The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (75 page)

It was about four in the morning, and the Jonkunoo parade had broken off for food. The air was heavy with the smells of fried breadfruit and curried goat. Pickneys huddled together over plantain tarts and slabs of chocho pie. Nanas got merry and girlish on rum punch and ginger wine.

Grace brought Evie a slice of her favourite dish: sweet potato pudding made with plenty of coconut milk and vanilla, and drenched in molasses. She couldn’t eat a bite. Something was bad wrong.

The feeling had been creeping up on her all day. She couldn’t lose it out of her mind; and yet every time she tried to grab hold of it, it flickered away like a yellowsnake down a hole.

‘Here,’ said her mother, sitting down beside her and handing her a tumbler of cold sorrel. ‘Little cool-drink to settle your head. And I added a drop of oil of Calvary to help smooth out your thoughts.’

Evie shot her a questioning glance.

‘Well I not stupid,’ said Grace with a snort. ‘You got some worry-head in you, so you need a little inspiration.’

You never could get round her mother. Just when you dismissed her as some raggity mountain woman with no education, she went and saw right through you.

Evie looked down at the heady red infusion of rum and hibiscus petals. She took a long pull, and its gingery heat coiled down into her insides. It was more than half rum. At Bethlehem they liked their drinks powerful.

Around her the crowd was milling about like ants in a nest. It was like one big birth-night party for the whole village. But still she could feel the darkness closing in. Why couldn’t they?

At the edge of the village she glimpsed the velvet blackness of Patoo flitting by, and heard his soft
hoo-hoo
. Several people looked round fearfully and made the cross sign, but Grace just tossed her head and yelled at him to get outta their parade. ‘Go way, Patoo! Go trouble someone else’s damn place with your bad news!’ There was a ripple of laughter.

And once again, Evie smelled stephanotis. Heavy and sweet, like at a burying. What was wrong?

A couple of days before, Ben had told her that she’d made a mistake about that red-haired girl; that it wasn’t meant as a warning for him, but for Sophie.

If she’d been wrong about that, then what else had she got wrong-side and tangle-up? Had she been wrong about old Master Jocelyn, too?

She thought back to that day at Fever Hill, when she’d sat in Miss Sibella’s dog cart and watched old Master Jocelyn following Sophie up the croton walk. Sophie and little Master Fraser.

She felt a faint tickling on her bare ankle, and looked down to see a small green devil-horse – a praying mantis – crawling up her leg. Thoughtfully, she brushed it off with her hand.

And suddenly she knew what was wrong, and the knowledge was a cold certainty in her belly. Old Master Jocelyn hadn’t been following Sophie. Not Sophie.

She grabbed her mother’s arm. ‘Something’s wrong. We’ve got to get to Eden, quick-time.’

Sophie was shaken awake by a frightened Clemency. Fraser was ill. She didn’t know what to do.

‘How ill?’ mumbled Sophie, still heavy with sleep.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know, dear.’

‘Clemency—’

‘But I don’t.’ She stood by the bed like an ineffectual ghost, twisting her waxy hands and shaking her head so violently that her dyed grey braids brushed against Sophie’s face.

But she was right about Fraser. When they reached the nursery he was thrashing about in the bedclothes, and battling against a terrified Poppy, who was trying to hold him down. Belle was curled up on the other bed, sucking her toy zebra’s ear and staring at them with great dark eyes.

As Sophie leaned over Fraser, a cold kernel of fear settled inside her.

He lay in a strange, stiff curve, as if he wanted to curl into a ball, but couldn’t. His eyes were screwed shut against the light, and his breathing was fast and shallow. ‘It
hurts
!’ he moaned, pummelling Poppy with his fists.

‘Where, darling?’ said Sophie. ‘Tell me where.’

‘All over! My head and my tummy and all
over
! Aunt Sophie, make the hurts go
away
!’

Sophie took his small fist in hers. It felt cold. What did that mean?

She glanced at the nursery clock. A quarter to two. Two hours before, he’d had nothing worse than a tummy-ache.

‘I knew something like this would happen,’ whispered Clemency, wringing her hands. ‘I knew that if I left Elliot on his own he’d be angry—’

‘Not now,’ snapped Sophie.

‘It
hurts
!’ screamed Fraser. He threw off the bedclothes and would have fallen out of bed if Sophie hadn’t caught him. In the glow of the lamplight she saw a bright pink rash splashed across the smooth, poreless skin of his calves.

