The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (44 page)

How long will it live?

Her head was throbbing, her lips cracked and sore. Once again she made a search for something to eat or drink. Shrivelled brown moss; mounds of dusty creepers spattered with bird-lime; the remains of the sapling: thorny, brittle and dry. She wondered if the creepers might be the ‘hogmeat’ that Sophie had told her about. If pigs could eat it, did that mean people could too? She broke off a leaf and chewed, but it was so bitter that she had to spit it out.

It occurred to her that she must cut a bizarre figure, in white canvas ankle-boots and sleeveless cambric combinations that only reached to the knee. Her gown had gone to make the rope, and her petticoat had got in the way when she’d tried to climb, so she’d taken it off. If only she’d had the sense to unearth her riding habit from the trunk. Then she could have used the skirt for a rope, and still had the trousers to protect her shins.

She sat back against the wall and shut her eyes. What did that matter now? What mattered was getting out of here, or finding some way of attracting help. A hunter or a passing smallholder, or a Negro on the way home from his provision ground. There must be someone about.

Then she remembered what the housekeeper had muttered when she’d brought in the tray. Some complaint about being forced to work over the Free Come holiday, the day after tomorrow.

She struggled to marshal her thoughts. The housekeeper had said that yesterday; which meant that tomorrow was the holiday. Which meant that there would be no Negroes passing by. There would be no-one about.

And no-one would come to search for her, because they all thought she was at Providence with Sinclair.

She pictured him telling the housekeeper that his wife had wandered off into the bush and was nowhere to be found. She pictured him riding down to Fever Hill to sound the alarm. She pictured Northside society tut-tutting over its afternoon tea.
Too dreadful, one can hardly bear to think of it. Apparently it was neurasthenia, and she simply wandered off. Poor Reverend Lawe! They say he’s utterly distracted. Searched for days, poor lamb, but never found a trace. And what horrid bad luck that the rains were over, or she might have had a chance.

She wondered how Cameron would feel when he heard the news.

And Jocelyn.

And Sophie. God, Sophie. Who would tell her? Would she even live long enough to find out?

When she opened her eyes, she saw that some of the blue had leached from the sky. How long till it got dark? One hour? Two? Would there be a moon? She couldn’t remember.

She put out her hand and studied it. Her fingers were swollen, the skin so taut that it hurt to make a fist. If she didn’t get out tonight, she would be too weak to do anything by morning.

Setting her teeth, she struggled to her feet. The blood soughed in her ears. Black spots darted before her eyes. She forced herself to begin again, to make another search for stones that might serve as wedges.

She found the rock she had been using as a hammer, and went to the part of the wall which was less sheer than the rest, where about four feet of her rudimentary ladder had survived. She found a crack about five feet up and started hammering in a wedge.

This time it went more smoothly than before. None of the wedges broke, the ‘hammer’ didn’t crack, and after about half an hour she’d made a zig-zag of hand- and footholds snaking roughly halfway up the wall. Which still left about nine feet more from there on up, so she’d have to carry her hammer and the rest of the wedges with her and put them in as she went along; but she’d worry about that when she came to it. She made a sack of her petticoat, slung it over her shoulder, and filled it with all the stepping-stones she could find.

She was nearly five feet up before a wedge snapped, and she went down. She landed heavily on her side, and pain shot through her shoulder.

Winded, she lay where she had fallen. She smelt dust and bird-droppings and her own oniony sweat. She tasted grit, and something that wriggled before she could spit it out. Mosquitoes whined in her ears. It was getting dark.

Her throat was swollen, her lips sore. It hurt to swallow. It hurt to move. She wanted to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come. She curled into a ball and dug her knuckles in her eyes. What do I do? she thought. What do I
do
?

No answer came. No heaven-sent voice whispering salvation in the wilderness. No half-forgotten survival hint now recalled in the nick of time. As far as she could remember, Robinson Crusoe had never fallen down a hole.

Eventually, she opened her eyes. In the twilight she was surprised to see a long gash down her left forearm. She groped beneath her for the rock that had done it.

