The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (48 page)

She stood up slowly, and her head swam. She hadn’t eaten or drunk for at least eighteen or twenty hours. She took a deep breath of the warm night air, and smelt sweat and dust and the coppery tang of the blood on her hands.

Twenty feet ahead of her, the calabash tree loomed in the moonlight. She made out the boulder where she had rested, a lifetime ago. Around it thorn bushes, and the spiky rosette of a wild pine.

In Sophie’s gazetteer it said that if country people get lost, they can sometimes get a little moisture from a wild pine.

She stumbled over to it, and fell to her knees in the dust. The spiny leaves dug into her palms, and the plant clung stubbornly to the earth – she had to rock it from side to side to loosen it – but at last it came free with a fleshy snap.

She broke off an outer leaf, and then another. A trickle of moisture ran into her palm. It was no more than an eggcupful, stale and gritty with midges, but when she gulped it down her thirst came roaring back. She snapped off another leaf and sucked the bitter sap. It would have to do until she reached the river.

The cane-fields can be eerie at night. The ghostly white slash of the marled track cutting through the dark. The tall, whispering cane. The certainty that if you get into trouble, there is no help to be had for miles around. In the cane-fields at night, it’s easy to believe in duppies, and in the sorcery that can take a man’s shadow and nail it to a tree.

Cameron led his horse down to the irrigation ditch, and thought about Madeleine out here on her own. Why had he allowed Sinclair to take her to Providence? Why had he wasted so much time?

For two hours they had been working their way north through the hill-pastures of Turnaround and Corner Pen –
No, sah, nobody see Miss Maddy heah about
– and down into the lonely cane-pieces of the Queen of Spains Valley. And always Sinclair rode beside him: silent, and very slightly aggrieved. As if this were some elaborate game which had gone on for just a little too long.

Cameron glanced over his shoulder and saw his brother standing at the top of the ditch, watching him.

He can’t have done anything to her, Cameron told himself. He isn’t capable of that. Of many things, perhaps. But not of that.

So why did he feel this tightening in the chest? This sense that events had jumped track and were veering out of control?

Above him, Sinclair tapped the reins against his thigh. ‘This is pointless. I’m going back. I shall start again when it’s light.’

Cameron led his horse back up the side of the ditch. ‘You never expected to find her out here, did you?’

Sinclair put his head on one side. ‘Of course not. How could one expect to find anything out here in the middle of the night?’

Cameron suppressed the urge to grab him by the collar and shake him. ‘That’s not what I meant,’ he said. ‘Tell me where she is.’

‘If I knew that, why would I—’

‘Tell me.’

Sinclair’s pointed tongue came out and moistened his lips, but he made no reply.

I can’t take much more of this, thought Cameron. He opened his palm and studied it, and clenched it into a fist.

He watched Sinclair draw the reins over his horse’s head and put his foot in the stirrup and hoist himself into the saddle. ‘For all I know,’ said Sinclair, ‘she’s at Eden. Waiting for you.’

‘For all you know, she’s out here on her own in the dark.’

‘We don’t know that.’

‘Well damnit, man, you said she was heading this way.’

‘And perhaps she arrived safely at Fever Hill. Why don’t you go and find out, brother? That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

Cameron ignored that. ‘For a man whose wife is missing,’ he said, ‘you’re showing remarkably little concern.’

‘Why? Because I don’t indulge in vulgar displays of emotion?’

‘What’s wrong with you? Don’t you care?’

‘Not nearly as much as you.’

Cameron lost his temper. One moment he was watching Sinclair gather the reins, and the next he was grabbing him by the belt and hauling him out of the saddle and throwing him to the ground with a
whump
that sent the horses squealing and the dust flying up.

A red haze misted his vision. He looked at Sinclair lying on his back, and as if it were really happening, he saw himself flipping him over and digging his knee into his back and grabbing him by the hair and pounding his face to a pulp. The blood roared in his ears. His palms itched to do it. It took a massive effort to put his hands behind his back, and step away.

Sinclair sat up gingerly, coughing the dust from his lungs. ‘Have you completely lost your reason?’ he said.

‘Tell me where she is.’

