The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (122 page)

Traherne raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re more likely to make a fool of yourself than to cause a scandal,’ he remarked. ‘Although of course, you must act as you think best.’

He was right. If she cut him, she would only bring ridicule on herself. She was powerless. There was nothing she could do.

Once again she turned her back on him, and this time she saw Drum pleading with his companion. In the moonlight she recognized Adam Palairet.

As she watched, Palairet glanced over Drum’s shoulder and saw her. For a moment his eyes held hers; then his gaze flicked to Traherne beside her. She could tell by his stillness that he was puzzled to see them together. Then he turned and spoke to Drum, and put his hand on his arm and led him away. There was a gentleness in the gesture which surprised her. It was as if he were soothing a troubled child.

Beside her, Traherne was watching the little pageant on the lawn with amusement. ‘I wonder what that’s all about.’

She took a breath and put her hands together. ‘Don’t ever speak to me again,’ she said.

He raised an eyebrow. ‘My dear girl—’

‘I’m not your dear girl. I’m engaged to be married.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘If you try to spoil things, I shall—’

‘Yes?’ he broke in gently. ‘You shall what? Try to make people believe in some bizarre misfortune which never took place?’

‘Where have you
been
?’ said Osbourne when she reached the safety of his room.

She shut the door behind her and leaned against it, breathing hard.

‘Good heavens,’ he said, ‘you’re shaking. What the devil has happened?’ He drew her into his arms and she leaned against him. ‘Is it Adam?’ he said. ‘Has that brute—’

‘No, no, it’s—’

‘Has he been interrogating you about me?’

‘Take me to London,’ she said fiercely.

‘What?’

‘You said you wanted to get away. Well, now I want it too.’

‘But – what about Dodo? I thought you couldn’t possibly leave her?’

‘I’ll square it with Dodo.’

He smiled. ‘Ah, the inconstancy of woman!’ He bent and kissed her mouth. ‘We shall leave at dawn,’ he murmured. ‘It’s already arranged.’ He kissed her again, more deeply, but she twisted her head away. ‘Darling infant,’ he whispered as his arms tightened about her.

‘Osbourne, not now . . .’

‘Darling, darling infant.’

‘
No
. . .’

But in the end, she let him. She didn’t want to. But neither did she want to be alone.

As she lay beneath him on the counterpane, she caught sight of her maid’s costume lying crumpled on the rug. It looked like a sloughed-off snakeskin.

‘Darling kitten,’ gasped Osbourne, squeezing her breast.

She remembered the flick of the yellowsnake’s tail as it disappeared round the tree trunk; just before Traherne put his hand on her breast . . .

Later, when Osbourne had rolled off her, she lay staring up into the darkness. She saw again that avuncular, old-gentleman smile.

It was a chance encounter, she told herself. It means nothing.

Beside her, Osbourne had fallen asleep. She turned on her elbow to look at him, and he suddenly seemed unfamiliar: a handsome, golden-haired stranger who had wandered into her life and promised to make everything better.

And it
will
be better, she thought. Everything will be better once we’re married.

Chapter Fourteen

Sibella was in a state of ‘utter distraction’ when they reached Berkeley Square. This meant that she was reading a novel on her favourite peach-coloured sofa, and looking the
dernier cri
in a gauzy mauve afternoon gown which suited her fair hair and plump figure to perfection, while a cold three-course luncheon awaited them in the dining room.

‘My new walking costume is a
disaster
,’ she announced briskly as she offered her cheek to Belle and then to Osbourne. ‘Addisons sent it round yesterday, and they’ve used the most ghastly machined lace in the panels. I’m minded to send it straight back. Added to which, Max’s wretched governess is ill; what am I to do if it’s serious and he has to come up to Town? I’ve a skeleton staff here as it is: Cook’s in an isolation ward at the Nuffield, and Mary and Jim are threatening to run off and nurse their relations. Osbourne, darling, do go down to Sussex and sort things out.’

‘Sort out what?’ said Osbourne.

‘Max!’ cried Sibella. ‘I can’t have him with me, not with half the world falling ill of this beastly ’flu. Even the doctors are going down with it. They’re so short-staffed that they’re talking of calling in the veterinary surgeons.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ said Osbourne. ‘I’ve affairs of my own to sort out.’ He caught Belle’s eye and winked. On the drive up from Kyme, he’d spoken of finding them an apartment for after they were married. ‘Something quiet and delightful, in one of those pretty little streets off Cheyne Walk.’

