The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (9 page)

The next morning she was sent back to her own room, because Cousin Lettice said it was inappropriate to go on sleeping in the nursery. Madeleine stood on the rug, gazing blankly at her things: at the dolls and the dressing gown on the end of the bed, and Mister Parrot. He had been placed on the chair – presumably by Cousin Lettice tidying up – along with her dried-out scarf and sealskin hat and mittens.

It was strange to look at Mister Parrot now. It felt as if he belonged to someone else. He wasn’t real any more. He was just a toy which her mother had made out of green and blue felt, with blue glass buttons for eyes. He was outside the shell.

She took off her frock and climbed beneath the covers and slept until noon, then got dressed again and padded into the nursery. She was leaning over the cot, dangling a knotted handkerchief for the baby to scowl at, when Cousin Lettice walked in.

As always, Cousin Lettice spoke without preamble. ‘You’, she said to Madeleine in her accusatory way, ‘will pack your trunk. The day after tomorrow we take the train for London. Henceforth you will live with us. The infant will go to Mr Fynn’s sister in Birmingham.’

She continued to say something about schools and headlice and the desirability of home tuition, but Madeleine stopped listening. When Cousin Lettice had mentioned the baby’s going to Birmingham, it felt as if someone had cut a hole in the shell and let in a blast of freezing air. It made her feel shaky and horribly exposed.

The world crowded in on her, and she could no longer keep it out. She felt the cold roughness of the rug beneath her stockinged feet. She heard the loud, stiff rustle of Cousin Lettice’s gown as she approached the cot. She smelt the sour smell of the baby, which had just been sick.

The baby belonged to
her
. It was her task to look after it. That was her job. How could it live at Birmingham, wherever that was, if she, Madeleine, lived in London?

It wasn’t possible. She couldn’t let it happen. Her mind raced. ‘Cousin Lettice?’ she said at last.

Cousin Lettice stopped talking and fixed her with her colourless stare.

Madeleine improvised. ‘Mama . . .’ she began, ‘Mama wants us to stay together.’

Two red blotches appeared on Cousin Lettice’s sallow cheeks. ‘What?’ she said sharply. ‘What is this you say?’

Madeleine caught her lower lip in her teeth.

Cousin Septimus appeared in the doorway, looking irritated. ‘Lettice, there is a tradesman at the door who—’

Cousin Lettice silenced him with a glance. ‘What is this you say’, she said to Madeleine, ‘about your mother wishing you to stay together?’

Cousin Septimus shut his mouth with an audible pop. He looked appalled.

Madeleine glanced from Cousin Lettice to Cousin Septimus and back again. ‘Mama wants you to look after us
both
,’ she mumbled. ‘She said – she said you’re the only one who can help us. With the taint.’

She had their full attention now. ‘Mama’, she went on, developing her theme, ‘said that only you can save us – save us both. Together. That’s me and . . .’ she glanced from the baby to the books on the shelf:
The Water Babies
and
Les Malheurs de Sophie
, ‘me and Sophie. That’s the baby. Sophie. That’s what she’s called.’

‘Not both of them,’ said Cousin Septimus, shaking his head so vigorously that his jowls wobbled. ‘Out of the question. We can’t possibly—’

Cousin Lettice raised her hand for silence. ‘A mother’s
wish
,’ she hissed. ‘It is our duty to pay it heed.’

‘A mother’s wish?’ Cousin Septimus studied her with dislike. ‘What would you know about that?’

Cousin Lettice’s colour deepened, but she refused to back down. ‘A mother’s wish,’ she repeated like a catechism. ‘A mother’s
dying
wish. It is a sacred charge, Septimus, you know that as well as I. It is a sacred charge which cannot be ignored.’

Cousin Septimus scowled, but did not demur. It appeared that even he had to agree with that.

Slowly, Madeleine breathed out. The shaky feeling was gone. The shell was whole again.

Chapter Seven

Letter to Jocelyn Monroe, Fever Hill Estate, Parish of Trelawny, Jamaica, from Captain Cameron Lawe, Carysfort Military Prison, Suakin, 18th March 1884.

