Iris and the Tiger Read online

  Praise for Leanne Hall

  ‘A surrealist mystery (what could be more intriguing than that?) and a fantastic journey through life, art, people and families. Wise, whimsical, delightfully original and altogether charming.’ Cassandra Golds on Iris and the Tiger

  ‘Reminiscent of Elizabeth Goudge’s classic The Little White Horse, full of mystery and an enchanting sense of elsewhere.’ Martine Murray on Iris and the Tiger

  ‘Refreshingly original, Hall’s debut novel has a genuine edge. It’s Blade Runner meets Peter Pan with a bit of sweetness, sadness and tension.’ Sunday Age on This Is Shyness

  ‘For more mature readers who choose to trespass into the realm of young-adult fiction, This Is Shyness is just the book to revive a faded sense of rebellion and adventure.’ Weekend Australian on This Is Shyness

  ‘It’s original, it’s edgy, it skirts the borders of fantasy while being anchored in the real world, and it’s totally absorbing. The long night is over, but we know the story continues. More please.’ Good Reading on This Is Shyness

  ‘This inventive read successfully combines elements of contemporary teen lit, dystopian adventures, and The X-Men into a delicate, elliptical, and heartfelt genre all its own.’ Kirkus on Queen of the Night

  Leanne Hall is the author of two novels for young adults, the Text Prize-winning This Is Shyness and its sequel, Queen of the Night. Leanne has worked in the arts, educational publishing and as a bookseller, but her enduring passion is for youth literature. Iris and the Tiger is her first novel for younger readers.

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Leanne Hall 2016

  The moral rights of Leanne Hall have been reserved.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by The Text Publishing Company, 2016

  Cover and internal illustrations © Sandra Eterović

  Cover and page design by Imogen Stubbs

  Typeset by J&M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Creator: Hall, Leanne Michelle, 1977- author.

  Title: Iris and the tiger / by Leanne Hall.

  ISBN: 9781925240795 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781922253453 (ebook)

  Target Audience: For young adults.

  Subjects: Animals—Fiction.

  Suspense fiction.

  Young adult fiction.

  Dewey Number: A823.4

  To Grant

  No one had ever asked Iris to spy for them before.

  She wasn’t totally convinced she’d be any good at it. But Iris also wasn’t in the habit of saying no to her parents—they paid her so little regard as it was—and when they first sat her down to outline their plan, Iris felt the unfamiliar glow of their attention.

  ‘Aunt Ursula is very old now and we’re worried someone might take advantage of her,’ her mum had explained. ‘When I knew her, she was always taking in strays. Sometimes she quite fell in love with them.’

  ‘For example, who is this “Mr Garcia”?’ Her dad made finger quotes in the air.

  ‘I think it’s señor, Dad.’ Iris dared to correct him. ‘I’m pretty sure they say señor over there, not mister.’

  Iris was twelve years old and perfectly capable of filling in the blanks. Her parents were concerned that Great-Aunt Ursula might be going soft enough in the head to accidentally leave her entire estate to an unknown Spanish boyfriend. She wasn’t really sure what she could do about it, but she would try. Besides, ten days in Spain would be far better than being stuck in the middle of the final school term. At least, that’s what Iris kept telling herself.

  So her interrogation of Señor Garcia began as soon as possible—on the drive from Barcelona Airport to Aunt Ursula’s country home, in fact.

  Iris was droopy after the long flight, but she was determined not to fall asleep on the job. Señor Garcia’s navy suit draped over his bony shoulders, and a large cap similar to a policeman’s hat hid his face. He doesn’t look like anybody’s boyfriend, thought Iris, as Señor Garcia beat time on the steering wheel with gloved hands.

  ‘And what exactly is it you do, Señor Garcia?’ she asked from the back seat, even though it was obvious that his job was to drive this shiny cream vintage car.

