The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (54 page)

‘I didn’t,’ said Sophie without turning her head.

Theo digested that. ‘I bet that’s an untruth,’ he muttered.

Sophie did not reply.

‘I don’t
like
Jamaica,’ said Theo.

‘I’m not surprised,’ Sophie replied. ‘It’s a very frightening place for a little boy.’

‘I don’t mean that I’m scared,’ retorted Theo.

‘Well, you should be. Jamaica’s full of ghosts.’

Theo blinked.

‘Some of them live in caves in the hills,’ she said calmly, ‘but mostly they live in trees like this one behind you.’

Theo jumped. ‘You’re making that up,’ he said belligerently. ‘It’s just an old tree.’

‘Actually it’s not, it’s a duppy tree. Ask anyone. Duppy is Jamaican for ghost. D’you see the folds in the trunk? That’s where they live. They come out at night and make people ill.’

Theo swallowed.

She was beginning to enjoy herself. ‘I used to believe that a duppy tree was making
me
ill,’ she went on. ‘But then a very brave little boy sorted things out for me, and after that I got better.’

Theo looked pale but defiant. ‘
How
brave?’

‘Extremely. He was a street urchin from London, and he swore all the time.’

‘What was he called?’

‘Ben.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘Nobody knows. After he dealt with the duppy tree he was never seen again.’

Theo thought about that. ‘Did it get him?’

‘Quite possibly,’ said Sophie.

Theo’s shoulders were hunched, and he was staring wide-eyed at the silk-cotton tree. Sophie nearly relented and told him that in fact the urchin had been spotted shortly afterwards, working as a cabin boy on a coastal steamer. But then she remembered those surreptitious kicks, and hardened her heart.

‘What did he look like?’ mumbled Theo, scarcely moving his lips.

‘Who?’

‘The street boy who disappeared. Ben.’

She shrugged. ‘Like a street boy.’

Across the road, a young groom jumped down from his carriage to check the harness on his horses. Something about the way he moved reminded her of Ben.

Strange the way memory works. She hadn’t thought about him in ages, and now suddenly she could almost see him. Thin as an alley cat, with filthy black hair and a grimy, sharp-featured face, and narrow green eyes. The ten-year-old Sophie had been captivated. And desperate to impress him.

‘You know an awful lot about Jamaica,’ said Theo humbly.

She felt another twinge of remorse. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘there’s one thing I forgot to tell you about duppies and duppy trees. They never attack Americans. It’s against the rules.’

Theo looked up at her uncertainly. ‘But how will they know that I
am
American?’

‘They can always tell.’

He nodded, and some of the colour returned to his lips.

‘Come along,’ said Sophie, ‘let’s find your mamma.’ But as she took his hand and turned to go, she glanced back over her shoulder at the young groom. His master and mistress were approaching down the street, and he was waiting for them. Suddenly Sophie’s heart lifted. The young groom’s master and mistress were Madeleine and Cameron.

She forgot the proprieties and yelled her sister’s name. ‘
Maddy!
Cameron! Over here!’

They didn’t hear her. And at that moment a wagon laden with sugar cane trundled down the street and hid them from view.

She let go of Theo and picked up her skirts and ran down the station steps to the edge of the street. Impatiently she waited while the oxen plodded past. And as the red dust slowly cleared, she saw them across the street: beautiful, unmistakable Maddy, with her luxuriant black hair piled beneath a wide straw hat, and her magnificent figure swathed in her favourite bronze silk dust-coat. She was leaning on Cameron’s arm, and he was bending over her, and she was wiping her eyes and nodding, and trying to smile.

Sophie opened her mouth to call again – then shut it. Something was wrong. Maddy looked upset.

At that moment Cameron turned to speak to the groom, and Sophie saw with a jolt that it wasn’t Cameron at all. Cameron was tall and broad-shouldered and in his early forties, with unruly fair hair and features that could never be called refined, but that possessed great strength and undeniable charm. The man to whom her sister was clinging –
clinging
– was also fair-haired, but much slighter and more delicate, and only in his late twenties, like Maddy herself. Sophie had never seen him before in her life.

Her thoughts darted. Something must have happened to Cameron. Something was terribly wrong.

‘Miss Monroe?’ said Mrs van Rieman, coming up behind her. ‘The train is about to leave . . . Is something wrong?’

