The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (68 page)

In this place where she is now, Strap lived, and Job, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others. Here Congo Eve danced the shay-shay in defiance of Cyrus Wright. Are their spirits still here? Are they watching her now?

Quickly she swings her legs off the wall and jumps to her feet. They’re nothing to do with her. Congo Eve is nothing to her. Any time she wants to get away from this, she can.
Any time.
All she has to do is say the word.

Quickly, so she can’t change her mind, she runs up the path to her mother’s place, hugging the book to her breast. She creeps up the steps – quietly so as not to wake her mother – and fetches her little wooden writing-box from under the bed. Then she makes her way out to the end of the yard, and seats herself on her grandmother’s tomb under the garden cherry tree. She takes out her pen and ink and a sheet of her special notepaper, and swiftly writes:
I shall be taking the air in Bamboo Walk tomorrow, at four o’clock. EM.
Then she seals it with a little stump of sealing-wax.

This has nothing to do with Congo Eve, she tells herself. In fact this only proves how
different
things are now: that these days a mulatto girl can receive admiration and
respect
from a buckra gentleman.

Without returning for hat or shoes she runs out of the yard, and takes the path round the old Pond, and heads due west through the cane-pieces of Alice Grove. She runs all the way to Pinchgut Hill.

When she reaches it, the settlement is just waking up. Dogs and goats are nosing around in the dust. Cooking-fires are smoking. There’s a good fat smell of coconut oil and fried breadfruit and cerassee tea.

Nobody is surprised to see her dropping by, and nobody wonders when she collars little Jericho Fletcher and draws him behind a jackfruit tree for a private talk. She can trust Jericho. He’s clever and quiet, and he has a shy little-boy admiration for her.

‘Here’s a quattie for you,’ she tells him. ‘You’ll get another if you run as quick as a black ant and give this note to who I say. To who I
say
, mind, and nobody else. Understand?’

Jericho gazes up at her with his shiny black ackee-seed eyes, and solemnly nods. For a moment Evie feels a twinge of guilt at using a child. But then she reminds herself that he’ll get his two quatties, and with them he can achieve that impossible dream of buying the longed-for hobby-horse.

She gives him the first quattie and the note, and closes his hand over both. ‘Run quick,’ she whispers, ‘quick now. And give this to Master Cornelius Traherne.’

Chapter Eleven

A slumbrous afternoon at the clinic, and not a patient in sight. Dr Mallory had gone off in disgust, leaving Sophie on her own. She sat by the open door at the rickety little table, struggling to concentrate on
Diseases of the Lungs
.

But the words conveyed nothing to her. It had been five days since her conversation with Evie by the aqueduct, and still there had been no word of Ben. Perhaps Evie had changed her mind about passing on the message. Perhaps he’d left Trelawny, or taken ship back to England, or Barbados or Panama or America.

She had no means of finding out, except to ask Evie again, and she was too proud to do that.

She rested her chin on her hands and heaved a sigh. What was she doing here? What did she want? These days she couldn’t concentrate on anything. She felt constantly dissatisfied: edgy and tearful, and full of vague yet insistent longings. At times she found herself envying Madeleine – for being beautiful, for having a husband who adored her – even though she’d never envied her before. What was wrong with her? What did she
want
?

One thing, though, was painfully clear. She didn’t want the clinic. It had been a huge, humiliating mistake.

Bethlehem itself was a pleasant little place. A typical smallholder’s settlement, it lay about three miles east of Eden great house, and a mile south of the Martha Brae. A cluster of wattle-and-daub houses thatched with cane-trash enclosed a dusty clearing containing a whitewashed Baptist chapel, a breadfruit tree, and the small tin-roofed barrack which Dr Mallory had commandeered for his clinic. Surrounding the village was a tidy patchwork of banana walks, coffee plots and provision grounds, reaching east to the cane-pieces of Arethusa, and north to the river and the edge of Greendale Wood.

The people were friendly but stubborn, and, as Cameron had predicted, reluctant to betray their own bush-doctors for a ‘doctor-shop’ where they couldn’t buy Calvary powder or dead-man oil. Most days, Sophie had little to do except dole out cough linctus, and dig the occasional jigger out of a pickney’s foot.

