Brightwood (9 page)

TWENTY

Daisy spent the rest of the morning in her bedroom, lying low, as Frank had advised. Every so often, she went over to the window to see if Gritting had taken the rowboat back across the lake to the boathouse. But it remained tied up at the nearby jetty. Which meant he was probably still somewhere on the main grounds.

She wondered what he was doing. Cutting the heads off the wild roses and the hollyhocks with his shears perhaps. Or laying more traps. Or tying another rabbit to his belt. He could be doing all these things while she hid like a coward in her room. How many animals would be hanging off him by the time he was done?

Daisy pushed the thought away, but it kept returning. Each time it did, another imaginary corpse was added to Gritting's belt until he was wearing a whole skirt of dead creatures, their heads bobbing and bouncing as he strode triumphantly along.

By noon, Daisy couldn't bear it any longer. She decided to go out and see what was happening.

She let herself down the rope from her bedroom window, using the ivy to clamber down the last twenty feet, her binoculars bumping against her chest, her knife hooked to her waistband.

She turned left and crept around to the front of the house, keeping to the shadows. When she got to the corner, she stopped and scanned the lawn with her binoculars.

There was nothing there. Just the ancient trees and the grass and the shimmer of gnats in the hot air.

Daisy decided to make a wide sweep of the front grounds. She went all the way down to the gates and then back up the other side, keeping close to the perimeter wall. There was no sign of Gritting anywhere. She slipped into the topiary and paused to rest in True's cool shadow.

“How am I going to stop him, True?” she asked. “What can I do?”

The breeze shifted and it seemed the horse turned his head slightly towards her.

“I told you before,” True said. “You must leave. You must get help.”

“I can't,” Daisy said. “I have to stay to protect the animals.” She stroked his leaves. “Besides, what if I'm gone for ages and there's nobody here to trim you?”

“I grow so slowly,” the horse said. “It saved me once.”

He was right. When the gardeners had stopped caring for the topiary, the outlines of the other creatures had quickly been lost. But even when he was a small bush, True had never grown as well or as quickly as the others.

“It must have been terrible to see them all go,” she murmured.

True paused as if lost in memory.

“The worst thing was their voices,” he said at last. “They got more and more muffled. And then they stopped sounding like voices any longer. I was glad when they fell silent in the end, although it almost broke my heart.”

“I wish I could ride you far away,” Daisy said. “I wish—”

She was interrupted by the faint crunch of gravel. She turned her head. Through the rusty, weed-­strangled metal forms of the dead topiary animals she could see Gritting coming down the path by the side of the walled gardens. He was carrying the shears, and the long steel blades glittered in the sunlight with a gleam so sharp it hurt the eye.

Daisy shrank against True's side. “He's not turning,” she whispered. “He's coming right towards us.”

“
Hide!
” True said in a voice she had never heard before.
“Do it! Now!”

She fell to the ground and scrambled towards the form of the baby elephant, fifteen feet away. It was covered in weeds and knotted vines. She pushed her way through and crept into the hollow cavity of its belly with her knees pressed to the earth and her head bowed.

The sound of crunching gravel stopped. Gritting had moved off the path into the ragged weeds and grass. She heard the shears: the grating whisper of the blades opening, the sharp, silvery hiss as they closed.

He's not interested in gardening,
Daisy thought.
He just likes to destroy things.

She remembered the way the long ears of the rabbits had swayed as they hung upside down, and she curled tight in her small cave, her heart hammering against the even smaller cave of her chest, her eyes squeezed shut.

The snip of the shears came again, closer than before.

A memory came to Daisy of an afternoon a long time ago, when she was tiny. She was playing hide-­and-­seek with her mother, sitting in the long grass of the meadow with her hands covering her eyes.

There's my baby girl!
her mother had called, laughing in that soft way of hers.
Just because you've got your eyes closed it doesn't mean I can't see you!

Another slice of the shears, so close she could hear Gritting grunt with effort as he brought the blades together. He muttered something to himself and stepped back. Daisy could feel the vibrations of his footsteps through the dry earth, loud as he passed her hiding place, then growing fainter as he moved away, through the copse of trees towards the front of the house.

She stayed where she was for several minutes, fearful he would turn and come back. Then, when she was quite sure he had gone, she crept out of the shelter of the baby elephant, brushing the earth and dried grass off her clothes.

“I think it's okay,” she told True. “I think we're safe. I'll just wait here a bit longer.” She sat down at his feet, gazing at his silhouette outlined against the sky. It seemed to quiver for an instant.

