The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (143 page)

She was just about to start towards her when something about the officer struck her as familiar. He was very slender, and he moved with a kind of contained and wary grace that she’d seen somewhere before.

Putting both hands on the nearest headstone, she screwed up her eyes to get a better look.

He was still too far away for her to make out his face, but as he took off his cap she saw that his hair was very dark, and his face pale. With the eyepatch over one eye, he resembled a pirate.

Belle gripped the headstone. It can’t be, she thought, as she watched him slowly approaching Sophie’s little group of gardeners, stopping every now and then to catch his breath.

Sophie had her back to him and was still busily berating her assistant. It wasn’t until the officer had almost reached her that she turned and saw him.

She went very still. Her shoulders seemed to slump. But at her sides, her hands clenched into fists. Then the officer had covered the last few paces between them and was catching her in his arms and holding her tight, and Sophie was crying and hitting him with her fists, then reaching up to touch his face.

Belle got a lift back to Saint-Omer with Ben’s fellow officers. Ben and Sophie had urged her to stay with them. ‘We’ll go out to dinner and paint the town red,’ Sophie had said, sounding as if she’d just drunk a whole bottle of champagne. But Belle had firmly declined. They needed to be alone together, she said. She would only be in the way.

But the real reason was deeper and more ignoble than that. After the first wave of elation at seeing Ben safe, her spirits had taken a shattering plunge. She was plagued by that irrational dread that since Ben was alive, then Adam would die.

The town house was silent and still when she reached it, and on the table in the hall two letters were waiting for her.

She did not – could not – pick them up at once. She couldn’t even look at them. Instead she made herself take off her hat and coat and gloves, and straighten her hair, before picking them up and walking slowly upstairs to her room. It wasn’t going to be good news. She could feel it.

The first envelope was postmarked Wimereux, and she recognized Adam’s forthright, slanting hand. She tore it open.

Inside was her own letter, carefully folded and replaced in its envelope, which had been neatly slit. There was no accompanying note. Adam had simply written on the back:
Return to sender. No reply
.

Belle lowered herself onto the edge of the bed, and sat blinking in the gloom. She felt as if she’d been kicked in the chest.

So that’s it, then, she thought.

Of all the replies she’d imagined over the past three days – scorn, joy, puzzlement – it had never occurred to her that he would simply send back her letter without one.

Outside, the church bell tolled six. A cart trundled through the square. The room darkened.

It was the cold that roused her at last. She realized that she’d been sitting there for over an hour. And she still hadn’t opened the second letter.

Slowly she lit the gas and peered at the envelope. With a little jolt of alarm she saw that it wasn’t a letter after all, but a telegram.

Accident at Maputah Works STOP
, she read.
Papa badly hurt STOP Please please come at once STOP Mamma STOP

Chapter Thirty-Three

Kingston, Jamaica, January 1919

Bad weather caused delays on the passage out, and as a result the steamer docked at Kingston Harbour in the middle of the night.

Belle’s first sight of Jamaica was dark and forbidding. Black mountains blotted out the stars. An eerie mist floated on the lagoon. Instead of the boisterous shouts of higglers on the pier, she was welcomed by the dismal slap of the sea against the hull, and the harsh grate of the anchor chain.

And it was cold. Her breath steamed as she waited on deck with Sophie, watching Ben giving instructions to the porters. She’d been away for so long that she’d forgotten how sharp the nights could get in January. She’d been away for so long.

The deck was only dimly lit by the engine lights, and in the crimson glow Sophie’s face looked as tense as Belle felt. For the past three weeks they’d become almost accustomed to the worry, but now that they were nearly home, Belle felt a cold settling of dread. Despite all the wires, and Mamma’s most recent letter, she wouldn’t believe that Papa was out of danger until she saw him for herself.

Those first awful days in Saint-Omer had been almost too busy to allow her to take it in: making arrangements to leave the GRC, sending wires, trying in vain to find out what was happening in Jamaica. Then the journey to London – more wires, more interminable waiting for news, while Ben pulled all the strings he could in order to secure them passage on the first available steamer.