She wouldn’t have minded if it hadn’t been for Dr Mallory. A clever, bitter, distressingly fat widower, he detested the practise of medicine, and had only become a doctor because God had told him to. He made no secret of resenting Sophie’s presence, even though it had been his own idea that she should help him. His chief delight seemed to be in criticizing her – in the guise of giving ‘friendly advice’ – and covertly ridiculing her lack of medical experience.

‘I fear, Miss Monroe, that for you our little clinic is beginning to pall? No, no, I
quite understand
. How inadequate we must seem after your London hospitals!’ He knew very well that her only experience of hospitals was three days as a volunteer at the Cheltenham Working Woman’s clinic. But when she reminded him of that, he always pretended to have forgotten.

The clinic had become a battle of wills between them. Dr Mallory clearly expected her to throw in the towel, while she was just as determined to deny him the satisfaction. So every afternoon she grimly drove east past the Maputah works, then turned north down a cane track and crossed the trickle of Tom Gully, which marked the boundary between Eden estate and Bethlehem village.

There Dr Mallory would greet her with an ill-tempered grimace, she would throw him a determined smile, and they would settle down to wait for the patients who rarely came. After an hour or so, Dr Mallory would take himself off to his little house for a rum and water and a nap, and Sophie would get out a book.

This afternoon, the village was more than usually quiet, for it was market day, and most people were away. Through the open door Sophie could see an old man sitting under a pawpaw tree at the far side of the clearing, polishing his Sunday shoes with a handful of shoeblack hibiscus petals. A couple of pickneys cantered past, playing pony and driver. Cling-clings chattered on the bamboo fences. Chickens pecked the dust. Beneath the breadfruit tree, Belle squatted on her haunches and admonished her toy zebra, Spot. She had conceived a passionate devotion for Sophie, and had badgered her mother until she was allowed to accompany her aunt.

With a tact which Sophie appreciated, Madeleine rarely enquired about the clinic. Cameron, however, was more outspoken. ‘Sophie, it’s been what, two weeks?’ he’d said after dinner the night before. ‘Isn’t it time to call it a day? After all, old Mallory doesn’t need you, and you don’t need him, and heaven knows the blacks don’t need either of you.’

He was right, of course. But how could she back down now, after making a stand about it? Was this to be yet another of her famous ‘about-turns’?

Belle’s voice outside the door cut across her thoughts. She was asking someone just beyond Sophie’s line of vision to take a look at Spot’s hoof. ‘It’s wobbly because Fraser pulled it,’ she said. ‘Aunt Sophie gave me some carbolized dressing.’

‘Dressing’s not much use for a broken cannon bone,’ said Ben.

Sophie’s heart jerked.

‘What’s a cannon bone?’ said Belle.

‘The bit above the fetlock,’ said Ben. ‘It’s broken all right. Flopping about all over the place.’

Very quietly, Sophie got to her feet and backed away from the door. She moved to the high louvred window, and stood on tiptoe to peer out.

He was squatting down to Belle’s level in the shade of the breadfruit tree. He wore his usual breeches and topboots and a collarless blue shirt, but instead of his groom’s cap a battered straw hat lay beside him in the dust. He was frowning and turning the zebra in his hands.

‘Will he get better?’ asked Belle, standing before him with her hands clasped behind her back.

He shook his head. ‘Best make an end of him.’

‘Oh. What does that mean?’

‘Put a bullet in him.’

Belle blinked. ‘You mean I ought to shoot him?’

He handed the toy back to her. ‘Best thing for him. He’ll never walk on four legs again.’

‘But if I carry him.’

He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. If you want to carry a stripy horse all day, that’s your lookout.’

She nodded, and hugged Spot under her chin. ‘Actually he’s not a stripy horse. He’s a zebra.’

‘What’s a zebra?’

‘Um. A sort of stripy horse.’

Ben smiled.

It was the first time that Sophie had seen him smile – really smile – since he was a boy. It made her want to cry.

Standing there with her hands on the window sill, she felt a sudden shattering rush of feeling for him. It took her breath away. It made everything clear.

