The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (3 page)

She swallowed. ‘Nobody sent me,’ she said.

Plainly he did not believe her. ‘Your name isn’t Falkirk,’ he said between his teeth. ‘It’s Durrant.’

‘No, Durrant was actually my mother’s—’

‘Your mother is Rose Durrant. Yes, I know.’ He mounted his horse. Madeleine had to step back smartly to avoid his spurs.

She was familiar with grown-up anger from her parents’ fights, but this was different. It was no sudden flare-up that was over in minutes, but a deep, slow anger that had no end.

She didn’t understand what had gone wrong. She sensed that without knowing it she must have tricked him in some shameful way. She felt hollow and breathless and sick.

‘Tell your parents’, he said, ‘that this will never work.’

‘They don’t know I’m here,’ she whispered, scarcely moving her lips. ‘And they wouldn’t trick anyone. They are honourable. They—’

‘Your parents wrecked lives. Don’t you know that yet?’

For the first time since they had met, he looked her full in the face. His eyes were glassy with anger, the pupils black and alarming in the vivid light grey. ‘Tell them they’re dead to me,’ he said in a quiet voice that made her go cold inside. ‘And they’re dead to the old man. Tell them they ought to have the courage – the decency – to stay dead.’

He yanked the horse’s head round and dug in his spurs, and the great hind hooves churned the snow inches from her feet, and the silver tail flicked stingingly across her face.

Her legs buckled and she sat down heavily in the snow. She stayed breathless and unmoving as the officer rode away, as he was swallowed up by the dark beneath the trees. And behind her the crow thudded down onto the gatehouse roof, and filled the air with raucous laughter.

Chapter Two

It was just beginning to get dark when Madeleine climbed down from Mr Ritchie’s wagon and started along the coast path.

It was snowing, and the icy wind made her head ache. For the first time in her life her beloved stretch of beach felt unwelcoming. No fat seals greeted her from the rocks. No graceful fulmars wheeled overhead. A trio of cormorants scudded past, but their emerald eyes glanced off her and swept on, like the beam of the Corsewall lighthouse. It felt as if the officer’s ill-will had spread to them.

To her surprise, Cairngowrie House was silent and dim when she let herself in. Hannah must have forgotten to turn up the gas. That made it doubly hard to manage the button-hook with her cold-numbed fingers, and by the time she had struggled out of her boots she was fighting back tears of rage. She tugged off her hat and coat and mittens and left them in a soggy heap in the hall, then padded angrily into the drawing-room.

It was empty, and only feebly lit by the dying fire. Muttering, she dragged the piano stool to the nearest gasolier and climbed on top to reach the chain. The drawing-room flared into life. Then she shovelled coal onto the fire, spilling most of it on the hearth. Then she wondered what to do next.

The clock on the mantelpiece said four, but there was no sign of tea. There was no sign of anyone. And she had been counting on tea to make things normal again.

When she thought about the officer she had a horrible churning feeling of guilt and bewilderment and loss. She should never have gone to the Forbidden Kingdom. She should never have told him her name. But why had he been so angry?

She went to the piano and scowled at the photograph of Eden in its tortoiseshell frame. Did Eden have something to do with it? It had certainly landed her in trouble before.

The photograph showed a luminous, ruined house in a jungle of palms and breadfruit trees. Creepers trailed from the broken verandahs. A tree-fern sprouted from a window like a shattered monocle. A graceful double curve of steps swept down into what had once been a garden, and at the foot stood a tall, fair-haired blur which was Papa. He had moved just as her mother exposed the plate.

Eden didn’t
look
dangerous, but it was. Madeleine knew, for she had grown up with it: her mother talked of it all the time. Her family, the Durrants, had built it long ago on the edge of the virgin forest, but in the end misfortune had driven them to abandon it, and now the forest was taking it back again.

In Eden everything is wilder and more alive than anywhere else. The sun shines more fiercely, the rain strikes harder, and the leaves are so green that it hurts your eyes. Oh, it’s a dangerous place, Maddy. In Eden good and bad and beauty and ugliness are all tangled up together. There are hummingbirds so lovely that you can’t look at them for long; and moonflowers which only bloom for a single night, and are so fragile and pale that they’re like the ghosts of flowers; and beautiful evil-looking plants whose poison can strike you dumb. And deep in the forest there stands an enormous silk-cotton tree with an entire world in its branches, and the black people say that it’s haunted. And the house itself is part of the forest again now, for no-one has lived in it for years and years, so it’s fearfully overgrown.

