The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (76 page)

‘Sophie,’ said Cameron, dragging her back to the present. ‘If you go back to England now, you’ll be running away.’

‘No. No, I’ll be making it easier for everyone.’

‘Not for me,’ he said quietly. ‘Not for Madeleine.’

She shook her head. ‘She’ll be better without me. Besides, she has Clemency. And Grace.’ She didn’t need to explain why Madeleine found it easier to tolerate them. Clemency and Grace had both lost children.

‘You’re running away,’ he said again.

‘Cameron—’

‘It doesn’t work, Sophie. I know. I tried it once.’

She did not reply. Perhaps he was right, but surely she had no choice. How could she stay at Eden? She didn’t deserve it. She didn’t deserve any of it.

And yet, she wanted to be persuaded to stay. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t yet booked her passage to England.

Inside the house a door opened and closed, and they both turned to see Madeleine in her long, rust-coloured Japanese dressing-gown walking across the hall on her way to the bath-house. Cameron watched her until she’d gone.

‘How is she?’ asked Sophie. ‘I mean, really?’

Cameron shook his head. ‘I don’t know. She won’t talk to me. That is, she talks to me, but she isn’t there.’

It was true. Madeleine sleep-walked through the days. She had bouts of activity when she would sew mourning gowns and run the household, but then she would abruptly wilt, and go to her room and sleep for hours. To Sophie she was kind, if a little distant, but she rarely met her eyes.

To everyone’s surprise, it was Clemency who’d kept the household from falling apart. Hopelessly ineffectual when Fraser was ill, she knew exactly what to do now that he was dead. She didn’t even seem perturbed at leaving Elliot for so long. She simply handled everything with a brisk, unflinching pragmatism which never faltered. After all, she was used to dead children. She’d been living with one for thirty years.

So while Cameron struggled to bring in the cane, and Madeleine sleep-walked through the days, Clemency took everything in hand. She gently persuaded Cameron to halt all estate work on the day of the funeral, so that the men could pay their respects. ‘They’ll expect it, Cameron dear. Tradition
matters
at times like these.’ She deftly settled the funeral arrangements. ‘It’ll have to be a mahogany coffin; after they turn five it isn’t done to bury them in white.’ She ordered yards of black parramatta, bombazine and crêpe, and set Grace to making aprons and armbands for the staff. She sent Sophie to Falmouth to buy visiting-cards and writing-paper with precisely the correct depth of black edging. And she wrote dozens of beautiful little thank-you notes for the flowers which poured in. ‘Flowers to Eden,’ Madeleine remarked with a wan smile. ‘I never imagined that would be necessary.’

Most important of all, on that first appalled and disbelieving morning, Clemency had sent for Olivia Herapath to take the mourning photograph. They took it without Madeleine’s knowing. ‘But it’ll be
such
a comfort to her later,’ Clemency told Sophie in her breathless whisper. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to see it, dear? So beautiful and so very
like
. In his sailor suit, with his favourite lead soldiers, and that new kite that you gave him. Are you sure you won’t see it? Well then, at least take a lock of his hair. I nearly forgot about that, but clever Grace reminded me just as they were closing the coffin.’

But Sophie had recoiled in horror from the little ivory envelope containing the carefully folded blue tissue paper. She didn’t want mementoes. She didn’t need them. She saw him all the time.

She saw him in her dreams, and as soon as she woke up. She saw him when she opened the
Introductory Primer
and read the passage which she’d first turned up in the glow of the nursery lamp.
No microbe can kill more quickly . . . we are wholly at a loss to explain why some patients suffer only mild infections, while others succumb to the acute fulminating form in a matter of hours
. In other words, Belle had caught only a slight fever, while Fraser had died.

Across the verandah, Cameron watched a croaker lizard scuttle along the baluster. Sophie wondered if he was angry with her; if he blamed her for his son’s death. But he didn’t look angry. Just exhausted and quietly devastated.

The lizard dropped from the baluster and moved towards the mouth of a drain. Scout gave a grunt and shot after it, his claws scrabbling on the tiles. The lizard disappeared down the drain. Scout grunted in disgust, and trotted back to his master.

‘Cameron,’ said Sophie quietly.

He turned to her, and tried to compose his features into a smile.

‘You do understand why I have to go?’