Still coughing, Sinclair brushed the dust from his riding jacket. ‘I don’t
know
where she is,’ he spat.

Cameron reached down and grabbed him by the collar and hauled him to his feet, and Sinclair’s arm flashed out, and Cameron felt warmth and wetness opening up across his chest, and looked down and saw a dark diagonal stain blotting his shirt.

He dropped Sinclair and took a step back. Christ, he thought, he’s got a knife.

He put a hand to his ribs, and it came away wet. A long, shallow slash that was already burning like the devil.

That’s a good sign, isn’t it? he told himself. It’s the ones that don’t hurt that mean trouble.

Sinclair had staggered back, and was staring at the knife in his hands.

‘Put that thing down,’ said Cameron.

‘
You
attacked
me
,’ muttered Sinclair. ‘It wasn’t my fault.’

‘It never is,’ snarled Cameron. ‘Now put the bloody thing down.’

Sinclair shot him a look of pure hatred. ‘You’re glad I did it, aren’t you?’

‘What?’

‘Now you can run squealing back to the old man, and tell him how wicked I am, how unfit to inherit—’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, no more about the inheritance—’

‘What, you expect me to believe that you don’t care?’

‘Well I don’t!’ roared Cameron. ‘Take it! Take the whole bloody estate! I don’t want it! I just want to find Madeleine!’

‘Oh, you do want it,’ cried Sinclair, ‘You do! It’s all you ever think about!’

Cameron moved forward and made a feint with his right hand, and Sinclair went for it, and with his left Cameron grasped his brother’s wrist and gave it a vicious twist, and with a howl Sinclair dropped the knife, and Cameron caught it.

Now it was his turn to look down at the knife in his hands.

‘You’d do it, wouldn’t you?’ cried Sinclair. He had fallen to his knees, cradling his wrist against his chest. ‘Your own brother. And you’d kill me like a dog in the road.’

Cameron heard the night wind whispering through the dark cane. He saw the moonlight glinting on the still water of the ditch. He sensed the silent watchfulness of miles and miles of empty fields.

He remembered as if it were yesterday what it had felt like to kill. The soft elasticity of flesh giving way to iron; the terror and the disgust, and the incredible feeling of power.

‘Your own brother,’ whispered Sinclair. ‘Like a dog in the road.’

Cameron looked from his brother’s clammy face to the dull grey metal in his hand. Then he turned and flung the knife as far as he could into the cane. ‘Get out of my sight,’ he said.

The wild pine water had made her thirsty again, but it had also sharpened her mind. Sitting with her back against the calabash tree, she could think beyond footholds and handholds for the first time in hours.

The river is the first thing, yes. Follow the voice of the river. It will be light soon. And it doesn’t sound too far. Perhaps a mile or so?

Find it. Sink into it. Drink until you can’t drink any more. Roll around in that slippery red mud until you’re sodden and cold, yes actually cold . . .

Then what?

Food and shelter and clothes and Sophie.

She struggled to recall the map of the Northside in Jocelyn’s library. From its source in the Cockpits, the Martha Brae made a great northwesterly loop towards Fever Hill, then veered east towards Eden for a mile or so, before once again turning north for Falmouth and the sea. She had a hazy picture of a bridge somewhere at the edge of the hills, and a fork in the track: one branch going north towards Fever Hill, the other east towards Eden.

At least – she thought there was a bridge. Or had she only imagined that?

It didn’t matter. She knew what to do. She must find the river and follow it to Eden, and then make Cameron get Sophie back. It didn’t matter that he had already refused. He would not refuse again. She wouldn’t let him.

And what about Sinclair? What if he came looking for her?

She brushed that aside. She couldn’t think about it now.

The crickets were ringing the low peal of the hour before dawn. The voice of Patoo echoed through the hills. In an hour or so it would be light.

Still with her back against the tree, she struggled to her feet. Something tilted beneath her heel, and she nearly lost her balance. She looked down to see what it was. It was small and silver-blue, and it had a cold metallic gleam.

The peace of the night blew away on the wind. She hadn’t realized until now that she had been afraid of this thing. And afraid of herself, and of what she might do with it.