He’d spent a small fortune in telegrams, but it wasn’t until Mamma’s letter had reached them the night before the
Alveira
left Southampton that they learned what had actually happened.

He’s out of danger
, Mamma had written, pitching straight in, and addressing her letter, Belle couldn’t help noticing, not to herself but to Sophie.
At least that’s what Dr Walpole tells me, although I won’t actually believe it until we can get him to a proper hospital in Kingston. Falmouth’s all very well for a broken arm, but not for this. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I do that a lot at the moment.

It was ten days ago – feels like ten years – and we’d started crop-time early, because – well, that’s just detail. Anyway he was at the works at Maputah (of course), even though there was no good reason for him to be there, he’s got a perfectly capable manager in young Neptune, but you know the way he is. He was riding that four-year-old bay that Ben always said had a wild eye (and he was right, as usual; afterwards I had to be restrained from having the wretched beast shot). But there I am, running ahead again.

The weather was getting, well, weathery, as old Braverly would say, and nobody noticed that part of the boiling-house roof – a patch of corrugated zinc that’d been tacked on till the new slates arrive – was working loose. It seems that all at once the zinc lifted, and startled that wretched,
stupid
horse. It didn’t throw Cameron, and he was just bringing it under control when it reared again, overbalanced, and crashed onto its side – with him underneath.

Here Mamma seemed to have broken off, for in the next paragraph the writing was smaller and much neater.
As you can see
, she went on,
I can’t bring myself to write about it. So I’ll be brief. Luckily, young Neptune had the sense not to move him till Dr Walpole arrived. He – Cameron – was unconscious for three days. Broken ribs. Fractured skull. Dr Walpole suspected bleeding on the brain, but that
seems
to have been a false alarm, and the cold compresses and this new drug aspirin appear to have brought down the inflammation – although he’s still too ill to be moved, so Kingston Hospital remains out of the question.

Sorry I haven’t written before, but I’ve had my hands full. To be closer to him I’ve been staying with Olivia Herapath on and off, she’s been marvellous; and Evie Walker has taken the twins whenever I ask, an enormous help. And this morning he opened his eyes and smiled at me.

No time to write more, must catch the post. Come soon. No time to say how
relieved
and
overjoyed
I was to hear that Ben is safe and well! Oh, Sophie, I can’t wait for you to be here. All my love, Madeleine.

That had been two weeks ago. Since then the wires had been less frequent, presumably because Mamma was spending most of her time at the hospital with Papa – but when news did come through, it was of a steady improvement. Belle almost found herself able to relax on board the
Alveira
. She was going home at last. After years of avoiding it, the decision had been taken out of her hands.

So why now, as she descended the gangway with Sophie, did she feel this fresh bite of anxiety? Was it because she was back on the same stretch of quay where Papa had said goodbye seven years before?

She was shivering in earnest by the time Ben returned with a cab, and the news that the quickest way to reach Falmouth would be to wait until morning, then catch the train to Montego Bay. He’d already taken rooms at the Myrtle Bay Hotel, so that they could lie down for a few hours before going to the station.

They reached the hotel at three in the morning, too late to telephone Eden. ‘At least they’ve finally
got
a telephone,’ said Sophie, ‘although Maddy tells me they’re always forgetting to use it.’ Ben sent a wire to Olivia Herapath in Falmouth, advising her of the arrangements; then they went to their rooms and failed to sleep.

As ill luck would have it, the train was late leaving Kingston, then delayed at Williamsfield, halfway down the line. It was nearly dark by the time they finally reached Montego Bay.

Mamma was waiting on the platform, but things got off to an uncertain start. In all the anxiety over Papa, no-one had remembered to warn her that Ben had lost an eye, and when she saw him she burst into tears. It took all his and Sophie’s efforts to persuade her that he was fine, and no longer in any pain. Belle stood beside them, not knowing what to say. She felt like a stranger waiting to be introduced.

At last Mamma got herself under control. She blinked at Belle, as if trying to remember who she was.

‘Hello, Mamma,’ said Belle. Awkwardly she went forward and kissed her mother’s cheek.