He hesitated. ‘Sophie – it wasn’t your fault.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because’, he said evenly, ‘you sent for the doctor as soon as he became ill. Sooner than anyone else would have done. And you did everything for him – everything that could be done.’

Sophie sat in silence, and her eyes grew hot. She wanted to believe him. If she could believe him, she could remain at Eden. Perhaps she could even see Ben again.

‘I don’t say this to make you feel better,’ Cameron said with an edge to his voice. ‘I say it because it’s true.’

‘And if I’d been with him all the time? If I hadn’t gone out and left him—’

‘He’d still have died.’

‘How do you know? How do you know?’

He gave her a long, steady look. ‘Because I asked Dr Pritchard. And Dr Mallory. And they both told me, quite categorically, that it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference if you’d been there or not.’

Sophie sat in stunned silence. So it had occurred to him to blame her. He had considered it. And then, being Cameron, he had found out the facts. And he had asked
both
doctors. There was something about that which frightened her. It showed such a need for confirmation.

She wondered what he would have done if the doctors’ answers had been different.
I won’t have Madeleine hurt
, he had told her once.
I won’t let anyone do that. Not even you
. She looked at his strong, uncompromising features, and wondered if he truly believed – not in his head, but in his heart – that she was wholly without blame.

For herself, she couldn’t do it. The events of that night had taken on an unreal quality, and she couldn’t untangle them in her mind. She’d been with Ben, and then Fraser had died. She couldn’t think of Ben without seeing Fraser’s wide grey eyes.
Fornication Leads to Misery and Hell
.

A small noise from inside the house, and they turned to see Belle standing in the doorway.

She wore a black frock with a wide black sash around her hips, and black stockings, and short black buttoned boots. A big black bow was sliding off her hair, and she was scowling and clutching the ever-present Spot by one ear.

She’d been impossible ever since her brother died, whining and clingy one moment, and the next throwing a screaming tantrum. It wasn’t until Clemency had put her into full mourning dress that she’d become a little better. ‘It’s only proper,’ Clemency had murmured when Sophie protested. ‘And it’ll make her feel part of things, which is what she needs.’

Scout jumped up and trotted over to the five-year-old, and nudged her in the chest. She gave him a smack on the nose. Scout shook his head with a soft flapping of dewlaps, and padded back to Cameron.

‘Papa,’ said Belle, ‘Clemency says I’ve got to stay indoors, and it’s
boring
. Why can’t I play outside? We’ve only just had Christmas.’

Cameron blinked as if he was having trouble recognizing her. ‘Just do as Clemency says,’ he said quietly.

‘But can’t I—’

‘No. Not yet.’

Sulkily, Belle thrust out her lower lip. She stalked across to the sofa and leaned against her father’s calf, and put one small hand on his knee. ‘But it isn’t
fair
. Somebody’s taken down the swing. Please,
please
make them put it up again?’

Cameron met Sophie’s eyes above his daughter’s head, and lifted his shoulders in a helpless shrug. The children had always been Madeleine’s responsibility. He was too busy around the estate to see much of them, except on Sundays, when he was usually too tired.

‘We’ll see,’ Sophie told her niece.

‘Who took it down?’ said Belle crossly. ‘I bet Fraser will thump them when he finds out. And so will I.’

Again Cameron met Sophie’s eyes. ‘
Qu’est-ce que je peux lui dire?
’ he said. ‘
Elle ne comprend rien
.’

‘
Mais bien sûr
,’ she replied. ‘
Elle est beaucoup trop jeune
.’ Of course Belle didn’t understand. How could a five-year-old understand that her brother was never coming back?

Fraser, too, had been too young. He had died before he understood what death was.

Still in French, Cameron asked Sophie if she would mind summoning Poppy, or Clemency, or – or anyone to take his daughter off his hands.

Sophie considered that for a moment, and then got to her feet. ‘I don’t think she needs Poppy,’ she told him in English. ‘Or Clemency. She needs you.’

Belle was still leaning against his calf, scowling and chewing the zebra’s ear as she struggled to follow what they were saying. There was a determined set to her chin that was very like her mother.

Cameron looked down at her for a moment, and his face tightened. Sophie wondered if he was remembering all the afternoons when he’d gone off alone to the works, or to some cane-piece, or to town, without taking his son along with him.

