Brightwood (5 page)

DAY THREE

TEN

The first thing
Daisy thought when she woke up the next morning was how much she would have liked to see inside Frank's bag. She hadn't gotten the chance, because the minute she took her eyes off her, the girl had vanished. Perhaps Frank was bored with talking to Daisy—or she had heard Sir Clarence calling.

Or perhaps she had been nothing but a dream.

Daisy got out of bed and went to the window to look for the rowboat. The sky was overcast and a low mist hung over the lake. But she could see that the boat was moored on the far side, which meant the man must still be at the boathouse.

Daisy hurried downstairs for breakfast, suddenly ravenous. She had eaten hardly anything the day before. Little Charles's voice was a thin pipe as she went by.

“More space!”

“I can't. I have to find out what the man is up to.”

“Set the dogs on him,” Little Charles advised. “My father set the dogs on a poacher once. They tore him to pieces!”

“That's terrible,” Daisy said.

“It was all right,” Little Charles said. “He was only a commoner, you know.”

“You're not being very helpful,” Daisy told him.

Tar wasn't very helpful either. He scurried up onto the kitchen counter as soon as Daisy had cut herself a thick slice of bread.

“Smells good,” he remarked, his nose twitching, ignoring her attempts to bat him away. “There are five kinds of smell in the world. First comes
rich
and then comes
ripe.
Perfectly good smells, but
rank
is better. After
rank
comes
rancid.
I'm very partial to
rancid
. . . ”

“I can't be thinking about smells now,” Daisy protested. “I have to eat and then I have to go out and . . . confront that man. I'm scared, Tar. I'm really scared.”

Tar made a dive for the crust of bread on Daisy's plate. “Last stage is
rotten,
” he announced with his mouth full. “Nothing better than a good rotten smell. Brings tears to my eyes.”

“Do you want to come with me?”

But Tar was gone. He was only a friend when there was food to be had. It wasn't his fault. It was just the way rats were.

She unbolted the kitchen door, slipped outside, and made her way to the front of the house to have a look at the man's car. But there was nothing to be learned from it. It was perfectly ordinary looking, apart from a long scrape down the left-­hand side.

The mist was still thick over the lake. Daisy could barely see the surface of the water, and the Wilderness beyond it was just a green haze. She waited at the base of the Hunter's statue.

“Are you frightened?” she asked him.

“Mine heart is all courage,” the Hunter muttered in a terrified voice.

“Don't worry,” she told him, feeling a little braver by comparison.

There was a movement out on the lake. The mist had formed a clump that seemed to writhe and swirl. Then the boat emerged with the man at the oars. He was far too big for the vessel and he handled it clumsily, with scooping, uneven movements that sent the boat lurching along. Despite this, he made surprisingly quick progress across the lake, and in a few moments, he was drawing close to the little jetty, barely twenty feet from where Daisy stood. He lunged forward, looping the boat's rope around the post at the end of the jetty, and then hauled himself out onto dry land.

Daisy stepped out from behind the Hunter so suddenly that the man staggered back with surprise.

“What are you doing here?” he said, advancing towards her. “This is private property.”

Now that the moment had come to say something, Daisy couldn't summon a single word. Apart from her mum, she had never been near a real, living person in her whole life. The man was so close she could see into his eyes. They were light blue and she couldn't stop staring at them. It wasn't their color; it was that there was so
much
color. The black bits in the middle—the pupils—were barely any larger than pinholes.

They reminded Daisy of something, although she didn't know what it was.

“How did you get in?” the man demanded.

Daisy had no good answer for this. She had gotten in by being born. But that seemed so obvious that it felt stupid to point out. She had taken all night to come into the world, and there had been nobody in the house to help her mum. When she'd finally arrived, her mum had cried. Not because she was sad, but because she was so happy. It was the happiest moment of her whole life, she said.

“Are you deaf?” the man said. “What's your name?”

“Daisy,” she whispered.

“What did you say?”

“Daisy. Daisy Fitzjohn.”

He stared at her. “That's not true,” he said. “There's no such person.”

“There is,” Daisy said. “It's me.”

“I don't believe you.”

Daisy felt tears pricking at her eyes. She didn't understand why he was questioning her. “It
is
me,
”
she insisted. “I live here. There's a picture of me in the hallway. My mum painted it.”

The man said nothing. His pale eyes were expressionless and his big hands hung loosely by his side.

“How old are you?” he said at last in a low voice.

“Eleven.”

