The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (60 page)

For weeks afterwards, Sophie loitered in the kitchen, on the off chance that Ben would come back. She daydreamed about swapping books with him, and impressing him with her knowledge of Dervishes. But he never returned.

Then, suddenly, she fell ill. The small pink bump on her knee turned into a painful swelling. She became feverish at night, and floppy and tired in the mornings. Finally the doctor was called, and he prodded her knee, and pronounced the dreaded word. She lay in bed looking up at the grim faces leaning over her, and felt truly scared for the first time in her life.

The condition first makes its appearance
, said the medical book which Maddy borrowed from Mudie’s library,
with a slight lesion such as a knock or contusion, into which the tuberculosis bacilli are thought to gain entry to the organism
. The organism. That meant her.

Her world shrank to her bedroom.

Cousin Lettice was outraged that any ‘charge’ of hers should have fallen so shamefully ill. Maddy became secretive and anxious. She saw Ben Kelly a couple of times more – without Sophie, of course – and, under questioning, she admitted that she’d told him about the TB.

Sophie was furious. Then appalled. Then – when he failed to come and see her – in despair. She knew why he was staying away. It was because of the TB. And now he was never coming back.

But she never stopped hoping that he might.

She wrote about him in a secret code in her journal. She debated how she would behave if she saw him again: whether she would be angry and aloof, or just pretend not to have noticed that he’d ever been away.

Of course when it finally happened, she was neither.

It was July 1895, and they’d been living at Fever Hill for just over eight months, when one day Maddy suggested – in a voice which brooked no opposition – that Sophie should take a little drive with Jocelyn to Falmouth, ‘for a change of air’.

The truth was that Maddy was worried about her. They all were. Although her health had improved when they’d first arrived in Jamaica, over the past few weeks she’d been getting steadily worse. And no-one knew that better than herself. She’d become horribly thin and yellow, and so weak that when she practised walking with the hated splint and the calliper on the other leg to even up the lengths, she hardly had the strength to manipulate her crutches.

It was market day in Falmouth, and the square was heaving with people as she sat on the bench on the court-house verandah and waited for Jocelyn to come and collect her. It was a noisy, colourful sight: the cassia trees dripping with great festoons of yellow blossom, the Negro ladies raucous and brilliant in their green and mauve and orange print gowns. Sophie hardly saw any of it. She felt more anxious and alone than ever before in her life.

Things at Fever Hill were going from bad to worse. Maddy had become unhappy and withdrawn, and wouldn’t tell her why. The house was full of whispers; they were surrounded by illness and death. A duppy tree had stolen her shadow and she was going to die.

There was no-one she could talk to. She couldn’t tell the old people like Jocelyn and Great-Aunt May, and Clemency was nice, but not yet familiar enough to confide in. And worst of all, Maddy –
Maddy
– had become unapproachable; she seemed to have too many dark secrets of her own to be able to spare time for Sophie’s.

There was nobody, absolutely nobody to help.

Then suddenly, through a haze of red dust at the other end of the square, there was Ben.
Her
Ben, from London. It wasn’t possible. Not possible that he could be here in Jamaica, when she needed him most. But there he was.

After the initial shock she struggled to her feet and yelled his name at the top of her voice. ‘
Ben! Ben! Over here!
’ She waved her sunhat so wildly that she nearly overbalanced on her crutches.

What seemed like an age – an age of terror lest he miss her and disappear for ever – passed before he finally heard her, and stopped dead. No smile. Just a sudden wary stillness as he spotted her.

She scarcely noticed. She was too busy laughing and crying and shouting his name. And as she watched him shoulder his way through the crowd towards her, she saw how he’d changed. He was taller and stronger – she later learned that he’d worked his passage to Jamaica on a sugar boat – and most noticeable of all, he was
clean
. His black hair was glossy, his skin wasn’t grey any more, but lightly tanned, and he wore clean blue dungarees and a calico shirt. And someone must have told him about cleaning one’s teeth with a chewstick cut from a roadside bush, for when he spoke to her his teeth were no longer grey, but white.

‘What’s up, Sophie?’ he said as he jumped up onto the verandah. He took off his frayed straw hat and sat down at the other end of the bench. Then he threw her a questioning look, as if he’d only seen her the day before.