At Madeleine’s first and last foray to Sunday School three years before, Miss McAllister had cut short her recital at that point. Oh no, dear, she had said, not overgrown. God would never allow that.

Miss McAllister had told her that what Madeleine called a ‘silk-cotton tree’ was in fact the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and that it couldn’t possibly be haunted, as the black people maintained – for the simple reason that there are no black people in Eden.

I believe there are some, Madeleine had cautiously replied. You see, I know about Eden, because it’s where I began.

Whatever can you mean, dear, Miss McAllister had said with a frozen smile.

Why, because it’s where my parents used to meet before I was born.

That was when Miss McAllister had burst into tears and fled the class.

Her mother was right: Eden was dangerous. Because of Eden, Madeleine’s only attempt at meeting other children had been a disaster, and she’d been banished from the rectory for ever. Because of Eden, her mother longed for Jamaica and detested Scotland.

And perhaps, she thought, it’s because of Eden that it all went wrong with the officer in the park.

Your parents wrecked lives
, he had said. What did he mean? How does one wreck a life? She pictured a broken ferry boat tilting rustily on a beach.

Her parents couldn’t have done something like that. It didn’t make sense. None of it made sense.

In the glare of the gaslight the ruined house stared back at her with its shattered tree-fern eye. What’s so special about you? she thought angrily. You’re only a mouldy old photograph. We’ve got hundreds of better ones in the darkroom.

On impulse she turned it over, undid the clasps, and slid it out of the frame. Then she laid it on top of the piano and with her thumbnail scored a deep, diagonal line across. Her nail scratched the blur that was papa, but she didn’t stop. Papa ought to be here to sort things out. Grimly she scored another line to make a giant X.

Upstairs a thump shook the ceiling, and she froze guiltily. The gasoliers’ crystal fringes chimed. A moment later she heard her mother ringing for Hannah.

The ringing continued. But no irritable ‘Coming, coming’ issued from the kitchen.

Wretched
Hannah. With an exasperated sigh Madeleine slammed down the photograph and stalked upstairs.

Afterwards, the moment when she opened the bedroom door became fixed in her mind as the point when her life changed.

Until then she had spent her days bickering and laughing with her mother, waging a covert war against Hannah, and wandering on the beach chatting to the seals and the cormorants and Mister Parrot. After she opened the door, everything changed.

Her mother – her elegant, unpredictable, beautiful mother – was crouching on the rug on all fours, panting and baring her teeth like an animal.

She looked as if she had been dressing to go out when she had fallen to her knees. The collar of her walking-coat was twisted, a large rip had appeared under one arm, and her blue velvet bonnet – Madeleine’s favourite – had slid down her back and become snarled in her hair.

Then Madeleine saw the great wet patch on the rug. She was horrified. It was inconceivable that her mother could have had an ‘accident’. But she couldn’t think of another explanation.

Her mother raised her head and saw her. ‘Ah, there you are,’ she said, bizarrely calm.

Madeleine tried extremely hard not to look at the wet patch. ‘Are you unwell?’ she mumbled.

‘Much better now, thank you, Maddy. Just run and fetch Hannah.’

Madeleine bit her lip. She couldn’t let the housemaid see her mother like this. ‘You should get up off the floor,’ she said. ‘You should get into bed.’

‘In a minute,’ her mother replied. ‘Dr Baines said that being on all fours might ease the backache, and although I hate to admit it, he’s right.’ She gave a mock grimace. ‘I know it looks odd, but I—’ She broke off with a sudden hiss as some sort of spasm seized her.

Madeleine gripped the doorknob.

‘Now here’s a thing,’ her mother gasped. ‘They’re coming rather more quickly than I’d expected. You’d better fetch Hannah at once.’

Madeleine fled.

She ran down to the kitchen, but to her dismay it was in darkness. So was the dining-room and the morning-room and her father’s smoking-room, and the scullery, pantry, larder, darkroom, cloakroom, downstairs water closet, and cellar. There was no answer to her increasingly shrill cries.

