The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (92 page)

To your right the track disappears into the deep woods on Overlook Hill, climbing all the way to the glade of the great duppy tree, then winding down the rocky western slope to the Martha Brae and the bridge at Stony Gap.

To your left runs the familiar, unthreatening dirt road which heads east past the works at Maputah, and then on towards Bethlehem, Simonstown and Arethusa.

But straight ahead – straight ahead and due south – that’s the narrow, stony track which winds up towards the distant hamlet of Turnaround, and the start of the Cockpits.

The Cockpits belong to no-one. They’re the province of mountain people and duppies. The Cockpits are a vast, hostile wilderness of deep ravines and tall, green, weirdly conical hills. Sudden precipices await the unwary, and haunted caves and hidden sink-holes. And if you get into trouble, you’ll have to wait a while for help, and the mountain people don’t welcome strangers. They’re the descendants of runaway slaves, and as tough and silent as the land which made them. They only come down from the hills for an illness or a nine-night; for the rest, they keep to their remote, never-visited settlements. Look Behind. Disappointment. Turnaround.

‘Turnaround’, Belle’s mother always told her, ‘means exactly that. So what do you do when you reach the crossroads?’

‘
Turn around
,’ Belle would reply.

Her mother hated the Cockpits. Belle didn’t know exactly why, except that once, before Belle was even born, she’d had a bad experience there. That was why she’d made Belle promise never, ever to go beyond the crossroads on her own.

And that was why Muffin now stopped out of force of habit when they reached the crossroads after giving Quaco the slip.

It was half past ten in the morning, and Belle could feel the sun beating down on her hat and shoulders. The rasp of the crickets was deafening. So was the pounding of her heart.

Up ahead, the track climbed a narrow defile littered with thornscrub and tumbled boulders before disappearing round a spur on its way to Turnaround.

Turn around
.

But surely, she reasoned, her promise to her mother could be set aside in an emergency?

In the pocket of her riding-skirt was the list of wishes she’d drawn up two weeks before.
Mamma and Papa to be happier and never quarrel again. Sugar prices to go up or treasure to be found, so that Papa will not have to work so hard. Aunt Sophie to come for a visit and make up with Mamma.

She wasn’t sure how she was going to achieve any of these, but she knew that she had to try. After all, there was nobody else to do it.

Two weeks before, she’d woken in the middle of the night to the sound of raised voices on the verandah. She’d lain in bed staring up at the mosquito net, hardly daring to breathe. Her parents never fought. Not properly
fought
.

Still holding her breath, she’d drawn aside the netting and shaken out her slippers, and hissed at Scout to
stay
. Then she’d tiptoed to the door of her room which gave onto the verandah, and peered out.

Her mother was pacing outside in her long rust-coloured dressing-gown. Her feet were bare, which Belle had never seen before, and her long dark hair was wild. ‘Another child?’ she cried. ‘How could you even suggest it? How could you even think of mentioning that again?’

‘Madeleine, hush,’ said Papa. His voice was low, but Belle could tell that he was angry. He too was in his dressing-gown, and somehow that frightened Belle most of all. It was as if the fight had been too great to be contained within their own room, and had boiled over terrifyingly onto the verandah.

‘D’you think we can just replace him?’ her mother flung back at him.

There was a silence before her father replied. ‘I think’, he said quietly, ‘that when you reflect on what you’ve just said, you’ll regret it.’

‘Why? It’s what you mean, isn’t it?’

‘My God, Madeleine, he was my son too!’

‘Yes, and now you want to pretend that he never existed!’

‘Madeleine –
stop
. Stop.’ His voice was sharp. Belle had only ever heard him use that tone twice in her life. ‘Don’t do this,’ he said. ‘Don’t push me away.’

Mamma turned and looked at him. She was breathing hard, with her arms rigidly at her sides, but Belle could see that she was trembling. It was as if she knew that she had gone too far.

For a moment they stood facing one another in silence. Then Papa went to her and put his hands on her shoulders, and drew her against him. After a moment she put her arms around him, and Belle saw how her hands clutched at his back. He rocked her gently in his arms, talking to her in a low voice. Belle saw her mother’s shoulders begin to shake. Then she heard her deep, painful, uncontrollable sobs.