She sat down clumsily, scattering her crutches, and hardly able to breathe. ‘You’ve grown so tall,’ she gabbled, ‘and brown! And you’ve got new clothes, and – and everything.’

‘And I don’t pong no more,’ he said, flashing his feral grin and rescuing the crutches.

She gave a self-conscious laugh.

‘And look at you,’ he said. Then his grin faded. She could tell that he was trying to think up something else to say, but couldn’t, because she looked so awful, and he wouldn’t lie to her.

It flashed across her mind that although he knew about her TB, he’d never seen her splint, or the calliper. And he’d never seen her so thin and yellow. She smoothed her skirt over her knees. Her hands were bony and horrible. Her spirits plunged. ‘I thought I’d never see you again,’ she said. ‘You never came to say goodbye.’

‘Couldn’t,’ he said. ‘Got into chancery, didn’t I?’

‘What’s chancery?’

‘Trouble. Bluebottles after me.’

‘Bluebott— Oh, you mean policemen.’ She nodded, sucking in her lips. ‘I guessed it must have been something like that.’ In fact she hadn’t guessed anything of the sort. In her imagination she’d invested him with some kind of interesting but curable illness which prevented him from seeing her, while at the same time making him extremely sympathetic about tuberculosis.

She decided not to ask what kind of trouble he’d been in. It was enough to know that he hadn’t kept away because of her illness. But it seemed impolite not to acknowledge it at all.

‘Um,’ she ventured, ‘the trouble you were in – is it all right now?’

He turned away and looked out over the square, and the slight contraction of his features told her that it wasn’t.

Anxiety seized her. ‘Where’s Robbie?’

He drew in his breath like a wince. ‘He’s not here,’ he muttered.

Then she knew. Dead, she thought. Poor Robbie. Poor Ben.

She resolved not to say another word about it. If he wanted to tell her, he would. If not, there was no point in asking. So instead she asked him how he’d got to Jamaica.

He thought for a moment, then told her that he’d worked on a boat.

‘Gosh, how exciting,’ she said as brightly as she could, for she could see that he was still thinking about Robbie. ‘Did you get seasick?’

He shook his head.

‘I didn’t either. Or Maddy.’ She twisted her hands in her lap. It was hard not to think about Robbie. She wondered how he had died, and if she would meet him when she went to heaven herself. These days, she thought about dying a lot. She had to. There was a distinct possibility that the duppy tree would get its way, and she would die very soon.

To push the thought aside, she took out her purse and tried to offer Ben some of her pocket money. She should have known better. He pushed it angrily away. She shut her purse and put it in her lap, clutching it in her bony fingers. ‘Oh, B-Ben,’ she stammered, ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’ Then she burst into tears.

She cried for what seemed like ages: great noisy hiccupy sobs. Through the sobs she felt him briefly touch her arm, then brush off her sleeve as if he’d made her dusty. ‘What’s up, Sophie?’ he said brusquely.

Then out it all came. The tension at Fever Hill. The terror of the duppy trees. Her dragging conviction that she was going to die.

To her relief he didn’t tell her to stop being an idiot. Nor did he try to cheer her up. He simply listened without interrupting. Then he asked one or two questions, and told her not to talk about it to anyone. Then he sat for a moment in silence, gazing at the higglers in the square without really seeing them. ‘Right,’ he said flatly. ‘You leave it to me. I’ll sort it out. But you got to do your bit. All right?’

She nodded, and shakily blew her nose. ‘What – what do I do?’

‘You don’t say nothing to nobody, you stop fretting, and you start getting better.’

And somehow, knowing that he was in Jamaica, she had. From that day her appetite came back, and she slept peacefully for the first time in weeks. But she never saw him again. Once more he had dropped out of sight as noiselessly as a cat.

At least, he had until now.

Chapter Six

‘Sophie, what do you think you’re doing?’ said Madeleine as she watched her sister drawing on her gloves.

‘I’d have thought that was obvious,’ replied Sophie. ‘I’m going out to make a call.’ She put on her hat and jammed a hatpin into the crown.

‘But you hate making calls. And yet suddenly you can’t stay away from Parnassus.’

‘I’m not going to Parnassus.’

‘You know what I mean. The only reason you’re going to Fever Hill is because it’s Sibella’s day to call on Clemency, and—’

‘And I can see Sibella as well as Clemmy,’ put in Sophie. ‘Precisely. Two birds with one stone.’

