The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (69 page)

There was no sound in the clinic, but outside she could hear the rasp of the crickets, and the distant humming of the old man under the pawpaw tree. She could feel the afternoon heat against her skin, and the warm leather-bound book beneath her fingers. She could see the shaft of sunlight cutting across Ben’s face. His arms were still crossed on his chest, and she could see a streak of dust on his wrist, and the cord-like veins on the backs of his hands.

Until now, she’d never felt the urge to touch a man. And she’d never wanted a man to touch her.

But you’re not going to do it, are you? she told herself in disgust. Because you’re not brave enough. Because what if he doesn’t feel as you do? What if he doesn’t want to touch you?

Belle appeared in the doorway. She was carrying the injured Spot – who now sported a handkerchief bandage – and she was scowling as she held it up for Ben’s inspection. ‘Will this help?’

Ben shook himself, and glanced down at her and blinked. ‘Um – a bit. Just don’t let him put any weight on that hoof.’

Belle nodded. ‘Can I have some cyanide ointment?’

‘No,’ said Ben and Sophie together.

Belle thrust out her lower lip, and threw them a look, and stalked out of the clinic.

When she’d gone, there was another silence. Then Ben shook himself again, and reached for his hat. ‘I’d better be off,’ he muttered. ‘I start work tomorrow, and I’ve still got to get down to town.’

‘Will you come again?’ she said quickly.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s not a good idea.’

‘Why?’ Now that they were talking again, she felt stronger. She might lack the courage to go to him, but she always had the courage to argue. ‘You’re friends with Evie,’ she pointed out. ‘Why can’t you be friends with me?’

‘Because I can’t, that’s all.’

‘Why?’

She watched him walk the length of the room, then back again. ‘You can’t go saying things like that,’ he told her angrily. ‘Not to me.’

‘Why not to you?’

‘Because I’m common. Because I grew up in a slum.’

‘I know that, but—’

‘That’s just it, you don’t know.’ He shook his head. ‘You don’t know.’

‘Perhaps not. But that’s all in the past. What does it matter?’

‘Of course it sodding well matters.’ He looked down at his hat, then tossed it back on the trolley. ‘Look. When I was the same age as that little girl out there, we lived in two rooms on East Street, for the eight of us. We used to sleep six kids to a bed. D’you know what that’s like?’

She shook her head.

‘Bedbugs and lice, and all the girls and boys mixed up together. So not much sodding chastity, if you take my meaning.’

She felt her face growing hot.

‘So one night,’ he went on, ‘when my sister Lil’s about twelve, our Jack – he was our big brother – he gets into her. You know what that means?’

She swallowed. ‘Yes. I think so.’

‘So the next day she finds herself a fancy man, and she’s off on the streets, doing tricks for a tanner. And that’s
good
. Because now it means she’s earning her keep.’

She dug her fingernail into a crack in the binding. ‘Did Jack get punished?’

‘Course not! Why would he get punished? He only done – did – what everyone else did.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘To make you see the difference between you and me. I’m just the same as Jack, and Pa, and any of them. Christ, I was getting into girls when I was eleven.’

She raised her head and looked at him steadily. ‘You’re right,’ she said between her teeth, ‘it does make a difference. It makes me feel horrified, and sorry for you. There. Are you satisfied?’

He met her eyes, then glanced away.

‘What happened to Lil?’ she said suddenly.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Well, something must have happened to her. Did she get – some disease? Did she get pregnant? What? Did she have to go to a – an angel-maker? That’s what they call them, isn’t it? When they get rid of unwanted babies?’

He flinched as if she’d hit him.

‘Why do you always do this?’ she demanded, angrily blinking back tears. ‘Always pushing me away when I get too close.’

‘Well I’ve got to, haven’t I? Otherwise you’d just blunder in and get hurt.’

‘You wouldn’t hurt me. Not really.’

‘Oh, yes I would! I’m like my pa that way. Anyone gets too close, and they get hurt. You take my word for it.’

‘No. No, I don’t believe that.’

‘That’s because you don’t know nothing. And the worst of it is, you don’t even know that you don’t know.’

