The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (27 page)

She kneaded her temple. What was she doing here, sitting on Mrs Herapath’s sofa with this lovingly assembled file of cuttings on her lap? What good did it do? What was she hoping to find?

She didn’t know. All she knew was that in the weeks since she had seen him at the Burying-place, she had found herself going over and over every word, every expression, every glance that had passed between them. He had been so honest with her; even at the end, when he’d clearly hated every minute of her relentless questioning. And he’d made no attempt to cast himself in a favourable light.

Perhaps that was why she was here now. Because in some strange way she felt she owed it to him to find out the truth behind the stark facts he had given her.

And if she was honest, there was another reason too. Perhaps, in talking to Mrs Herapath, she might discover whether he and Grace McFarlane were lovers.

‘Well?’ said Mrs Herapath, dragging her back to the present. ‘What do you think?’

Madeleine coloured, glad that the older woman couldn’t guess her thoughts. ‘What do I think?’ she said. ‘I think – he kept quiet to protect Ainsley. That’s it, isn’t it? So that the world wouldn’t discover that Alasdair Falkirk, the “gallant officer”, was in fact Ainsley Monroe, the man who deserted his wife.’

‘And didn’t it work
splendidly
,’ said Mrs Herapath, handing her a cup of tea. Thankfully, she wasn’t ‘manifesting’ this afternoon – having entered, as she put it, ‘a little patch of calm’.

‘But surely’, said Madeleine, ‘people guessed that Alasdair Falkirk was Ainsley Monroe? I mean, people in Jamaica. It’s not much of a disguise. Falkirk’s the family name.’

‘Oh, doubtless a few of them did,’ said Mrs Herapath, ‘but that’s hardly the point. The point is, Cameron made it possible for people to behave as if they
hadn’t
guessed.’

Madeleine watched her briskly despatching a buttered scone with guava jelly. All these rules, she thought. They weren’t her rules. She had been born outside them. She felt like an interloper in an alien tribe.

With her forefinger she traced a circle on the blue morocco folder. ‘What about the piece of paper he took from – the body. What was it? Do you know?’

‘Letter from Clemency,’ mumbled Mrs Herapath through a mouthful of scone. ‘Granting Ainsley absolution. As it were.’

How like Clemency, thought Madeleine. Clemency with her breathless little laughs and her startling outbursts of truth. ‘Oh, I didn’t at
all
care for being married,’ she had once confided. ‘But I did so
adore
being with child. I felt so
significant
.’

And how like Cameron Lawe to have thrown away his career and his good name for the honour of the family which had brought him up. It seemed a curiously old-fashioned gesture. And it made Madeleine feel more of an outsider than ever, and obscurely angry with him. After all, she was the one with the Monroe blood – and yet it was he, the adopted son, who had done the honourable thing. It was an unwelcome reminder that she was not only a bastard but a liar, and dishonourable through and through.

‘How do you know all this?’ she asked, stirring her tea.

‘Why, Cameron told me, of course,’ said Mrs Herapath. ‘A few months after Hector died.’ Her glance strayed to the photograph above the writing desk, and she shook her head. ‘Desperate time. Desperate. But that darling boy used to come down out of the hills every week, just to see me. He was the only one I could tolerate. He didn’t
pussyfoot
. We just sat and smoked and talked about Hector. Such a tonic. And that glorious voice.’ A flush rose to her cheeks, and she blinked rapidly. ‘You know, I’ve always believed that he told me his story as a sort of
distraction
. To “take me out of myself”, as one’s maid might say. And it worked beautifully. For of course, as soon as he told me the bare bones, I simply had to know every last little thing. That’s why I sent for the transcripts.’ Her tone implied that transcripts of military proceedings could be obtained as easily as a mail-order catalogue from Whiteley’s – which, if one was a baron’s daughter, they presumably could.

‘But I still don’t understand,’ said Madeleine. ‘Why won’t Jocelyn see him? Surely he of all people must have guessed why Cameron did it?’

‘Oh, undoubtedly.’

‘Then why?’

Mrs Herapath spread her tapered fingers. ‘Disgrace is disgrace, my dear. Discharge with ignominy. Incarceration. Scarcely the sort of career which Jocelyn had planned for him.’