Sophie turned and tried to say something, but her words were drowned out by another ox-wagon. And when she looked back, and the dust had settled again, the carriage and groom and the fair-haired young gentleman and her sister had gone.

Suddenly she was desperate to get to Montego Bay. But as Mr van Rieman informed her with grim pleasure, the train was delayed. A wagon had overturned just outside Montpelier, spilling its load of logwood across the tracks. It would take at least half an hour to clear.

As Sophie paced up and down outside the train, she talked herself out of panic. After all, there couldn’t be anything seriously wrong, or Maddy would have sent her a wire. Wouldn’t she?

At last, after nearly forty-five minutes, they got under way again, and the train began its lumbering descent towards the plains of the north coast. They trundled through acre on acre of green cane-fields shimmering in the breeze. Sophie counted the minutes till they would reach their destination.

Mrs van Rieman exclaimed with pleasure at the view of Montego Bay spread out below them – at the tidy red-roofed houses and the royal palms, and the glittering turquoise sea. Sophie hardly saw it. Surely,
surely
Maddy and Cameron would be waiting at the station, just as they’d promised? And perhaps the delicate-featured young man would be with them too, and it would all be cleared up. Surely it would be cleared up.

They drew into the station in a cloud of dust and steam. The platform was thronged with higglers of every shade of black and brown, and poor Mrs van Rieman softly shrieked at Theo to
stay close
, and barely registered Sophie’s muttered thanks and hasty leavetaking.

Then suddenly there they were –
both
of them. Her knees nearly buckled with relief. There was Maddy in her bronze silk dust-coat, pushing her way up the platform steps with a brilliant smile on her lovely face – and here was Cameron coming forward and sweeping Sophie off the ground in a hug. The delicate-featured young gentleman was nowhere to be seen.

‘
What
a relief!’ cried Sophie, when Cameron had set her down and she could breathe again. She turned to Maddy. ‘I saw you at Montpelier. I shouted, but you were gone before I could catch your eye.’

‘Montpelier?’ said Maddy, laughing as she stooped to free her dust-coat from the wheels of a passing trolley. ‘Sorry, but it wasn’t me. Cameron, would you tell the porter to be careful with that? If I know Sophie, it’ll be stuffed full of books, and weigh a ton.’

‘But Maddy,’ said Sophie, astonished, ‘I saw you.’

Madeleine straightened up and looked at her in amusement. ‘So now I’ve got a double up at Montpelier, have I? How very exciting.’

‘But—’

‘Sophie, I’ve been shopping in Montego Bay all afternoon. Now come along. You must be exhausted. And there’s so much to talk about. I can’t believe it –
three years
! We’ve planned it all out. Cameron’s riding behind, so we’ll have the dog cart to ourselves. And Braverly’s making a special dinner, and the children are staying up for a treat. They’re absolutely wild with excitement. Come
along
!’

Chapter Two

She awoke at daybreak with a dragging tiredness, and a sense of unease that wouldn’t be reasoned away.

She opened her eyes and drew back the mosquito curtain, and lay watching the sunlight warming the terracotta floor tiles. She listened to the soft slap of the servants’ canvas slippers, and the chatter of the grassquits beneath the eaves. She breathed in the mingled scents of beeswax, jasmine and wood smoke. It was the smell of Eden: reassuring, but now obscurely threatened.

Stop worrying, she told herself. Just enjoy being home.

She remembered when she used to wake up in this same room at dawn, and slip down to the river to meet her best friend Evie, who had run up through the cane-pieces from Fever Hill. They would go off to one of their secret places in the woods, and ask the spirits to get rid of Evie’s freckles, and keep the bacilli out of Sophie’s knee, and watch over Ben Kelly, wherever he was.

She turned and pressed her face into the pillow. Why think of him now? It was as if her thoughts were determined to revert to the unresolved and the unexplained. The boy who’d briefly been her friend, and then left without saying goodbye. The sister who was behaving so inexplicably.

She got out of bed and went to the window, flexing the stiffness out of her knee. Her room looked east, over a jungle of huge-leaved philodendron and wild almond trees, towards the stables at the bottom of the slope. Through the green-gold fronds of a tree-fern beneath the eaves, she saw Cameron mount his horse and give a last word to Moses the groom. He wore his usual riding-breeches, shooting-jacket and topboots, and looked as he always did: hurried and untidy, but utterly capable. Surely, she thought, he’d show it if something were wrong?