“Eleven? It's not possible.” He paused. “Unless . . . ”

“Who else lives here?” he asked. “Who looks after you?”

Daisy didn't know why he seemed so agitated.

“It's just us,” she said. “Just me and my mum.” There was no stopping her tears now. “Do you know where she is?” she cried out. “Do you know why she hasn't come back?”

He was silent, watching her.

“No,” he said at last. “I don't know where she is.”

“Then . . . why did you come?”

“I was just passing by,” the man said. “I didn't know you were here.”

“You broke the lock on the gates!” Daisy protested.

He didn't seem to have heard her. He gazed at her thoughtfully. The sun came out, evaporating the mist on the lake, and the man's face darkened in the sudden shadow of the Hunter.

“Where do you go to school?” he asked.

“In the ballroom,” Daisy said.

“The ballroom?”

“My mum teaches me. We're learning about the Romans . . . ”

“But you do go out? To the doctor for checkups or to play with friends?”

Daisy was silent.

“Perhaps your mother takes you out for trips,” he said.

“My mum says she's going to take me when . . . when I'm older.”

He stepped forward out of the shadow and she saw his eyes again, the blue very pale in the bright light.

“You mean you've
never
been out? Not even once? You must have tried, sneaked out by yourself from time to time?”

Daisy lowered her head. He made it sound as if it was strange that she hadn't gone out, as if she'd done something wrong by not trying. But she had only been doing what she'd been told.

“I'm not allowed,” she whispered, feeling her cheeks grow hot.

“How about visitors, then?” the man said.

The tears rose in Daisy's eyes once again. How many questions was he going to ask her? Why wouldn't he stop? She was the one who was meant to be finding out about
him
. He had turned it the other way around.

“Surely you have visitors,” he continued. “Other children perhaps? Friends of your mother?”

She shook her head desperately, helplessly.

“Plumbers?” the man persisted. “Repairmen . . . ”

“We don't need that,” Daisy said. “When something breaks, we get a new one.”

“Are you saying you've never been outside and you've never . . . you've never even had a visitor?”

For a split second, she saw his eyes flood black. Then his pupils shrank back again.

“Nobody knows you're here,” he said in a wondering voice. “Nobody knows you exist.”

ELEVEN

Daisy felt herself start to tremble inside.

“I just want to find my mum!” she cried. “I have to go and find her!”

“I don't think that's a good idea,” the man said quickly. He paused and then smiled, as if it was an afterthought. “We should both wait here until your mother gets back. I think that would be the most sensible thing to do. What do you say?”

Daisy opened her mouth to say she didn't care what he thought and she didn't want to wait anywhere with him. In fact, she wanted him to leave right that minute. But the trembling had reached her throat and she couldn't utter a single word.

Instead, Daisy turned and ran away.

“Hey! Come back!” he shouted. He ran after her and she ran even faster: Around the back towards the glasshouse and then left, straight into the Wilderness, through nettles and bramble bushes, barely feeling the stings and scratches.

The trees grew thick and Daisy slowed down, stumbling over roots, branches whipping at her arms and face. At last she stopped and stood with her back to the trunk of a tree, as if she had reached the very end of the world and could go no farther.

Her face was wet. She was crying. She could hear her own quiet sobbing and the sound of the wind in the topmost branches.

Nobody knows you're here. Nobody knows you exist.

The moment the man had said it, she had known it was true. And she realized that she had always known. She had known without speaking about it, or even thinking about it. It was so obvious, how could she
not
have known? Her life wasn't normal. It was peculiar, perhaps even wrong.

Her face burned with shame. Far off she heard the sound of clanking metal. It came from Brightwood Hall's old stable yard, abandoned for a hundred years in the deepest part of the Wilderness. Daisy hated the stables, with their double doors hanging agape and their ancient darkness. The clanking came from a huge, rusty chain that dangled from a post and swayed in the wind, turning and twitching like something that should not be alive but was.

She crouched down and pressed her hands tight against her ears.

All this time, she had thought of the outside world as a strange place, hard to imagine. But it wasn't. It was the other way around.

It was Daisy herself who was strange and hard to imagine.

“Can I be perfectly honest?” Daisy looked up. The girl, Frank, was standing on the far side of the clearing. She still appeared in black and white, and the contrast was even clearer in the dappled sunlight, as if her outline had been sharpened by a knife.

“You don't want to be sitting on the ground like that for any length of time,” Frank said. “Not in terrain like this.”

“Why not?”

