The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (24 page)

Madeleine raised her head and met her eyes. They were ice-blue and startling, with rims of angry red. ‘What sound advice,’ she said crisply, rising in her turn. ‘I think I shall take a turn about the lawns, the better to reflect upon it. That is,’ she added, ‘if I am permitted to leave the house during daylight hours?’

Something flickered in the ice-blue gaze. ‘I was not aware’, said Great-Aunt May, ‘that you were subject to any restriction.’

The wind had dropped by the time Madeleine made her way out onto the lawns, still buttoning her dust-coat in her haste to get away.

After the shadowy great house it was like walking into a furnace. She didn’t care. She felt a perverse satisfaction at the thought of the ‘crime’ she was about to commit. Sinclair would be outraged. How he would enjoy that.

Over the Cockpits she could see a thick bank of slate-grey cloud, and distant lightning flashing, on-off, on-off, like a lamp flaring in a darkened room.

Storm on the way, she thought. Good. Let it come.

She glanced back at the house, and caught a glint of sunlight on the upper gallery. That would be Great-Aunt May, donning her steel-rimmed spectacles. The old witch had lost no time in regaining her post.

Take a good long look, Madeleine told her silently. This ought to give you something to talk about.

She turned and made her way across the lawns. There was no-one about. The helpers were all in their quarters down by the river, the dogs dozing in the undercroft. Only a john crow lazily circled overhead.

She made her way up the rise and over the other side to the Burying-place. It was a peaceful, sunny clearing: untended and seldom visited, except by Clemency. Tall coconut palms and wild lime trees enclosed a dusty green hollow, where a dozen raised barrel tombs dreamed away the decades in the long silver grass.

It was deserted. Cameron Lawe had not yet arrived. Or perhaps, thought Madeleine with a start, he’s already been and gone. What a fine irony that would be. You decide to brave universal condemnation, only to find that you’ve missed your chance.

She waded through the grass to the poinciana tree which shaded the tomb of Jocelyn’s young wife Kitty. Beside it, a low slab of blue slate – robbed of its inscription by the weather – made a convenient seat. A gap in the trees gave her far-reaching views to the south: down past the tangled ruins of the old slave hospital, over the emerald expanse of the nursery cane-pieces, to the cattle pastures and the distant treetops of Providence, and the blue-grey Cockpits beyond. And somewhere up there, hidden among the trees, lay Eden. With an effort of will she pushed the thought aside.

She took a deep breath, and smelt lime blossom and spicy red dust, and the sharp green tang of the asparagus ferns among the graves. Around her the long grass buzzed with crickets. Above her head the poinciana was brilliant with vermilion flowers and alive with sugarquits.

Some of her anger and frustration seeped away, leaving in its place a distant sadness. To her right stood the little white marble tomb of Clemency’s baby, lovingly adorned with fresh flowers every night.
Elliot Fraser Monroe, died 1873, aged two days.
Her half-brother. The last remaining trace of her father at Fever Hill.

And before her she could just make out the deep Gothic inscription on her grandmother’s tomb. Time had dulled its edges, but not the pain behind it. That still shouted to heaven.

Here lies Catherine Dorothy Monroe, née McFarlane
1831–1850
and with her the blasted expectations of an adoring husband.
Death, thou hast obtained thy victory.

She thought about the love which had made Jocelyn stay faithful to a memory for a lifetime. She thought about the love which had compelled her parents to forfeit everything they had in order to be together. She thought about her cramped and haunted existence with Sinclair.

A breeze stirred in the coconut palms to a pattering mockery of rain. An egret sped across the sky, shining white against deepening grey.

She put her hands by her sides and felt the hot, smooth slate beneath her palms.

You
chose
this life, she told herself. You went into it with your eyes open. Now you must make the best of it.

Yes, but how?

She plucked a grass stem and turned it in her fingers. She had never felt so alone.

A movement at the edge of her vision made her start. She turned to see Cameron Lawe standing at the edge of the trees, watching her.

What was he thinking? Was he remembering that long-ago meeting in the snow?

She rose to her feet and stared back at him across twenty feet of silver grass and barrel tombs. Her heart was hammering against her ribs. ‘I’d quite forgotten’, she lied, ‘that it’s your day for visiting.’ Her voice was steady, but she had to clasp her hands together to stop them shaking.

