The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (100 page)

And yet – she
needed
to know. More than that: she sensed that Congo Eve was trying to tell her something. Maybe that was why the journal had found its way to her in the first place.

With a shiver of apprehension she opened it again, and began to read.

February 22nd, 1832
Have just been delivered from exceeding peril. Was returning to Falmouth from Salt Wash when a Negro leaped out and dragged me from my horse. It was the Negro Strap, much altered & terrible of visage. He struck at me with all violence, shouting ‘This for what you done to Congo Eve’, but by the mercy of Providence his blows glanced off my stick. He drove me back into the Morass & I called out Murder, and some militia men rode up & laid hold of the villain & beat him till he knew no more. I sustained a bruised elbow, very sore, & was much befouled by the Morass. Altogether put beside myself with fright.

March 7th
By the mercy of Providence I am now fully restored, & greatly rejoiced, for the Rebellion has been quelled. Mr Monroe exceeding active at the assizes. I myself have been at the square many times to view the punishments, and yesterday I watched Strap flogged and hanged. The brute made a tolerable good death. Dined with Mr Monroe: broiled conch, a ham, & good porter.
Cum
Congo Eve in the undercroft,
supra terram.
Told her of her paramour’s end. I said, Now he is gone for ever. Let that be a lesson to all Negroes who would raise their hand against the white man. She replied not a word. I shall keep her in the collar overnight
.

March 14th
Since the last entry a sennight ago, I have been sick near unto death with the bloody flux. I believe it was some foul Negro poisoning by Congo Eve, for she went runaway the very night I was took sick. Have not been able to learn how she broke free of the collar, but suspect the other Negroes of assisting her. They fear her for knowing Obiah, Mial, &c.

July 28th
Congo Eve still runaway. It has been over four months, & all attempts to recover her have failed. Find myself exceeding low in spirits, & much troubled by the Night Mare. Doubtless I am not yet fully recovered from the flux.
Cum
Jenny in Bullet Tree Piece,
sed non bene.

August 5th
One of Mad Durrant’s field Negroes saw a woman ‘very like to Congo Eve’ some weeks past, heading south into the Cockpits! Have sent men after her & posted a reward.

August 6th
Have myself questioned Mad Durrant’s field Negro. He did indeed see the woman heading south, towards the region known as Turn Around. Have sent more men with hounds.

‘There you are,’ said Grace McFarlane.

Evie jumped. She shut the book with a thud and clasped it tight. Her heart was pounding.
The region known as Turn Around.
Of course. Of course.

‘So,’ said her mother. ‘You been away.’ She took in her daughter’s bare feet and naked shins and her wary expression, but she made no remark.

Evie nodded. Yes, she thought, I’ve been away. I’ve been in
the region known as Turn Around
– perhaps in the very cave in which Congo Eve stayed hidden all those years ago.

She was shaken, but not deeply surprised. Some part of her – the four-eyed part that she used to hate – had perhaps guessed it all along.

Grace ran her tongue around her teeth, and spat. ‘You’re looking meagre, girl. Look like you been ill, up at Mandeville with that friend of yours.’

‘I had a fever,’ said Evie.

‘Hn,’ said Grace.

‘But I’m better now. I’m much stronger.’

Grace gave her a long, searching look. Then she nodded. ‘That I can see.’ She indicated the book. ‘You got much more of that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, when you done, come along back a the house. I’m making red peas soup.’

Evie nodded.

Her mother turned to go. ‘So Evie,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘You back now. Yes?’

‘Yes, Mother,’ she said. ‘I’m back.’

When her mother had gone, Evie sat in silence by the aqueduct, watching the dragonflies skimming the opaque green water. I’m back, she thought. But for how long? And what am I going to do?

Again that sense of tautness and suspense. The air felt hot and heavy, crackling with energy. She opened the book.

Surprisingly, there were only about five more pages of script, and the rest was blank. She resisted the urge to read the last page first, and went back to where she’d left off.

It appeared that when Cyrus Wright had sent out the hounds in August 1832, he’d sent them out in vain. The next entry was a pair of small, mildewed clippings from the
Daily Gleaner
, carefully pasted in. Both were from a column advertising for the return of strayed stock and runaway slaves.
January 1st, 1835. Escaped: Congo Eve, five feet five inches high & branded with the mark CW on left shoulder, belonging to Mr Cyrus Wright of Fever Hill Estate. Whoever shall lodge the said Negro with the subscriber shall receive a reward of ten shillings. Cyrus Wright (sub).