Mewing like a kitten, she raced upstairs. She checked the bedrooms and the bathroom, and finally the attic.

‘I can’t find her,’ she panted when she’d rejoined her mother.

While she was away, her mother had struggled out of her walking-coat, tossed the bonnet in a corner, and climbed into bed. Or rather, she was sitting against a pile of pillows with the counterpane tented over her knees. She looked pale, but much more her normal self.

‘I can’t find Hannah,’ Madeleine said in a calmer voice. ‘Her carpet-bag’s not there. And her trunk’s padlocked with a note on top. I think she’s gone.’

Her mother shut her eyes. ‘That bloody,
bloody
girl.’

Madeleine was shocked. Her mother never used bad words. To cover her confusion she retrieved the bonnet from under the wash-hand stand and placed it on the dressing-table stool.

Without warning another spasm took hold of her mother. This time she had to suck in her lips to keep from crying out.

Helplessly Madeleine waited for it to end. If only Dr Baines were here. The abdominal binder hung forgotten over the bedpost: a cruel reminder of his absence.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ her mother said at last. ‘These pains are supposed to happen.’

Madeleine looked at her in disbelief. ‘Why?’ she demanded. ‘Why are they “supposed” to happen?’

‘They simply mean that the baby has decided to arrive a little earlier than we expected.’

‘The
baby
?’ Wildly she scanned the room. ‘Can’t you tell it to wait? It can come tomorrow when I’ve fetched Dr Baines.’

Her mother’s lip curled. ‘I’m afraid not. And from the way this is going, I think we’re going to need him tonight. You’d better run up the path and tell Mr Ritchie to fetch him.’

Madeleine swallowed. ‘Mr Ritchie’s not at home,’ she said in a tight voice.

‘
What?
’

‘He went to his daughter’s in Portpatrick for a fortnight. He just left.’

Her mother had gone frighteningly pale. When she shut her eyes her eyelids were nearly blue.

Madeleine said, ‘I can go for Dr Baines.’

‘No you can’t. Not all the way to Stranraer.’

‘Yes I can. I can take a lantern—’

‘Maddy, it’s four miles.’

‘But I know the way—’

‘No.’

‘But—’

‘It’s snowing, it’s pitch dark, and you’re only ten years old. Absolutely not.’

There was a long silence. At last her mother opened her eyes. She licked her lips. ‘Well, Maddy,’ she said quietly. ‘There’s nothing for it. We’ll just have to do this on our own.’

Madeleine gripped the bedpost. She had no idea what ‘this’ actually meant.

‘You’re going to have to help me. Can you do that?’

Madeleine gave a doubtful nod.

‘That’s my brave girl. Now in the bottom left-hand drawer of my dressing-table, under the evening corsets, you’ll find a little red booklet. Fetch it and bring it to me.’

Madeleine went to the dressing-table and, after some embarrassed fumbling, she found a thin, much-thumbed booklet bound in rust-coloured cloth. Gilded lettering announced it to be
The Wife’s Handbook by Dr Archibald Philpott – Or How a Woman Should Order Herself During Pregnancy and Delivery, With Hints on the Management of the Infant, and Other Matters Necessary to be Known to the Married Woman
.

‘That’s the one,’ said her mother. Another spasm took hold, and this time it went on for longer. By the end, Madeleine was swallowing tears.

‘I think’, panted her mother, ‘you had better read it aloud.’

Madeleine’s teeth began to chatter. ‘I can’t.’

‘Yes you can. Come on, Maddy. You’ll feel better with something to do.’

Shakily Madeleine opened the book. Chapter One swam before her eyes.

Her mother waited, fixing her with a dark, unblinking stare.

‘
From – from the first marriage-night,
’ Madeleine began uncertainly, ‘
no woman under the age of forty-five can consider herself safe—
’

To her astonishment, her mother laughed. ‘I think we’ve come a bit further than that! There’s an index at the back, Maddy. Find the section headed “Labour”, and start reading from there.’

Chapter Three

‘
When the pains grow frequent and severe,
’ Madeleine read aloud, ‘
loop a roller towel around the bedpost and give the ends to the woman to pull on, while she braces her feet against the footboard.
’

‘We haven’t got a roller towel,’ panted her mother. ‘Fetch a sheet – from the linen cupboard.’ Then she was off again on another wave of pain.