The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (28 page)

Sophie wondered if she would have the courage to brave the hothouse on her own. That afternoon, when she was talking it over with Victory, it hadn’t seemed too daunting. But here in the dark, it seemed impossible.

As she was pondering that, a sharp cry echoed through the sleeping house.
I can’t! I can’t!

Sophie caught her breath. She pulled the sheets up to her mouth and waited. But the cry didn’t come again.

Someone had been having a nightmare. She couldn’t tell who it was, except that it had been the voice of a grown-up. A grown-up having a nightmare. A terrifying thought. She had never imagined that grown-ups could be so scared.

‘I can’t! I can’t!’

Sinclair collapsed beside his wife and rolled onto his back, shuddering and staring up into the darkness. After a while he drew a deep breath. ‘This cannot go on,’ he said.

His wife raised herself on her elbow to look at him. Her face was grave, but he knew that inside she was laughing at him. Why was she forever laughing at him?

He sat up and poured himself a glass of water from the decanter on the bedside table. The chloral made it bitter, but he drained it with a grateful shudder.

In the glow from the nightlight his wife had an unwholesome beauty, and he felt again the deep, dirty pull in his loins. He wanted her, but whenever he tried to take her, he couldn’t. His flesh wilted. His skin prickled with dread.

It was all her fault. Sometimes when he was alone, he would take one of her camisoles from the dressing-room and press it to his face. And always beneath the milky scent of her skin he would catch that faint, impure sweetness: the smell of blood. It didn’t matter how many baths she took. He would always detect it now.

Why was God punishing him? Why had this affliction struck him, an innocent man?

He had been so hopeful when they had first married. Surely, he had reasoned, the dying sister must be the only one afflicted, and his wife almost pure – or at least, pure enough to bear his child?

Beside him, his wife lay back on the pillows. ‘You should try to get some sleep,’ she said, her voice falsely gentle.

‘What an original idea,’ he snapped.

She ignored that. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘if you stopped taking the chloral for a while—’

‘If I require medical advice,’ he said, ‘I shall consult Dr Pritchard.’ He turned on his side so that he wouldn’t have to look at her.

‘Goodnight, Sinclair,’ she said.

He did not reply.

Long after she had fallen asleep, he lay watching the ethereal glimmer of the nightlight through the gauze. It looked so pure. So spiritual. Small wonder that his wife detested it. She said it disturbed her to have a jar of fireflies slowly dying through the night.

He gazed into the soft, pulsing light, and waited for the chloral to carry him away.

He awoke drenched in sweat, and throbbing with a desire so strong that it hurt.

It was nearly dawn. The fireflies were dead. He lay on his back, wondering what to do. This was becoming unbearable.

At length he slid out of bed and crept to the dressing-room, moving softly so as not to alert his wife. He needed to be alone. He needed to pray. He needed to get away from his wife.

He crossed the lawns and began to climb the rise. The sky was lightening in the east when he reached the top, and below him Fever Hill still slumbered in a light morning haze. He took a deep draught of cool, fresh air, and some of the tension within him began to subside.

This
is what matters, he told himself as he looked out over his inheritance. Not some female sullying your bed. But this.

Below him lay the great house, and beyond it the New Works and Clairmont Hill, and the ruins of the Old Works, and the cane-pieces of Alice Grove all the way to the road. To the west lay the cane-fields of Glen Marnoch and the Queen of Spains Valley and the distant works at Caledon. To the south-west lay the hill-pastures of Corner Pen and the treetops of Providence, and to the south-east, the lush young cane of Bellevue and Greendale and Bamboo Walk, stretching all the way to the Martha Brae. To the edge of Eden.

Eden. As always, the thought of his brother brought an upsurge of bitterness.

The
injustice
of it. He, Sinclair, was the beautiful one; the godly one deserving of praise. And yet simply because he had been born a few years later, none of that mattered. Despite court-martial, incarceration and disgrace, people respected his brother more than they did him. Men measured their actions against his. Women sought his protection and regard. Even now, Clemency missed him, May feared him, and Jocelyn loved him the more. And why? Simply because he was the
elder
.

