The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (129 page)

‘Is that what this is about?’ said Adam, looking tired. ‘The dog cart?’

Belle made a supreme effort to keep her temper. These days, everything got on her nerves. Adam. The boy. The Hall. A great, draughty mausoleum, it lacked electricity, a telephone, and proper staff. All it had was a cook who couldn’t cook, and a disapproving maid-of-all-work whose uniform smelt of kippers, and whose hobnail boots curled upwards at the toes like the untrimmed hooves of a donkey.

But what got on Belle’s nerves more than anything else was Miss McAllister.

‘Perhaps Maud has a point,’ said Adam, unwittingly courting disaster. ‘Perhaps you ought to rest for a few days more.’

‘Why?’ demanded Belle. ‘Because she says so?’

He did not reply.

She took a deep breath. ‘I’ve been here a week,’ she said as steadily as she could. ‘I’ve tried to do what she says. I’ve stayed in bed. I’ve forced down the most ghastly nursery food. I’ve even tolerated this wretched invalid chair. Now I simply want to go for a walk.’

‘To the beach,’ said Adam.

‘All right, to the beach. What’s so—’

‘It’s two miles. If you do that on foot you’ll have a relapse.’

‘So now you’re a doctor?’

‘Well, I got you through the ’flu, didn’t I?’

‘Which of course puts me
for ever
in your debt—’

‘I didn’t mean that.’ A flush stole over his cheekbones, and she knew that she’d hurt him.

She watched him go to the window and stare out across the loch.

Damn. She’d spoilt it again. It was always happening. He would come in to see how she was, and for a few minutes things would go quite well. They would talk about the War, and how Stranraer was coping with rationing and the ’flu. He would tell her about the improvements he was making to the Home Farm, which she liked, because it reminded her of Papa’s letters about the estate. Then she would say something mean, and ruin everything.

Why did she do it? What was this compulsion to scratch the surface; to force him to react?

She smoothed the rug over her knees, and wondered how to find a way back. The fire hissed in the grate. Outside, the wind soughed in the pines. On the landing, there was a listening silence. Belle tried to ignore it.

She’d been given one of the guest chambers at the front of the Hall: a large, shabby room with a moth-eaten four-poster bed and gloomy, smoke-darkened oak panelling. It was at the head of the stairs, and the door didn’t close properly, so Miss McAllister could hear every word. No doubt the old bat was listening right now, feeding on each fresh outrage that fell from the lips of the Scarlet Woman.

Well, let her, Belle thought savagely. It’s not as if we’re getting up to anything indecent.

‘Would you like to go back to London?’ said Adam without turning round.

She stared at his rigid back.

‘You could stay at the house in Berkeley Square. I’m sure I could—’

‘No,’ she broke in. ‘I don’t want to go back there.’ She couldn’t stay there now that Sibella was gone. Besides, sooner or later, Cornelius Traherne would be bound to turn up.

‘Then what about Dodo?’ said Adam. ‘You could go down to Kyme.’

Again she plucked at the rug on her knees. ‘You don’t have to find me a home, you know. I’m not a stray dog.’

He turned and looked down at her, his face unreadable. He had a way of withdrawing into himself – of taking himself out of reach. In another man she would have taken this for moodiness, but with Adam she sensed that it had more to do with self-preservation. She guessed that this was what he’d done at the Front, in order to get by. Of course, she would probably never find out for sure, because he would never talk about it. At least, not to her. Although that was hardly to be expected, when she was being so capricious and ungrateful . . .

She gave herself a little shake. ‘You know, you’re not under some kind of obligation, just because Osbourne— Just because he . . .’ Her eyes began to fill. Not
now
, she thought. Not in front of him. ‘What I mean,’ she went on, ‘is that you’re not obliged to look after me, simply because he’s your cousin.’

‘I don’t agree.’

God, he could be stubborn.

‘If Maud wants you to go in the dog cart,’ he said, ‘then I’m afraid that’s what you’ll have to do. You know we don’t have a motor, and the carriage is being repaired. And it’s too far to walk.’

‘Fine,’ she said between her teeth. ‘Maud’s word is law. Blessed be the Gospel according to Maud.’

Maud opened the door. Her sharp little eyes darted from Adam to Belle, then back again. ‘Are you not yet ready?’ she said.

