Eden Falls

by Sanderson, Jane

  ‘Silas Whittam, the new master of the estate, was an impatient man, and he ordered the men to torch the crop. They hesitated, knowing – as he did not – how fire in Jamaica could rush like floodwater across the island’s fields and forests, ceasing its destruction only when it reached the sea. Their foreman, a thoughtful man named Roscoe Donaldson, stepped forwards to speak, and advised the hot-headed young master to wait for the rains, which would soon arrive, and would help contain and control the power of the blaze. Silas Whittam roared with contempt at their lily-livered concerns, and he pulled, from the crowd of women looking on, a young girl in a white slip, with bare feet and her hair falling to her shoulders in a mass of narrow braids. Roscoe Donaldson flinched and protested, for this was his only daughter, Ruby, but Silas only laughed because he intended her no harm. He smiled at the girl, who regarded him solemnly with her almond eyes, and he handed her a roughly made torch of wood and cloth. She held it at arm’s length, and he struck a match and lit it, then pushed her gently forwards to the edge of the cane fields.

  ‘She crouched, and held the burning ball of cloth against a long, dry stem, and at once the fire caught hold and a lizard’s tongue of orange flame licked upwards, dancing madly along and across, until another, then another was alight. In seconds, the blaze was too hot to bear and everyone stepped back, mesmerised by its power. Silas Whittam and Ruby Donaldson, architects of this immense destruction, looked at each other with shining faces, and they laughed. He placed a hand on her shoulder and together they watched the crops burn. Occasionally she sneaked a look up at him, because to her he seemed as thrilling and exhilarating as the fire itself, and it felt like a privilege to be by his side.

  ‘Time passed. The banana plants grew and thrived, and Ruby and her mother, with a hundred other women, carried the fruit every day in loaded cottas to the Rio Grande. She rarely saw Silas Whittam, although when she did he would smile at her and show her that he remembered what they’d done together. He had silky brown hair that she longed to touch, and pale, refined skin. His nose was narrower than hers, and his lips thinner. She was fourteen, and her mother called her beautiful, but Ruby thought him more beautiful than anyone she had ever seen, and she would fall into a silent fury when the other pickers called him “bakra” and blamed him for their aching backs and limbs. Sometimes, he gave her books to read, or a peeled orange, and once, in the heavy, red light of the evening, he had sat her by him on the steps of his porch and given her rum punch – just a sip, he had said, for now – and talked to her about England. It was companionable, cosy, and it seemed, to Ruby, to hint at a shared future. This was why, when he kissed her and slid his hand inside her blouse, she allowed it, and shivered with pleasure at his touch.’

  Ruby stopped talking. She looked at Eve’s ashen face, watching her across the table. Her eyes were wild and damp with fever.

  ‘You must go back to bed,’ Ruby said. ‘I’ll prepare you a herbal tea and help you upstairs.’

  She stood, but Eve said, ‘And now you ’ate him,’ and her sickness, or the shock, made her voice shake. ‘Did ’e force you, in t’end?’

  Ruby shook her head.

  ‘I was willing. I loved him. I thought he loved me.’

  ‘You were just a child.’

  ‘I was fourteen.’

  ‘A child.’

  ‘There were younger girls than I with a child on their hip, but yes, I was a great deal younger than him.’

  ‘And was it just once?’

  Ruby shook her head.

  ‘’ow many times?’

  Ruby shrugged. ‘A few,’ she said, feeling a natural defensiveness rise in her breast, although it was all such a long time ago. ‘I went to him after dark and we would lie together in his bed. I loved him,’ she said again. ‘And then, one evening, I had to tell him that I was expecting his child.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he changed. Everything changed. He suddenly couldn’t bear the sight of me. He denied that he was the father. He said it could be any man from the Port Antonio docks to the Blue Mountains.’ There were tears in her eyes, and she wiped them away angrily.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I was hardly faced with a multitude of choices. There was an obeah woman on the plantation and my mammy wanted her to…’ Ruby hesitated, searching for an acceptable word ‘…intervene. But I had felt the baby move, and I knew I could love this child because it would be mine alone.’ She glanced at her son. ‘And it was Roscoe,’ she said.

  Now they both looked at the sleeping boy, as if to confirm the reality of him. Eve shivered, though her face was damp and her nightdress clung to her skin.

  ‘Please,’ Ruby said. ‘Let me take you back upstairs.’