‘That’s all right,’ he said.

‘I expect you’d rather be alone.’

‘No, no, I—’

‘But you’ve come all this way, and brought flowers.’ She coloured. That sounded bizarrely like a hostess greeting an unexpected guest.

He frowned at the flowers in his hand: an artless bunch of large spiky white blooms and heliconia, its great scarlet claws tipped with gold. The white ones were ginger lilies. A memory surfaced of something her mother used to say.
At Eden there are ginger lilies as big as your hand, and moonflowers that only bloom at night . . .

Not
now
, she told herself fiercely. She was horrified to feel her throat beginning to tighten.

‘In fact,’ he said, still frowning, ‘I did rather wonder if you’d be here.’

A cold wave washed over her. ‘Why? What do you mean by that?’

‘I suppose – only that I hoped you might be.’ He tossed his hat and riding-crop in the grass and ran a hand through his hair. ‘I’m sorry, that wasn’t very proper. But it’s the truth.’

She didn’t know how to take that. What did he mean? Had he recognized her?

He was looking down at the flowers in his hand, his face unreadable. Over the past ten years he seemed to have learned how to hide his feelings. But she still sensed in him that capacity for violence and tenderness that she had sensed as a child. If he knew her secret, he would be a formidable enemy.

To break the silence she said, ‘How did you get here? I didn’t see you arrive.’

He gestured over his shoulder towards the old slave hospital. ‘There’s a track down there. It joins the road up to my estate. That’s where I left my horse.’

‘Ah.’ She realized that she was twisting her hands together, and that he had noticed. She thrust her hands into the pockets of her dust-coat. She said, ‘Sophie tells me that I was rude to you the other day.’

‘No, no,’ he said unconvincingly.

‘She says that I practically cut you dead.’

For a moment some of the tension left his features, and he gave her that incipient smile which seemed habitual to him. ‘Your sister has strong views.’

‘Yes. Yes, she does.’

He hesitated. ‘Those crutches of hers. What is it, polio?’

‘Tuberculosis of the knee.’

‘Ah. And – is she—’

‘Getting better. Oh yes.’ But she sounded more certain than she felt. Over the past weeks, Sophie’s progress seemed unaccountably to have slowed.

She watched him approach the tomb on the other side of Kitty’s, and cast last month’s shrivelled flowers into the asparagus ferns, and place the ginger lilies at the head. He seemed ill at ease. Was that because he had been having doubts about her? Or was it more innocent than that? Had he simply lost the habit of polite conversation?

She watched him studying the tomb. The inscription read:
Alice Amelie Monroe, née Vavasour, 1821–83.
What, she wondered suddenly, had Jocelyn’s mother to do with Cameron Lawe?

‘She was my great-aunt,’ he said as if she’d spoken aloud. ‘When I was a boy, she was a widow, living up at Providence. She used to swoop down and snatch us away from our lessons, and take us for long rides in the hills. I adored her.’

‘So does that mean – was your mother a Vavasour?’

‘Yes. I’m sorry, I thought you knew that.’

‘Sinclair never speaks of his parents.’

‘Ah.’

Vavasour was a Huguenot name. Like Durrant. It was an unsettling feeling to know that they both came of the same stock.

‘In Jamaica,’ he explained, ‘everyone’s related to everyone else. For instance, Jocelyn married a McFarlane, whose grandmother married a Traherne, whose daughter married a Barrett, whose cousin married a Durrant—’ He broke off.

‘And the Durrants’, she supplied, ‘bring us neatly back to the Monroes.’

There was an awkward silence. She shut her eyes. What self-destructive madness had prompted her to blurt that out?

When she opened them again, it was to find him studying her face. Here it comes, she thought. She lifted her chin and met his eyes. Let’s get this out in the open, she told him silently. I dare you to remember.

Not a trace of recognition showed in his face. Only puzzlement, and something else that she couldn’t fathom. The relief was so great that her knees nearly gave way.

‘Are you all right?’ he said, putting out a hand, then withdrawing it.

‘I’m fine,’ she muttered. ‘Perfectly fine.’

A gust of wind stirred the feathery leaves of the poinciana tree. A flock of wild canaries swooped down onto it, squabbling noisily, and put the sugarquits to flight.