‘Don’t you mean three?’

Sophie did not reply. Since the Trahernes’ tea party she had veered between anger at the risks Madeleine was running, and frustration that she was being kept in the dark. But she hadn’t confronted her sister over Alexander Traherne. What was the point? She’d only deny everything.

No, the only way to get at the truth was to corner Ben and make
him
tell. He’d never lied to her in the past, and she was fairly sure that he wouldn’t now.

The day after the tea party, she had tried to put her plan into effect. She’d borrowed the dog cart and driven to Parnassus, ‘to call on Sibella’. But to her dismay, Ben hadn’t been there, and she’d learned from old Danny Tulloch that he’d been sent up to Waytes Valley on an errand. The following day, Sibella had driven up to Eden to call on her – but
she
had been out. It felt as if Fate were trying to stop her from seeing him.

‘You don’t need to go to Fever Hill to see Sibella,’ said Madeleine relentlessly. ‘You’ll be seeing her in a few days at the Historical Society picnic.’

‘But Clemency won’t be there, will she?’ Sophie said sweetly. ‘And I really ought to see her, oughtn’t I?’

Madeleine sighed. ‘Well, whatever you do,’ she said quietly, ‘don’t make trouble for Ben. It wouldn’t be fair.’

Sophie paused with another hatpin in her hand and looked at her in surprise. ‘So you admit that he’s at Parnassus?’

‘Well of course. He’s been there for nearly two years.’

‘But – Maddy. Why did you never tell me before?’

‘Sophie—’

‘He was my friend.’

‘That’s precisely why I didn’t tell you.’ Frowning, she picked at the lacquer on the looking-glass frame. ‘Listen, Sophie. You had a schoolgirl crush when you were little—’

‘I did not,’ said Sophie indignantly.

‘– but things are different now. You’re no longer a child. You can’t go around making a spectacle of yourself like you did at Parnassus.’

‘I didn’t,’ muttered Sophie without much conviction.

‘Yes you did. Sibella saw you, and so did that house guest of Rebecca’s, and half the staff.’

Clever Madeleine, thought Sophie. Diverting attention from her own goings-on by focusing on me. ‘I wouldn’t have needed to “make a spectacle of myself”,’ she replied, ‘if you’d been more open with me.’

They met each other’s eyes in the glass. ‘Why can’t you have a little faith in me?’ said Madeleine. ‘Why can’t you just let things be?’

‘How can I? If I see something going wrong, how can I just stand by and “let it be”?’

Madeleine opened her mouth to reply, then shook her head. ‘You always do this. You get hold of something and you just will not let go.’

She’s treating you like a child, Sophie told herself angrily as she crossed the bridge at Romilly and drove north along the Eden Road. Keeping you in the dark as if you’re not ready to handle the truth. Who does she think she is?

It was horrible to feel like this about her own sister; horrible to be so angry with her. But she couldn’t help it.

In the dog cart beside her, Fraser whistled tunelessly through his teeth, happily unaware that he’d been brought along as a pretext. Once they reached the house and found Sibella safely ensconced with Clemency, Sophie intended to take him down to the stables ‘to see the horses’.

At the big guango tree she turned left onto Fever Hill land and headed west through the cane-pieces of Bellevue. Two miles in, the track veered north, and followed the trickle of the Green River, until presently the great house loomed up ahead: huge, shuttered and lonely on its bare brown hill.

She felt a twinge of guilt about Clemency. It was hardly fair to call on her simply as an excuse for questioning Ben. Clemency deserved better than that. And she needed help. ‘She hasn’t been off the estate in years,’ Cameron had told her the night before. ‘Scarcely eats a thing – except for laudanum, of course. She mixes it with pimento dram to hide the taste. Try to make her see sense and come and live with us.’ As a sop to her conscience, Sophie had resolved to do just that.

But to her frustration there was no-one about when they drew up at the steps. No sign of Sibella’s pretty little buggy, or of Clemency and her niece taking tea in the gallery.

Fraser sucked in his lips importantly, and jumped down and ran to the horse’s head. ‘Shall I take the carriage down to the stables?’

‘Just tie it up here,’ murmured Sophie, gazing up at the blank, shuttered façade. Her anger had drained away, leaving only self-doubt. Perhaps Maddy was right. Perhaps she shouldn’t interfere.