The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (61 page)

Dead leaves rattled sadly across the steps as they climbed to the gallery. It was empty and dim, and smelt of desolation and decay. The floor was soft with dust, the cane furniture mildewed and broken. But someone had replaced a leg of the sofa with a pile of books, and made a nest for themselves with a tattered tartan throw. On the floor beside it lay a stack of
Gleaner
Saturday supplements, and Clemency’s silver scissors and cuttings book. On a side table, next to a battered kerosene lamp, stood a gleaming silver frame containing the familiar funeral photograph.

‘Clemency?’ called Sophie. Her voice echoed through the shadowy house. ‘Clemmy?’

No answer. She felt a curious reluctance to go inside. It had always been a strange house: a place of shadows and whispers, turned in upon itself. In his last years Jocelyn had hardly moved from his library, while his ancient aunt, known to all the family as Great-Aunt May, had lived in implacable isolation in the upper gallery, and Clemency flitted between her rooms and the family Burying-place.

But now Jocelyn was dead, and Great-Aunt May was living in a townhouse in Falmouth. Only Clemency remained, attended by Grace McFarlane, who made the daily climb from her home in the old ruined slave village at the bottom of the hill.

This afternoon, however, not even Clemency was to be found. Impatiently, Sophie drew out her watch. She sighed. Five o’clock. According to Madeleine, Sibella usually called at four.

With the toe of his boot, Fraser drew an arrow in the dust. ‘Aunt Clemmy will probably be at the Burying-place. That’s where she has her tea.’

‘But I cannot possibly leave,’ whispered Clemency, handing Sophie her cup and fluttering her pale, dry hands at the dead. ‘How could I leave all this?’

Once again Sophie bit back her frustration. They’d found Clemency alone, sitting on the bench beneath the poinciana tree which shaded the graves. There was no sign of Sibella. When Sophie asked if she was expected, the older woman simply looked blank.

‘Sometimes Miss Traherne comes later,’ offered Fraser, sensing Sophie’s disappointment. Then he ran off to set out his toy soldiers on a tombstone.

Sophie hoped he was right. But she couldn’t help reflecting that as they were on the other side of the hill from the house, she wouldn’t hear the carriage even if Sibella did turn up. For all she knew, Sibella might come, find no-one at home, and go away again. And here she was, trapped in this dismal place: an overgrown clearing hemmed in by coconut palms and wild lime trees, where seven generations of Monroes dreamed away the decades in a tangle of asparagus ferns and long silver grass.

Stifling her impatience, she turned back to Clemency, and grimly resolved to do her duty. ‘You’d love it at Eden,’ she said as persuasively as she could, ‘and the children would adore to have you with them.’

But to her astonishment, Clemency’s china-blue eyes widened with alarm. ‘Oh,
hush
! You’ll make Elliot feel left out!’

Sophie hesitated. ‘Clemmy, darling. Elliot has been dead for twenty-nine years.’

Fraser raised his head from his hussars, and scanned the Burying-place with interest. According to Madeleine, he regarded his deceased relation as some kind of shadowy friend who liked to hide in the grass.

‘
Hush!
’ whispered Clemency again, as if the inhabitant of the little white marble tomb might hear and be offended. ‘I am very well aware of that, Sophie. But I fail to see that it signifies.’

Her son had died in 1873, two days after he was born. Through a chain of mishaps he had not been baptized, and for a decade afterwards she had tormented herself with the conviction that he was in hell. Then Cameron had persuaded her that Elliot was in fact in heaven, and she had blossomed. For the first time in years she had ventured out in daylight. She’d even gone to church. But it had been a false dawn. Gradually, the notion of her son looking down from heaven had seized hold of her mind, until he’d become an all-seeing, admonitory, God-like presence from whom she could never escape.

Sophie put Clemency’s teacup back on the tray and tried again. ‘You’d only be an hour’s ride away. You could come here every day if you wished.’

‘It wouldn’t be the same,’ said Clemency. She took a little flask of pimento dram from her pocket, poured a measure into her cup and drank it down, giving Sophie her wincing, apologetic smile.

Sophie forced herself to smile back. As always with Clemency, she felt a twinge of vicarious guilt. This submissive yet curiously stubborn woman had once been married to her father. Married, and then deserted for Rose Durrant.