Dear Jocelyn,

By the time this reaches you, you may already have seen accounts of an incident arising from the death of my Commanding Officer, Major Alasdair Falkirk, as a result of which I have been the subject of a General Court-Martial. I am writing to report the circumstances in so far as I can, and the sentence of the court, which Her Majesty has today confirmed. (In view of the ongoing campaign, the Court-Martial was convened at great speed, and I regret that there was not time to warn you of it in advance.)

Cameron set down the letter and put his elbows on his knees and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes.

Discharge with ignominy from Her Majesty’s Service. Forfeiture of all field medals and decorations. Committal as a common felon to a public prison for a term of not less than two years.

He remembered Jocelyn’s face on the day he had received his commission in the Borderers. He had been so proud. ‘For seven hundred years, your family has sent its best to fight for their country. You have the finest of traditions to uphold, my boy. Honour it.’

This was going to tear him apart.

Cameron took his hands from his eyes and stared at the rough coral wall of his cell. A large copper-coloured cockroach emerged from a crack beneath the window. A fly crawled across the notepaper on his makeshift desk. It was an old crate of Nestlé’s Condensed Milk which Sergeant Watts, an ill-at-ease gaoler, had dragged in for him the day before. As it was six inches lower than the rough native angareb on which he slept, he had to pause frequently to ease the ache in his shoulders.

He got up and went to the window, and the cockroach withdrew into its crack. Through the shutters came the steady roar of the bazaar. He smelled cumin and palm oil and goat.

Clear and bright and painfully vivid, he pictured the old man receiving the news. He would be on the great north verandah at Fever Hill, sitting in his favourite rattan armchair with the frayed old tartan throw trailing on the tiles. At his elbow there would be the usual Scotch and soda, and beside it the tarnished daguerreotype of Kitty, the young wife who had been dead for thirty-five years. The liver-spotted hands would be carefully shaking out his weekly
Times
– his one extravagance – which had just arrived on the mail coach from Kingston. The sunbleached eyes, as fierce as an osprey’s, would be scanning the columns with grim relish for reports of suffragists and Baptists and those damned, meddling educationists.

Then the stillness as he spots the familiar names:
. . . A notable casualty of the Battle of Tamai was Major Alasdair Falkirk of the 65th York and Lancasters. It is this correspondent’s painful duty to report the horrifying news that one Captain Cameron Lawe, a brother officer on special attachment from the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, was observed in the aftermath of the hero’s fall despoiling the body . . . persistently refused to explain his actions . . . immediate Court-Martial on grounds of insubordination and conduct unbecoming . . .

Beneath the window sill the cockroach re-emerged and tasted the air with delicate antennae.

. . . conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, pursuant to Article Fifty-three of the Articles of War . . . disobeying the lawful command of his superior officer in such a manner as to show a wilful defiance of his authority, pursuant to Article Forty-seven of the Articles of War . . .

The hearing had only lasted a morning, but it had felt like a week. It had taken place in the mess hall at Fort Euryalus, the one place in Suakin large enough to accommodate the regulation bench of thirteen officers together with twelve witnesses, three shorthand-writers, and a throng of spectators. The heat was overwhelming, the air thick with the sweet-onion stink of sixty hard-riding men in heavy field uniform. And the flies. God, those flies.

Cameron had found it hard to keep his mind on the proceedings.
Your parents are dead to me
, he had told the little girl in the park. Why had he said that? Why? Had he
wanted
Ainsley dead?

Irrational to imagine that wishes can influence events. But nevertheless he felt that. He felt responsible.

He should have moved heaven and earth to get a transfer back to his own regiment. If he had succeeded, perhaps Ainsley would not have been preoccupied as he rode across the battlefield. Perhaps he would have survived.

Compared with that, what did it matter what they said about him at the hearing?

‘You must tell us everything,’ Major Forrest had said on his first and only visit to Cameron’s cell. An etiolated man with a passion for lists, he had clearly been uncomfortable in his role of prosecutor. And his patience had soon worn thin. ‘Damnit, man, the fellows need an explanation! What the devil was it about? A woman? A debt? Just tell us. We’ve all been through it. We’d understand.’

Cameron had studied the bloodless face and wondered if that were true. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he had said.

‘Hang it all, Lawe, you know how this works. You’re not some raw recruit, you’re an experienced officer. They’ll throw the book at you.’