A gust of wind cooled his face. He shut his eyes. Calm yourself. Calm.
Cain killed Abel and was cast out, and Seth the third son of Adam found grace in the eyes of the Lord, and from his loins all men descended.

You
shall
come into your inheritance.

He pictured that day just as he had as a boy, when Great-Aunt May had first read him the story of Cain and Abel and Seth. He would be riding a white horse up the carriageway, and people would be lining up to honour him. His brother would be destitute and friendless, and Sinclair would lean down and extend the hand of charity. Perhaps.

Already the sun was burning off the mist, and the birds were beginning to stir. But he wasn’t ready to go back yet. He couldn’t face the same torture all over again. Wanting her, and being repelled by her; feeling her sapping his strength, depriving him of his manhood.

He turned and set off down the other side of the hill.

He walked without seeing, but after a while a stink of rottenness brought him back to his surroundings, and he saw that he had reached the ruins of the old slave hospital. He was standing in a dank, shadowy little dell, where broadleaf trees and ironwoods blotted out the sky. Thick cords of strangler fig trailed over the tumbled cut-stone walls. The rasp of crickets rose and fell like the swell of a dirty sea.

Before him stood the windowless cell where the less viable slaves had been sequestered. Its bulletwood door still hung firm on its hinges.

Once, when he was eight, he had trapped his brother inside that cell. The aim had been to frighten him, but it had failed. Cameron had become so angry that when his shouts had drawn a garden boy and he was freed, Sinclair had had to run all the way to Great-Aunt May for protection. And it had been Cameron she had asked Jocelyn to thrash, as punishment for frightening his younger brother.

As his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, he noticed a plant growing on the threshold of the cell. Its great glossy leaves were speckled with sickly grey, like some loathsome disease. That, he thought, is what the blacks call dumb-cane; because a few drops of its milky juice on the tongue of a recalcitrant slave caused hours of choking agony.

Once again he felt the dark, dirty tug at his loins. It was as if the evil thing were calling out to him.

No-one crosses this threshold
, it whispered.
Even the blacks don’t venture in, for fear of their filthy heathen spirits. But you need not be afraid, for you are a white man. You could penetrate this darkness. And here you could ease the intolerable pressure building inside you.

He felt the sweat break out on his forehead. His breath came fast and shallow. You could do it, he thought. And no-one would ever know.

Perhaps. But God would know.
And God
, as Great-Aunt May used to tell him,
has a special Eye for what is done in the dark
.

He turned and ran. He crashed through the undergrowth: raising clouds of midges, startling ground doves, and tearing his clothes. He didn’t stop until he was back at the top of the rise.

‘What am I to
do
?’ he whispered to the empty sky. ‘Why did You give me that woman and then deny me a son? How am I to come into my inheritance? Help me! For I am innocent!’

But no answer came.

He looked down at the great house, and felt a sudden horror at what his life had become. Soon he must go back down there and bathe and shave and dress, and sit at breakfast opposite that mocking, disobedient creature whom he had the misfortune to call his wife.

Why do women exist? he wondered. Weak, passive, unreflecting creatures, whose only purpose is to kindle vile appetites in the flesh of men, while they themselves – the
injustice
of it – remain coldly inert to carnal desire.

Chapter Nineteen

I speak buckra talk
, Grace McFarlane had said, looking Madeleine up and down with her lovely, insolent eyes.
Oh yes. Mas’ Camron teach it to I.

Beautiful, independent, knowing Grace, with her polished mahogany skin and her frank, uninhibited ways. Of course she would appeal to a man like him. Wouldn’t she?

It was a wildly inappropriate thought to be having at the Trahernes’ July Ball. But then, Madeleine hadn’t expected Cameron Lawe to be there, drinking cognac in the billiard-room.

She had been with Mrs Herapath, crossing the marble entrance-hall towards the ballroom, when she had seen him, standing silently amid a throng of gentlemen.

As if suddenly conscious that he was being watched, he had turned his head, and their eyes had locked. She had known by his stillness, and by some deeper sense that she couldn’t explain, that he was sharply, intensely
aware
of her, as she was of him.

