The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (62 page)

Sophie stooped to retrieve the hairpins. She envied Sibella. She wanted to leave too. She felt lonely and forlorn, and she couldn’t take much more of Clemency’s nonsense, especially in this great book-lined room which echoed with memories. On the wall hung the grim old oil painting of Strathnaw; below it the daguerreotype of Kitty. She missed Jocelyn savagely.
Things are different now. You’re no longer a child.

‘– unless of course they’re married to each other,’ continued Clemency, ‘in which case they get a shelf to themselves.’

Sophie took a deep breath and pressed her fingers to her eyes. ‘Is that why the Brownings are on the floor?’

‘Precisely,’ said Clemency. ‘You see, I haven’t yet found them a shelf. Poor dear Jocelyn had such a huge collection.’

Sophie picked up an old estate book and flicked through it. It seemed to be some sort of overseer’s journal. Perhaps she should take it to Evie as a peace offering.

‘Oh my dear,’ cried Clemency in one of her startling changes of mood, ‘I am so
frightfully
sorry.’

Sophie stared at her. ‘What ever for?’

‘I’ve just remembered. You
own
all this! And here I am rummaging about as if it belongs to me!’

‘Clemmy—’

‘I had quite forgot! Dear Cameron explained it all to me when Jocelyn died, but I forgot. How wicked it was of me to refuse to leave when you asked! I shall go at once. At once.’

‘Oh, Clemmy, stop! Stop.’

Obediently, the older woman shut her mouth, sucking in her lips like a child.

Sophie glanced about her at the well-loved volumes, and at Clemency’s pretty young-old face, so fraught with tension.

She had mishandled everything. She’d patronized Evie, and embarrassed Ben, and now she’d upset this poor woman, whom she ought to have helped. Madeleine was right. She shouldn’t interfere. She would only make things worse.

She took Clemency’s hot, dry hands in hers. ‘You must stay here for as long as you wish. For ever, if you care to. Do you understand?’

Clemency watched her lips and nodded.

‘Good. That’s settled, then.’ She kneaded her temple. ‘Now. Where shall we put the Brownings?’

Night’s coming down quick at the old slave village, and Evie’s sitting out on the step, eating fufu with her mother, and trying to keep the black uneasiness from creeping into her heart.

Mosquitoes are humming a hive roundabout, the crickets and the whistling frogs are starting up their night song, and Patoo’s going hoo-hoo up in the calabash tree.

Evie shivers. Sophie’s in trouble, or she will be soon. What that trouble is, or when it will come, Evie doesn’t know. But trouble will come for sure. She’s seen the sign.

‘Eh, Patoo!’ shouts Grace. ‘Get outta me yard!’ And the owl hitches up his wings and flies away. Satisfied, Grace takes another pull on her pipe. Then she throws Evie a narrow-eye glance. ‘Looks like you got some worry-head, girl. Make a try and tell me.’

Evie shakes her head. ‘From this I can take care I self.’

Damn. Why is she always talking
patois
when she comes home? Soon as she’s here, it seems like she just slips off her education like a pair of old board sandals, and leaves it at the door.

That’s one of the things she hates about living here. Talking
patois
and eating out in the yard, like some low-class mountain nigger. That and the obeah-stick by the door, and her mother’s broad bare feet and country nigger headkerchief. And her insistence on living in this rundown ruin of a place.

Merciful peace, her mother’s only forty-five! She’s still a fine, limber, beautiful woman. Why should she choose to live like this? Doesn’t Evie make good money as a teacheress? Wouldn’t she gladly pay for shoes and a store-bought dress? Why can’t they go and live at Coral Springs, and forget about slave time and duppies?

But no. Not Grace McFarlane.
I not about to forget who I am and where I from,
she always says
,
and you take care not to forget too. You one of the four-eyed people, Evie. You born with a caul. You wearing a little piece of it right now, in that guard you got at you neck, to stop the spirits troubling you.

But Evie never did
want
to be four-eyed. Who asked her? Who gave her the choice? And her mother is wrong. Wearing a little piece of the caul is
no good at all
for keeping away spirits.

It always starts the same way. A sudden rush of sweet-sweet smell, then the cold fear creeping down the back of her neck. A spirit looks just like a regular person, but still there’s something wrong about it. You always know that it’s dead. It’s got no sound to it, and the wind never lifts a hair of its head. It’s in the wrong time and the wrong world. And for a while, when she sees it, Evie’s in that world too.