He rubbed a hand over his face, and cleared his throat. Then he leaned forward and picked up his daughter beneath the arms, and swung her onto the sofa beside him.

Sophie left them sitting side by side: Belle quietly scolding the zebra for some imaginary transgression, Cameron with one arm on the back of the sofa behind her, absently stroking her glossy dark hair as he gazed out at the lime trees to where Fraser’s swing used to hang.

Chapter Seventeen

‘So that’s where you were that night,’ said Madeleine between her teeth, as she paced up and down the verandah the following afternoon. ‘You were with Ben Kelly.’

Sophie sat on the sofa and watched her sister twisting her hands together, and held her breath.

It had happened without warning, like a thunderclap. She’d come out to join Madeleine for tea, and found her alone and tautly waiting. Apparently the previous evening, Ben had sent word by Moses, asking Sophie to meet him on Overlook Hill – and somehow Madeleine had intercepted the message.

The previous evening.
Which meant that Madeleine’s anger hadn’t sprung from the impulse of the moment.

‘I
asked
you not to go to him,’ Madeleine said accusingly. Her face was pale, except for a dark red streak on either cheek. ‘You promised that you wouldn’t.’

Sophie opened her mouth to say that she’d never promised. Then she shut it again. What was the use?

‘Did you sleep with him?’ Madeleine said suddenly.

Sophie looked down at her fists, clenched in her lap.

‘My God,’ said Madeleine, ‘you did, didn’t you? He summoned you – so you left Fraser to go to him. And then he—’

‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘Did he hurt you?’

‘No!’

‘My God. My God.’ She put both hands to her temples. Then she looked at Sophie. Her eyes were hard. Her face had a rigidity that Sophie had never seen before. ‘I’ll never forgive him,’ she said in a low voice.

Sophie stared at her. They both knew that she didn’t just mean Ben. She meant her sister, too.

Sophie spread her cold hands on her knees. ‘Madeleine . . .’ she began. ‘It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t—’

Madeleine turned on her. ‘Don’t you ever speak of this again. D’you understand? I’ll never forgive him. I hope he rots in hell.’

Vapour misted the tree-ferns as Sophie rode her mare up the overgrown forest track on Overlook Hill. The woods echoed with early morning birdcalls: the harsh rattle of the jabbering crows, the purring
cru-cru-cruuu
of the baldpates, and the lonely, explosive cry of the red-tailed hawk.

It had been shamefully easy to get away. Cameron had left for the works at daybreak, and Clemency was still asleep. Belle was in the nursery, cutting out pictures of ponies from back numbers of
The Equestrian Journal
. Madeleine hadn’t yet woken up. After the scene on the verandah the day before, she’d gone to her room. She hadn’t emerged for dinner, and Cameron had told Sophie that she’d taken a Dover’s powder and gone to bed. He’d given Sophie a thoughtful look, and she’d wondered how much he knew. She hadn’t had the courage to ask.

She kept seeing that look in Madeleine’s eyes. That hard, accusing stare which told her what her sister couldn’t bring herself to say out loud.
I’ll never forgive you.

And who could blame her? She’d begged Sophie not to go to Ben, but she had, and then Fraser had died. The two events were unrelated, but not in her heart.

Sophie understood that, because she felt it herself. And now more than ever she knew that she had to get away. Away from Madeleine and Cameron, and Eden and Ben. She felt exhausted and fragile, as if the slightest touch would break her into pieces. She longed for the grey anonymity of London.

With her riding-crop she swept aside spiders’ webs strung across the path. Dewdrops pattered onto great waxy leaves. Lizards darted up tree trunks netted with creepers. She smelt the sharp green scent of new growth, and the heavy sweetness of decay. The smell of Eden.

Tomorrow it would be nothing more than a memory. And that was the way it
should
be. She couldn’t face it any more. Eden had become terrible to her.

She reached a point in the path where the way was blocked by the tilting trunk of a fallen breadnut tree. Dismounting to lead her horse, she came face to face with a tangle of cockleshell orchids on the mossy bark. She blinked at the twisted pale green petals, and breathed in their funereal sweetness. With a dull ache she remembered how they’d glowed in the moonlight, just before he’d kissed her.