The second clipping contained an identical advertisement dated the following year. The reward was doubled.

There followed two pages of spare one-line entries, often only one per year. There was no more mention of the weather, or of his sexual conquests, or what he’d had ‘to his dinner’. Cyrus Wright had lost his taste for the minutiae of his life. But every so often he would tersely record that his health and spirits remained ‘indifferent’. And each year there was a stark note that Congo Eve had not yet been found.

The penultimate entry was longer, but tremulous. By then, Cyrus Wright had been an old man of eighty.

November 13th, 1849
Congo Eve not yet found, but rumoured alive and in the hills. This day, Master Jocelyn Monroe was wed to Miss Catherine McFarlane. Miss McFarlane brought with her several Negroes from her father’s estate, including Leah, the sister of Congo Eve, and Leah’s daughter Semanthe. The daughter is blind, but has a look of Congo Eve. Both mother & daughter are said to be in contact with Congo Eve, & to have learned from her the unclean secrets of Obiah & Mial. I questioned them strenuously, but the wretches refused to tell of her.

The final entry was six weeks later, and in another hand, large and untutored.
January 2nd, 1850. This day Cyrus Wright Esq. died in his sleep. By Elizabeth Mordenner, his wife.

Evie closed the book and put her hands on the cover. So Cyrus Wright had died in his sleep, with a wife at his side – a wife he’d never even bothered to mention in his journal.

The fact that he’d died peacefully after escaping punishment for all his cruelties would once have outraged Evie. Now she almost felt sorry for him. It was clear from his bitter little notations that he’d spent the rest of his life – all eighteen years of it – tormented by the knowledge that Congo Eve was living freely in the hills, in
the region known as Turn Around
. He might have survived an attempt to poison him; he might have escaped Strap’s attack on his life; but in the end, Congo Eve had had her revenge.

Evie had thought a lot about revenge while she was regaining her strength up in the cave. She’d promised her mother that she would never confront her father, Cornelius Traherne, and she intended to keep that promise.
And yet
– she craved justice from the Trahernes. Justice for herself and for her mother, and for that child begotten in incest, whom she’d sacrificed in the cave.

But what should she do? Should she emulate her ancestress and try a poisoning? Or should she act the civilized twentieth-century teacheress, and turn the other cheek?

Who was she? That was the question. Until she decided that, she wouldn’t know what to do.

All her life she had wanted to be white. All her life she had envied Sibella Traherne – rich, pretty, thoughtless Sibella, who had everything Evie had always wanted. Sibella Traherne. Her half-sister.

But strangely, Evie didn’t envy her any more. How could she? Sibella was just a poor, weak woman who was terrified of her own father, and detested the man she was going to marry. And if Evie couldn’t envy her, then why try so hard to be white?

She wasn’t white. She was mulatto. She was the four-eyed daughter of Grace McFarlane, and a kinswoman of Congo Eve. Wasn’t that something to be proud of? Wasn’t that what Congo Eve had been trying to tell her all along?

A gust of wind stirred the ackee tree above her head. She looked about her at the creeper-clad ruins of the old slave village – the village which Alasdair Monroe, in his murderous rage, had burnt to the ground after the Rebellion. Then an idea came to her.

Pensively she traced a triangle on the cover of the journal. Maybe that’s it, she thought. Her heart quickened with excitement. Maybe it’s time to get up a little Christmas Rebellion of your own.

To reach the Burying-place at Fever Hill, one crossed the lawns at the back of the house, and took the path over the crown of the hill and halfway down the other side.

But if one then continued on past the Burying-place, the path snaked through a thicket of ironwoods, and finally ended at a creeper-choked ruin in a dark little dell. People shunned this place, for it was the ruin of the old hot-house or slave hospital. A place of duppies and evil memories: some long-ago, some not so long-ago.

Precisely because no-one went there, it also possessed a curious kind of peace. At least, it did for Ben. That was why he’d caused the three coffins to be placed here beneath a temporary bamboo shelter, until the mausoleum could be built. It was also why he’d come here to be alone, after fetching Evie.

