The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (36 page)

‘Ben,’ she said. ‘Promise me you’ll go to see her.’

He glanced up, his eyes unfocused.

‘Promise?’

He nodded.

She wondered if he’d even heard. ‘I have to go now,’ she said. She stood up and dusted off her skirts.

He stayed where he was.

‘Ben? Would you help me onto my horse?’

That seemed to bring him back to himself, as she had hoped it would. He struggled to his feet and pocketed the card, then untied Kestrel and helped her into the saddle.

‘Rain coming,’ he said. To her relief he sounded almost his old self. ‘Where you off to, Madlin, in such a hurry?’

‘Just making a call,’ she said.

He glanced up the road. ‘Not much up there,’ he said.

She did not reply.

A moment later his face changed. ‘Bloody hell. Bloody
hell
. The brother.’

Dear God, he recovered fast.

‘That’s it, isn’t it? You and the parson’s brother.’

She flashed him a look, but he wasn’t quelled. He was shaking his head and gazing up at her with new respect. ‘Sodding hell,’ he said. ‘What a sodding mess.’

She gave him a twisted smile. ‘As you say.’ She gathered the reins and turned Kestrel’s head. ‘Look after yourself, Ben Kelly. If not for you – then for Robbie. Yes?’

He did not reply. But as she was putting Kestrel forward, he called out after her. ‘Madlin?’

She reined in.

‘The parson. If I
had
of shot him. Would you of cared?’

She looked at him standing there in the dusty road, so young and so alone. She wished there was more that she could do for him. ‘Stay away from Fever Hill,’ she told him. ‘Don’t get mixed up in this.’

The first spots of rain were pitting the red dust as she cantered south towards the Martha Brae.

The foreman of a field-gang confirmed that she was on the right road. Just head on up, ma’am, and once you cross the river you’re on Eden land. Mas’ Camron’s in the first cane-piece just past the bridge.

He said something more about a broken axle, but she was already too far ahead to hear.

The road climbed steadily, darkened by tall cedars and wild almond trees with huge, wind-tossed leaves. Over the Cockpits, lightning flared in a purple-grey sky.

She crested the hill and made a muddy descent towards a moss-covered bridge across the river, where she brought Kestrel to a skittering halt.

The Martha Brae slid silent and opaque between banks of heliconia and thick, purple-flowered creepers. On the other side, in a clearing of ironwood and giant bamboo, lay a cluster of ruins. She knew them at once. The old slave village at Romilly. It had often featured in her mother’s stories.

She had a powerful sense that nothing had changed since her parents’ time; that on the other side of the river lay the past. Cut-stone dwellings stood open to the sky. Thick, corded creepers laced the tumbled walls.

Once again she was poised at the edge of the Forbidden Kingdom. But this time there was no baleful marble serpent, no sharp-eyed crow mocking from the trees. The only sound was the pattering of rain on the leaves, and her own uneven breathing.

She hadn’t expected it to be so difficult. She’d thought only of seeing Cameron and telling him the truth; not of where she was going. Seeing it now, the Forbidden Kingdom just a few paces away, she felt shaky and exposed and obscurely frightened. Even the rain seemed threatening. A rainstorm in July? Who ever heard of that? It felt as if the hills themselves were warning her to stay away.

Another crash of thunder. Kestrel snorted and sidestepped. She gathered the reins and put the mare forward, and cantered over the bridge and down into Eden.

She kept her eyes on the road as she passed the ruins, and cantered between the trees. Suddenly the woods were left behind. Cane-pieces opened out on either side of her, acid green in the stormy light. Up ahead, the hills loomed shockingly close: the start of the Cockpits.

Some distance away, in a cane-piece to her right, a little group of field-hands clustered about a wagon leaning drunkenly into an irrigation ditch. She saw Pilate tethered nearby, and Cameron’s fair head. He was by the wagon, stooping to examine the damage. As she reined in, he straightened up and saw her.

At that moment the wagon gave a shuddering jolt and sank further into the ditch. Everyone sprang back.

Cameron turned to speak to a tall Negro beside him, and reached for his hat, and went round the back of the wagon to untether Pilate.

‘I have to talk to you,’ she said when he’d ridden across. She had to raise her voice above the noise of the rain.