God, she thought. What’s that? ‘Clemency,’ she said without turning round, ‘take Belle and go and sleep in the servants’ quarters.’

‘What, darling?’

‘I said take Belle right now, and go and sleep in the servants’ quarters, and don’t come back till I tell you. D’you understand? Tell Braverly and Susan to stay with you, and
not
to come inside.’

‘But darling—’

‘For God’s sake, Clemmie, whatever this is, it could be catching!’

Clemency’s hands crept to her throat.

‘Poppy,’ said Sophie over her shoulder. ‘You run and wake Moses and tell him to saddle Master Cameron’s horse and ride as fast as he can and fetch Dr Mallory. As fast as he can, d’you hear? And he’s to tell Dr Mallory it’s an emergency, and to come at once. And he’s to send a man for Dr Pritchard, too, and another down to Parnassus to fetch Master and Mistress. Now go!’

Poppy fled.

Please God make it the measles, Sophie said to herself over and over, when they’d left her alone with Fraser. Let it be the measles or mumps, or something else that we know how to fight.

He was still thrashing and moaning, but slightly quieter now, since she’d moved the lamp to the other side of the room. He had no fever, and he was not delirious. As she tried to raise his head to help him take a little water, he gave an involuntary twitch and kicked her thigh. ‘Sorry, Aunt Sophie,’ he mumbled.

‘Doesn’t matter, darling,’ she told him, smoothing back his hair from his forehead.

‘When will the hurts go away?’

‘Soon. Soon. When the doctor comes.’ She felt a pang of guilt at deceiving him. It would be at least two hours before Dr Mallory got here; and Dr Pritchard, in whom she had greater faith, would arrive some time after that. Two hours, and she was useless to help him. All she could do was try to reassure him, and get him to sip a little water, while she rifled through her
Introductory Primer on Diagnostic Medicine
with mounting desperation.

And always at the back of her mind was the gnawing dread that this might in some way be her fault. What if she’d been here all the time, and could have spotted some subtle sign of impending illness, and sent for the doctor straight away? What if she’d stayed at home and looked after him, as Madeleine had begged her to?

The wide grey eyes gazed up at her with total faith. When she set down the book on the bedside table, they followed her every move. She tried to smile.

His face contorted. ‘It
hurts
!’

‘I know, darling,’ she murmured, sitting on the edge of the bed and taking him in her arms and stroking his hair. ‘I know, I know, and I’m so sorry.’

He twisted away from her and punched the pillow.

The rash was worse. It had spread all over his legs and arms, and when she raised his nightshirt she saw with horror that it now covered his whole body. How could anything spread so quickly?

A terrible thought gripped her. She reached for the book, and turned to the index at the back. The words blurred and shifted, and she couldn’t find what she was looking for. Then she had it.
Brain fever . . . see Meningococcal Disease; also Meningitis
.

Dawn was commencing to light when Evie and her mother reached Eden. By the look of things, Master Cameron and Miss Madeleine had just gone inside, for the carriage was still at the door, and the horse had its head down, blowing hard.

In an instant, Evie took in all the wrongness of the house. Miss Madeleine’s bronze satin evening mantle dropped in the dust and trampled under the horse’s hooves like a body. Miss Clemmie and little Missy Belle standing in the carriageway in their nightgowns, wide-eyed and frightened. Moses hanging on to the horse’s bridle like he couldn’t let go, and old Braverly swaying and muttering psalms, and Poppy and Susan keeping up a wake-dead moaning in each other’s arms.

And there in the doormouth sat Sophie, rigid on the threshold in her dressing-gown, her lips bluish-grey, her eyes staring into darkness.

‘Sophie?’ said Grace.

Sophie raised her head and tried to find the source of the sound, as if she was having trouble focusing.

‘Sophie,’ said Evie, going to sit beside her and putting her arm round her shoulders.

‘It was brain fever,’ said Sophie. Her voice sounded flat, as if she had nothing left inside. ‘Dr Mallory came, and Dr Pritchard, and they said—’

At that moment from inside the darkened house came a terrible, wrenching scream. Evie had never heard such a sound in her life. It was like some animal having its innards ripped out.

Sophie’s face crumpled. ‘I was holding him,’ she said. ‘I was holding him. And he died.’

Chapter Sixteen

Sophie was busy in her room when there was a knock at the door, and Cameron asked if he might come in.