Belle was terrified. It was horrible enough to witness her parents fighting – fighting like two separate people. It was worse to hear her mother cry.

‘I don’t know what’s happening,’ her mother mumbled, her voice muffled against his chest. ‘I thought we were through it, years ago. But now she’s back, and suddenly it’s all out in the open again, and I can’t seem – I can’t—’

Then Papa bent his head to hers and murmured something which Belle couldn’t hear. And after a while Mamma nodded, and leaned against him as if she were exhausted, and they turned and walked slowly back to their room.

But now she’s back.

That could only mean Aunt Sophie. And it astonished Belle, for she adored Aunt Sophie, and she knew that Papa and Mamma did too. But the fact remained that everything had been all right until Aunt Sophie had come back.

Hadn’t it? Or had Belle only
thought
that everything had been all right?

Muffin tossed her shaggy head and snorted, impatient for some decision to be made about the crossroads. Belle stroked the pony’s neck and told her to quieten down.

It was a week after the fight on the verandah that something else had happened to set her wondering. She’d accompanied her father on one of his rare calls to Parnassus, and he and Aunt Sophie had gone for a walk on the lawns, with Belle trailing behind.

Suddenly Papa had turned to Aunt Sophie and said quietly, ‘Sophie, come to Eden. It’s time. It really is.’ Belle had the impression that this wasn’t the first time he had asked.

But Aunt Sophie had crossed her arms about her waist and shaken her head. She looked sad, and so did Papa.

‘Just for a few days,’ he said. ‘Or an afternoon.’

Aunt Sophie looked at the ground. ‘She doesn’t want me,’ she said in a low voice.

‘Yes she does. She may not even be aware of it herself, but she does. That’s what’s making her so unhappy.’

But Aunt Sophie was shaking her head. ‘She still blames me.’

‘For what? For Fraser?’

‘She does, Cameron. I know she does.’

‘Do you truly think so? Or is it that you still blame yourself?’

Aunt Sophie did not reply.

So in the end Papa had sighed, and bent to kiss her cheek, and then they’d left.

Belle couldn’t understand it. Blame? What did they mean by blame? Nobody was to blame for what had happened to Fraser. She knew that because Papa had explained it to her when she was little. Fraser had become very ill and the doctors couldn’t save him, so he’d died. Just like the new mastiff puppy who’d got pneumonia last October.

Once again, Muffin tossed her head. Belle cast a doubtful glance up the track.

Her plan had seemed so easy in the safety of her own room. Of all the wishes on her list,
treasure to be found
was the most straightforward. In
Tales of the Rebel Maroons
there was a story about the Spanish Jars which the buccaneers had filled with gold doubloons and hidden in caves in the Cockpits. And according to the map in her father’s study, there were several promising caves somewhere just off the track to Turnaround.

So why was she even hesitating? There was no other way. She knew that. She’d tried everything else. She’d prayed. She’d petitioned Aunt Clemmy’s dead baby. She’d even tried to ask Grace McFarlane.

That had been the worst of all. She’d waited at the crossroads at midnight on the night when Braverly said Grace went to talk to the great duppy tree on Overlook Hill. But Grace had looked so different as she strode up in the blue moonlight: so like a real witch. She wore a ghostly white shift hitched up above her calves, and a white headkerchief, and a necklace of parrot beaks that made a horrible soft clicking as she walked. Belle hadn’t dared to breathe. She’d hidden in the shadows until Grace had passed, and then run all the way home.

That had been two days ago. It was now the nineteenth of December – two whole weeks since the row on the verandah – and she was tired of calling herself a coward all the time.

Besides, she’d been enormously careful to protect herself and Muffin from the duppies: she’d pinned a sprig of rosemary and Madam Fate to her belt, and tied another big bunch to the pony’s browband. They ought to be
fine
.

Thus telling herself, she gathered the reins and put Muffin forward up the track to Turnaround.

To begin with, the path seemed reassuringly like any other. She recognized honeyweed and a calabash tree; hogmeat and Jamaica buttercup and shame o’ lady. But the ground climbed steeply, and soon she was on foot, leading Muffin between looming slopes of tumbled boulders and thornscrub.

There was no birdsong. Even the rasp of the crickets seemed hushed. She felt eyes on her, but when she stopped and looked back, she saw no-one – although she was alarmed to note that the crossroads had disappeared from view.

