The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (94 page)

He wasn’t listening. He was looking up at the cave, his face sharp with concern.

Not for the first time, she wondered if he was the father of Evie’s child. But if he were, surely he would have looked after her better than this?

He turned back to her. ‘Did she tell you who the father is?’

She shook her head. ‘Who is he? D’you know?’

‘Of course not. That’s why I’m asking you.’ He saw something in her face, and tossed his head. ‘You thought it was me.’

‘It crossed my mind.’

‘Do you honestly think that if I were the father, I would have let her come up here?’

‘I only said that it crossed my mind. I didn’t—’

‘Sooner or later,’ he cut in, ‘she’ll have to tell me his name. And when she does, I’ll rip his spine out.’

She could see that he meant it. She almost envied Evie for inspiring such fierce concern.

He turned back to her and searched her face. ‘Are you absolutely sure that she’s going to be all right?’

‘I told you, I’m as sure as I can be.’

He looked at her for a moment. Then he threw himself onto a boulder and put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. ‘God,’ he muttered. ‘God.’

It was only then that she realized just how worried he’d been.

And as she watched him, something stirred at the back of her mind. That day at the clinic, when she’d asked him about his sister.
Did she get pregnant? Did she have to go to a – an angel-maker? Isn’t that what they call them?
He had flinched as if she’d struck him. Clearly it had touched a very raw nerve. So perhaps what had happened to Evie had touched a raw nerve too. Perhaps it had brought bad memories to the surface.

That day at Bethlehem. She remembered every detail. Belle squatting beneath the breadfruit tree with Spot. Ben turning the toy in his hands, and suddenly smiling. That brief, astounding moment when he’d kissed her for the first time.

Suddenly she felt an enormous sadness. She thought, What children we were. And look at us now. Evie up in that cave, crying for her dead child; me stuck at Parnassus in an impossible engagement. And Ben – what about Ben?

As he straightened up, she looked at his face. Wealth seemed to have given him authority, but it didn’t seem to have brought him either happiness or peace.

He was hatless and dishevelled, in riding-breeches, dusty topboots and shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. He looked just the same as he had in the old days. It was almost as if the last seven years had never happened – as if she’d simply gone riding one afternoon, and come across him up in the hills. Only the scar bisecting his eyebrow bore witness to the passage of time.

She looked at the dark hair falling into his eyes. It seemed cruel that she could remember exactly how it felt if one brushed it aside. It was so unfair. What was the good of remembering? He clearly did not.

There was an awkward silence. Then he said, ‘I suppose I ought to thank you for coming.’

‘Oh please,’ she said tartly, ‘don’t do anything just because you “ought”.’

That seemed to surprise him. Then his lip curled. ‘I take it that this won’t cause problems for you?’

‘What kind of problems?’

‘I mean, with your – fiancé.’

She felt herself reddening. Until that moment she’d forgotten all about Alexander. It simply hadn’t crossed her mind that by coming here she had flouted every one of his prohibitions: not to go for long rides, not to see Evie McFarlane, and not to have anything to do with Ben Kelly. ‘There won’t be any problem,’ she said firmly. ‘Neptune was very discreet.’ She paused. ‘Speaking of Neptune, you told him to avoid Eden. Why?’

He shrugged. ‘I’m not on very good terms with your brother-in-law. As I’m sure you already know.’

‘As it happens, I didn’t. I don’t often see them.’ As soon as she’d said it she wished that she hadn’t. But she was tired, and the spirit of contradiction was strong in her. It always was when she was with Ben.

As she feared, he picked up on it. ‘What do you mean, you don’t often see them?’

‘Just that. I haven’t been back there in a while.’

‘How long is a while?’

She did not reply.

‘You haven’t been back since you left. Have you?’

Damn him for jumping to the right conclusion.

‘Seven years,’ he said, incredulous. ‘Good God Almighty.’

How pitiful she must seem to him. So terrified of the past that she couldn’t even bring herself to go back once for a visit. He, on the other hand, seemed to have put it all behind him with remarkable ease.

She watched him draw out his watch and frown at it, then snap it shut. ‘It’s getting late,’ he said, standing up and brushing off his hands. ‘Neptune will be back soon with the horses. He’ll take you home.’

