The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (18 page)

She wondered why Lettice had kept it all these years: a short note from a disgraced ex-soldier. But Lettice had always admired soldiers. Perhaps she had possessed a hidden streak of romanticism.

The letter was dated December 1886, and it began bluntly and without preamble.
Dear Mrs Fynn, I was surprised to receive your letter – not least because until now I didn’t know that I had a cousin in England. But you are right to apply to me: better that than to have written to Jocelyn. As you know, he took the death of his son hard – although you’ll appreciate that he would never admit that, even to himself.

Why not? thought Madeleine angrily. Why shouldn’t he admit it? The death of his only son? My God, what sort of family is this?

As you are also aware, Jocelyn wants nothing to do with Ainsley’s progeny. Neither do I. But from what you tell me, your expenses are great, so I feel it my duty to contribute what I can. My attorneys will contact you shortly, with a view to amplifying the trust which Jocelyn set up two years ago. I would simply ask that you do not mention this to him, as I see no point in causing him further distress. Yours etc . . .

Clouds covered the sun, and the Jamaica window dimmed. Madeleine sat in the empty room with the letter in her hand.

It was hastily written, and blunt to the point of discourtesy. And Cameron Lawe’s distaste for ‘Ainsley’s progeny’ showed in every line. Like her grandfather, he had been only too ready to pay money in order to sweep the inconvenient bastards under the carpet. And like her grandfather, he had thereafter washed his hands of them. What did he care if the trust was emptied by an unscrupulous guardian? What was that to him?

Down in the street, the milkman’s pony paused from long habit outside their door, and waited in vain for Sophie to run down the steps with a carrot.

Madeleine crumpled the letter and threw it across the room. She took a fresh sheet of writing paper, and Lettice’s fountain pen.
Dear Mr Lawe,
she wrote.
I accept your offer. Yours, Madeleine Finlay.

Part Three

Chapter Thirteen

Jamaica, March 1895 – five months later

Cameron is back in his cell at Millbank prison.

It’s the first day of his sentence. He’s lying on the planks in the cold and the stink, and the ceiling is pressing down on him and the black sand is blowing in from the desert, and somewhere down a distant corridor a child is crying. Black sand stops his mouth and sugars his eyes. He can’t see. Can’t find what he’s looking for. Doesn’t know what it is. And all he can hear is that black sand hissing, and that lost child crying in the dark.

He took a shuddering breath and woke up.

It was dawn. He was lying in his own bed on the verandah at Eden. The sky showed a cool, fresh blue through the hole in the roof. He breathed in, and smelled the metallic sweetness of wet red earth.

He lay listening to the musical ring-ring of the river-frogs, and the buzz of the crickets, and the sugarbirds and grassquits squabbling in the tree-ferns near the house. Usually this was his favourite time, when he was at his most optimistic, and all things seemed possible. But the dream had left an aftertaste of longing and regret that he couldn’t shake off.

He wondered why he’d had it again. It only came when things went wrong. When croptime was late, or there was a fire in the boiling-house. What was it this time? Was it because Sinclair was back in Jamaica? Or was it simply that Eden was haunted – and, as he’d once heard a cane-cutter say, you can’t make peace with ghosts.

He heard the click of claws across the tiles, then felt a blast of hot breath on his shoulder, and Abigail’s rasping tongue. She climbed on top of him, he pushed her off, and she clattered away to chase ground doves in the garden.

He rolled onto his side and wrapped the pillow round his head. He was almost as exhausted as when he’d dropped onto the mattress five hours before. For the past three months he’d been racing to get in the cane before the rains made the tracks impassable, and now it was piled high in the works yard, and the mill and the boiling-house were running day and night, and he and his men were red-eyed with fatigue.

A few minutes later, Abigail was back to complete the wake-up ritual. Again she clambered on top of him, and when he could no longer breathe – for she was big even for a mastiff – he pushed her off and sat up.

He pulled on his nightshirt, grabbed the old sheet he used for a towel, and made his way down the steps and through the dripping garden to the river. Abigail bounded ahead of him, startling a flock of white egrets out of the giant bamboo and making the emerald plumes nod and scatter raindrops.