Turning back to the room, she saw with what care her sister had prepared it for her return. There were new curtains of blue and white dimity, and a desk amply stocked with paper and ink; a wash-hand stand with eau de Cologne and rosewater, and, on a shelf, a substantial pile of books.

It was a motley collection, assembled with respectful incomprehension by someone who’d never acquired a taste for reading herself. A Thomas Hardy; Carlyle’s history,
The French Revolution
; a volume on Florence Nightingale. Madeleine must have raided their grandfather’s collection at Fever Hill. Surely such thoughtfulness could not have been motivated by guilt?

And touchingly, Madeleine had brought up the great map of the Northside from Jocelyn’s study, and hung it where it could be seen from the bed. As Sophie climbed back under the covers, she could almost hear her grandfather’s sharp, no-nonsense voice telling her tales of the family history. How Benneit Monroe and his friend Nathaniel Lawe had come out to Jamaica to fight the Spanish in 1655, and then carved up the Northside between them. Benneit Monroe had taken the land to the west of Falmouth, and Nat Lawe – Cameron’s ancestor – that to the east. And, as Jocelyn never tired of telling her, they had always retained their properties back ‘home’: the Lawes’ estate in Dumfriesshire, and the Monroes’ great staring barracks at Strathnaw – which Sophie knew only from the grim yet fascinating oil painting behind Jocelyn’s desk.

As a child she’d wanted a happy ending to the fairytale: an assurance that everything remained unchanged ‘to this very day’. She’d been dismayed to learn that after the great slave rebellion of 1832 the fortunes of the Lawes had dwindled, until they’d been forced to sell first Burntwood, then Arethusa, and finally the estate back ‘home’.

‘But Cameron has stopped the rot,’ Jocelyn would say, with a gleam of pride in his fierce, sun-bleached eyes.

‘But what about us?’ Sophie would say with a frown. ‘There aren’t any boy Monroes left, are there? Only Maddy and me, so—’

‘So what?’ snapped Jocelyn. ‘When I’m gone, you shall have Fever Hill, and Madeleine shall have Strathnaw. That’s what counts.’

‘But—’

‘Sophie, at the best one doesn’t get to see further than the next couple of generations. The land remains in the family. That’s good enough for me.’

Perhaps for him, but not for her. She’d wanted permanence. But it seemed that, even with land, permanence could never be guaranteed.

She thought about that now as she lay in bed, trying to summon up the sound of her grandfather’s voice. It didn’t seem possible that there was no Jocelyn Monroe waiting for her at Fever Hill.

And it didn’t seem possible that Madeleine was deceiving Cameron. She loved him, and he loved her. There must be some other, quite innocent explanation. Maddy had gone to Montpelier to buy him a secret birthday present. Or – or something.

She turned on her side, and met the eyes of her mother, gazing at her from the faded daguerreotype in its leather travelling frame.

Rose Durrant had been darkly beautiful, like Maddy, and had died when Sophie was born. Sophie knew her only through gossip and family legend. Permanence? Stability? Rose Durrant had snapped her fingers at all that. She had flouted convention and ruined lives – including her own – by running off to Scotland with Jocelyn’s married son and heir.

Sophie gazed into her mother’s wilful, long-dead eyes.
The trouble with the Durrants
, a family friend had once told her,
is that they always went too far
.

Had Maddy inherited more from her mother than her striking good looks and her talent for photography? Had she also gone too far?

Turning that over in her mind, she fell asleep. But in her dreams it wasn’t her harsh, loving, utterly dependable grandfather who visited her, but reckless, secretive Rose Durrant.

When she awoke again it was nearly noon, and the dawn freshness had given way to heat. The house felt empty and quiet, but she could hear Madeleine calling to the children in the garden.

She dressed hurriedly and went out into the big raftered hall which served as sitting-room, dining-room and general dumping-ground.

In the flurry of last night’s arrival she’d hardly noticed her surroundings, but now she saw with dismay how much shabbier everything had become. The huge old mahogany table still showed the water-stains from when Cameron had first lived here as a bachelor beneath a leaky roof. And along with the usual clutter on the sideboard – a hurricane lamp with a chipped glass shade, a child’s velveteen zebra (missing one ear) – was a pile of sheets awaiting turning. Clearly money at Eden remained as scarce as ever.