Mamma put her hands on Belle’s shoulders and gave her a little shake. ‘Belle,’ she said. ‘My God. Belle.’ Then she brushed Belle’s cheek with her lips, briefly enveloping her in the scent of rosewater and rice-powder which instantly evoked bedtime stories on the verandah at Eden. She looked thinner than Belle had ever seen her, and her face had the same stretched, wide-eyed look of the visitors in Flanders.

‘I came as soon as I got your wire,’ said Belle, unnecessarily. There was so much she wanted to say, but she didn’t know where to start.

Mamma seemed to feel it too, because she tried to smile, but succeeded only in compressing her lips. Her hands tightened on Belle’s shoulders, but it was to Sophie that she spoke. ‘He’s taken a turn for the worse,’ she said, clearly struggling to keep her composure. ‘It was last night. I don’t understand it all; you’ll be able to get more out of Dr Walpole. There was a swelling. Bleeding on the brain. It subsided, but they think it started an infection. He’s running a fever.’

There was an appalled silence while they took this in. There had been brain fever in the family once before. Everyone tried not show that they were thinking of it.

‘But he’ll be all right,’ said Belle.

Mamma turned and blinked at her, and again Belle felt like an intruder who’d spoken out of turn. ‘We don’t know,’ she said.

Mamma had set her heart on their all spending the night at Eden, so Ben and Sophie swiftly gave up any plans of turning off for Fever Hill. No-one asked Belle what she wanted. If they had, she would have found it impossible to explain the sense of dread which dragged at her as they left Falmouth and started up the old Eden Road.

The new motor car only added to the dreamlike sense of unreality. As they rattled over the bridge at Romilly which marked the edge of the estate, mist floated about the giant bamboo, and the moonlight cast weird, spiked shadows across the road. Belle turned her head and gazed at the black water of the Martha Brae, and thought of yellowsnakes and Cornelius Traherne. Eden at night. This was not the homecoming she’d imagined. Cairngowrie and Adam seemed a million miles away: as if they’d happened to someone else.

They reached the turn-off to the house, and the old guango tree loomed out of the shadows, its great arms lifted to the stars like some fierce guardian spirit. In the moonlight the house looked ghostly and mysterious: the white bougainvillea glowing eerily as it tumbled down the steps, the tree-ferns surging against the walls like a dark primeval sea. Belle thought of the mildewed photographs of the house in the old days before Papa had bought it, when it had still been a ruin. Now in the moonlight it seemed as if once again the forest was about to take back its own.

Fortunately, when they got inside, normality took over. The twins had been allowed to stay up to greet them, and old Braverly the cook – who seemed hardly to have aged in seven years, perhaps because he’d been ancient ever since Belle could remember – had prepared a special dinner in their honour: jerked hog roasted over pimento wood, fried plantain, rice and peas and pickled calabash; and to follow, Bombay mangoes and his famous coconut ice cream. They all did their best, but no-one had much appetite except for the twins, who sat opposite Belle, staring at her.

When she’d last seen them, they’d been cherubic two-year-olds. Now they were lean, handsome ten-year-olds, the image of Papa, with his thick fair hair and unwavering light grey eyes.

More than anything else, the sight of her brothers made her feel like a stranger. Lachlan and Douglas had grown up without her. Eden, Mamma, Papa – it all belonged to them. Not to her.

Throughout dinner, Mamma kept up a steady stream of brittle talk, mostly to Sophie and Ben, but trying when she remembered to include Belle with her eyes, as one does with a guest of whom one isn’t quite sure. She kept twisting the rings on her fingers, and asking if they needed more food. Clearly her nerves were stretched to breaking point.

At last, the twins were hustled off to bed by Hannah the nurse. Not Poppy, Belle thought with a pang. Even that had changed. Ben and Sophie discreetly withdrew to unpack, leaving Belle to join her mother for coffee on the verandah.

A silence fell.

It was a chilly night, and Braverly had dragged out the old brazier of black Spanish iron, which threw a red glow on Mamma’s lovely, exhausted features as she rearranged the coffee cups on the tray and avoided looking at her daughter.