‘But – Cameron did it to protect him. I can’t believe that even Jocelyn—’

‘Believe it, my dear. There’s granite in that old man.’

And perhaps, Madeleine reflected, Cameron had been right in what he had told her at the Burying-place.
Some people need outrage in their lives. It helps them screen out what they’re too afraid to confront.

And it was certainly true that no-one on the Northside seemed to want to remember Ainsley and Rose. Even Cameron himself didn’t like to talk of them. She thought of his taut face at the Burying-place when she had questioned him.

And Mrs Herapath, despite professing to have adored Rose, had expunged all trace of her from her cluttered, picture-lined little drawing-room. Earlier that afternoon she had told Madeleine that she’d destroyed all her photographs of Rose. She had been so
angry
, she said. So angry and so let down.

It reminded Madeleine of Cousin Lettice burning her mother’s photographs in the grate at Cairngowrie House; and Jocelyn overturning his son’s gravestone. It was as if they all believed that by destroying the image or the graven word, they could somehow erase the person.

She glanced down at the folder on her lap. Strange. She had expected to feel the old, familiar anger towards her parents. After all, here was yet another life which they had managed to wreck. Instead, she felt only pity and dismay.

‘I suppose’, she said, ‘none of this would have happened if Ainsley hadn’t married Clemency. But from what she’s told me, he wasn’t in love with her. Or she with him. So why did they marry? Why did they marry if they weren’t in love?’

Mrs Herapath gave a bark of laughter. ‘My dear! What an astonishingly naïve question.’

Madeleine flushed.

‘And remember, Ainsley wasn’t even twenty. I’m rather afraid that poor dear Jocelyn practically forced him into it.’

‘Forced him? I – didn’t know that.’

‘Didn’t you?’ She shrugged. ‘But you mustn’t blame the old man. He genuinely believed that he was acting for the best. As indeed he was.’

‘But why should he want his son to marry a Traherne? He detests the Trahernes.’

‘Well of course he does. We all do. But they’re still vastly preferable to the Durrants.’

‘The D— I don’t understand.’

‘Why, my dear, if it hadn’t been for that marriage to Clemency, Ainsley and Rose would have eloped.’

‘
Eloped?
But – I thought the affair with Rose began
after
he married Clemency.’

‘Good heavens no! Ainsley and Rose had been in love since they were children.’

At that moment there was a knock at the door, and Etheline came in with fresh hot water and scones.

In a daze, Madeleine watched Mrs Herapath briskly fielding the refreshments, thanking the helper, and waiting for her to leave, all with that suspenseful air which people assume when they’re keen to go on with a choice piece of gossip.

She offered Madeleine the plate of scones, then helped herself to another. ‘Eighteen sixty-six,’ she said, reaching for the butter dish. ‘That’s when they met. Of course, they’d met before. Dozens of times. But that was the first time they actually
saw
one another, if you know what I mean. Fever Hill great house. Boxing Day Masquerade.’

‘You – were there?’

‘Oh, everyone was there. It may be difficult to credit now, but in those days, Jocelyn was really rather sociable.’ She stopped buttering her scone, and looked back into the past. ‘Ainsley arrived late, as I recall. Caused quite a stir in his costume. Banquo’s ghost. Completely white. Immensely striking. And there in the ballroom was Rose as some sort of –
signorina
, I believe. I dare say it was simply got up, with just a few scraps from her grandmother’s clothes-press, for they never had any money to speak of. But she
did
look enchanting.’ She shook her head. ‘They must have been – what, sixteen? So terribly
young
.’

On the bookshelf, the ormolu clock struck half-past five. Out in the square, a street-seller went past, touting her wares. ‘
Ripe pear gwine past! Ripe pear! Ripe pear!
’

Mrs Herapath’s gaze returned to the portrait of Hector. ‘I must say, I did feel rather sorry for them,’ she said. ‘You know what it’s like when one falls in love for the first time. It’s as if there’s a current simply pulling one along. One can’t escape it. One can’t swim against it. All one can do is follow it, and hope that one doesn’t drown.’

Madeleine made no reply. With great care she placed her teacup on the side table at her elbow. ‘But if they were so much in love,’ she said at last, ‘why didn’t Jocelyn let them marry?’

