“Are you thirsty?”

Daisy left the kitchen and clambered through the house to the Portrait Gallery, heading for an area piled high with Day Boxes from a few months before. There was a tiny baby's bottle in one of them. It had belonged to a doll. Daisy hadn't played with the doll for a long while, but the bottle had turned up in the bottom of a drawer while she was tidying her room, and her mum had included it in the box for that day.

She searched among the boxes, opening flaps and peering inside. After a moment or two, she found the one with the bottle. It was just the right size. She scrambled back to the kitchen and filled it with water.

“Tar?” She knelt down beside him. His eyes were still closed.

Daisy put the tip of the baby bottle into his mouth, squeezing it gently. But he didn't swallow. “Please,” she begged. “Please try.”

She could feel him trembling as she stroked him.

“It's all right,” she said. “It's going to be all right.”

The shadows grew long over the kitchen floor. Daisy tried again to give him water.

“Please, please, don't die,” she said. “I'll tell you a story. It starts off sad, although you mustn't worry, because it has a happy ending. Are you listening, Tar?”

Beneath her fingers, his heart beat slow.

“My mum tells me this story. It's the story of her. When she was little, this house was full. There was her family, her mum and dad and brother, and there were lots of people who helped with everything. Her dad was tall and he smelled of lemons, and her mum was the most beautiful woman in the world and she smelled of flowers and new clothes.”

Daisy stroked Tar's head. “I'm telling you what they smelled like because I know you're interested in smells. But the next bit of the story is sad. They had a boat—a really big one. One day they all went out for a lovely trip, but my mum lost something. Or rather, her doll lost something. It's easy to get muddled up because the doll had the same name as my mum, and she also looked exactly like her. Anyway, Mum got off the boat and it sailed without her and there was a terrible accident and she never saw any of her family ever again.

“She wasn't completely alone, of course,” Daisy continued. “She still had her granny and the people who looked after the house. So she was okay. But she wasn't happy. She didn't want to go to school anymore or ever leave the house. They got tutors for her so she could learn at home. Then, when she was around fifteen, her granny died. And lots of the old servants left.

“My mum was good at painting, and when she got a bit older, she tried going away to a place called a college so she could learn how to do it better. But she was lonely. She missed home every single minute of every single day. When she met my dad, she thought he might stop her from feeling so lonely, but he couldn't. So she came back here to be on her own.

“Then I arrived,” Daisy said. “And that made everything better. My mum says we don't need anyone else. Because we have our home and we have each other forever.”

She glanced down at Tar.

“That's the good bit of the story,” she told him. “I told you there was a happy ending.” Her voice trembled. She leaned forward with the baby bottle.

The water trickled out of Tar's mouth and wet his paws.

He was gone. He was never coming back.

“Hey,” Tar said in a feeble voice as he opened his eyes. “Am I dead?”

“No,” Daisy cried. “You're alive!” She wanted to kiss him although she knew he would hate it.

“I
ought
to be dead,” Tar said. “I ought to have gone to the great sewer in the sky. But rats have ten lives.”

“I didn't know that.”

“Cats only have
nine,
” Tar said with great scorn. His voice was growing stronger by the second. He sniffed the baby bottle of water. “I can't drink this, it's terrible. Water should be nice and dark and swimmy.”

“Swimmy?”

“With bits in it,” he explained. “Swamp water is nice and swimmy. Puddle water's sometimes good too.” He sniffed the bottle again. “This is from a
tap
!” he exclaimed. “It's brand-­new! Got no vintage at all!”

“I did my best,” Daisy said. “It was your fault you got sick. You shouldn't eat so much.”

“What nonsense!” Tar said. He wiped his whiskers and gave his hindquarters a good scratch.

“This a raisin?” he asked, nibbling at her cardigan.

“No, it's a button.”

“Can you eat it?”

“No.”

“What's the point of it, then?”

“I love you, Tar,” Daisy said. But he had run away.

Daisy tidied up the kitchen and wiped down the surfaces. Then she went back up to the Portrait Gallery to put the baby bottle back.

Her mum was strict about keeping things in the right Day Box.

Before she closed the lid, she looked to see what else was in there. She reached in and pulled everything out of the box. There was a rolled-­up piece of paper, a scarf, and an envelope.

The scarf was bright blue. Daisy remembered her mum wearing it. That was after the only real snowstorm of the winter. It had snowed all night, and in the morning, Daisy and her mum had gone out to play. Brightwood Hall was perfectly white, glittering like sugar in the wintry light. The only color to be seen was the blue of her mum's scarf and the hint of pink in her pale cheeks as she and Daisy made a huge snow rabbit out on the lawn.

Daisy couldn't help thinking that it was a terrible waste to put the scarf into the Day Box. It was so soft and beautiful.

She unrolled the piece of paper. It was a list of things from the bulk-­buy store. It was all printed out, and Daisy guessed the store had given it to her mum to remind her of everything she had bought and to tell her how much it had all cost. It was a long list. Daisy couldn't get to the end of it because the paper kept trying to roll up again as fast as she unrolled it.

The day before, the man had pointed out something very obvious to Daisy, and now something different although equally obvious occurred to her.

Even if they lived for two hundred years, they would never get through the boxes of cereal, the sacks of flour, the bags of pasta, and all the other food down in the basement and stacked in the reception area. Even if they stopped using electricity, they would never use up the horde of candles, the flashlight batteries, or the LED lights. And even if they wrapped the house itself in string, there would still be hundreds of balls left over.

Why did her mum buy so much stuff? The question made Daisy feel sad and frightened at the same time. Yet her mum always looked so happy when she came home from her shopping, humming as she sorted through the provisions and made a note in the log for each new item. And every week, the walls of groceries grew a little higher.

“I know it's a lot,” her mum had told Daisy, “but you never know what you might need. Better to be safe than sorry.”

Crazy,
the man had called her.
She needed help.

He was wrong. It wasn't true. Then Daisy wondered how she could be so sure. She had never known anything different, after all.

She forced the thought away and turned her attention to the last item in the box, the envelope.

There was handwriting on the outside. Her mum's name and their address here at Brightwood Hall. The writing was neat and easy enough to read, but the dots above the
i
's and
j
's were odd. They were very large, as if someone had gone over them several times with the pen, pressing down on the paper with almost enough force to tear it.

There was something heavy in the envelope. Daisy tipped it into her hand.

It was a watch. Daisy had never seen it before. It was made of gold, the sort of watch a man might wear, she guessed. On the back there were words engraved in flowing letters:

For my darling Tony

I will love you for all time.

Anne

Daisy ran a finger over the words, reading them again and again. Tony and Anne were the names of her mum's parents. They had gone out on their yacht and never come back. She flipped the watch over.

On the front it said
Rolex,
and around the dial there were tiny diamonds. It was a beautiful watch. Or it had been beautiful once. Now the glass was shattered and the hands hung crooked, and even though Daisy shook it and held it to her ear, she couldn't hear a tick.

It didn't look as if it had been dropped or accidentally bumped.

It looked as if someone had taken a hammer and hit it once, very hard and sharp, exactly where it would cause the most damage.