He sat on a block of cut-stone with his elbows on his knees, watching a centipede working its way along the coffin which held his brother’s remains. It was peaceful in the clearing, but not at all quiet. The rasp of the crickets rose and fell like the soughing of the sea. A flock of jabbering crows flew raucously overhead. A mongoose emerged from beneath a dumb-cane leaf, spotted Ben, and vanished into the undergrowth.

Life was going on all around him. Busy, indifferent, beautiful. So why couldn’t he find peace? After all, he’d achieved what he wanted. He’d found Robbie and Lil and Kate, and brought them out to the warmth and the light. Why wasn’t that enough?

‘What do you want from me, Kate?’ he said aloud.

A cling-cling flew down onto the roof of the shelter and regarded him with a beady yellow eye.

‘I made the wrong choice and you paid for it,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve tried to make amends. What more do you want?’

The cling-cling hopped along the roof and flew away.

Ben sat on in the clearing, while the rasp of the crickets intensified. He was dizzy with fatigue and still half drunk – and still disgusted with himself. That look on Sophie’s face.
What happened to you, Ben? Inside, something’s gone.

He’d bought Fever Hill in order to get her back. He saw that now. He’d bought it because she’d lived here once; because she loved it. Perhaps that was why he’d fallen in love with it too.
What happened to you, Ben? Inside, something’s gone.

Was she right? Was that why Isaac had left, and Austen? Ah, but what was the good of wondering? What was the point?

Slowly he got to his feet, and started back up the path.

He’d crested the hill and was wading through the long grass towards the Burying-place when a flash of white caught his eye. He stopped. His mouth went dry. Below him, sitting on the bench beneath the poinciana tree, was a ghost.

She was dressed in vaporous white, in the fashion of twenty years before. A high-necked blouse with leg of mutton sleeves, a bell-shaped skirt cinched in at the waist, and a beribboned straw bonnet. What little he could see of her face was a waxen yellow.

Then she turned and smiled at him, and he glimpsed an escaping lock of dyed grey hair, and breathed again.

‘Hello, dear,’ she said calmly. ‘I was wondering when we’d bump into each other.’

He took off his hat and went down towards her. ‘Hello, Miss Clemmy.’

‘I hope you don’t mind my coming unannounced? But your letter did say that I might visit at any time.’

‘I meant it,’ he said. ‘I’m glad to see you, Miss Clemmy.’ He meant that too. He didn’t want to be alone any more.

He’d only met her once before, and that had been years ago when he was a boy, and she’d summoned him to Fever Hill on an errand. At the time he’d thought her mad and slightly pitiful. But she’d treated him with the instinctive courtesy with which she treated everyone, and he’d never forgotten.

She patted the bench beside her and asked if he’d care to sit down. She sounded as cheery as if she were at a tea party; not communing with the spirit of her infant son.

Ben hesitated. ‘Wouldn’t you rather be alone with Elliot?’

She smiled. ‘You know, he’s not actually down here. He’s up in heaven. This is just the place I come to, because it’s nice and quiet, and so much easier to get his attention.’

Ben couldn’t think of anything to say to that. So he tossed his hat in the grass and sat down.

Miss Clemmy folded her pale hands in her lap, and watched a yellow butterfly sunning itself on a large barrel tomb at the far end of the Burying-place.

Ben said, ‘You’re looking very well, Miss Clemmy.’

‘Thank you, dear,’ she said, still watching the butterfly. ‘I’ve been busy, and I fancy it agrees with me.
So
much to do, what with looking after Belle – strange child – and of course, dear Madeleine.’

‘How is she? Madeleine, I mean?’

Her pretty young-old face contracted. ‘She misses her sister dreadfully. But they’re both too proud to make amends. Or perhaps too frightened of what would happen if it didn’t work. I don’t know. But I do know that nothing will be right until it’s sorted out.’

Ben made no reply.

‘Madeleine’s down in Falmouth,’ Miss Clemmy went on with a smile. ‘She’s spending the day with the Mordenners. I’m going down to join her after I finish here, and dear little Belle’s going along for tea, on her pony! She absolutely pestered Maddy to let her.’