The river was green and opaque and stingingly cool when he dived in. He trod water, and watched Abigail bend one stocky foreleg to drink. Moses was leading the horses down from the stables, with a trio of pickneys skipping behind him in the hopes of a ride. Cameron was dismayed to find that he could take no pleasure in any of it. Again that strange, indefinable sense of loss.

He had bought Eden to make his peace with Ainsley’s ghost, but it hadn’t worked out that way. Perhaps the blacks were right: perhaps duppies are angry creatures – to be fled, and not appeased.

But he couldn’t leave Eden now. He had fallen in love with her. She was beautiful, dangerous and infuriating: a chaotic and wayward nymph. Sometimes, in his black moods, he would ask himself what he was doing here. Why didn’t he just give up and let her slip back into the wilderness of sweetwoods and guango trees where she’d been dreaming away two decades of oblivion before he found her? But in the end he always stayed.

Abigail’s impatient bark dragged him back to the present. God, why couldn’t he shake off that dream?

Back at the house he shaved, flung on clothes, and forced down a plate of ackee and saltfish, which his cook served every morning in the mistaken belief that he liked it. In fact he hated it, for it reminded him of prison, but it was too late to tell old Braverly now. He was as sensitive as a girl about his cooking, and it would only send him off on a ganja-fuelled spree that would land him in Falmouth jail. So Cameron gritted his teeth and ate his saltfish.

After breakfast he left Abigail to guard the house, and rode to Maputah, where Oserius had been supervising the works overnight. He stayed all morning, and dealt with a build-up of trash outside the mill, a broken hogshead in the curing-house, and a fight between warring boilermen.

As the morning slipped away, his frustration deepened. It wouldn’t take years to haul Eden into the present: it would take decades. The mill was still powered by the centuries-old aqueduct from the Martha Brae, and completely at the mercy of the weather. Oxen still toiled with agonizing slowness to bring in the cane. Who was he deceiving? Over at Parnassus, old Addison Traherne had laid down a tramway
twenty-five years
before. Even the works at Fever Hill had long since converted to steam.

At midday he returned to the house for a hasty meal of curried goat, then rode over to the western cane-pieces to defuse a row between rival cutting gangs. In the heat of the afternoon, when the rain was a distant memory and the land a parched and dusty red, he rode the eight miles north to Falmouth. He hated going to town, but he’d learned that if he went when it was hot, he rarely encountered anyone he knew.

At Ryle’s he ordered kerosene and candles, at Doran’s a crate of Scotch and a box of cigars, and then settled his accounts at the saddler’s and the farrier’s. Finally he decided to make a quick call on Olivia Herapath. She usually helped to put things in perspective.

The ‘Closed’ sign was up on the studio door, but Etheline let him in and showed him through to the salon at the back. The little room was dim and fugged with tobacco smoke, and littered with yellow-backed novels. Olivia must be having one of her bad days. He decided to stay for as long as it took to lift her mood.

She was on the sofa, manifesting as one of her more alarming past lives: a terrifying old obeah-woman named Juba, who wore a strident blue and orange print robe, a blistering yellow handkerchief, and a tangle of cats’ teeth and parrot beaks across her formidable bosom. The contrast between such vivid Negro splendour and Olivia’s pasty white face was oddly affecting.

She did not look well. He noticed that the black silk mantle which festooned Hector’s photograph had been shakily rearranged, and that her sharp little eyes were rimmed with red. But the glance which she flung at him outlawed pity.

He asked if she meant to put a spell on him, and she smacked him on the chest with her obeah-stick and scolded him for staying away so long. ‘You’re on your own far too much up there,’ she declared, checking him over as if he were a stallion she was thinking of buying. ‘Young fellow like you. Deplorable state of affairs. Simply won’t do.’

Cameron gave her a slight smile and moved a copy of
The Heathen Heart
to make room beside her.

‘You ought to go out into Society,’ she insisted. ‘People would accept you with open arms if you gave ’em half a chance.’

‘I’m not—’

‘They don’t care what you did ten years ago. Heavens, man, this is Jamaica!’

‘I’m aware of that.’

‘Cricket. Bridge. The odd concert. Wouldn’t kill you, would it? What on earth’s stopping you?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said with perfect truth.