‘I’ve only to put on my boots,’ Belle replied sweetly.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said Adam.

When he’d gone, there was a prickly silence. Then Belle said, ‘I suppose you heard that.’

‘Heard what,’ said Miss McAllister.

‘My latest blasphemy.’

The thin mouth tightened. ‘What I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘is how you can be so ungrateful to him.’

‘Then I don’t suppose you’ll understand this either,’ said Belle, ‘but I never actually asked him to help me. He’s only doing it out of some misguided sense of family honour.’

The older woman drew herself up. ‘I was not aware,’ she said stiffly, ‘that family honour could ever
be
misguided.’

Belle set her teeth.

‘Now come along,’ said Miss McAllister. ‘The dog cart is waiting, and the boy must have his constitutional. We can’t all be waiting on the whim of one sick young woman.’

Maud was so angry that she could hardly speak.
Maud’s word is law. The Gospel according to Maud
. It wasn’t the blasphemy. It was the mockery. The assumption that because she looked like a dried-up old spinster, that was what she was.

In stony silence they arrived at the beach. Maud stepped down from the dog cart and sent the boy off to walk to the Point – walk, don’t run, and don’t go within six feet of the water. Then she turned to the girl. ‘I shall be at the House for an hour,’ she said. ‘I suggest that you sit on those rocks and take the air. And don’t tire yourself.’

The girl gave her an insolent smile. ‘Thank you. I don’t need a nurse.’

Maud felt her cheeks growing hot. ‘You are a rude, unprincipled chit,’ she snapped. ‘Your mother was just the same.’

That wiped the smile off the lovely face.

‘Oh, did you not know?’ said Maud, pretending surprise. ‘Your mother lived here as a child. Yes, here at Cairngowrie House, with that mother of hers. That Rose Durrant.’

The blood had drained from the girl’s face, and Maud wondered if she’d gone too far. But this had been building up all week, and she couldn’t have stopped if she’d tried. ‘She was no better than she ought to have been, that Rose Durrant, and your mother looked fair to be going the same way. And as for you. Well. You’re just the same.’

The girl swayed.

‘Do you know what she did, that Rose Durrant? She sent her child to my Sunday School! Oh, yes. You write and ask your mother if she remembers. Ask her if she remembers Miss McAllister the Sunday School teacher.’

She left the girl speechless, and strode up the path towards the House. She felt shaky, and she had the queasy sense that she’d been cruel. She pushed the thought aside.

As she unlatched the gate, the little garden enclosed her with its welcome, as it always did. She could have wept with relief.

She went to the bench in the porch and sat down. It was a bright, sunny October day. To the north, beyond the mouth of the loch, she could just see the rocky mound of Ailsa Craig; to the east, across the water, the bracken on Beoch Hill blazed a rich tawny. Maud took a deep breath, and fixed her gaze on a huddle of oystercatchers bobbing up and down on the water.

It was no use. This afternoon, Cairngowrie had no power to calm her. Her hands clenched into fists. That girl.

No doubt to her, Maud McAllister was nothing but a sour old spinster, fit only to care for other people’s children.

Why did people always assume that spinsters love children?

‘Of course,’ they used to say, ‘Maud adores children.’ But she didn’t. She disliked their selfishness and feared their scorn. It was just that when she was young, she had been too timid to contradict. Her father had told her to run the Sunday School, so she had. And as the years went by, she’d felt more and more like an impostor.

Then one Sunday, while they were all making each other miserable in the name of the Lord, that child, little Madeleine Falkirk, had stood up and calmly told the class about Eden.

‘My mamma grew up there,’ she’d said, as if reciting a catechism. ‘It’s a magic jungle, and in the middle of the jungle stands the great Tree of Life.’

She had described it so well. The curtains of creepers that were spangled with fireflies after a rain; the moonflowers and the orchids. Maud had been entranced.

But then the child had fixed her with that beautiful, innocent, corrupted gaze. ‘Eden is where I began,’ she had said, ‘because before I was born, Mamma and Papa used to meet there in secret, under the Tree of Life.’

Maud had burst into tears and fled the class.

Afterwards, people had assumed that she’d been shocked, but that wasn’t it at all. What had made her run weeping onto the sands below the Manse was the sudden realization that she was never going to experience the kind of passion that Rose Durrant had experienced under the Tree of Life. That no man would ever look at her with desire.

