The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (73 page)

In the end, she decided not to do anything – at least, not today. After all, she could hardly saddle her horse and ride off to Bethlehem in the middle of Christmas lunch.

Fortunately, Cameron was preoccupied with crop-time, and Madeleine had her hands full with the children, so neither of them noticed that Sophie hardly said a word. After lunch Cameron rode over to Maputah, and Madeleine calmed the children down with a game of Answerit. Sophie wrote to Rebecca Traherne, excusing herself from tomorrow’s Masquerade, then read the children stories. Then she pleaded a sick headache and went early to bed.

Boxing Day dawned cloudy and cool – ‘bleaky’, as the servants called it – and everyone was subdued and slightly cross. After breakfast Madeleine took the dog cart to fetch Clemency from Fever Hill. Clemency had flatly refused to desert her dead child on Christmas Day, but after much persuasion had consented to come for Boxing Day and stay the night, to help Sophie look after the children while Madeleine and Cameron were at Parnassus. Predictably, Clemency was now repenting her weakness and desperate to cancel the visit, which was why Madeleine asked Sophie to accompany her.

She would have gone anyway, as she needed to question Evie about Ben. But to her dismay, the McFarlanes weren’t at the old slave village. According to Clemency, they were spending Christmas with relations – ‘somewhere’. Clemency couldn’t remember where.

Back at Eden, they ate an elaborate lunch in Clemency’s honour. Then Cameron rode over to the western cane-pieces at Orange Grove, while Madeleine withdrew to bathe and dress for the Masquerade, and Clemency and Sophie kept the children amused. At least Clemency did, by drawing an enormous Christmas tree and helping them colour in the decorations. Sophie pretended to watch, and had second thoughts.

Ben was all alone in the world. She’d never known anyone so alone. He had no family, and no friends except for Evie, who hardly saw him. Grace and her relations looked after him because in the past he’d done them a good turn; but they were motivated by obligation, not affection. He wasn’t one of them. In a country where a man was either a planter or a banana farmer, a Negro or a coloured or a coolie or a Chinaman, Ben was just a poor white. He didn’t fit in. How would he feel if she didn’t come and see him when he was hurt?

The answer, she reminded herself sternly, was that he probably wouldn’t care one way or the other. After all, he’d been quite happy to let her wait on Romilly Bridge with neither explanation nor apology. Why should he want to see her?

But what if he did?

At five o’clock, Madeleine and Cameron left for Parnassus. They were starting early, as Cameron needed to stop off at the Fever Hill works to talk to the manager.

‘We’ll be back at some unearthly hour around dawn,’ said Madeleine, rolling her eyes. ‘Rebecca always lays on an enormous breakfast, and by then everyone’s so exhausted, they fall on it.’

Already Poppy was getting the children ready for an early bed. Belle was still a little frail after shaking off a slight fever the week before, while Fraser had simply eaten too many sweets. ‘I’ve hidden the rest,’ said Madeleine, drawing Sophie aside, ‘but he’ll work on Clemency, he always does, so I’m
counting
on you to be strong.’

Did Sophie imagine it, or did her sister give special emphasis to that ‘I’m counting on you’?
You
can’t
go to see him. I need you to promise me that you won’t. Don’t make things worse for him than they already are
.

At last the carriage departed in a cloud of dust, and the house settled into peace. It was twenty past five. It would be light for about another two or three hours, and after that there would be a nearly full moon. Plenty of time to ride to Bethlehem and see him. She’d be home by eight. Nine at the latest. And Clemency and Poppy could look after the children.

But would that be fair on Clemency? To leave her alone, and in charge of the house?

And think of the humiliation if she rode all the way there, only to find that he’d already left. Everyone would know why she’d come. She’d be a laughing stock. The love-sick buckra miss, forlornly dogging the footsteps of her reluctant swain.

Clemency came out onto the verandah and perched on the sofa, and gave Sophie one of her wincing smiles. ‘They’re fast asleep,’ she whispered. ‘Exhausted, poor little dears. I must say, I am too.’

Sophie forced a smile. A whole evening with Clemency. She couldn’t do it. She needed to know that Ben was all right. She needed to see for herself.

Quickly, she stood up. ‘D’you know, I think I need some air. Should you mind dreadfully if I take myself off for a ride?’