“True?”

There was a creaking, snapping noise. The sky turned dark and tilted towards her. The next moment, she was lying half buried beneath True's branches.

“
True
!
” Daisy cried, scrambling to her feet.

He lay on his side, his central stem cut almost completely in two. Gritting's shears had managed to sever all except a thin strand of bark. The horse had held himself upright as the blades bit deep and for long moments after, through balance or through force of will. Now, at last he had given way.

He looked different on the ground. His legs no longer looked like legs. They were just an undignified collection of spindly branches. Daisy touched his head. His eyes were closed.

He had been made into a horse by chance. Nothing but chance had preserved him through the long, lonely years of neglect. And now a random snip of the shears had brought him down.

“It's not important.” His voice was as thin as a reed. “None of that matters. In the end, the only thing that matters is to keep your Shape . . . ”

She stroked his nose and his ragged, leafy ears.

“Please,” she begged. “Please don't go.”

He didn't reply.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“I thought it would,” True said. “But it doesn't. It's strange, like being . . . untied.”

Daisy examined his poor broken stem. “I could try and tie it back together,” she cried. “Or fetch water. Would it help if you had water?”

He was silent. Not even his leaves rustled.

“Be careful of yourself,” he said at last. She had to lower her head close to hear him.

“Will you be able to run, where you're going?” she whispered. “Will you gallop?”

He didn't answer.

Daisy sat beside him for a long while. She had cried many times in the past few days, but she didn't cry now. It felt as though she couldn't, even if she tried. At last, she got up and made her way slowly back to the house.

TWENTY-­ONE

Daisy crept into her mum's room, desperate for comfort. It was the closest she could get to actually being with her. But there was no comfort there. Despite the clutter, the room felt empty. Her mum's dresses hung like ghosts in the closet, and her paintings had their faces turned to the wall.

The only picture her mum had ever displayed was the portrait of Daisy hanging in the reception area, although Daisy thought her mum's paintings were beautiful.

She sat on the floor in her mum's bedroom and turned the nearest painting around so she could see it. It was another—more recent—portrait of her. She was sitting with her legs tucked up in an armchair. The chair was covered with orange velvet, so cleverly painted that it looked real enough to touch.

There was a tiny white brooch pinned to the painted collar of Daisy's shirt. Daisy leaned in for a closer look. She didn't own a brooch like that, in the shape of a boat.

Except it wasn't a boat. It was a yacht. Daisy could see the masts and the tiny wisp of a flag. It was the
Everlasting
.

Curious, she put the painting aside and looked at the next one in the stack. It showed a bowl of fruit on a table and, next to it, a bunch of daffodils in a tall glass vase. The bowl was decorated with blue and white squares. It looked exactly like the one downstairs in the kitchen, although now, examining it more carefully, Daisy saw there was one tiny difference. Her mum had painted the shape of the yacht in one of the white squares.

“The
Everlasting
,
” Daisy whispered.

She looked at other pictures, slowly at first, and then more and more rapidly. There were at least fifteen years' worth of paintings, stacked in groups of ten, all of them showing some aspect of Brightwood Hall. There were portraits of Daisy in different stages of her life, scenes of the house, the gardens, and a whole variety of familiar objects.

The
Everlasting
was in every single picture.

Sometimes it was plain to see. In one painting, for example, it appeared as an ornament on the ballroom mantelpiece. In another, it was a toy lying among Daisy's dolls and books. But mostly, the yacht was hard to find, hiding in the shape of a cloud or woven into the pattern of a carpet.

Her mum hardly ever mentioned the accident that had destroyed her family, and Daisy had assumed it was because she didn't think about it much. Now she saw that she had been quite wrong about this.

She turned the last picture around. It had been painted before Daisy was born. It showed the lawn and the great trees, deep in the green dream of a summer afternoon. Daisy looked for the
Everlasting,
and sure enough, she found it. A faint outline on the grass, formed from a shadow, like a trick of the light.

Her mum must have thought about it every hour of every day. She was obsessed with it.

Daisy wished that word
obsessed
hadn't come into her mind. Now it wouldn't go away. She thought of her mum's Day Boxes and the piles of groceries stacked up like protective walls.

Obsessed.

She stood up, rubbing her face in agitation, not noticing that her hands were dusty from the paintings. She saw a card lying on the floor. It must have fallen between two of the older paintings and lain forgotten until now. Daisy picked it up. There was a photograph of a kangaroo on one side and words on the other. Daisy could see at a glance that it was Gritting's handwriting. She stuffed it into the back pocket of her shorts to read more carefully later. She was too busy with her thoughts to worry about relics just now.