‘Well then, tell me!’ Without thinking, she got up and went round to his side of the table. ‘You say that I don’t know anything, but whenever I ask, you won’t answer my questions.’

‘You’re twisting things round,’ he muttered.

‘No I’m not.’

He drew a deep breath. ‘Look. I didn’t tell you those things to make you feel sorry for me.’

‘I know that.’

‘I told you to make you understand. To show you what I am, so you’ll stay away.’

She did not reply. She stood with her hands by her sides, looking up into his face. There was only a yard between them. She had reached the edge of the cliff.

She was close enough to see that the green of his eyes was ringed with turquoise, and split by little spokes of russet.

Green eyes, she thought, aren’t as noticeable as blue; you don’t remark on them straight away, but when you do, it’s like sharing a secret.

‘Christ, Sophie,’ he muttered. Then he closed the distance between them and laid his warm hand on her cheek, and bent and kissed her quickly on the mouth.

It only lasted a moment. She just had time to feel the warmth of his lips on hers, and to catch his dry spicy smell, and then he’d twisted away and was making for the door.

In a daze she heard the jingle of a bridle and a horse trotting, and a man’s voice, suddenly nearer. She turned, blinking in the glare, and saw Cameron standing in the doorway.

When he saw her, his face lit up with a smile. Then he recognized Ben, and froze.

Dawn. The glade of the great duppy tree on Overlook Hill.

It was only an hour’s ride from the house, and yet it seemed a world away, for this was the start of the Cockpits. Vapour rose from the great tattered leaves of philodendrons, and beaded the spokes of spiders’ webs strung from tree to tree. Curtains of strangler fig and clots of Spanish moss hung down from the outstretched arms of the oldest silk-cotton in Trelawny.

Sophie sat on one of its great folded roots, and watched her horse cropping the ferns. Her eyes felt scratchy with fatigue. She hadn’t slept all night.

Cameron hadn’t said a word at the clinic. He’d simply glanced at Sophie, and given Ben a long, unreadable look, and then gone back outside and scooped up Belle, and ridden out of Bethlehem. Ben had stood in the doorway watching him go, then shaken his head, and walked out of the village without a backwards glance.

Dinner that night had been a fraught affair, with Sophie braced for an attack that didn’t come. Cameron was courteous as always, but silent and withdrawn. It was clear from Madeleine’s constrained attempts at conversation that he’d told her everything.

But after all, Sophie kept telling herself, what could he have seen? By the time he’d reached the doorway they’d already drawn apart. He hadn’t seen them kiss. All he’d seen was their taut faces. Which would have fooled no-one. Least of all a man as perceptive as Cameron.

Somehow Sophie had got through dinner, and then pleaded a headache, and gone early to bed. She’d half expected Madeleine to come to her room and have it out, but she hadn’t. And that made it worse.

All night she’d lain awake, staring up at the mosquito net, her feelings in turmoil. Exasperation at Cameron for making her feel guilty; anger at herself for getting Ben into trouble again; a welter of emotion when she remembered that kiss.

The sun climbed higher. The heat grew. High above the canopy came the lonely cry of a red-tailed hawk. She breathed in the heavy sweetness of growth and decay, and listened to the secret rustle and hum of the forest, and the crickets’ rasping song.

If she shut her eyes, she could summon up the exact feel of him against her mouth. His lips had been hot and dry and surprisingly gentle, his hand warm on her cheek. She could still smell his sharp, indefinable scent.

It had happened so quickly that she hadn’t had time to respond. But how, she wondered, how
does
one respond? What does one actually do?

She had never kissed a man before. But once, when she and Evie were fourteen, they’d tried to kiss each other for a dare. They had leaned towards one another with their eyes tightly shut, and stuck out their tongues until the tips just touched – then leaped apart with squeals of horrified laughter at the alien feel of warm, wet flesh.

She put her hand on the tree’s rough bark, and by her thumb a big green cotton-cutter beetle tasted the air with delicate antennae. She raised her head and gazed up at the great spreading canopy, laden with tiny scarlet orchids and spiky wild pines.