Clemency’s pretty young-old face lit up with relief. ‘Darling, not at
all
! In fact, I was just going to ask if you’d mind if I went to my room for a little lie-down, and perhaps a short prayer?’

Sophie felt a twinge of sadness.
A short prayer
probably meant several hours on her knees, apologizing to Elliot for having deserted him. ‘Of course I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘You do whatever you like, Clemmie. I shall be back in a couple of hours, but don’t worry if I’m late. And don’t wait supper for me.’

Enough agonizing, she told herself briskly as she changed into her riding-skirt and pulled on her boots. For once, stop debating things from every angle, and simply
act
.

In the looking-glass she gave herself a small, determined smile. She felt better already.

In old times, the slaves had had three days’ holiday a year: Christmas Day, Boxing Day, and New Year’s Day. They’d made good use of them.

They’d shed their drab osnaburg clothing and dressed up in the brightest prints they could find, with anklets of scarlet john-crow berries and necklaces of blue clay beads, and fearsome cow-horned masks. Then, for those three days, they’d yelled and danced and drummed their way through towns, villages and estates, in a make-believe return to the African homeland they had lost.

The Masquerade at Parnassus was a tidy Anglicized version of the old parade. A sedate Britannia headed the procession, followed by the Montego Bay Coloured Troupe playing patriotic songs. Then came a carnival king and queen in flowing robes and gilt paper crowns, and an entourage of servants in fancy dress and papier mâché masks: the Sailor, the Jockey, the Messenger Boy; and finally a civilized version (in nautical dress) of the traditional ringleader, ‘Johnny Canoe’.

After the procession came a supper, a
tableau vivant
staged by the Falmouth Horticultural Society, dancing, and finally a breakfast. Such was the Trahernes’ Boxing Day Masquerade. It carried not the faintest echo of that darkest of all Christmases seventy-two years before, when the slaves had begun a rebellion that lasted for months, and destroyed over fifty Northside great houses.

But at Bethlehem, on the edge of the Cockpits, the echoes remained. And the parade was the real thing: a throwback to a darker, wilder past. No-one mentioned ‘Johnny Canoe’.
Jonkunoo
was king. Jockeys and sailors were nowhere to be seen; in their place were half-naked men in grotesquely horned masks: Devil, Horsehead, Pitchy-Patchy, the Bull – leaping, dancing and yelling to the harsh rhythms of pipe and drum. Europe had given way to Africa; English to half-forgotten snatches of Eboe and Koromantyn; pantomime royalty to witch-doctors and the Mothers of Darkness.

As a child, Sophie had watched Jonkunoo parades with a mixture of excitement and terror, but she’d always had Cameron to huddle against when it got too frightening. Now, as she tied her horse to a tree at the edge of the village, she was sharply aware that she was the only white person there.

A shouting, drumming, dancing crowd thronged the torchlit clearing. She saw faces she recognized, but they looked unfamiliar in the leaping shadows. The drums were loud in her ears. The air was thick with the smell of pimento-wood fires, and jerked hog, and pepperpot and rum. It had been a mistake to come. Ben couldn’t possibly be here.

As she stood uncertainly at the edge of the crowd, the Bull – the Jonkunoo himself – leaped out in front of her. The cow-horned mask thrust into her face, and she caught an alarming glimpse of dark eyes through painted slits, their whites stained yellow with ganja. ‘
Jonkunoo!
’ he bellowed, then leaped away.

She drew a shaky breath. Ridiculous to be frightened. She
knew
these people.

As she was pushing her way through the crowd, she saw a pickney she recognized: the schoolboy from Romilly Bridge. ‘No, Missy Sophie,’ he said when she asked if he’d seen the injured buckra man. ‘He went away.’ Where did he go? He shrugged and gave her an encouraging smile. ‘Not far.’ But she could see that he didn’t really know, and was only being polite.

It was as she’d feared. Ben was gone, and all she’d achieved was to make a fool of herself.

Then she caught sight of Evie, and relief washed over her.

The coloured girl was sitting with her mother and the village nanas beneath the breadfruit tree. She was hunched on the ground, and gazing at the procession with unseeing eyes. When she saw Sophie, her lips parted in a little ‘O’ of surprise. She glanced about her, signalled to Sophie to stay where she was, and got up and ran over to her. ‘What are you doing here?’ she said in a hoarse whisper. She looked tired and troubled, and her hand on Sophie’s arm was feverishly hot.