Clemency had never uttered a word of reproach. Indeed it was doubtful if she even remembered that she’d had a husband, for she’d only married him because her brother Cornelius had told her to. The defining event of her life had not been her husband’s desertion but the death of her child. She had pulled her loss around her like a shawl, and devoted herself to grief. For nearly thirty years she had worn nothing but dull white mourning, and papered her rooms with funeral photographs of the dead infant. And when her hair had failed to turn white from grief, she’d simply dyed it grey.

She was now fifty-one, but looked nearer thirty, her extraordinary young-old features still delicately pretty, her blue eyes wide with perpetual apology. Except when it came to the question of leaving Fever Hill.

Sophie stirred her tea and fought the downturn in her spirits which this place always brought about. Her terrible old ancestor Alasdair lay over in the far corner. Her grandfather Jocelyn lay close by, reunited after five lonely decades with his adored young wife Kitty. And her father Ainsley lay beneath the low slate slab on which Fraser now paraded his lead hussars. Her father, who had left a trail of ruined lives: an unwelcome reminder of the risks which Madeleine was running.

‘Oh look,’ said Fraser, glancing up from his battle, ‘here’s Miss Traherne.’

Oh, thank God, thought Sophie. She got to her feet, took up her sun-umbrella, and gave Clemency a brisk smile. ‘I’ve just remembered, I promised Fraser I’d take him to see the horses. Do you mind? I’ll be back very soon.’

Her heart was beating uncomfortably fast as they crossed the hard brown lawns and started down the croton walk towards the stables. Fraser raced ahead like a puppy, doubling back every so often to make sure that she was following. She felt slightly bad about using him like this, especially as he’d fallen in with her plan with a six-year-old’s unquestioning trust.

‘You’ll never guess who’s in the stableyard,’ he told her breathlessly as he tugged at her hand to make her go faster. ‘
Evie!
She can make animals out of cane-trash. She made a giraffe for my birthday and it’s absolutely
brilliant
!’

Oh no, thought Sophie. She wanted to see Evie again, but not here. Not now, when she needed to talk to Ben.

Apprehensively, she emerged from the croton walk into the glare of the stableyard. At the far side she could see Sibella’s little buggy. Beside it Ben, hatless and in shirtsleeves, was setting down a pail of water for the horse. On the seat of the buggy sat a coloured girl in a pink print dress, chatting to him and swinging her legs.

Fraser raced across the yard, and Evie turned and smiled down at him. Then she saw Sophie, and said a word to Ben. He straightened up, wiping his hands down his breeches and throwing Sophie a wary, unsmiling look.

She felt horribly self-conscious as she walked towards them across the yard. It was a struggle not to limp. ‘Hello, Ben,’ she said with as much ease as she could muster. ‘Hello, Evie, how are you? It’s good to see you again.’

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Ben roll down his shirtsleeves and reach for his tunic and cap. He did not respond to her greeting.

‘Hello, Sophie,’ murmured Evie with a shy smile. ‘It’s good to see you, too.’

As a child, Sophie had always been a little in awe of Evie, who, apart from being a year older, had been prettier and healthier, and had a secret born-day name, and a mother who was a witch. Now Sophie saw that the child had grown into a breathtakingly beautiful young woman. Dark almond-shaped eyes with an almost oriental slant; chiselled features of unnerving perfection; flawless coffee-coloured skin. Sophie felt overdressed in her fussy, unflattering afternoon gown, with her frilled sun-umbrella and gloves.

She turned her head and nodded at Ben in what she hoped was a friendly manner. He nodded back, but didn’t meet her eyes. Fraser sidled over and stared up at him with the wary respect which small boys show for the mysterious brotherhood of grooms.

Awkwardly, Sophie furled her sun-umbrella and dug the point into the dust, wondering how to begin. In the old days, Ben would have flashed her his feral grin and said, ‘What’s up, Sophie?’ But this wasn’t the old days.

Hating herself for her cowardice, she turned back to Evie. ‘I was wondering when we’d bump into each other,’ she said brightly. ‘I didn’t know that you’d taken a position at Fever Hill.’

‘I haven’t,’ replied Evie in her soft Creole accent. ‘I teach school over at Coral Springs.’

She was too polite to show offence at being mistaken for a maid, but Sophie’s cheeks burned. Evie had always been bright and ambitious. How could she have made such a blunder?

