The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (51 page)

And she wanted to. More than anything. But the risk was too great. And the only way round it that she could come up with was too shocking to mention to anyone. She couldn’t even tell Sophie. Or Clemency. Or Dr Pritchard.

She watched Jocelyn square his shoulders and give himself a little shake. ‘We shall be by the carriage,’ he said as he picked up his hat.

‘Jocelyn—’

‘By the carriage,’ he said firmly. ‘Don’t worry. We shan’t go without you.’

Cameron arrived at the church shortly after the service had ended. He had brought Abigail with him. A mastiff for moral support. If he hadn’t been so on edge, he would have smiled.

The previous evening he had taken his Scotch and soda and made a tour of the renovations to the house. The missing shingles had been replaced, the new bathhouse was nearing completion, and the master bedroom finally had a bed in it – although from habit he still slept out on the verandah. But as he’d stood in the golden evening light surveying what had been achieved, he’d wondered if it would all be for nothing.

Duke Street was busy with churchgoers, and he had to search for a place to leave Pilate. Through the dust of departing carriages he spotted Cornelius and Rebecca Traherne on the other side of the road, talking to Jocelyn, Clemency and Sophie. Madeleine was nowhere to be seen. God damn it to hell. Not
again
.

Sophie caught sight of him and waved so vigorously that she nearly fell over. She was wearing her new light walking-splint, of which she was immensely proud. ‘Dr Pritchard has pronounced my lungs quite sound, and the tuberculosis practically
vanquished
,’ she had told him on her last visit to Eden – which had been an historic one, for Clemency had brought her all on her own, and had absolutely driven the trap herself. ‘I shall have a limp,’ Sophie had told him, as if it were a badge of honour, ‘but Grandpapa says it will take more than that to keep me from whatever I put my mind to. I have asked him to teach me to ride, and he has promised to see to it. But I expect I shall have to remind him several times, for he often forgets.’

Clemency had spotted him too, and shyly lifted a hand in greeting. He tipped his hat to her and forced a smile. She had remained loyal to the grey hair dye – ‘such a soothing colour’ – but was gaining daily in assurance, now that May had taken to spending all her time upstairs. With unnerving suddenness Jocelyn had transferred the management of the house to Clemency, and after a hesitant start she was beginning to overcome her fear. And her health had improved immeasurably, now that she had something to do.

Across the road, Sophie was patting her lap and calling to Abigail to come. Cameron gave the mastiff a nudge with his boot and she padded across, her tail lazily swinging, her head lowered for the expected caress.

‘Grandpapa,’ said Sophie, ‘how do I get her to sit?’

‘You don’t,’ said Jocelyn drily. He threw Cameron a glance, and the corners of his mouth went down.

Cameron nodded to him, but made no move to join them. He knew the old man would understand.

He turned and made his way up the church path, taking off his hat and gloves as he reached the porch. St Peter’s was empty, except for Mr Mullholland the curate, and a trio of lady volunteers tidying the flowers. No Madeleine. Cameron swore under his breath. The curate shot him a look.

He went back into the glare of the churchyard. Since Sinclair’s death he had seen her exactly seven times, and always in the company of others. For the most part she was edgy and monosyllabic, or worse: polite. And over the past five weeks, he hadn’t seen her at all. He’d had to content himself with two brief notes, both pleading ‘indisposition’. She was avoiding him. He couldn’t work out why.

Since the funeral she hadn’t left Fever Hill except to go to church. Nothing out of the ordinary there, he reminded himself. No respectable widow would make calls for at least a year after her husband’s death. Except that with Madeleine, there was more to it than that.

It was as if she felt obliged to do penance: to Jocelyn for having lied to him; to Clemency for being the daughter of the man who had deserted her and the woman who had stolen him away; and perhaps also – and this was worst of all – to Sinclair’s ghost.

In his darker moments, Cameron cursed his brother. He wished he could honestly grieve for Sinclair, but he was too conscious that, for his brother, death had been an escape. He would have been crushed by the public disclosure of his guilt. And as things had turned out, there had been no disclosure. Grace had said that she was content to let it lie.

Cameron had told her who had killed her son as soon as Madeleine had told him, the week after the funeral. ‘In a sense,’ he had said to Grace, ‘one might regard Sinclair’s death as – I don’t know, perhaps an act of God?’ Grace had studied his face for a long time, her mahogany features unreadable. ‘Maybe so,’ was all she had said.