‘Where’s Ben?’ said Sophie.

Evie bit her lip. Then she drew Sophie aside into the comparative privacy of a coffee walk behind the houses.

‘Evie, you’ve
got
to tell me. He’s not at Great-Aunt May’s, I checked. She sacked him. So—’

‘He’s all right,’ said Evie. ‘Not to fret, Sophie. He’s all right.’

Sophie crossed her arms about her waist and took a few paces between the coffee trees. Suddenly she was alarmingly close to tears. She hadn’t realized until now how worried she’d been. ‘What
happened
?’

Evie put her hand on Sophie’s back and rubbed it gently up and down. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, you must know more than me. Maddy said it was an accident, but—’

‘An accident?’ Evie snorted. ‘No, he had a fight with Master Alex, and then—’

‘Master Alex?’ Sophie looked at her in bemusement. ‘But – you can’t mean that Alexander Traherne managed to beat him up?’

Evie burst out laughing. ‘Course not!’ She wiped her eyes, suddenly much more her usual self. ‘No, they met on the road, and got to argifying – I mean, arguing. Why they were arguing, I don’t know, but then Ben hit him. And the next day, he got set on by some men, and beaten up.’

‘What men?’

Evie shook her head. ‘Strangers from foreign.’

‘Strangers,’ Sophie repeated. Presumably ‘Master Alex’s’ hired thugs. ‘And where is he now?’

‘I don’t know, Sophie. He left yesterday. Got a lift partway with Uncle Eliphalet on his mule, but I don’t know to where.’

‘What direction? North? South?’

‘North-west.’

‘Towards the river?’

‘I think so. But truly, I don’t know.’

I do, thought Sophie.

It was nearly eight o’clock by the time she reached Romilly, and the light was fading. The most direct route from Bethlehem would have been by the river path which followed the Martha Brae all the way to the ruins. But that went straight past the house, and she didn’t want to bump into Clemency or one of the servants. So instead she took the main road that went past Maputah and skirted the edge of the Cockpits, then turned right at the crossroads, and headed down the Eden Road to Romilly. She was lucky. Everyone was either at a Jonkunoo parade, or sleeping it off. The countryside was strangely hushed, for the sea breeze had long since dropped, and the land breeze was only blowing faintly from the hills.

When she reached Romilly it appeared deserted, but she’d been expecting that. She tethered her horse to an ironwood tree and made her way on foot along the river path which led to the innermost ruins of the old slave compound. Giant bamboo turned the path into an airless, shadowy tunnel. A thick carpet of leaves muffled her footsteps.

Ben had set up camp in a roofless, three-walled ruin a few yards from the river. He hadn’t heard her approach. He was in shirtsleeves, sitting on a block of cut-stone beside a small fire, with one leg stuck out in front of him, and a pair of bamboo crutches laid on a blanket on the ground.

The side of his face that was turned towards her was unmarked, but she saw the patchwork of purplish-yellow bruises on both forearms, and the bandage round his knee. His shirt was open to the waist, revealing lower ribs strapped with tape, and more cuts and bruises above. By the crutches lay a small calabash, probably containing one of Grace’s special salves, with a roll of tape beside it, a pair of rusty scissors, and a can of water that he’d obviously been heating on the fire. It looked as if he’d started to change the dressings, and then lost interest.

As he turned to poke the fire, she saw the dark bruising down his right cheekbone and around the eye; the crusted blood on a deep vertical cut bisecting his eyebrow. The contrast with the unmarked side of his face was startling.

She stepped out from under the giant bamboo, and he saw her and went still. ‘I thought I’d find you here,’ she said.

Chapter Fifteen

He did not reply. But plainly he was horrified to see her.

Suddenly she saw herself as she must appear to him: her hair coming loose, her jacket and riding-skirt covered in dust. The bedraggled bluestocking, trailing after her unwilling prey.

What was she doing here? He didn’t want her. And why should he? Look at him. After that one long stare he had turned back to the fire, and, in profile, the unmarked side of his face was forbiddingly beautiful.

But still she floundered on. ‘Why didn’t you stay at Bethlehem? I mean, they were looking after you there, so why—’

‘Because I wanted to come here,’ he cut in. In the leaping firelight his cheeks were dark with stubble. It made him look older, rougher, and startlingly unfamiliar. ‘I wanted to be on my own. All right?’