  He did not answer. At the airport he had silently held up a sign saying ‘IRIS CHEN-TAYLOR’, and waved at her a letter written by Aunt Ursula in loopy, old-fashioned cursive. In it, Ursula had apologised for her failure to meet her at the airport and introduced her ‘dear and trusted friend, Señor Reynaldo Torres Garcia’.

  Iris had no choice but to go with the tall stranger with the shadowy face—even though it was only her second time overseas, and the first plane she’d caught on her own. But she’d already veered off the set of instructions that her dad had written down for her: Aunt Ursula was supposed to be at the airport in person.

  ‘You don’t speak English?’ Iris asked, after their silence grew awkward. She felt the determination slide out of her voice. With no further conversation to come, she pressed herself to the car window.

  The car soon turned off a main road onto a smaller one. Ahead was a gate: two fancy iron doors attached to two brick pillars. Señor Garcia sat up extra straight now; Iris could sense his excitement.

  The car slowed to a crawl, and Señor Garcia pointed to a metal plaque.

  Iris squinted. I wonder what that means?

  Her heart beat a little faster with the idea that she would soon see the house and her notorious great-aunt. Her mum hadn’t told her much about Aunt Ursula’s country estate, except that it was ‘unforgettable’. But when Iris had asked for more details, her mum hadn’t said anything, so maybe she had forgotten after all.

  Trees crowded the edges of the road, leaving no verge. They were different from Australian trees—tall and straight and almost black. When they passed a narrow path, Iris turned her head and caught a dim sparkle that might have been water.

  They were the woods you read about in fairytales. Under the cover of leaves it was almost as dark as night. Iris could imagine woodcutters and bears and enchantments in their depths; you could get lost in them easily.

  They’re trees with secrets, she thought, and shivered.

  Great Aunt Ursula’s home was much further from the city than Iris had expected. The drive from the airport had taken three hours, and she’d already seen scorched hills, olive orchards, craggy mountains and terracotta-roofed villages.

  After a few minutes the thick forest cleared, replaced by lawn and a scattering of ratty box hedges.

  Señor Garcia followed the driveway in a wide arc before coming to a halt. He was a much smoother driver than Iris’s dad. Even so, Iris felt pukey with nerves as Señor Garcia opened the door and she stumbled from the car.

  The house was an enormous white mansion. It was two storeys high and had countless windows. Six columns held up the front entrance. There were arches everywhere and waves of plaster along the roof that looked like cake icing. It was the most magnificent house Iris had ever seen.

  Iris felt like nothing more than a tiny speck compared with the grand old building and the ancient trees. There was ivy spreading along the walls that had to be older than she was—a thought that filled Iris with new fear. Back in Australia she’d been able to p
retend that she might be able to pull this plan off. Now she wasn’t so sure.

  When Iris turned around a moment later, the car, her luggage and Señor Garcia had glided away. She was so tired it now seemed possible for whole cars to disappear into thin air.

  Rushing down the marble steps was a woman dressed in a flapping shirt and a pair of old suit pants held up with a length of rope. Her black hair swung in a sharp bob around her face. She had a sparkly gaze and a spritely air.

  ‘You made it!’ She flung her arms out in welcome. ‘I was filled with horror about the plane crashing—oh, the tearing metal, the screeching, the flames! But here you are, and all in one piece too!’

  She hugged and kissed Iris noisily on both cheeks in the European way, before holding her at arm’s length and giving her a good once-over.

  This, Iris thought, must be Aunt Ursula.

  Iris’s mum had only one photo of Aunt Ursula. It had been taken on the beach during her own visit to Spain, more than thirty years ago. Her mum was fourteen, with too much eyeliner and too little bikini, and her hair had been teased up at the front. She swore it had been the fashion. Aunt Ursula had worn a floppy sunhat and sunglasses that covered everything but her lipsticked smile.

  ‘Hello, Great Aunt Ursula,’ Iris managed to squeeze out. Her aunt wasn’t quite what she was expecting, although she couldn’t pinpoint exactly why.