She was surprised to see him, for it was the middle of the afternoon, and he’d left for the works straight after luncheon. ‘I thought you were at Maputah,’ she said.

‘I was,’ he replied from the doorway. His eyes went to the packing-cases around her, but he made no comment. ‘I wonder, do you have a moment?’

She glanced at the folded blouses in her arms, and put them on the bed. ‘Of course. Shall we go out onto the verandah?’

He nodded, and stood aside to let her pass.

She wondered if he too was aware of the new formality between them. They even moved differently. Her mourning gown of dull black parramatta seemed to impose on her a rigidity of which even Great-Aunt May would have approved, while Cameron had developed an unconscious habit of touching the black armband on his sleeve, as if it were a bruise.

Apart from Scout, they had the verandah to themselves. Madeleine was lying down in her room, and Clemency was reading to Belle in the nursery.

Cameron took one end of the old cane sofa, and Sophie the armchair opposite. Scout heaved himself up and trotted over to his master, and then slumped down again at his feet.

Cameron ran his hand over his armband, and tried not to look at the gap between the lime trees where Fraser’s swing used to hang. He’d lost weight, and his eyes were bloodshot. He looked exhausted. January was the busiest time of the year, when the works at Maputah and Fever Hill had to run twenty-four hours a day or the cane would spoil, and bankruptcy would follow hard on bereavement. Sophie wondered when he found time to grieve, and where he went to cry. She herself had done with crying. She had cried until she couldn’t cry any more, and now she was too hollowed out by grief and guilt to feel anything but a desperate fatigue and a longing for peace.

Cameron caught her watching him, and they exchanged tight, meaningless smiles.

‘You wanted to talk to me?’ she said.

‘I – yes.’

‘Is anything wrong?’

There was silence while they both considered that.
Is anything wrong?
Everything was wrong. Fraser Jocelyn Lawe had been lying out on the wooded slope behind the house for three weeks now: the first inhabitant of Eden’s new Burying-place. Clemency had said that his white marble tomb was almost as beautiful as Elliot’s, but Sophie hadn’t seen it for herself. She couldn’t bear to.

Nor had she attended the funeral. Instead she had stayed at the house, while Cameron had followed the hearse to Falmouth, and stood in the churchyard surrounded by his workers, and finally ridden back for the burying.

Clemency had been one of the few ladies to attend, along with Olivia Herapath and, surprisingly, Rebecca Traherne. The sole female representative of the Monroes had been Great-Aunt May, glacially correct in strict half-mourning. ‘Full mourning would be inappropriate,’ she had declared in response to a dauntless enquiry from Mrs Herapath. ‘The child was four generations removed from my own.’

Madeleine herself had not attended. She’d simply announced that she wouldn’t be going to church any more; that she was finished with God.

Cameron studied Sophie for a moment before he spoke. ‘Moses tells me that you’ve ordered the carriage for Monday. For Montego Bay.’

Sophie put her hands together in her lap. ‘I hope that’s all right,’ she said carefully. ‘I shall be catching the eight forty-five to Kingston. I’ll be booking a passage on Tuesday’s packet to Southampton.’

‘Don’t go,’ he said.

‘I think I must.’

He ran his thumb across his lower lip, and gave her a considering look. ‘What if you do one of your about-turns halfway there, and want to come home?’

She gave him a faint smile. ‘I don’t think I shall.’

But she sounded more certain than she felt. Half of her thought she was wrong – that she was running away when Madeleine needed her most. The other half told her that it was the only thing to do. Madeleine didn’t want her here any more. They hadn’t talked about it – they hadn’t talked at all. But Sophie could feel it. Perhaps Madeleine blamed her for Fraser’s death. Or perhaps she simply couldn’t forgive the fact that Sophie had been with him in his final hours, while she, his mother, had not.

And always at the back of Sophie’s mind was the thought of how much worse Madeleine would feel if she ever found out that on the night when her son was dying, her sister had been with Ben.

Sophie had agonized over whether to tell them, but had decided against it. Why make things worse than they already were? So instead, she’d told them only what she thought they could take: that she’d gone for a moonlit ride, and returned to the house around midnight, to find Fraser with a slight stomach ache; that she had sent for the doctors when it worsened, and stayed with him until he died. Cameron had looked at her in puzzlement, as if wondering why she thought it necessary to tell them all that. Madeleine had studied her woodenly, as if waiting for something more. Then she’d nodded once, and got up and left the room.