But Evie goodnaturedly smoothed things over by telling her about the teacher’s dissertation on local history which she was writing at weekends.

‘My grandfather had lots of old estate papers,’ Sophie said quickly, to make amends. ‘You must make use of the library whenever you like. Really. Do.’

Evie smiled and thanked her, but they both knew that she never would.

How pompous I sound, thought Sophie. The white Lady Bountiful patronizing the coloured girl. She summoned what remained of her courage and turned to Ben. ‘Hello, Ben,’ she said. Then she remembered that she’d already greeted him.

He tipped his cap to her with wary respect. ‘Is it about the horse, miss?’ he muttered, looking at the ground.

‘The horse?’

‘Your horse, miss. He’s still out front. I took him a pail of water, but were you wanting me to bring him down here?’ He still wasn’t meeting her eyes, and his face wore a determined look, as if he’d worked out beforehand how he would behave.

‘Um – no. No, thank you, that’s quite all right.’ She bit her lip. ‘Ben – I’m sorry if I embarrassed you the other day. I mean, at Parnassus.’

‘You didn’t, miss,’ he muttered. ‘And – it’s Kelly, miss. Not Ben. Better like that, if you understand.’

Again she felt herself colouring. So that’s how it’s to be, she thought. Madeleine was right after all.
Things are different now. You’re no longer a child.

She glanced down at the sun-umbrella, and traced a line in the dust. ‘Just as you wish,’ she said. ‘Well, I won’t take up too much of your time, I just needed to ask you something. I think I saw you in Montpelier? On Monday?’

He frowned at his boots. ‘I don’t remember, miss.’

Oh, no, she thought with a sinking heart. Not you too. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked.

He nodded.

There was another awkward silence. Evie sat in the buggy, studying her shoes. Ben turned his cap in his hands and frowned.

Sophie wondered why she’d come. What was she doing here? What could she possibly achieve, except to make everyone, including herself, supremely uncomfortable?

She looked at the young man standing before her with his head bowed and his black hair falling into his eyes, and she realized that she had been wrong about him. She’d built him up in her mind into something that he could never be. He was just a groom. His skin was tanned from the wind and the sun, and his hands calloused from stable work. He was just a rough young man who’d pulled himself out of the slums – who’d made good, according to his lights – but who would never be anything other than a rough young man. He wasn’t some kind of special friend, as she’d believed when she was a child. He didn’t think as she did.

It was a bleak thought, and it made her feel bereft. She had lost something which had never really existed. And she hadn’t realized how much she’d valued it until now.

It was Fraser who came to her rescue. Perhaps sensing that something was wrong, he moved across and took her hand and looked up at her and smiled: a small tow-headed ally in a sailor suit.

She felt a rush of gratitude. ‘Well,’ she said, looking down into his big grey eyes, ‘Fraser and I must be getting back. Goodbye, Evie, I’m sure I shall see you again soon. And good luck with your dissertation. Goodbye – Kelly.’

‘Goodbye, Sophie,’ said Evie with her shy smile.

‘Miss,’ said Ben with a nod.

The croton walk seemed endless, and she knew that she limped. She could feel their eyes on her all the way.

But when she glanced back, she saw with a pang that Ben wasn’t even watching. He was bending down under the horse’s belly to adjust its harness. Only Evie was looking after them, with a curiously intent expression on her lovely face.

At Sophie’s side, Fraser held fast to her hand and took slow, giant strides. ‘Aunt Sophie?’ he said with a frown.

‘Yes?’

‘Did you notice that Miss Traherne’s groom has green eyes?’

She did not reply.

‘Does that mean he’s a changeling? Mamma read us a story about that once. It means that he was snatched as a baby and swapped, and is really a prince.’

‘Nonsense,’ muttered Sophie. ‘He’s not a changeling. He’s just a groom.’

She found Clemency with Sibella in the library. Clemency was struggling to explain her system for reorganizing the books, and Sibella was fast losing patience. ‘
Bonne chance
,’ she murmured, pressing her cheek to Sophie’s in farewell. ‘If I stay an instant longer I shall forget myself. Come along, Fraser darling, you can show me out.’

‘But the
principle
isn’t difficult,’ said Clemency, running a hand through her dyed grey hair and scattering hairpins over the parquet. ‘I simply
feel
that for the sake of propriety, the gentleman writers ought to be kept separate from the ladies.’