  ‘I’ve not been in an aeroplane in over twenty years. Can you imagine?’

  Aunt Ursula’s voice bore only the slightest trace of an Australian accent. Her ears, neck and fingers were laden with more bling than Iris had ever seen—and not cheap, fake stuff. Her parents were right: her aunt was loaded.

  ‘You must call me Ursula. Great Aunt makes me feel so old. Did you realise that you are the spitting image of your grandmother? Oh, you really are!’

  Iris frowned. Her grandmother had been beautiful in her youth, as all her relatives had told her, so this was clearly an untruth. But Aunt Ursula had already moved on.

  ‘I have prepared a very special poem for your arrival, Iris.’

  Aunt Ursula turned and leapt up the stairs, posing dramatically in the doorframe. The cherub molded above the door looked down on her kindly. She threw a half-curled hand into the air.

  ‘Little flower! Little Iris!’ she barked, her face turned upwards.

  Iris crossed her arms. At home, in Australia, no one ever wasted an opportunity to tell her how small she was for her age. Even on the plane, all the adults had smiled at her, as though she was terribly cute for travelling on her own.

  Cute was the worst.

  Little flower, little Iris

  Bold clothes of brilliant purple

  Liquid lavender

  What do you wear at your heart, quiet flower?

  Pulsing! Beating! Furious Yellow!

  Aunt Ursula actually thumped herself in the heart with a fist on the final line. Iris forced herself to clap as her aunt’s wails died. Aunt Ursula bowed, then curtsied, then bowed again.

  Iris tried to push down her rising panic.

  It’s going to be a strange week.

  Aunt Ursula took Iris around the rear of the building to a marble patio hemmed by fancy railing. There were deckchairs and an umbrella, and a number of delicate wrought-iron chairs and tables.

  From this height, Iris gazed over the sloping grounds of the estate. The gardens rolled away from the house as far as she could see. There were hedges and old oak trees and low stone walls. The gardens were quite overgrown, but still beautiful.

  ‘My kingdom, if you will!’ Aunt Ursula pointed theatrically. ‘Bosque de Nubes runs that-a-way, from the highway to the hills.’ She sighed. ‘But look at that blasted golf course! Only fifty metres from my lovely woods. Every time I see those fatheads in their checked pants and silly caps, I want to throw their clubs in the lake. So, there it is, Iris,’ she said, bright again. ‘The grand estate that everyone is trying to get their filthy hands on. They’re all waiting for me to die, you know.’

  Iris didn’t know what to say. She desperately wanted to know who Aunt Ursula meant by they, but her father had warned that she should not, under any circumstances, talk about inheritance.

  ‘Bosk…de Noob,’ she blurted out. ‘What does that mean in English?’

  ‘Bosque de Nubes,’ Aunt Ursula corrected her. ‘The English translation is Forest of Clouds. You saw the forest on your way in? It goes for miles. A tangle of thorns and ferns, ditches and watchful trees. Rotting leaves, a swamp or two. It’s a lovely place to go rambling.’

  Aunt Ursula smiled down at Iris. But Iris remembered how dark and close the forest had looked from the car—anything but lovely. She tried to imagine exploring it alone and a shivery feeling ran through her again.

  ‘The trees look like big storm clouds,’ she murmured.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Aunt Ursula. ‘A poetic image, Iris, but that’s not where the name comes from. Several times a year a thick mist forms in the valley and hangs low in the trees for days. The trees look wonderful wrapped in puffs of white mist. The locals have parties in the woods when it happens. Though children have been known to wander off into the mists on those nights and forget themselves entirely…’

  Aunt Ursula was distracted by a man in overalls and a cap who had just wandered around the corner of a nearby building. She waved.

  ‘Bosque de Nubes is a large place, an exciting place,’ she continued. ‘You can ask me anything you want, anything you are curious about… Are you a curious person?’

  Iris had plenty of questions. About the lost children and, of course, plenty of questions belonging to her dad.