Mrs Herapath’s dreamy expression vanished. ‘A
Durrant
? Two hundred years of dissolution and
crimes passionnels
and goodness knows what else besides? Oh no, my dear. That would never have done.’

‘But – from what I’ve heard, there’s no family on the Northside that hasn’t had its share of that sort of thing. Including the Monroes.’

‘Well, the odd indiscretion, of course. But the trouble with the Durrants was that they always went too
far
.’

It was Madeleine’s turn to look back into the past. She remembered her father saying something similar to her mother during one of their passionate arguments.

She turned back to Mrs Herapath. ‘Did you ever correspond with Rose? I mean, after she went to England?’

Mrs Herapath looked outraged. ‘Good heavens, no!’

‘But I thought she was your friend.’

‘She
was
. But she forfeited all that when she ran off with Ainsley.’

There was an uncomfortable silence.

Mrs Herapath moved the sugar basin a fraction to the right, then moved it back again. ‘She knew the rules, Madeleine. But she didn’t
respect
them. That was always her mistake. It would have been perfectly possible for her to have carried on seeing him after he married Clemency, so long as they’d been
discreet
. Happens all the time. No-one causes a to-do about it – because no-one is forced to
know
. But Rose couldn’t do that. Oh, no. She had to run off with him. She had to make it impossibe for us all to ignore.’

So that was her crime, thought Madeleine. It wasn’t that she broke the rules, but that she broke them in such a way that it was impossible to ignore.

It struck her as strange that Mrs Herapath should have reserved all her opprobrium for Rose. It was as if in such affairs the man were merely the passive victim, and only the woman was guilty.

For the first time in a decade, she felt sorry for her mother. It seemed a terrible punishment, to be cut off for ever from everyone she had known, and exiled from this lush, ruined, bewitchingly beautiful island where she had spent her whole life. After Jamaica, Cairngowrie House must have seemed so bleak.

She watched Mrs Herapath buttering another scone with some ferocity. ‘You still miss her,’ she said.

‘I do not,’ snapped Mrs Herapath.

There was an uncomfortable silence.

‘It’s just such a
shame
’, Mrs Herapath burst out, ‘that the whole wretched muddle had to whiplash onto Cameron. Confounded waste. Attractive boy like that.’ She plucked a crumb from her lap and frowned at it. ‘You want to be careful about that, my dear.’

Madeleine was startled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘This sudden interest in transcripts and whatnot. I’m not at all sure that it will do.’

She felt herself colouring. ‘You were the one who suggested I should learn more about the family.’

‘This isn’t what I meant.’

‘Yes it is. He’s family, isn’t he? I don’t see the harm.’

‘That,’ said Mrs Herapath, ‘is rather my point.’

Nineteenth of July

Evie has found out where my shadow is. In return for my silver crucifix that Cousin L gave me when I was confirmed, she went and asked a great many black people (not Grace of course), and finally learned that my shadow is in the hothouse – where I can’t go. I had suspected it was there, for the hothouse is full of duppies, as it was once the slave hospital.

Victory has offered to go and fetch it for me. He said it would be safer if he went, as I might not be able to keep the duppies at bay. I think that is SO brave, but of course I said no. Victory is only six; it wouldn’t be fair. Besides, he wouldn’t know which shadow is mine.

Despite what Evie says, I bet I CAN get to the hothouse on my own. I can move about quite well now on my crutches, and I wouldn’t have to go all the way up the rise, for Victory says there is a path that goes around it, if one knows where to look. That would be much easier. And for protection, I have the little charm which Grace made for me, and Victory has brought some extra rosemary, which I’ve put in a glass of water by my bed. But I wish I had my crucifix as well.

The best time to go will be extremely early in the morning, when nobody has woken up, and the duppies are still asleep. The morning after the Trahernes’ ball will be the best, for then everyone will stay in bed until very late.

Out on the lawns Remus barked twice, and then fell silent.

Sophie stopped writing and drew back the mosquito curtain. She turned down the lamp, and moonlight streamed through the broken louvres. The lawns were bleached to silver. The duppy tree was a pillar of darkness, with great outstretched arms.

Sophie listened for a long time, but Remus didn’t bark again. All she could hear were the crickets and the distant hoot of Patoo, and the slow creak of the floorboards as Great-Aunt May walked the upper gallery.