‘Thank you,’ she replied, ‘but I think I’ll wait and help you bring Evie back.’

‘She isn’t coming.’

She blinked. ‘What do you mean?’

‘She wants to stay up here till she’s better.’

‘
What?
But she can’t.’

‘Try telling her that.’

‘In a
cave
? But—’

‘Look, she doesn’t want anyone to know, especially not her own family. And in case you’ve forgotten, you’ve only got to spit in this damn country and you hit half a dozen McFarlanes or Tullochs or Parkers.’

‘I haven’t forgotten,’ she retorted. ‘I haven’t forgotten anything.’

He threw her a curious glance. Then he said, ‘You don’t need to worry. She’ll be all right. I’ll stay with her tonight. And tomorrow—’

‘Tomorrow I’ll come up and see how she is.’

‘That won’t be necessary.’

‘Oh, I think that it will.’

He sighed. ‘You couldn’t manage it without your fiancé knowing.’

‘You leave that to me,’ she snapped. She wasn’t sure exactly how she
would
manage it, but she was damned if she was going to be dismissed like some servant who’d outlived her usefulness.

He put his hands on his hips and took a few paces up the track, then turned back to her. She thought he meant to remonstrate with her, but instead he said simply, ‘I think I need to apologize to you.’

She was astonished. ‘For what?’

‘That day in Kingston. I gave you a bad time of it. I overdid things.’

She thought about that. Then she raised her chin. ‘Do you know,’ she said in a cut-glass accent, ‘I rather fancy that you did.’

He laughed. ‘All right, I deserved that. In my defence, I think I was still a bit angry with you. But that’s all over now.’

She felt a gentle sinking in the pit of her stomach.

In the distance, Neptune appeared with the horses. Ben watched them for a moment, then turned back to her. ‘Seven years ago,’ he began, then cut himself off with a frown.

‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Seven years ago, what?’

Again he glanced at Neptune, who was still out of earshot. ‘Just this,’ he said. ‘I was a fool, and you were right. You were right to break it off. It would never have worked.’

Slowly she pushed herself to her feet. Then she picked up her hat and dusted it off. ‘Probably not,’ she said.

He nodded, his face grave. ‘I just thought it needed saying, that’s all.’

‘I see.’

‘Well. I’ll tell Neptune to take you back.’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

He thought for a moment, then held out his hand. ‘Goodbye, Sophie.’

She looked at it without speaking. Then she shook hands with him, and looked up into his face and tried to smile. ‘Goodbye, Ben,’ she said.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Christmas on the Northside is a strange time of year.

People celebrate in the usual way by going to church and eating too much Christmas pudding, and having Johnny Canoe parades, but there’s always a ghost at the feast: the shadow of the great slave rebellion of Christmas 1831.

The white people call it the Christmas Insurrection; the black people call it the Black Family War. Everyone knows somebody who lived through it. Everyone knows the stories. Fifty-two Northside plantations destroyed. Dozens of great houses reduced to cinders, thousands of acres of cane put to the fire. Fever Hill, Kensington, Parnassus, Montpelier; even old Duncan Lawe’s place out at Seven Hills – which two years later, in his bitterness at the emancipation of the slaves, he renamed Burntwood.

Great-Aunt May was twelve years old when she sat in the wagon beside her baleful old father, Alasdair Monroe, and watched their great house go up in flames. She saw the cane-pieces destroyed, and the sugar works at the foot of Clairmont Hill; she saw the huge boiling-house chimney come crashing down like a cathedral.

And seven weeks later, when the insurrection had been savagely crushed, she had sat beside her father again, and watched the hangings in the square. In the course of the rebellion, fourteen white people had died, and about two hundred slaves. Some four hundred more were killed in the reprisals which old Alasdair helped to orchestrate.

In the eighty years since then, Great-Aunt May had never spoken of what she’d seen – except once, to Clemency. And years later, on an overcast Christmas Eve when Clemency was being more than usually badgered for a bedtime story, she had told a thirteen-year-old Sophie.

Ever since then, Christmas for Sophie had possessed a dark undercurrent. It never felt completely real. It was a time when light and dark, life and death, past and present, danced side by side at the great masquerade.