As she’d stood sobbing in the icy north wind, she had seen herself as others saw her: a twenty-eight-year-old spinster with a lumpy red face and no lips. This was not who she was; not in her heart. But she realized with anguish that the body does not accurately reveal the soul. The body lies. And the world doesn’t care.

Ten years later, she had met Adam.

By then her father was dead, and she was keeping house for her brother Randolph at the Manse. The Manse had been her home all her life, but now that it was just the two of them, it closed in on her.

It had always been a dark house, for the lower windows on three sides had been bricked in to avoid the glass tax; and it was cold, for only the living room fire was ever lit. That afternoon, the house was so quiet that it made her breathless, so she slipped away for ten minutes to watch the cormorants. Then Duncan Ritchie happened along in his cart, and on impulse she did the unthinkable: accepted a lift up the coast road to Cairngowrie Sands. The Sands were only four miles from the Manse, and she could easily walk back when she was ready. But she needed that great curving sweep of buff-coloured sand, that harsh wind clawing at her face and hair.

That was when she’d seen the boy running down from the Hall. A coltish eight-year-old with a tear-streaked face, he’d stood on the beach flinging stones at the sea, and shouting his grief at the sky.

The two branches of the family had never been close, and Maud didn’t know him very well. But she’d been fond of his mother, whom she’d recently nursed through her last illness, so now she felt compelled to do something to help him.

‘Have you ever made a sand-angel?’ she said.

The way he looked at her. The brown eyes limpid with grief, and wary, like an animal’s. Wondering if she would make things better or worse.

‘I believe,’ she said, ‘that you lie on your back and wave your arms in the sand. I’ve always wanted to try.’

They tried it together, and got covered in sand: gloriously, unforgivably dirty. The angels were remarkable. Adam made a face for his with sea shells, and gave it an angry snarl. Maud gave hers razor-shell claws for skewering fish, and a wild jumble of kelp for hair. ‘The bubbles are knots,’ she told him. ‘Mermaids never comb their hair, and they get the most dreadful tangles, but they don’t care, they just cut it all off and start again.’

When it was time to leave, they kicked the angels to bits, then went their separate ways like partners in crime. ‘I had a wizard time,’ said Adam. Then he gave her a smile that she never forgot. Surprised and admiring. As if he knew who she really was, and liked her for it.

She walked home with a spring in her step, to an outraged Randolph clamouring for his tea. She didn’t care. She didn’t know it at the time, but she was in love.

On the bench, Maud put her fists to her eyes. Stupid to be thinking of that now. Stupid, stupid old woman.

She opened her eyes and stared across the glittering waters of the loch. It would be dusk in an hour or so, and already the birds were flying in to roost on the sands. Barnacle geese and oystercatchers, dunlins and widgeon and mallards. But now, finally, what she’d been hoping to see: a trio of cormorants scudding over the waves with contemptuous grace.

Maud loved cormorants. Graceful, green-eyed risk-takers who lived in nonchalant squalor on guano-spattered rocks. ‘The slums of the bird world,’ Randolph used to sneer. But that was why she liked them. They were so different from herself.

A few hundred yards down the beach, the Clyne boy was almost level with the tithe cottage. He was no risk-taker. The wind had dropped, and the waves lapped tamely at the sand, but he was keeping at least twenty feet away.

At the other end of the beach, the girl sat on the rocks, staring out to sea. That girl with her scornful, beautiful face. That girl who, with one flick of her long black eyelashes, was about to ruin Maud’s world. What did Adam see in her, apart from the obvious?
Why
did he have to bring her here?

After the sand-angel episode, Maud and Adam had become friends. They’d gone on nature walks, and he’d shown her his sketches. She’d saved up little things to tell him.

Then he’d grown up.

She would have been horrified beyond words if he’d ever guessed the truth, but she was too honest to hide her feelings from herself. She knew that what she felt for him was not the affection of an old woman for a much younger nephew, but the love of a woman for a man.

She loved the breadth of his shoulders and the rangy grace of his body. She loved the intelligence which informed every line of his face. She loved the back of his neck, and the warmth of his brown eyes with their little flecks of gold; the catch in his voice when he was moved.