The next instant the moment was broken. One of the gentlemen clapped him on the shoulder, and for a second he was distracted. Madeleine seized her chance and swept on towards the ballroom.

He isn’t supposed to be here, she told herself fiercely. He never goes into Society. It isn’t fair.

For she had decided that Mrs Herapath was right. It just wouldn’t do.

And now she stood, as she had stood all evening, in the Trahernes’ enormous, shimmering ballroom, longing to be safely back home with Sophie, where she wouldn’t have to think about anything. Least of all Cameron Lawe.

It was one o’clock in the morning, and Sinclair had declared it their duty to stay until three. So far she had danced with him once, and once with Cornelius Traherne, and once with Jocelyn. She had smiled until her cheeks were stiff, and seen enough beaded trims and chiffon overdresses to give Clemency an exhaustive account of the latest importations. She had heard her first orchestra, and been astonished that they all managed to play the same tune without getting lost. She had listened to a river of Mrs Herapath’s imperious gossip, and wondered what her friend would say if she learned that she was talking to a bastard who had once posed for photographs in the nude. And she had kept a silent watch for Cameron Lawe, and been relieved and disappointed when he did not appear.

And underneath it all, she had felt a creeping unease. Looking about her at the Trahernes’ bought-in sophistication, she’d had the strangest feeling that this whole glittering masquerade might at any moment be swept away by the darkness waiting at the edges. The delicacy of Strauss might fill the ballroom, but outside the air rang with the crickets’ harsh song. In the galleries, Italian finches sang in little filigree cages, but out in the moonlight it was Patoo who haunted the trees. And through it all the soft-footed helpers glided among the guests in impenetrable silence.

But no-one else seemed to notice anything amiss, least of all their host. And why should he? According to Mrs Herapath, Cornelius Traherne had just crowned himself emperor of Northside Society by betrothing his elder daughter to an Irving of Ironshore.

And he had clearly spared no expense to celebrate his triumph. Parnassus, the first great house in Trelawny to be wired for electricity, was a blaze of light. The grounds had been newly landscaped by English gardeners, the cinnamon and pimento trees clipped to release their fragrance, and the pergolas planted with roses, stephanotis and mignonettes. The state rooms had been repanelled in satinwood, the ballroom newly floored in black and white Carrara, and the band of the West India Regiment replaced by a thirty-piece orchestra shipped out from Vienna.

An army of French chefs had been drafted in to create
tortue claire
,
foie gras à la gelée
,
filet de boeuf hollandaise
, and
charlotte à l’italienne
– and, for the traditionalists among the guests, baked black land-crabs, fricassée of ring-tailed pigeon, and lobster pepperpot. Silent helpers dispensed Margaux, Lafitte, and Pommery Extra Sec.

It was very perfection. Although, as Mrs Herapath remarked to Madeleine between the gavotte and the polka, ‘It takes more than a liveried footman to make a gentleman.’

And Cornelius’s great-great-grandfather had known all about that, for he had been a blacksmith. ‘Yes, my dear, a
blacksmith
. Isn’t it killing? His name was
Owen
, I believe. Sailed for Jamaica in 1714, bought a swathe of cheap Government land, and set about “bettering himself”, as these people do. Kowtowed to the Monroes, the Lawes and the other first families, sent his sons home to become gentlemen, and purchased slaves by the shipload. And imported fresh batches every three years.’

And when he died, his son had left the estate with an overseer and gone back to England to live off the revenue, and his heirs had followed suit. It was only in 1832 that the Christmas Rebellion had summoned Addison Traherne back to Jamaica, to view the blackened ruins of Parnassus, and four thousand acres of cane turned to ash.

At ‘home’ the Government had pushed through the Emancipation Bill, and in Jamaica the slump had set in. And as blacks could no longer be forced to work for nothing, the columns of the
Gleaner
had filled with notices of bankruptcy. Soon estates could be had for the price of a dinner service.

And Addison had looked about him and seen that the only men to prosper were the money-lenders, so he had become one himself. The family motto was
Deus mihi providebit
: God will provide. ‘But in the meantime,’ as Mrs Herapath paraphrased behind her fan, ‘I intend to help myself. And if that means profiting from other men’s ruin, then so be it.’