He gave her a concentrated look that she couldn’t read. ‘That’, he said, ‘isn’t a good idea.’

‘I know, but— I know.’

With the back of his hand he wiped the rain from his face. ‘What about Sinclair? Does he know you’re here?’

‘Of course not.’

A terrific peal of thunder. Their horses sidestepped in alarm.

He glanced over his shoulder at the men by the wagon, then back to her. ‘Come up to the house.’

Chapter Twenty-Four

By the time they reached the house, the rain was coming down in force.

They went in the back way, so Madeleine saw nothing of the exterior except rain-pummelled creepers and broken fretwork eaves. Then they were in the hall, and he was showing her into a dim and shuttered ‘spare room’, then leaving her without another word, to go and see to the horses.

She removed her hat and her sodden dust-coat and threw them on a chair. Her hair was wet, her riding habit damp but not soaked through. Nothing to be done about that now. Besides, it was too hot to catch a chill.

As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she made out more of her surroundings. A thick, soft covering of dust, and a musty smell of neglect – but the room must once have been beautiful. The walls were panelled in amber sweetwood, the windows hung with the remains of blue and white shantung, the floor tiled in cool terracotta. But the hangings were mildewed, the panelling worm-eaten, and the canopied bed had collapsed into a pile of mouldy planks. Rain rattled into a washbasin through a hole in the roof. The chair on which she’d thrown her dust-coat had lost one of its legs.

She remembered the haunted ruin in the photograph on the piano at Cairngowrie House. The tree-fern in the window like a shattered monocle; the steps curving down into the jungle garden. She was inside the house which her own forebears had built. Inside the past.

A crash of thunder and a brilliant flare of lightning, and the rain on the shingles became deafening. She moved to the window.

Against the broken louvres the fronds of an enormous fern trembled in the rain. She looked down over a steep slope of wind-tossed trees: palms and wild almonds and tattered philodendrons, their huge leaves dipping and swaying beneath the onslaught. At the bottom of the slope she made out stables and a cook-house, smothered by creepers and bougainvillaea and great scarlet bursts of ginger lilies. It was hard to tell whether the buildings supported the greenery, or the other way round.

Everywhere she looked she saw dilapidation and decay and abundant life.
In Eden everything is wilder and more alive . . . the sun shines more fiercely, the rain strikes harder, and the leaves are so green that it hurts your eyes . . .

No, she told herself. Don’t think about that now.

On the wall near the door hung a shattered looking-glass, still with a silvered fragment in one corner. She went to it and set about unpinning her hair and combing it through with her fingers, and putting it up again.

The rain ceased with tropical suddenness. Blue sky began to show through the hole in the roof. Sunlight limned the ferns with gold, and a haze of vapour rose from the slope. Grassquits twittered furiously amid a ringing chorus of frogs.

She opened the door into the hall and looked out. It was empty. Cameron must still be down at the stables. She emerged into a large central space made airy by high open rafters, louvred fanlights, and several more holes in the roof.

The house seemed to be smaller than Fever Hill, but was clearly much older. Mrs Herapath had told her that it was the oldest on the Northside, and one of the few to have survived the Christmas Rebellion – for by the standards of the time, the Durrants had been good to their slaves. ‘Too good,’ Mrs Herapath had muttered darkly. ‘Too many little black and brown unofficial Durrants scurrying all over the place.’

The hall was empty of furniture except for an enormous and very dusty mahogany table which was clearly a dumping ground: a trio of hurricane lamps with cracked glass shades; a tottering stack of
Gall’s Weekly Newsletter
s from the previous year; three large tins of Everett’s Patented Harness Cleaner; a crate of Glenfallock Highland Whisky, Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, and a tattered copy of Cassell’s
Book of the Horse
. From what she could see of the rooms that led off the hall, they too were in a similar state of neglect.

How can he live like this, she wondered.
Where
does he live?

She moved through to the sitting-room, which was empty except for an ancient, battered chest of drawers on top of which lay a belt with a broken buckle, a watch-chain and a pile of loose change. She resisted the temptation to look in the drawers, and went forward to the louvred doorway, which presumably led into some sort of gallery.