It grew hotter. The sun was high in the sky, the light so bright off the rocks that it hurt her eyes. Up ahead the path forked. From the map, she recalled that if one took the right-hand fork, one soon reached the speckled region marked
caves
. At least, she thought so.

It was noon when she found it. The path had forked often, but she’d made sure to mark each turn with a distinctive knot of grass, as her father had taught her. She was thinking of him as she rounded a corner and spotted it: a mouth of pure darkness about twenty yards up the slope. It was half hidden by a thorn tree, and curtained by strangler fig, but unmistakably a cave.

She touched the rosemary at her waist. It felt woefully inadequate. What use were herbs against duppies, and maybe Ole Higue herself? But she’d come too far to turn back now. She tied Muffin to a thorn bush, and crossed herself, and started to climb.

As she got closer, she saw that the mouth of the cave was fringed with spiky wild pine, and a small creeping plant with grey-green stems and tiny nubbly green flowers. Orchids, she thought, her heart pounding.
Ghost orchids.
She wished she hadn’t remembered the name.

Inside the cave, something moaned.

Belle froze. Possibilities tumbled over in her mind. The Rollen-Calf? Ole Higue?
A duppy?

Another moan. This time it sounded more like an animal. A wounded cat? A goat? But did wounded goats sound like that?

Clutching the herbs in her fist, she edged closer.

An uprush of cool, earth-smelling air swept her face. At first she couldn’t see anything, but as her eyes grew accustomed to the dimness she made out rough walls streaked with ratbat dung, a dirt floor, and, in a corner, a crumpled blanket of homespun, spattered with a great dark stain.

Her heart lurched. Beside the blanket lay a woman: curled up, motionless, and as grey as a duppy. It was Evie McFarlane.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

That girl sick bad
, said the voices in the cave walls.
Baby dead, him dead inside of her. And sure as sin, that girl ready to dead too
.

Drip, drip, drip
went the spring at the back of the cave.
Father, brother, lover. Sin, sin, sin.

Pain burns her belly. She screams. But the only sound she makes is a nightmare wheeze.

A while back, a little girl came and gave her water. She felt the butterfly brush of soft hair on her neck, and the sweet child-breath on her cheek. But then the little girl pressed a sprig of rosemary into her palm and whispered that she was going for help, and then she faded back into the walls.

Now all Evie can hear is the
drip, drip
of sin, and the murmur of the cave people.
What you doing in this old stone-hole, girl? This no place for you . . . This a bad-luckid place full of spirits and dead-bury memories . . .

Then comes a new voice, a woman’s.
If this is living, then I want no more of it
. . .

Who said that? Was it Congo Eve, or Evie McFarlane?

A woman needs lot, lotta courage to live in this wicked world . . . You got courage, Evie? You got spine?

‘Christ, Evie, Christ . . .’ mutters the man kneeling beside her.

Ben?
What’s Ben doing up here in the hills? Is he dead too? Is he stuck in this old stone-hole alongside Evie McFarlane and Congo Eve and all the jealous, whispering spirits?

She hears the skitter of pebbles as he scrambles down the drop at the back of the cave towards the spring. Then his returning footsteps, and the clink of the bucket as he sets it down. ‘Christ, Evie, Christ . . .’ His voice is shaking, and he’s swearing continuously under his breath.

Coolness floods her mouth. She swallows, splutters, and tries to swallow again. Coolness curls down inside of her, deep down where the fire lives.

He starts washing her neck and arms, but she pushes him away – or at least, she tries to. ‘Damn it, Ben,’ she tells him, ‘I’m a woman, not one of your damn horses.’ But the words won’t come out. All she hears is a low, cracked moan.

Where’d he get the bucket? Oh yes, she remembers now. She brought it with her, didn’t she? She planned it all out. The bucket and the blanket, the stack of hard dough, and the little bottle of bitter brown physic. The thought of that makes her want to retch.

Ben raises her in the crook of his arm to help her drink. Pain flares in her belly.

She opens her eyes. But it isn’t Ben looking down at her, it’s Cyrus Wright. ‘Go
way
,’ she mumbles. ‘You rascally whoreson crowbait – go
way
.’