She stooped to retrieve it, and her fingers closed on the incongruous blue steel of Ben’s gun.

Sinclair rode back to Providence shaking with humiliation and rage.

His mind teemed with fearful images. His wife’s animal gaze. The crippled child telling the old man everything. The mockery in his brother’s eyes as he threw away the knife.
I don’t care about the estate.

‘You do care,’ Sinclair whispered. ‘You do.’ He was so angry that he could scarcely breathe. Nothing was any good if his brother didn’t care.

By four o’clock the hunting lodge at Providence loomed into sight. He ran up the steps to the gallery and poured himself a brandy and soda, and drank it pacing up and down. He had been tempted to go straight to Fever Hill – he’d even ridden that way at first, to throw his brother off the scent. But he knew that to go to Fever Hill now would be a mistake.

He wasn’t safe yet. He would not be safe until he had gone back to the sink-hole and seen for himself that she was dead. Then he would be free to go to Fever Hill and deal with the child, and put an end to his brother’s ambitions. Only then would he know peace.

The thought of going back into the Cockpits, alone and in darkness, was almost more than he could bear. But he told himself that this, too, was part of God’s great test.

Cameron had been catastrophically wrong about Sinclair. He had been wrong about everything. And now, as he tracked his brother through the greyness before dawn, he fought the urge to overtake him and thrash the truth out of him.

It wouldn’t work. For reasons he didn’t understand, Sinclair would never tell him what he knew.

They were on a narrow track that wound ever deeper into the Cockpits. Why? Presumably because she had come this way – but why into the Cockpits, and why east? Towards Burntwood? Ah yes, that would be just like her. You won’t help me get my sister back? Well fine. I’ll do it myself. And if that means crossing the Cockpits on my own, then so be it.

He had been such a fool. What did it matter that she had lied to him? What did it
matter
?

He felt again that heaviness in his chest. The dread at what he might find.

The track became steeper, and he dismounted to lead his horse. The animal baulked at the slope, and as it tugged on the reins he felt the cut across his ribs opening up again. It was stiff and sore, and it made every breath hurt, but he was almost glad of it, for it kept him alert. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept; couldn’t count the miles he’d ridden in the last twenty-four hours. And now this endless, unreal, stumbling journey into the Cockpits after a brother he’d never truly known until tonight.

He had been so blind. He had genuinely believed that Sinclair wasn’t capable of harming her.

And what if she were the one who paid for that mistake?

The sky was beginning to lighten in the east when he crested the hill and found himself looking down into a dark hollow that seemed vaguely, troublingly familiar. Some distance below him he saw Sinclair’s fair hair. He ducked behind a boulder, and watched Sinclair dismount and disappear round a bluff. It was too dark to see any more. He tied his horse to a thorn bush and started silently down the slope.

No sound of voices. No sound at all. Just the wind in the thorns and the distant hoot of an owl.

Sinclair emerged from behind the bluff – alone – and made for his horse, staggering a little. Cameron felt a cold wave washing over him. What had Sinclair seen down there? What had he done?

He watched Sinclair mount his horse and start briskly up the other side of the hollow. When he was gone, Cameron made his way down the slope and into the darkness at the bottom.

Day just about commence to light, and Grace must a dozed asleep, but then she comes awake with a start.

At first she thinks that everything fine: she sitting out on her step, neck little stiff, but everything fine. Then she sees the new grave by the garden cherry tree, and she knows it not fine, that it never be fine again.

Then she hears someone out in her yard. Who got the nerve to intrude on Victory nine-night? She starts up, hot and vex. Who there! she yells out. Go way! Get out a me yard!

A boy moves out from the shadows under the paw-paw trees. And Grace about to yell again, when she astonished to see that he buckra boy – only so poor and ripped about that he resemble dirty Congo nigger.

Hat in hand, he comes over to her, and she sees that he whistle-thin, with face tight-stretch and full of mourning, though he not like to show. And peculiar strange, him eye
green
, like puss-eye. Grace never put her sight on a boy like this, and she starts to consider if he some sort of sign.

Then she thinks again. This boy no sign. This just a damn intruding disrespectful buckra boy, and in her own self yard, on Victory nine-night.