Her swollen fingers closed on it painfully. But it wasn’t a rock. It was a shackle. Rough with corrosion but still solid, and unmistakably a leg-iron: part of the section which encircles the ankle. She thought back to her first foray across the sink-hole floor. That soft, chalkily yielding crack of bone beneath her hand.

Heart pounding, she sat up. Her skin prickled with the sense of being watched. Someone had been here before her. Someone was down here still.

She strained to make out shapes in the gloom. And after a while they began to move, as shadows do when you look at them for long enough.

‘I don’t want to harm you,’ she whispered. ‘I just want to get out.’

The shadows stopped moving and became a listening stillness.

She felt warmth and wetness on her arm, and glanced down. She touched the cut with her fingertips. It had bled freely, but was already forming a scab.

The shadows watched, but didn’t move.

She crawled over to her petticoat and tore a strip with her teeth to make a rough bandage.

The shadows kept to their side of the hole.

When she had finished binding the cut, her fingers were sticky and glistening. She sat cross-legged in the dust and turned her hands this way and that. In the deepening gloom, the blood looked almost black.

The shadows began to feel less of a threat and more like company.

At Cairngowrie House, she had pictured the taint as little grey flecks floating in scarlet.
It’s in the blood.

She thought about that now. She thought about waking up in her mother’s cold, snowlit bed, and peeling back the blankets to reveal the great scarlet stain.

She thought about her mother on all fours on the rug.
Well, Maddy, we’ll just have to do this on our own.

She scowled at the blood on her hands.

Her mother had been wild, self-indulgent, undisciplined, and brave. She had hurt people and made enormous mistakes, and had reaped both the good and the bad of what she had done, and she had never blamed anyone but herself. When she’d got into trouble, she’d simply done her best to get herself out.
Well, Maddy, we’ll just have to do this on our own.

A noise above her made her start. A john crow had alighted at the edge, and was peering down at her, its eyes bright and dispassionate. She reached for a stone.

Behind her the shadows waited to see what she would do.

The stone clipped the edge of the sink-hole and tumbled harmlessly back to earth. With a squawk the john crow spread its wings and flew away.

‘Come back tomorrow,’ she shouted. ‘I’m not dead yet.’

Chapter Thirty-One

Up in the rafters, a spider is spinning its web. It is working from the outside in, and will finish soon, unless a helper comes and brushes it away.

The spider has nearly finished when it disappears behind a shiny black face. ‘Now chile,’ says Nurse Fletch, ‘be quick an take you medicine. I don’ got all day.’

The medicine is oily and brown and tastes of ash, but the child swallows it in one gulp, for she is a good child, and doesn’t want to go without supper again.

The inside Sophie watches the child take the medicine, and knows that it tastes of ash, but she doesn’t say a word. The inside Sophie never speaks. If she did, the nurses would find her and take her away.

The inside Sophie watched when they took the child’s clothes and strapped her to the bed, and gave her injections which made her jangly all over. The inside Sophie watched when they took Pablo Grey to the incinerator in the yard and burnt him, and the twisty black flakes flew up up up and crumbled to nothing, which is what really happens to you when you die. The inside Sophie watched when the child screamed and screamed until they gave her morphine which made her sick, and the nurses were vexed, and wouldn’t change the sheets. The inside Sophie saw it all, but never said a word. The inside Sophie never speaks. If she did, the nurses would find her and take her away.

The child’s bed is in the south gallery, with the rest of the female patients. She can’t see out because of the louvres, but below them there are gaps between the balusters and she can see down into the yard, to the incinerator where they burnt Pablo Grey. And she can see up into the rafters where the spider is spinning its web, and she can see behind her to the wall where the gecko puffs up his scarlet ruff to attract the flies.

Once, the gecko fell plop onto the child’s midriff, and beside her the old lady with the scabs on her arms burst into giggles. ‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘A gecko in your lap! That means you shall have a baby by and by!’ She went on giggling until the nurses came and gave her an injection.