Once when she was little, her mother warned her about spirits.
They’re trickified things
, she told her.
Sometimes they mean good, and sometimes bad. And four-eyed people like you, Evie, you got to learn which is which, or you’ll get things wrong-side and tangle-up
.

But Grace never did say
how
Evie was to learn that. And long ago Evie learned that since she can’t tell if they mean good or bad, it’s best to swallow her spit and say nothing at all.

Like the time when she was twelve, and saw blind old grandmother Semanthe, who’d died when she was little, sitting by the hearth, as sharp as sin. Two weeks after that, Evie’s brother died. For years she blamed herself. Maybe if she’d told, he would have lived. But how was she to know that nana Semanthe had meant it for a warning?

And last month she’d seen a spirit-girl standing behind Ben. A thin, sad spirit-girl with red hair and blue shadows under her eyes, just standing there. Evie hasn’t told Ben yet. What good would it do, since she doesn’t know what it means?

Thinking on that, she gets up quickly and brushes the dust from her skirt. ‘I’m going for a walk.’

Grace chews on her pipe and blows a smoke ring. ‘Watch youself out there, girl.’

‘I always do.’

She leaves the yard and starts off into the dark, moving noiselessly between the tumbledown slave houses mounded over with creepers, and the big black pawpaw trees standing guard. All the houses are ruined, except for theirs. They’re the only ones who live here. Apart from the duppies.

Ratbats and moonshine, she thinks with disgust, that’s my home. Halfway between the gates to the Fever Hill Road and the busha house up on the hill. A halfway place for a halfway girl who’s neither black nor white.

She reaches the old aqueduct at the edge of the village, and curls up on the ancient cut-stone wall. The frogs are loud roundabout, and the scummy smell of the stagnant water fills her nostrils.

When they were children, she and Sophie used to come down here looking for treasure: for one of the big jars of Spanish gold that the nanas say got lost from ages back. Of course they never found one. But once they found a little calabash baby rattle from slave time, still with a couple of john-crow beans inside. They tossed for who should keep it, and Sophie won. She was always the lucky one. It’s no different now.

Evie stretches out her legs and studies her brown canvas shoes with dislike. This afternoon at the stables, Sophie looked so pretty and fine in that beautiful flounced dress, with the white lace gloves, and those lovely high-heeled shoes with the little pearl buttons on the straps.

Jealousy curdles within her.
How are you, Evie? I didn’t know that you’d taken a position here
. As if Evie’s some kind of maid!

A ratbat flits across the moon. A forty-leg ripples up the trunk of the ackee tree. Evie clasps her knees and scowls at it.

The truth is, it wasn’t Sophie’s fault. She meant no harm, and she was mortified by her mistake. It’s Evie McFarlane who’s got this black, uneasy confusion in her heart. There’s trouble coming for Ben because of that red-haired spirit-girl. And some kind of trouble for Sophie, too. But how bad? And when? And what should she do?

Maybe she should talk to Ben. She can tell him most things, for he’s like a brother to her; sometimes she even calls him her ‘buckra brother’. His skin may be white and hers brown, but underneath they’re the same; they’ve both lost loved ones and done bad things, and they’ve both got no place where they can fit in.

Thinking of that, she brings out the little bag on the cord at her neck. Not the guard with the piece of her caul inside, but the other one: the tiny green silk bag that she calls her ‘buckra charm’, for it contains the fine gold chain that she can never openly wear. If she did, her mother would ask questions, and the man who gave it her would know that he can have her for true. The sweet-mouth man with the cut-crystal eyes and the up-class buckra ways.

But she’s no fool, is Evie McFarlane. He’s had no kisses from her, and no hand’s play, either. She’s a decent girl and she knows her worth.

And yet – sometimes it feels good just to take out the fine gold chain and pour it from palm to palm, and remember that she only has to crook her finger at him, and everything will change. No more slave village. No more fufu out in the yard. And best of all, no more four-eyed nonsense. No more dead-bury spirits walking about under the sun.

Because all that four-eyed talk is just so much cane-trash, Evie, it’s just so much trash. You’re
not
four-eyed. You’ve got
no
spirit-sight. You never saw nana Semanthe sitting by the hearth, or the red-haired spirit-girl standing behind Ben.