The
Everlasting
had made her think about the rowboat, although apart from the fact that they both floated, the yacht and the boat were completely different. For one thing, the boat was tiny. For another, it was extremely old: the planks worn and splintery, the wood almost rotten in places.

Thinking about it gave Daisy an idea.

There was a drill among the tools in the utilities room. She went down to have a look at it. She pressed the trigger tentatively and the drill bit whirred.

There was no time to go back upstairs and exit the building using the rope. Gritting might decide to return to the boathouse at any moment. Daisy pulled the heavy storage unit away from the kitchen door and slipped outside.

She crept around the sheds to the lake and jetty and, without giving herself a chance to feel frightened, scrambled into the rowboat. It was even easier than she thought to drill into the old wood. She chose a spot underneath the seat, where Gritting wouldn't see, and drilled five holes in the bottom of the boat. It wasn't enough to let in a lot of water when the boat was empty, but Gritting's weight would turn the trickle into a flood.

“He'll sink,” she told the Hunter.

“ 'Tis a lonely grave, beneath the waves,” the Hunter commented in a dreamy voice.

“He's not going to
drown,
” Daisy said. “He'll just get wet.”

“Wet?” The Hunter sounded puzzled. The idea of getting wet was obviously not poetic enough for him to fully grasp.

“He'll get drenched,” Daisy said, trying to be helpful.

“Ah,
drenched,
” the Hunter repeated, his beautiful face lighting up. “Drenched in the lake of eternity . . . drenched in the water of—”

Daisy had already gone. She ran back to the house and pushed the storage unit up against the kitchen door again. Then she went upstairs and out onto the roof. She was just in time. Gritting was walking down the path to the lake. He turned a corner and she couldn't see him any longer. In a few seconds, he would be at the jetty.

The boat itself was beyond her line of sight, hidden by the angle of the house. She held her binoculars tight and waited.

One minute. Then two.

Had he seen the holes? Was the boat already full of water?

No. Gritting entered her vision, rowing in his lurching way. Daisy thought the boat looked lower in the water than she remembered, although she might have just been imagining it. It was nearly evening, the sun was low over the lake, and the surface of the water glittered, half blinding her.

He was twenty yards out, and now there wasn't any doubt about the boat being lower. It was barely a few inches above the water. Gritting was just a silhouette against the sun, and he had begun to row faster, his body jerking back and forth, the oars digging into the water with a frantic motion.

He tried to turn but was already at the middle of the lake. The boat was level with the surface. In another, instant it had slipped from sight. Gritting leaped to his feet. For a split second, he looked as if he were standing on nothing except water. Then he too was gone.

Daisy turned and scrambled back through her bedroom window, half terrified by what she had done. What if Gritting couldn't swim? What if he got tangled in weeds and pulled to the bottom?

She ran through the Portrait Gallery in a panic.

“I didn't mean to drown him!” she cried.

“We used to drown witches in the olden days!” Little Charles's voice was jubilant.

“I don't believe you!”

“It's true. Witches got thrown in the lake.”

“Be quiet, Little Charles!”

“They were rubbish witches anyway,” he said. “If they'd been any good, they'd have done a spell to make themselves invisible or dry up the lake or something. So they deserved to be drowned.”

Daisy hurried past him and down the great staircase.

Tar was waiting for her in the kitchen. She hadn't fed him for a while.

“I didn't drown him, did I?” she said. “It isn't my fault, is it?”

“Something, something, something,” Tar muttered, not meeting her eye. Daisy fetched some stale bread, tore it into pieces, and knelt on the floor to feed him.

“I just wanted to cut him off from the boathouse,” Daisy said. “I just thought if he couldn't get to his equipment and provisions, he'd
have
to leave.”

She paused. A terrible thought had just occurred to her.

“Do dead bodies float, or do they sink?” she asked Tar.

“Neither,” Tar said promptly. “First they get eaten by fish. Then they drift up on the shore with lots of bits missing . . . ”

“I shouldn't have done it!” Daisy wailed. “I shouldn't have—”

There was a noise outside. A rustling. She glanced up. From her vantage point on the floor, she could see the side of the sink unit and the window that looked out on the patio beyond.

It was dark outside. The noise came again. She was just about to get to her feet when she froze. Gritting's face was suddenly there, framed by the window. His wet hair hung like weeds, and the pupils of his eyes, always small, now looked as if they had been washed clean away, leaving his gaze as flat and as featureless as the lake itself.