He
mattered
to her. He always had. Ever since that first day in the photographer’s studio, when he’d stood at bay before Madeleine’s imitation gun: a whip-thin alley cat of a boy who’d snapped and snarled, and then been reduced to captivated silence by a gilded horse on the binding of a book. He mattered to her because his mind worked the same way as hers, and because he could sense what she was feeling, and because – because he just did.

And now at last she understood why she’d never been attracted to any of the young men she’d ever met; why she’d simply felt that it wasn’t possible to develop a regard for them. It was because they weren’t Ben.

The window sill was rough beneath her hands, and she clung to it. This was what Madeleine had warned her about. She felt dizzy and shaken. And hopelessly sad.

She couldn’t tell him what she felt. She couldn’t tell anyone. No-one must know, because it was impossible. Even she could see that.

There is nothing you can do about this, she told herself, and the truth of the words settled inside her like a stone. There is nothing that can be done.

Holding her breath, she watched him reach for his hat and look about him, then make for the door.

Quickly, before he spotted her, she drew back from the window and sat down, and bent over her book.

When his shadow cut across the doorway, she glanced up, and made what she thought was a creditable job of appearing surprised. She was on the verge of tears, and she was sure that it showed in her face – but if he noticed, he made no sign. He just stood in the doorway and gave her his unsmiling nod. ‘Can I come in?’

She clasped her hands together on the book, and nodded.

He tossed his hat on the medicine trolley, and went to lean against the opposite wall, glancing about him at the bottles and jars on the shelves. He moved with his usual wary grace, and for an instant she felt a flicker of sympathy for poor fat Dr Mallory, who’d probably never had a graceful moment in his life. ‘So this is the clinic,’ he said.

She cleared her throat. ‘Yes. This is it.’

He picked up a jar of carbolic and turned it in his fingers, then put it back again. ‘I worked for a hospital once. Runner for St Thomas’s. Learned all the names of the medicines.’

‘Was that before you knew me and Madeleine?’

He nodded.

She wondered where he’d been for the past five days. His clothes were dusty but clean, and he didn’t look as if he’d been sleeping rough. He’d even managed to shave, and given himself a scrape along the jawbone.

As she looked at the hard, clean planes of his face, she wished savagely that her childhood fantasy could come true – that he would turn out to be a changeling prince, so that everything would end up all right.

She looked down at her hands, and saw that they’d tightened into fists. ‘So what happened to that promise you made me give you’, she said, ‘about not seeing you again?’

He crossed his arms on his chest. ‘Yes, but
I
never promised nothing, did I? Anyway. I just come to say thanks. That’s all.’

‘For what?’

‘For putting in a word for me at your aunt’s. Great-aunt. Whatever she is.’

‘I take it that this means you’ve got the position?’

He nodded. ‘Scary old cat, isn’t she? But I think we’ll muddle along all right.’

She remembered Great-Aunt May’s imperious declaration:
I must have things about me which are beautiful
. ‘I imagine’, she said, ‘that you’ll do very well.’

‘So why’d you do it then?’

‘Why did I do what?’

‘Put in a word for me with Miss Monroe.’

‘It was the least I could do, since I got you dismissed.’

‘You didn’t.’

‘Yes I did. That day when you drove me home, you had words with Alex – Master Alex – I mean, with Alexander Traherne.’

‘That’s not why I got the sack.’

‘Then why did you?’

He did not reply. A faint redness stole across his cheekbones.

‘Sibella said you were insolent.’

He laughed. ‘You could say that.’

‘She mentioned some incident at the stables, but she didn’t say what. Just that Cornelius and Alexander were both incandescent.’

‘Does that mean angry?’

‘You know it does.’

‘Well. They had it coming.’

‘But why did you do it? Why antagonize the most powerful family in Trelawny?’

He turned his head and studied the jars on the shelf. Then he shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I suppose because I knew it wouldn’t last.’

‘What wouldn’t last?’

‘The job. It was too good. So I made it end. That’s what I do.’ He turned back to her, and they regarded one another in silence.

She was still sitting behind the table, and he still stood by the shelves against the opposite wall. There was about six feet between them.

Only six feet, she thought. All you’ve got to do is get up and cross that little distance. But you can’t do it, can you? It’s just as impossible as if you were standing at the top of a cliff, and all you had to do was take one step to go over the edge, but you still couldn’t do it. Because you’re not brave enough.