And you did
not
, this afternoon at the stables, see old Master Jocelyn following Sophie up the croton walk; stooping a little and leaning on his silver-topped cane, like he always did before he died.

Chapter Seven

Sophie always was pretty bad at hiding her feelings. So when she ran into a spot of bother it wasn’t long before all Trelawny knew. Including Ben.

He did his best to steer clear of it, but he couldn’t help picking up talk. Moses Parker and his niece Poppy heard it first, up at Eden. Then they told their cousins the McFarlanes down at Fever Hill, and they told
their
cousins, Danny and Hannibal Tulloch at Parnassus. And on to Ben.

It turns out that Miss Sibella saw Sophie chatting to Evie in the stableyard, and then ‘had a quiet word’ with her about getting too familiar with the coloureds. Sophie didn’t take too kindly to that. In fact, the very same afternoon she rode over to see that Dr Mallory at his darkie clinic at Bethlehem, and started helping out. She made out that she’d meant to do it all along, but Ben’s not fooled. She’s just doing it because Miss Sibella had that ‘quiet word’ with her.

And according to Moses and Poppy, the quality up at Eden were none too pleased about it, neither. Madeleine was worried that it’d keep the young men away. ‘How are you going to meet anyone if you’re always at Bethlehem?’ As for Master Cameron, he couldn’t see the point. ‘I’m not sure where you’ll find the patients, Sophie. I mean, people of our sort are hardly going to desert their own doctors for a bush hospital in the woods. And as for the blacks, I’d have thought they’ll see it as undercutting their own people – the myal-men and the obeah-women. They may even be offended.’

He had a point, but Sophie wouldn’t see it. She’d got the bit between her teeth, all right.

That was a week ago, and since then things have been limping along quietly enough. But today it’s the Historical Society picnic, and it looks like the ladies are ganging up on her again.

The picnic’s a big posh charity affair with a lecture and a lunch and tea after. This year, Master Cornelius is the host, so it’s no expense spared. Huge stripy marquee and a band, and all sorts of fancy nosh. The only thing is, it’s up at Waytes Lake. Not Ben’s favourite place.

The last time he was here was with Mrs Dampiere. He can see her now, talking to Master Cornelius under the poinciana tree. She catches his eye and tries not to smile. She thinks it’s funny. Ben don’t. He feels like everybody’s watching him, like everybody knows. And it only makes it worse that Madeleine and Sophie are here, too.

So now it’s tea-time, and Madeleine’s off by the lake talking to Master Alex, and Sophie’s sitting in the marquee with Miss Sibella and old Mrs Pitcaithley and Mrs Herapath, and that’s when they start in on her about the clinic. All very ladylike and polite and ‘for her own good’, but still having a go. Hannibal Tulloch’s on serving duty, and hears it all. Though why he thinks Ben cares one way or the other is anybody’s guess.

What’s it to Ben if some posh bint’s got in over her head? Besides, just because he give her a hard time in the stableyard the other afternoon, that’s no reason why he should worry about her now.

But still. He takes a little walk past the doorway, to see what’s what. And when he does, he gets a surprise. He’d expected her just to be a bit narked. After all, she’s not the sort to be fazed by a telling off. But when he sees her she’s sitting by the tea urn, all alone, and with that look on her face that she gets when she’s trying not to show she’s upset. It puts him in mind of when she was a kid, and she give him the picture-book and he went for her. It puts him in mind of the other day at Fever Hill.

A while later, he’s standing by the carriage with Trouble when he sees her again. Master Alex and Madeleine are still by the lake, and she’s making straight for them, very determined. Up she goes to Master Alex – not a glance at her sister – and draws him aside and starts talking to him, all sweetness, but very, very firm. That’s Sophie for you. One minute she’s down in the dumps, and the next she’s doing something about it.

To begin with, Master Alex is looking down at her and smiling, the perfect gentleman; then his smile fades, like he’s just had a nasty surprise. Then he looks over at Ben.

Shit, thinks Ben, as he watches them coming towards him. What’s she gone and said to him?

‘It seems that Miss Monroe has hurt her wrist,’ goes Master Alex, looking a bit pink about the cheeks. ‘You’re to drive her home at once.’