The young lady in the other bed told the child not to mind old Mrs de Charmilly, who was sent here years ago when this was a clinic for nervous cases. The young lady was nice, with fluffy, colourless hair and glistening eyes, but she coughed a great deal. Once, her guardian sent her a little blue glass atomizing flask of cocaine to ease her throat, but she coughed so much that it didn’t last long; and the day before yesterday she was taken upstairs for cautery, and hasn’t come back.

The child has been here for ever and ever. Once upon a time there was a pretty sister who was brilliant at guessing games, and a nice lady in a floaty white dress, and a stiff old gentleman with thousands of books. But that was far away and long ago.

The child sleeps all the time now, except when she is woken by the nurses to take her medicine or her semolina, or by somebody coughing. After the medicine, everything becomes fuzzy. Fuzzy shadows and fuzzy strips of sunlight on the floor. Even the gecko is fuzzy. Noises are fuzzy too, although sometimes they become stretchy and loud.

Until now, there hasn’t been much noise, except for coughing and sometimes the gurgly noise of a person trying to breathe. But now there is a great deal of noise. Old Mrs de Charmilly is screeching and biting her scabs, and the nurses are shouting and running about, and there are footsteps in the gallery: not the footsteps of the nurses in their cotton slippers, but someone in boots.

The child turns her head and sees a tall gentleman at the other end of the gallery. The nurses are crowding round him and waving their arms, and the inside Sophie can tell that they are frightened, although she can’t make out what they are saying.

The tall gentleman walks the length of the gallery very fast, with the nurses trailing after him, and now he is standing over the child, looking down. The inside Sophie knows him, but cannot remember his name. It has something to do with pilot-lights and a horse.

The tall gentleman doesn’t speak, but the inside Sophie can tell that he is extremely angry, which is why the nurses are so scared. But the inside Sophie isn’t scared at all.

The tall gentleman is undoing the straps on the child’s arms and leg and around her splint, and wrapping her in a blanket and lifting her up, and carrying her along the gallery and down the steps and out into the sunlight, which makes the child blink.

Then the tall gentleman turns, and the child sees the nurses huddled on the steps. They aren’t shouting now, but they won’t come down from the steps, for they are too frightened.

Carefully, so as not to jar her splint, the tall gentleman passes the child to a helper. The helper smells sweaty and scared, and for a moment the inside Sophie thinks that the tall gentleman means to leave her behind. But then the helper lifts her high, high, and the tall gentleman takes her before him on his horse, and they are moving off down the carriageway. She can’t see much because of the blanket wrapped around her, but she can smell the horse and hear its hooves, and see the tips of its glossy black ears.
Pilate
, she thinks. The horse’s name is Pilate.

After a while they reach the great iron gate, and it’s shut, and the gatekeeper runs out and begins to shout and wave his arms about. Then the tall gentleman tells the gatekeeper a very bad thing, and after that there is no more shouting, and the gates open up, and they pass through.

Later, through a gap in the trees, the inside Sophie sees the sanatorium in the distance. She sees the pointy witch gables and the great windowless cutwind where they lock up the children and leave them to die. She watches the sanatorium for as long as she can, to make sure that it’s really, truly gone.

The inside Sophie wants to tell the tall gentleman that she is glad that he came for her, but she can’t, for the inside Sophie never speaks. If she did, the nurses would find her and take her away.

As Cameron drove the borrowed trap through the gates of Fever Hill, he glanced at the reddening sky and gave the reins an impatient flick. It would be dark soon, and he needed to see Sophie to safety before he could think of starting for Providence.

The sensible thing, of course, would be to postpone Providence until the morning. But he couldn’t do that. He needed to know that Madeleine was all right. Which was irrational, he knew that. Why wouldn’t she be all right? No reason. Except that since their fraught conversation outside the church on Sunday morning, she had allowed her sister to spend three more days in that appalling place, without making any further attempt to get her out. And that wasn’t like Madeleine. Whoever she really was.

A mongoose shot across the carriageway, and Pilate swerved and tossed his head. Cameron gave him a slap with the reins and told him to quieten down. He turned to Sophie, beside him. ‘He’s just making a fuss’, he explained, ‘because he doesn’t like pulling a trap. He thinks it’s beneath his dignity.’