‘Well find out. You’re becoming just like Jocelyn. Though I know
that’s
a forbidden topic. In any event, you should call on me more often. And don’t look like that, you know I’m right.’

‘Olivia, you’re always right.’

She gave a fruity laugh. ‘Don’t humour me, you wretch.’ She poured him a large glass of claret and indicated the humidor on the side table. She herself was smoking Juba’s villainously smelly white clay pipe.

‘So,’ she said after they had both lit up.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Tell me all the gossip.’

She threw him a jaundiced look. She knew very well that he had none of her passion for gossip, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, he must do penance for his neglect. So for the next twenty minutes he did, and she made him laugh despite himself. She was shrewd and coarse as only an aristocrat can be, and she knew ‘everyone who mattered’. Small wonder that she terrorized every Society matron from Lucea to St Ann’s Bay – and that they flocked to her. For where else could they have their photographs taken and their friends dissected by a genuine noblewoman – even if she had dropped her title on marrying a commoner?

‘I’ve been wondering’, she said at last, ‘how long you think you’re going to get away with it.’

‘With what?’

‘With never mentioning your brother.’

Cameron’s heart sank.

‘Heaven help us, Cameron, he’s been back for nearly four months!’

‘So I’ve heard.’

‘And he’s acquired a wife.’

‘I’ve heard that too.’

She studied him narrowly. ‘You’re going to have to do something, you know.’

‘What do you suggest?’

With her stick she rapped him on the knee. ‘You’re going to have to come down out of those hills and
marry
someone.’

‘Olivia—’

‘That brother of yours means to give the old man a grandson. Adoptive grandson. Whatever that’s called. Anyway, he means to cut you out.’

Cameron made no reply.

‘Well?’ she said. ‘Have you seen them yet?’

‘Have I seen whom?’

‘Cameron, behave. Have you seen your brother and his new wife?’

‘You know I haven’t. I don’t see any of them. Ever.’

She snorted. ‘Well,
I’ve
seen them. Someone had to do it. I left my card on her the morning they arrived.’ She bared her small yellow teeth in a grin. ‘Sinclair doesn’t care for me at all, but he dared not send his regrets. He’s such a snob.’

Which, thought Cameron in amusement, was a little rich coming from Olivia Herapath, née the Honourable Olivia Fortescue of Fortescue Hall, who regarded anyone ennobled after Crécy as a parvenu. Sometimes he wondered why she made an exception for him.

There was a pregnant pause while Olivia disentangled her mourning pendant from the parrot beaks and waited for him to speak.

At last he gave in. ‘So,’ he said. ‘What do you think of my new sister-in-law?’

Her eyes glittered. ‘Now
there’s
a puzzle. Damned good lines, and a tolerable taste in dress – but
no accomplishments
! No French, no German, no music. Can’t even ride. Although I hear that Jocelyn’s been giving her lessons. But it’s frightfully
odd
, don’t you think? One wonders where Sinclair found her. And the most provoking thing of all is that she’s far too good for him.’

Cameron was surprised. ‘You mean you like her?’

‘I know, isn’t it singular?’ She paused to draw on her pipe. ‘For one thing, she knows her photography. Oh, yes. She’s set up a darkroom in the undercroft – she says it’s such a shadowy house that she might as well. Although who knows, perhaps it’s a means of getting away from Sinclair.’ Another puff. ‘Of course,
he
doesn’t approve at all, but what can he do, when she buys her supplies from a baron’s daughter?’ She shook her head. ‘Damned intriguing. Can’t make her out. Perceptive. Fearfully reserved. Bit of a temper. Prodigiously attached to some sort of invalid sister – whom I haven’t yet met. And d’you know, I rather fancy that she’s
kind
.’ She snorted. ‘So not at all like me!’

Cameron maintained a diplomatic silence.

‘I cannot imagine why she married him,’ she added, ‘except of course for the obvious, I suppose.’

‘You mean money?’

She inclined her head at the ways of the world.

‘Well then,’ he got to his feet and picked up his hat, ‘it seems he’s got what he deserves.’

Usually, seeing Olivia Herapath lifted his spirits, but as he rode out of Falmouth he felt only irritation and an odd sense of betrayal. Olivia was
his
friend, dammit. Why did she have to approve of Sinclair’s wife?