Cameron Lawe glanced up at them. ‘Rain on the way. I should be going.’ He thought for a moment, then held out the heliconias to her. ‘I wonder, would you mind? These are for Ainsley.’

The ground tilted in front of her. ‘
What?
’

He gestured at the blue slate behind her. ‘Ainsley Monroe? Jocelyn’s son. That’s the grave. – I’m sorry, I thought you knew.’

She pulled in her skirts from the slab on which she’d been sitting moments before. ‘B-but – there’s no inscription,’ she stammered. ‘Nothing at all.’

‘It’s underneath.’

‘What?’

‘The inscription. The old man had it turned over, so that he wouldn’t have to look at it.’

She put her hand on Kitty’s tomb to steady herself.

‘You’re not all right, are you?’ he said. ‘You’ve gone quite pale. You really should sit down.’

The buzz of the crickets was loud in her ears, the sun fierce on her back. She felt sick. ‘His own son. He did that to his own son.’

He moved round to her side, careful to keep some distance between them, and went down on one knee and placed the heliconias on the hot blue slate. ‘You’ll soon find out’, he said, ‘that forgiveness isn’t a very marked trait in that family.’ He paused. ‘I suppose you know the Monroe motto?
Death before dishonour.
Poor old Ainsley got it the wrong way around.’

‘“Poor” Ainsley? But I thought you were terribly angry with him.’

He threw her a curious look. ‘Why would you think that?’

She remembered the officer’s cold, unforgiving eyes as he had stared down at her in the snow.
Tell them they’re dead to me
, he had said, before he had turned and ridden away.

‘Why would you think that?’ he said again.

She swallowed. ‘I don’t know. I suppose – because everyone else is.’

‘Twenty years is a long time to stay angry,’ he said. He glanced at the heliconias, and to her surprise his lip curled. ‘Those were his favourites. When I was little he used to tell me that they were dragon’s claws. And of course I believed him. I always did.’

It had never occurred to her that he had grown up with her father. That he might have cared about him. The thought threw everything into disarray.

She watched him silently contemplating her father’s grave. He no longer looked threatening. He looked dusty and tired, and he had cut himself shaving. There was a raw scrape along his jaw, and a smudge of dried blood on his collarless shirt.

As she looked at him, she felt a lightening inside her, as if something tight had worked itself loose. This man had loved her father, and her father had loved him. In the end that was all that mattered. It was as if, at last, the officer in the park had turned his horse’s head, and ridden back for her.

She cleared her throat. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I didn’t really come up here by accident.’

He kept his eyes on Ainsley’s grave. ‘I did wonder about that.’

She put a hand to her temple and smoothed back her hair. ‘Sinclair made a fearful row when he heard that I’d spoken to you at Mrs Herapath’s. It’s too ridiculous for words. So I thought I’d really give them something to row about.’

He turned his head and looked at her, and his light-grey eyes were warm. ‘That wasn’t a very good idea.’

‘No. I don’t suppose it was.’

They exchanged tentative smiles.

Above the Cockpits a thick, straight cord of lightning split the sky. A few seconds later there came a terrific, rippling crack of thunder. The canaries rose in a cloud and flew away. A grey curtain of rain moved towards them across the emerald cane.

Cameron Lawe stood up. ‘It’s strange,’ he said, ‘but you’re not at all what I expected of Sinclair’s wife.’

‘What did you expect?’

‘Oh. Someone little and blond and pious, I suppose.’ He thought about how that sounded, and coloured. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that you’re not pious.’

‘That’s all right,’ she said, biting back a smile. ‘I’m afraid I’ve never cared very much for the Bible.’

He looked at her for a moment. ‘That’s very direct.’

She made no reply.

Another ripple of thunder. He glanced up at the sky, then back to her. ‘You should go in or you’ll get wet.’

‘I don’t care about that.’

‘Well. I do.’ He stooped to retrieve his hat from the grass.

Suddenly she didn’t want him to go. She wanted him to stay and talk to her about Eden. And she found herself wondering about the ‘Negress’ with whom he’d cohabited, and what dreadful crime he had committed to get sent to prison. She said, ‘According to Sinclair, you did something “unspeakable”. Can that really be true?’

He turned his hat in his hands. Once again his face had become unreadable. ‘Quite true, I’m afraid.’