  ‘Is there a map of Bosq—um, the Forest of Clouds?’ She tried to keep her voice light. ‘We learnt to draw maps in Geography last term.’

  Her dad’s actual question included details about infrastructure and something called easements, but there was no way Iris could slip those kinds of complicated words into the conversation without giving herself away.

  ‘And the children that go walking into the forest, in the mist,’ she added belatedly, for herself, ‘they come back, right? They don’t get lost forever, do they?’

  Aunt Ursula made a kooky clicking noise with her tongue, almost as if she disapproved.

  ‘I wonder if you are going to be different from your mother,’ she said. ‘Early signs are not promising.’

  A cool breeze rose up around them and rattled the leaves on the orange trees. Iris realised what it was that was unexpected about her great-aunt: she was so intense. An almost visible aura of energy crackled around her. Iris’s mum had said Aunt Ursula would be well into her nineties now, but Iris found that hard to believe.

  She seems so much younger than that, she thought. Could Mum have got it wrong?

  Inside, the house was just as impressive.

  The lobby had a wide staircase that rose up like a cobra and curled around to make a balcony. There was an enormous chandelier above the main waterfall of stairs and the floor was an expanse of thousands of coloured tiles. The walls were dotted with gilt-framed portraits of people wearing fashions from hundreds of years ago.

  Iris tried not to let her mouth hang open. It just keeps getting crazier, she thought. She craned her head, trying to figure out the size of the upper floor.

  ‘Who else lives here?’

  She knew that James, Aunt Ursula’s brother, had lived here once, but he’d died years ago.

  ‘Let’s see…there’s me, of course,’ said Aunt Ursula. ‘The gentleman outside, that’s Marcel, the groundskeeper. He has a son your age. There’s Señor Reynaldo Torres Garcia, who you’ve already met. And Elna, the housemaid. She’s quite new, that one. Not entirely sure about her yet.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  Iris tried not to sound surprised. Her mum had told her about all sorts of maids and cooks and butlers from her visit.

  Aunt Ursula didn’t respond. She pointed left and right like a policeman directing traffic.

  ‘Over there
is the dining room and the parlour and the main library. Through that archway are the kitchen and the laundry. That whole rear corner is where the maid lives, and Reynaldo has living quarters there too. Marcel and his son live in the cottage…’

  Aunt Ursula trailed off, looking across the lobby in a distracted manner. She shuffled first in one direction, then the other, sleepwalker-style.

  ‘The upstairs guestroom is a little poky, but I thought you’d like to stay in the same room your mother did when she was here…’

  Iris watched as Aunt Ursula mumbled and drifted away, until she’d disappeared through an archway at the far end of the lobby.

  Is she coming back, or is that it?

  Iris stood, forgotten, in the grand space. Her ears hadn’t popped since the plane, and all of a sudden she felt very, very tired. She was thousands of miles away from home, tasked with something that, it was clear to her now, was impossible. Her surrounds went in and out of focus.

  ‘No complaints, no complaints,’ she chanted under her breath.

  At home, complaints were looked down on, so she’d taught herself to say these words in times of need. She was incredibly jet-lagged. Her mum had warned her that Aunt Ursula was unusual—and exactly the kind of person who would wander off in the middle of a conversation.

  Iris took a deep breath. There was nothing to do but start up the red and gold carpeted stairs and search for the guestroom. The enormous mansion would not intimidate her.

  But when she grabbed onto the banister, she felt a slither, and then a tickle on her palm. Something whipped itself around her wrist and pulled tight.

  Iris drew her hand away. The banister was made of dark-red wood and had carvings of twisting vines and leaves. Iris paused until her breath returned. It was just an ordinary banister. She waited a few more seconds, and yes, that’s all it was. But she still climbed the stairs with a racing heart.

  The top floor had a stained-glass window and was as dim and hushed as a church.

  Iris spied her suitcase and backpack on the other side of the balcony, neatly placed outside a door.