She never forgot that first moment when she opened the doors. She had expected a dim, shuttered chamber like the gallery at Fever Hill. Instead she found herself on a wide, open verandah in a blaze of light.

A flock of parakeets exploded from the trees, and filled the sky with emerald wings. The sun shone green through tree-ferns dripping beneath the eaves. Purple grenadilla invaded the broken fretwork balustrade, and white bougainvillaea, and papery red hibiscus. At her feet a double curve of creeper-choked steps swept down into a steaming wilderness. She saw mango trees and cedars and palms; lime trees and wild cinnamon, powder-blue plumbago and purple thunbergia, and the vivid orange and cobalt of strelitzia. At the foot of the slope, the opaque jade-green river slid by beneath water-heavy plumes of giant bamboo, the banks aflame with torch ginger and the scarlet claws of heliconia. Across the river, the road cut a rust-red slash through the shimmering cane-pieces, and far in the distance lay the grey-blue glitter of the sea.

The air was rich and hot and buzzing with life. The rasp of crickets, the piping of frogs, the twittering of sugarquits and wild canaries. She took a deep breath and smelt the mineral freshness of wet red earth.
In Eden everything is wilder and more alive . . .

She ran to the end of the verandah and leaned out as far as she could. The house was set in an amphitheatre of forested hills, their slopes dark in the glare of the sun.
And deep in the forest there stands an enormous silk-cotton tree. That’s where we used to meet, your father and I.
She scanned the hills, but it was impossible to see for the glare.

Then, as she watched, a haze passed across the sun, and for an instant, far in the distance, she thought she saw it. Taller than any oak, its great outstretched limbs supported a separate world above the canopy: a world of strangler fig and Spanish moss and orchids like little darts of flame. The Tree of Life.
The creepers hang down to the ground, and at night after a rain they’re speckled with fireflies; and there are moonflowers as big as your hand, so fragile and pale that they’re like the ghosts of flowers; and with each breath you take in the scent of cinnamon and lime and sweet decay . . .

She blinked back tears.

A sound of footsteps behind her, and she turned to see Cameron coming out onto the verandah.

He saw her taut expression, and misread it. ‘It used to be a proper gallery,’ he said, as if he felt he must apologize, ‘but the wood-ants got into the louvres. It seemed simpler just to open the whole thing up.’

She crossed her arms about her waist. ‘It’s beautiful.’

There was an uneasy silence. She noticed that he remained by the doors, a safe distance away. He stood with his hands in the pockets of his shooting jacket, awkward and on edge.

Then two things happened at once. An enormous mastiff hurtled up the steps and launched itself at Cameron, and an ancient black man with unsteady yellow eyes emerged from the house bearing a tray with an earthenware pitcher, two tumblers, and a bottle of rum.

Helper and mastiff narrowly missed one another, and Madeleine, grateful for the diversion, found a rickety cane chair near the steps, and sat down. She took a tumbler from the helper’s tray and held it on her knees with both hands.

There wasn’t much furniture on the verandah, but the question of where Cameron lived was finally solved. He lived out here. Behind him was a cot-bed hastily covered by a moth-eaten grey blanket, and flanked by an elderly washstand and a large, iron-bound campaign chest. On the chest was a stack of battered ledgers, an ancient kerosene lamp, and a corner of silvered mirror-glass. She thought, no wonder he cuts himself shaving.

He caught the direction of her glance, and coloured. ‘Sorry about this. You must think I’ve gone bush.’

She shook her head.

‘It’s just that there’s always so much to do on the estate. I haven’t had time for the house.’

‘Why do you sleep out here? Is it because of prison?’

He dismissed the helper, and watched till he was gone. Then he turned back to her. ‘How did you know that?’

‘Oh. Just a guess.’ She paused. ‘Was it awful?’

‘Um. Yes.’

‘Did it change you?’

‘I think so.’

‘How?’

He frowned at the floor. ‘Made me more tolerant, I suppose. I mean, I had some good friends in prison, but they weren’t the sort of people with whom I’d have associated before.’ Again he coloured, and she guessed that he was thinking about Grace.

She wanted to tell him that she wasn’t the least bit shocked that he’d had a black mistress. How could she be shocked, when right now her photograph was probably gracing the trays outside Bob Venables’ grimy little shop in Holywell Street?