Years ago, Cameron had brought her up here to help overcome her terror of duppy trees. And under this same tree, nearly three decades before, her sister had been conceived. Rose Durrant had called it the Tree of Life. She had told Madeleine stories of how she and her lover Ainsley Monroe had met in secret in the forest at midnight, when the fireflies spangled the creepers, and the pale moonflowers were open to the night.

Rose Durrant had been almost as young as Sophie was now: blinded by love, and utterly reckless.
Oh, the Durrants were an impossible lot
, Olivia Herapath had once remarked.
They always went too far
.

Like mother like daughter? wondered Sophie, looking up at the tree. It had not escaped her notice that a few weeks ago she’d been suspecting Madeleine of the Durrant taint of recklessness, when it turned out to be she herself who most resembled their improvident mother.

Falling in love with a
groom
?

Something Great-Aunt May had said came back to her.
Your mother had the instincts of a guttersnipe, and so have you.

‘It isn’t true,’ she said. Beside her hand, the cotton-cutter opened its wings and buzzed away.

You are drawn to your inferiors because you know that you are unfit for anyone else.

That wasn’t true either. She knew that. It was merely the vicious, twisted lie of an angry old woman.

And yet she couldn’t repress a flash of bitterness. Others had found love safely within their own class. Sibella. Madeleine. Why couldn’t she?

And what was she going to do about it now?

Chapter Twelve

When she got back to Eden, there was a letter waiting for her from Sibella. Sensing trouble, she took it to her room to read.

Parnassus
15th December 1903

Dear Sophie,

I called on you yesterday at that beastly ‘clinic’ of yours, but you weren’t there, and a horrid old man told me that Cameron had sent you home. I shudder to think why.

Sophie, how could you disgrace me so? You positively engineer an assignation with one of my own father’s servants at the Historical Society picnic, and then your brother-in-law is forced to drag you away from yet another assignation in some ghastly slum. Are you deaf to all reason? To all sense of propriety? Most of all, are you deaf to your obligation to me in this most trying time of my life?

What would happen if everyone felt at liberty to associate with inferiors? Why, every schoolchild knows that God Himself created the different ranks, and that we as Christians must do our duty in whichever degree it has pleased Him to place us. What would happen if people simply ignored this? Everything would get horribly mixed up, and soon there would be no difference at all, and then where should we be?

It pains me to say this, but I feel it my duty to tell you that you have utterly degraded yourself by this unnatural partiality. Moreover you have, by association, degraded me. I had thought that I was bestowing a favour upon you by asking you to walk up the aisle behind me as my chief bridesmaid. Indeed, I positively set upon Amelia Mordenner when she suggested that you might be too self-conscious, because of your limp. And this is the thanks I get.

It grieves me unutterably to say this, but you have left me no choice. I must absolutely rescind my offer, and make Amelia chief bridesmaid. Perhaps this will teach you the folly of . . .

There was more. Four close-written pages of it. Sophie read it to the end, then tore it up and burnt the pieces in the wash-hand stand.

She was surprised to find that Sibella’s arguments left her completely unmoved. The only thing which angered her was that reference to her limp.

She sat on her bed for several minutes, thinking. Then she went to her desk and dashed off two short notes. One was to Sibella, wishing her luck with Amelia Mordenner. The other was to Ben, asking him to meet her at Romilly Bridge on the day after tomorrow.

Quickly, before she could change her mind, she sealed the notes and took them to the stables, where she gave Quaco the stable boy a shilling to deliver them at once and in secret. Then she went back inside and sat down at the breakfast table. She was fairly certain that she’d made a mistake in writing to Ben, but she didn’t care. She needed to see him again, to sort things out. She wasn’t at all clear what that might entail, but she knew that it would be quite impossible to leave things as they were.

To her relief, Cameron had already left for the works, and she only had to face Madeleine and the children. ‘What did Sibella want?’ asked Madeleine, pouring the tea.

‘To excommunicate me,’ she replied.

Fraser looked up from his milk. ‘What does ex—’

‘I’ll tell you later,’ said his mother, putting a slice of toasted johnny cake on his plate and starting to butter it. She threw her sister an enquiring glance. ‘Does that mean you won’t be coming with us on Boxing Day?’

‘What?’ said Sophie.