He was right about that. For the army deals in certainties: cause and effect, obedience and disobedience, crime and punishment. His silence created uncertainty, and was therefore the worst betrayal of all.

He had soon given up listening to the prosecutor making his case. Fort Euryalus, he mused. That’s an odd name. Wasn’t there a Euryalus who fought at Troy?

Jocelyn would know all about that.
The Iliad
was his Bible. When they were small, he used to read them a passage every night as a bedtime story. They didn’t understand a word, but they adored it just the same, because it was Jocelyn.

He was the only father they had ever really known, for he had come for them on the day of the accident which had killed their parents. Cameron had been barely six, and Sinclair just a baby.

The white house at Arethusa had been in uproar that day. High rooms echoing to the piercing
ai ai ai
of Negro mourning. Bare feet slapping on hardwood floors. Cameron, forgotten in the chaos, had been discovered on the stairs, and briskly shooed away.
Gwaan back a yuh room, Mas’ Camron! Gwaan back a yuh room!

Instead he’d wandered out onto the verandah, where his mother used to sit with him and watch the rain sweeping the cane-pieces. She would laugh as the grey curtain moved towards them, and clap her hands when the lightning split the sky.

Bewildered, Cameron had stood beside her empty chair and wondered what would happen now. The servants said his mother was gone for ever, but he didn’t understand what that meant. All he knew was that he didn’t belong here any more. He was a different colour from everyone else.

He wondered if he was old enough to look after himself. He could find plenty of mangoes and guineps to eat, but where would he sleep? And what if there was a hurricane or a cane-fire or a flood?

Then Jocelyn had come. Cameron had watched the tall, unsmiling gentleman riding slowly up the white marl carriageway between the green cane-pieces. The tall gentleman had barked at the servants to get back to work, despatched the baby and its nurse in a buggy, and finally hoisted Cameron before him on his monumental horse, and set off slowly down the carriageway. On the long ride to Fever Hill he never smiled or said a word, but his arm held Cameron fast like an iron bar.

And when they reached the great house on the hill, Jocelyn sat him down on a verandah overlooking a vast rippling valley of cane which stretched to the distant curve of the sea. He introduced Cameron to the two huge bull mastiffs, Castor and Pollux, and made him hold out his hand to be sniffed, so that they would know him for part of the household. Then he had the housekeeper bring out a big tumbler of coconut milk and a bowl of red pea soup. The soup was thick with salt beef and cocos and yellow yam, and Cameron demolished it in seconds, like a puppy.

Then Jocelyn took his hand in a leathery grasp and led him to the library, where they walked the length of the family portraits. Jocelyn spoke of the Monroe who had fought at Falkirk in 1298, and of the Lawe who had distinguished himself at Agincourt, and of the centuries-old friendship between the two families, which had begun in 1655 when Nathaniel Lawe and Benneit Monroe had sailed for Jamaica together, and then carved up the Northside between them: Benneit taking the land to the west of Falmouth, and Nat Lawe taking that to the east.

‘Our families are bound together,’ Jocelyn told him, ‘by ties of shared adversity and marriage and friendship. Your father—’ he broke off and blew his nose for quite a long time, ‘your father was my best friend. Henceforth I shall be as a father to you. You belong here now. At Fever Hill.’

Cameron ran his fingers over the coral window sill, and the cockroach darted back into its crack. He thought, the old man gave you a home. And see how you have repaid him.

For the first time in his life he saw himself as he truly was. Arrogant. Self-righteous. Intolerant. And with a deep, ungovernable impulse to violence which until now he had never questioned.

He remembered that last ride with Ainsley at the oasis. The raw, churning anger in his chest. He had been so certain. So sure that he was right.

On the makeshift desk the letter to Jocelyn waited for his signature. The stilted account had taken hours to draft and filled two sides, but he still hadn’t found a way to explain or even hint at what he had taken from the body of ‘Major Falkirk’. Others would read the letter before it reached Jocelyn, so he must be circumspect in the extreme.

On a separate sheet he had penned a few equally guarded lines about ‘Mrs Falkirk’ and her children.
A child of ten, I believe, and an infant yet to be born. Needless to say, something must be done for them, as I understand that the major’s means were but moderate.