Fraser’s death had added another layer of darkness. Christmas had become a time when terrible memories broke the surface without warning. She might be sitting at tea with Rebecca Traherne, or reading to Clemency from the fashion report in the Saturday supplement, and suddenly she would be back on the steps at Eden in her nightgown, straining for the sound of carriage wheels in the dark. She would hear the soft whisper of the bronze satin evening mantle settling in the dust. She would see the blood drain from her sister’s cheeks. And then would come that terrible, desolate, animal cry.

Light and dark, past and present, life and death. Not real, not real.

Now here she sat in her ballgown beside Alexander – this man who overnight had become a stranger to her – as the phaeton made its way slowly up the carriageway towards the great house on Fever Hill.

It had been seven days since that strange meeting with Ben up in the Cockpits, and since then she had led a double life. Polite, sleep-walking days at Parnassus were punctuated by wild rides into the hills to see Evie. No-one seemed to notice her absence. Nothing seemed real any more.

She turned and regarded Alexander. He was in a difficult mood, for Cornelius had taken the hated Lyndon in his brougham, and relegated them to the second carriage; but not even ill humour could spoil his good looks. He had chosen the Sailor for his costume, and the tight white uniform with its rich gold braiding suited him to perfection. No wonder, she thought, that Evie fell in love with him.

She still couldn’t quite believe it. Two days before, she had taken Evie some books, and found her swiftly regaining her strength – and with it, her anger. An unguarded word about Parnassus had slipped out. Sophie had guessed the rest.

Evie and Alexander. All those visits to Kingston ‘on business’. Of course.

Evie had lifted her chin and given her a look of cool defiance from which she couldn’t banish the anxiety. ‘If it’s any comfort,’ she’d said, ‘it started long before you met him in London.’

‘I don’t need comfort,’ Sophie had replied. ‘It’s just – unexpected. That’s all. I don’t even mind. I really don’t.’

But in the days that followed, she discovered that that wasn’t entirely true. She
did
mind. She minded that she’d been so wrong about him. She minded that she’d been so easily taken in. She minded that he’d only ever been after her money.

And what breathtaking hypocrisy! Calmly to caution her against the impropriety of befriending a mulatto girl, when he himself had impregnated that same girl, and then thrown her aside.

My God, she thought, as the phaeton trundled up the carriageway, how did everything get so twisted? Here you are with this weak, mendacious, unfaithful man, whom you intend to jilt as soon as decently possible after Christmas – here you are, making your way to
Fever Hill
, for a masked ball to be given by Ben. None of it makes sense. It isn’t real.

The press of carriages was great, so their progress was slow. She turned her head and tried to lose herself in the flickering lights strung between the royal palms. Ruby, saffron, sapphire, emerald. She caught a glimpse of the great house on the hill, ablaze with electric light. That couldn’t be Fever Hill. Not Fever Hill. Not real, not real.

They passed the pond and the aqueduct, and the creeper-clad ruins of the Old Works. Without warning, torches flared amid the tumbled cut-stone. A dark figure cut across the flames, bare-chested and inhuman in a fearsome bull-horned mask. She caught her breath. Suddenly it was seven years ago, and she was back at the Jonkunoo Parade at Bethlehem, looking for Ben. Not real, not real.

‘Apparently,’ said Alexander beside her, ‘our Mr Kelly is letting the estate workers have their own parade – at the Old Works, if you please. Given that the beggars burnt it to cinders in the rebellion, I call that confoundedly poor taste.’

Sophie did not reply. She remembered the smell of pimento smoke at Bethlehem; the gnawing dread that she would never find Ben.

But that was then, she told herself, and this is now.
That’s all over.
That’s what he said.

She hadn’t seen him since that day in the hills, for he’d contrived to be away whenever she visited Evie. But she was glad of that. She didn’t want to see him again. And she didn’t want to see him tonight. What was the point? It was all over now.

‘Your grandpapa’, said Alexander, cutting across her thoughts, ‘would never have permitted a thing like that.’

‘A thing like what?’

‘A Johnny Canoe parade down at the Old Works. Haven’t you been listening?’

She looked down at her lap and realized that she’d been clenching her fists. Alexander didn’t yet know that she knew about Evie. But he seemed to have sensed the change in her; he seemed determined to needle her into conversation.