Belle gave him a tight smile. She hadn’t slept well, worrying about Traherne. ‘But you will be staying with us, won’t you, darling?’ she said. ‘That’s all right, isn’t it, Sibella?’

‘I’m counting on it,’ said Sibella. ‘We need a man in the house at times like these.’

Osbourne sighed. ‘I can’t possibly.’

‘Why not?’ Belle said uneasily. The prospect of being without him alarmed her. It was no use telling herself that Traherne would never come here – and that even if he did, he wouldn’t be admitted; that Sibella hated her father, and the servants had permanent instructions to say that she was not at home.

‘I simply can’t,’ Osbourne said again. ‘This is the first place Adam will look.’

Sibella rolled her eyes. ‘You’re not still avoiding him?’

He looked pained. ‘It’s rather a case of him hounding me.’

‘Well, I don’t know anything about that,’ said Sibella, ‘but I do
wish
he were here to sort things out about Max. Adam’s the kind of man who gets things done.’

‘The solid, dependable type,’ said Osbourne with a yawn.

Sibella gave him a wry smile. ‘That’s not quite what I mean.’

‘Well, as I’m not the solid, dependable type,’ he said, rising to his feet, ‘and I’ve an obscene amount to do, I’m off to my club.’

Belle’s hands tightened in her lap. She had an irrational sense that things were slipping away from her; that Traherne had been only the beginning . . . ‘Shall we be seeing you tomorrow?’ she said, hating how clinging that sounded.

‘What barnacles women are,’ murmured Osbourne. ‘Kitten, I shall come if I can. But really, I—’

‘Luncheon,’ Sibella said crisply. ‘One o’clock. Don’t be late.’

When he’d gone, Sibella cast herself onto the sofa with a sigh of relief. ‘Actually, I’m rather glad he’s gone. Now we can have a quiet time on our own.’ She threw Belle an appraising look. ‘What’s wrong? Have you two had a tiff?’

Belle shook her head. ‘Everything’s fine. And you? How are you?’

Sibella threw her a look that said she knew she was being fobbed off; then went along with it. ‘Yet another proposal from dear old Sir Monty,’ she said. ‘Honestly, Belle, why do they
imagine
I want to become a wife again? It’s so much more fun being a widow. But speaking of wives, how’s Dodo?’

Belle told her, and Sibella listened avidly. She had an unquenchable appetite for gossip, and a starkly unromantic view of relations between men and women, which her enemies called callous. When Belle had finished, she reached for the bonbon dish. ‘It sounds,’ she said, ‘no different from most marriages I know.’

‘Isn’t that a bit harsh? After all, this is Dodo.’

Sibella shrugged. ‘She’s tougher than you think. She’ll get over it. One can get over anything, darling. Even marriage.’

Belle studied her for a moment. Then she broke into a grin. ‘Oh, Sibella. What would I do without you?’

She meant it. It always struck her as bizarre that the Trahernes should have furnished both the man who’d shattered her life, and the woman who’d put it together again. Sibella Clyne was shrewd, pragmatic and unsentimental, but she’d been briskly kind to Belle: never questioning her hatred of school, and lying fluently to the headmistress on the numerous occasions when she’d run away. She’d never once badgered Belle about her lack of involvement in war work, and in recent months she’d turned a discreet blind eye to the affair with Osbourne.

To the outside world she was a plump, gossipy socialite who gave excellent dinners and talked amusing nonsense. But sometimes Belle caught a flash of another woman underneath: a woman who’d ‘got over’ two deeply unhappy marriages; who treated her wealth with disdain and her friends with quiet generosity; who rebuffed her numerous suitors with firmness and grace.

‘Belle, what’s wrong?’ Sibella said again.

Belle hesitated. She was longing to tell Sibella all about her engagement, but something held her back. With a shock she realized what it was. She didn’t know if Sibella would be delighted or appalled. ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ she said.

Sibella gave an unladylike snort.

‘If you want to know,’ Belle said lightly, ‘while I was at Kyme, I had a bad bout of homesickness.’ She paused. ‘And I happened to run into your father.’

‘Oh Lord, no wonder you’re out of sorts.’ Sibella leaned back and stared at the ceiling. She’d never told Belle what lay behind her animosity to him, and Belle had never asked. It was simply a given between them. ‘I’d heard he was in the country,’ she said at last. ‘No doubt he’s seeing to poor Lyndon’s affairs.’