“Where do I begin? You've got your army ants, your vipers, and your venomous spiders, just for a start. Then there are the leeches. You ever heard of the saber-­toothed leech?”

Daisy shook her head.

“Not many have,” Frank said. “It's more of a biter than a sucker. It burrows. Looks for points of entry.” She paused and made a face. “Your ears, your nose, your mouth, your b—”

“That's disgusting!” Daisy scrambled to her feet.

Frank patted her survival bag. “I've got most of the anti­venoms in here, but if you're bitten by a saber-­toothed leech, you're on your own.”

“Even Sir Clarence knows
that
,” she added.

Daisy decided it was time to put her foot down. “I don't live in a lost city and this isn't a jungle,” she said firmly. “There aren't any army ants or leeches lurking around.”

“Army ants don't lurk,” Frank said. “They march. Sometimes in a straight line, sometimes in a fan formation.” She slapped an invisible insect on her arm and then flicked it off with a matter-­of-­fact gesture. “Why are you sitting around blubbing, anyway?” she asked.

Daisy's shoulders drooped. “Nobody knows I exist,” she said.

Frank let out her breath in a long, exasperated sigh. “Like I said, I've got a lot of things in my survival bag. I've got a penknife with fifty-­nine blades, water purifying equipment, first aid kit, compass—not that I need it, because I can make my own out of a plain old pin and a plain old leaf anytime I want—matches, flint, peppermints, collapsible hat, collapsible cooking pan, collapsible stove.”

Daisy stared at the bag doubtfully. It didn't look big enough to hold quite that many items.

“Breathing tube for avalanches,” Frank continued. “Two-­man tent, a bottle for messages when you're cast away on a desert island, fishing hooks, splinter extractor, night vision goggles, and a spare pair of socks.”

Frank stopped for breath. “Among
many
other things,” she added. “But I don't have anything for your problem.” She folded her arms across her chest and stared hard at Daisy. “There's a simple reason for that.”

“What?” Daisy asked.

“Because it's stupid,” Frank said.

Daisy was so outraged that for a second or two, she couldn't speak.

“That's easy for you to say!” she burst out.

“We're wasting time,” Frank said. “This man. Who is he and what's he doing here?”

“I don't know,” Daisy admitted.

“You didn't even
ask
?”

“I wanted to,” Daisy began. “But it was hard. He kept—”

“Never mind,” Frank said with an impatient gesture. “I need to think.”

She began to pace back and forth across the clearing with a look of deep concentration. There wasn't much space for walking, and when she got to a bush or a rock, Daisy expected she would simply pass through it, in the manner of a ghost. But she didn't. Instead the obstacle itself appeared to move, shifting out of her path in a way that made Daisy blink and rub her eyes.

“I've got it,” Frank said at last, still striding to and fro.

“What?”

“The padlock was cut, wasn't it? That means the man must have arrived with a pair of metal cutters. And the wheel thing he keeps pushing around. He brought that too.”

“I don't understand.”

“He has
equipment,
” Frank said. “That can only mean one thing.”

“What?”

“He's a rival explorer,” Frank announced. “Got to be.”

Daisy couldn't help feeling disappointed. The explanation was completely ridiculous.

“I really don't think—” she began.

“There's always a race to be the first in a new place,” Frank interrupted. “I've seen it before. Not with Sir Clarence, of course. No chance of him ever being the first to find anything. He can't find his own boots without a map, and even then it's touch and go. No, it's obvious. This man wants the Lost City all for himself. All the artifacts, everything.”

Daisy thought of the bags the man had taken from the trunk of his car.

“Those are his supplies,” Frank told her. “His provisions. He's set up camp.” She shook her head. “It doesn't look good. Things could get ugly.”

She glanced at the knife sticking out of Daisy's waistband, which Daisy had used to prune True.

“You might want to brush up on your knife-­throwing skills.”

“I don't have any knife-­throwing skills,” Daisy said, pulling the blade out.

“Never too late to start,” Frank said.

Daisy squared her shoulders and squinted uncertainly at a nearby tree stump.

“Nothing to it,” Frank said.

Daisy threw the knife at the stump. It bounced off with a thud.

“It's a knife,” Frank said in a condescending voice. “Not a paintbrush!”

Daisy gritted her teeth but kept silent. She threw the knife again. It missed the stump, although at least it flew blade-­first this time, landing with a satisfying stab into the ground.

“Stop flinging your arm,” Frank commanded. “You want a short, chopping action.” She sighed and shook her head. “First, Sir Clarence and now you. Why do I always get stuck with such amateurs?”