He rounded the corner of the church, and saw Madeleine standing before the Lawe family plot, where a new stone commemorated Sinclair Euan Lawe, suddenly in a riding accident at the age of thirty-one.

With a spasm of anger Cameron saw that she was still wearing the dull black crape of deepest mourning. He’d been blunt about that, the last time they had met. ‘Surely it’s time to lighten the gloom just a little? Or do you propose to emulate the Queen, and remain in deep mourning for the rest of your life?’

‘According to Clemency’, she had retorted, ‘one year of deep mourning is proper form.’

‘Perhaps it was, twenty years ago,’ he had said. ‘Besides, since when were you guided by form?’

To that she had made no reply, and he had known that he’d gone too far.

In the end he had grasped the bull by the horns. ‘I don’t understand you, Madeleine. What is this about? You didn’t love him.’

‘No,’ she had sombrely agreed. ‘No-one did.’

To begin with, he had wondered if in some perverse way she felt responsible for what had happened to Sinclair. ‘It was an
accident
, he had told her with deliberate bluntness. ‘Why should you feel guilty because he lost his way and fell down a ravine?’

Then he realized that he was mistaken. It was not the manner of his brother’s death which had brought about her withdrawal, but the fact of it. Sinclair’s death had given her back her freedom. She had benefited from it. How could she not experience guilt?

Above his head a flock of grassquits squabbled noisily in a frangipani tree. As he passed, they rose in a cloud and flew away.

Madeleine had seen him, and was waiting composedly beneath her parasol of dull black silk.

He had to admit that she looked very well in mourning. Black suited her dramatic colouring, and gave her dignity and poise. It also reminded him disturbingly of Great-Aunt May.

As he approached her, the little family group that was laying a wreath at a nearby tomb turned discreetly away, and made strenuous efforts to display no curiosity whatsoever.

Madeleine flicked them a glance, then gave Cameron a meaningless smile and offered him her hand. He took off his hat and pressed her black-gloved fingertips and bowed, and they turned and started sedately for a more secluded part of the churchyard.

For a while they walked without speaking. To break the silence he said, ‘Sophie looks well.’

‘She is,’ she replied. ‘And she can’t wait to show you her new treasure. Mrs Herapath gave it to her on Friday. It’s a photograph of our mother.’ Sophie and Clemency were becoming frequent callers on Olivia Herapath – who, while still cool towards Madeleine, was making rather a point of spoiling her sister.

Cameron said, ‘I thought Olivia destroyed all her photographs of Rose years ago.’

‘It turns out that she couldn’t bear to part with this one, as it’s the best portrait she ever took.’

‘Except for the one of Hector, of course.’

She smiled. ‘Of course.’ She seemed perfectly at ease with him provided that they kept to neutral ground. It made him want to shake her. Here they were, making small-talk like a couple of acquaintances at a five o’clock tea, when all he wanted to say to her was,
Marry me. Promise that you’ll be my wife. I can’t go on like this, I need to hear you say it.

‘Cameron, I’m sorry,’ she said with disarming suddenness.

He coloured. ‘For what,’ he muttered.

‘I’ve treated you appallingly. The truth is, I haven’t been able to talk to anyone. Not even you. I needed to think about things. To make sense of what happened.’

There must be more to it than that, he thought. But he decided not to press her yet. This was the most that she’d said to him in eight months.

‘I know it’s been hard for you,’ she said.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Yes it does.’

They exchanged glances, and his heart leapt. Then she spoilt it by asking if he’d heard any news about Ben Kelly.

‘Not as yet,’ he said between his teeth. The boy had been seen shortly after the funeral, working his way towards Kingston on a coastal steamer, but since then all enquiries had drawn a blank.

‘No doubt he’ll turn up,’ Cameron added. He knew that he sounded perfunctory, but he didn’t care. Her concern for the scrawny little street Arab baffled him. She’d explained that they had been friends in London, in some incomprehensible way which made Cameron absurdly, humiliatingly jealous. And she had also admitted that for some unexplained reason the boy had followed her to Jamaica, and lent her his gun. His
gun
? Why the devil should a fourteen-year-old boy need a gun? But as to that, she either could not, or would not, say.