There was a silence while they thought about that.

Sibella got up and went to the looking-glass above the chimney-piece. Suddenly her face showed every one of her thirty-four years. ‘It’s so odd,’ she said in an altered voice. ‘I never thought I cared for Lyndon when he was alive; he was simply my odious little brother. But now that he’s gone . . .’ She sat down again, shaking her head.

Belle went to sit beside her.

‘This wretched war,’ Sibella said shakily.

Belle took her hand.

Sibella gave her a watery smile. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m just a bit down. So many gone. It’s so – so hard to
accept
. . .’ She gave a little snort of laughter. ‘Do you know, this morning I was reading quite an amusing piece in
The Times
, and I actually made a mental note to cut it out and send it to Freddie? The poor man’s been dead for over a year, and I still can’t . . .’

‘I know,’ said Belle.

‘It’s not as if I loved him,’ said Sibella. ‘People like me aren’t capable of love. But I was
used
to him. With him I never had to pretend.’ She took a ragged breath, then put both hands to her hair. ‘Heavens, I must look a perfect fright.’

Belle stood up. ‘Let’s go and have lunch,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll see about this disaster of a walking costume. And if there’s the slightest doubt about it, I shall take it back to Addisons myself.’

The costume did need altering, and the next morning Belle seized on it as an excuse to get out, and made her way to Bond Street, leaving Sibella laid up with a headache.

Belle had slept badly, for Osbourne had neither telephoned nor sent a note. She couldn’t shake off the sense that her house of cards was about to come tumbling down.

Having declined Sibella’s offer of the motor, she made her way on foot, in the hope that the walk would lift her spirits. As she turned into Bond Street she was engulfed by the familiar crowds in khaki and mourning: the Tommies and the officers, the conductorettes and munitions workers; the Dominion troops whose dark faces always evoked Jamaica. She saw VADs pushing the wounded in Bath chairs: pale, shrunken young men in jaunty blue flannel suits and red neckties. She passed a newspaper stand where headlines screamed of the Allies’ triumph in driving the Germans back beyond the Antwerp–Metz railway.

She felt the familiar twinge of guilt. Her mother and aunt worked hard for the Jamaica War Relief Fund; Dodo sent books to officers in the trenches; even Sibella organized parcels to the Front. But she herself had resolutely avoided all that. It was as if any involvement in war work might bring her too close to reality – to the reality she’d been running from since she’d left Jamaica. In London she had her mask: her identity as Belle Lawe, the irrepressible socialite. If she gave that up – even temporarily – then real life would intervene, and she might be found out . . .

She saw to the alterations at the dressmaker’s, then, as the anxiety still hadn’t worn off, she decided to cheer herself up with a visit to the park, and hailed a cab: one of the aged hansoms that had been pressed back into use now that the motor-taxis and omnibuses were on restricted service.

As they drove, she realized quite how much London had changed while she’d been down at Kyme. Here and there in the crowd, she saw people wearing white surgical masks as protection against the ’flu, which was worsening day by day, and beginning to be spoken of as an epidemic.

No-one else seemed to find the masks alarming. No-one else even noticed. The cab rattled past a mother and child on the pavement, both wearing masks. Their eyes met hers blankly. They were used to this. But to her it didn’t seem real. She began to feel like a ghost.

‘Oh, people are dropping like flies,’ the cabbie told her with gloomy relish. ‘It’s ten times worse than it was in the summer, and now it’s mostly the young as are falling off. They’re saying it’s the Kaiser’s secret weapon, but I don’t know. I remember the Russian ’flu of ’89, and you’re not telling me
that
was down to the Kaiser. Still,’ he added, belatedly remembering his tip, ‘you’ll do all right just so long as you smoke enough, and carry a pocketful of salt.’

Belle paid him off and got out. It was a beautiful, soft September day, and although there were no flowers in the flower beds it was a relief to see grass and trees. She almost managed to ignore the two great anti-aircraft guns positioned at Hyde Park Corner. But as she passed a newspaper stand, she noticed that the billboards carried only tidings of the War, and said nothing about the epidemic. So how
could
people be ‘dropping like flies’?

And yet, there was the public telephone booth at the corner of Grosvenor Street, padlocked shut ‘
to prevent infection
’. And as she walked down South Audley Street she passed red and yellow flags tied to the railings, with home-made signs tacked to the doors:
Influenza; Tradesmen leave provisions on step; Doctor walk in, don’t knock, all in bed
.