Once, he had demanded in exasperation if there was anything else that she hadn’t told him.

‘Probably,’ she had replied. ‘Is there anything about your own life that you haven’t told me?’

Touché. That was one of the things he loved about her: that bluntness which could flash out without warning and take one’s breath away.

They had reached the overgrown part of the churchyard behind St Peter’s, and were drawing near to the Durrant graves: a handful of lichen-crusted tablets in an untended, disorderly cluster. Cameron watched her shut her parasol and loop its cord over her wrist as she stopped to read the legend on her grandfather’s tomb.
Aristide Durrant, 1813–68. Of Your Charity, Pray for His Soul.

‘Madeleine,’ he said, ‘it’s been eight months.’

Her eyes remained stubbornly fixed on the tomb.

‘Eight months,’ he repeated, ‘and you’ve never allowed me to say it.’

‘Cameron . . .’

‘Well, this time you can’t stop me.’ He went to her and reached out and gently took her hand in his. She tried to pull away, but he kept his hold.

‘People will see,’ she muttered.

‘No they won’t. There’s no-one about.’ He was silent for a moment, looking down at her hand. Then he turned it palm upwards, and slowly unbuttoned the three little black jet buttons of her glove, and peeled it back. Then he bent and kissed the soft, pale skin on the inside of her wrist. He felt her tense; he heard the sharp intake of her breath. He caught the milky scent of her flesh.

Dizzily, he straightened up.

She was looking down at his ungloved hand grasping her black-sheathed fingers. Her dark brows were drawn together. Her mouth was set.

‘You know that I love you,’ he said, still holding her hand. ‘You know that.’

She made no reply.

‘And I thought – at least I hoped – that you—’ He broke off. ‘Marry me. I want you to marry me.’

Still no reply. Her head was bowed. She was biting her lip.

He drew her closer to him. ‘I’m not asking you to name the day,’ he said. ‘If you want a long engagement, then you shall have it. I just – I just need you to tell me that some day, in the future, you will be my wife.’

At last she raised her head and looked at him. To his dismay he saw that her face was pale and agitated, her eyes bright with tears. She put her free hand on his chest and gently pushed. ‘Not here,’ she said.

‘Madeleine—’

‘Not
here
.’ With a kind of violence she twisted from his grasp and turned, and took a few unsteady steps, and put her hand to her temple and smoothed back her hair.

And as he watched her, a terrible feeling of risk swept over him. He realized that if he could not bring her to accept him now, today, he would have lost her for ever. His life without her would stretch before him as a meaningless blank. He would never stop wanting her. He would never want any other woman. He would end up like Jocelyn: hopelessly longing for a love whom he had lost decades before.

He felt as if he were standing at the top of a high cliff, looking down over the edge. ‘If you’ve stopped loving me,’ he said, struggling to keep his voice steady, ‘it would be kinder to tell me now. One word will be enough. I’ll do whatever you say. You can tell me to go the devil and I’ll do it. I’ll never trouble you again. But God damnit, Madeleine, just tell me.’

‘I haven’t stopped loving you,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘You know I haven’t.’

‘Then
what
?’

She shook her head. ‘We can’t talk about this now. Jocelyn’s waiting—’

‘And he’ll go on waiting. He doesn’t mind.’

‘This isn’t the right place. People might—’

‘They don’t matter. Nothing matters but this. You can’t put it off any longer. I won’t let you.’

She turned away.

Again he had that appalling sensation of risk. He fought the urge to take her by the shoulders and shake her until she told him what was holding her back.

At last, to his incredulous relief, she simply nodded. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘We can’t put it off any longer. Come. Let’s walk.’

They turned and took the path that ran the length of the churchyard, heading for the silk-cotton tree at the end.

When she still made no move to begin, he decided to help her. He said, ‘I’ve been trying to work out what’s troubling you.’

He felt her turn and look at him, but he kept his eyes on the path. The silk-cotton was still in bloom, and he watched her black skirts stirring the creamy white flowers that littered the gravel. ‘It seems to me’, he went on slowly, ‘that if you do still care for me, then whatever’s troubling you must have something to do with – I’m not sure exactly what, but perhaps you feel some – disinclination – for marrying again.’