  ‘I can go alone,’ Eve said. She stood, but she didn’t leave. Instead, she said, ‘Yet ’ere you are, working for ’im when I should think you can hardly bear to look at ’im.’

  ‘It was an agreement,’ Ruby said. ‘I had no choice but to accept the terms.’

  ‘What sort of agreement?’

  ‘That I preserve the secret, if your brother supported us financially. My daddy thought him the very devil, but he was not wicked through and through. He gives me money sometimes, for Roscoe, and he employs me here. But no one knows the truth, except, now, you.’

  ‘And Roscoe? Does ’e ask?’

  ‘Not yet. One day he will, and I shall tell him his father was a good man who loved us both.’

  ‘Ruby, I—’

  Ruby held up a hand. ‘It can all wait. Go to bed. I’ll bring you feverfew, when the water’s boiled.’

  Eve, finally, did as she was bid, moving like a wraith through the shadows of the hotel. A light was on in Silas’s office and his door was open, but she walked past without even a glance. He saw her slip soundlessly by, and he was shocked; he had thought – in fact, he had been sure – that she would hear the tale and then come to him in sympathy.

  Chapter 34

  They took Henrietta from hospital to Holloway in a Black Maria drawn by a pair of old dray horses. There was a narrow slit in the side of her locked compartment, and through this Henrietta watched the outside world where dreary people in drab clothes went about their desultory business: freedom was wasted on them, she thought. If she were free she would wear a scarlet hat and a magenta coat, and she would run everywhere and always be happy. Then she thought, Imprisonment is making me foolish.

  She closed her eyes, to shut out the spectacle of unworthy, liberated people, and she didn’t open them again until the horses lumbered to a halt in the prison yard. Her door was unlocked and she came unsteadily down the metal steps of the carriage on to the cobbles. Her hands were cuffed, tighter than was necessary, and it was raining: fine, sharp, soaking rain that suited her mood. A silent wardress led her through the yard and Henrietta let her mind drift north to Netherwood Hall and to the comforting image of Parkinson. She pictured the butler, erect and immaculate, descending the steps of the house in order to receive her from the Daimler, his dear, familiar face a study in restrained joy at her arrival, and she was consumed by a sudden longing to see him.

  She hung her head and followed where she was led, only dimly aware of the sounds around her, and the other prisoners in front and behind. She knew the drill, and was at least spared the intimate physical examination she had previously endured. A roll of bedding was pushed into her arms, along with a brick of yellow soap wrapped in a fold of paper. The smells of Holloway Prison, she imagined, would stay with her for ever, and one of them would be carbolic acid. She thought about the late summer fragrances of lavender and pot pourris, and the stillroom in Yorkshire where rose petals were turned into eastern-scented jellies, and she allowed fat tears of self-pity to roll down her cheeks.

  The wardress, behind her now, shoved Henrietta in the small of the back and moved her along through a series of barred doors – unlocking them, locking them again, each time with a different key – toward the iron staircase and the tiered landings. Her face wore
an expression of grim contempt and Henrietta, passive and obedient, thought this only right. For a while, when all this began, she had felt like a warrior, a Boadicea for the modern age. But essentially, she thought now, she was a spoilt child who had wandered too far from home.

  Henrietta lay on the thin mattress of her bunk and counted the squares in the grille at her window. There would be seventy, she knew this already. It was a different cell from her previous one, on a different landing in a vast prison, but there was a symmetry to the place that could almost be comforting.

  She was alone, although there was a second bunk below hers and she knew it might be filled at any time. Outside the iron door of her cell prison life seethed and swelled and she knew that solitude, in this relentless cavern of noise, was to be cherished while it lasted. She thought about the strangeness of the past days and how, when she had opened her eyes in the hospital bed, she had remembered nothing of how or why she got there. Her noble cause, her great reforming zeal had dimmed and dissipated, like the lights from a firework that explode into the sky and seconds later are gone, forgotten. Later, of course, she had pieced together the sequence of events, remembering – with Toby’s help – the brick, the remand, the court case, the sentence, the fall. She remembered, too, the fury she had felt when she ran down Whitehall to Downing Street, and the white heat of moral outrage that sent the brick flying through the fanlight of Number Ten. But she didn’t quite feel it now, she found. Votes for women seemed less imperative than the immediate problem of her extended incarceration, which had filled Henrietta with a kind of hollow, debilitating despair.

  The blanket she lay on was grey and coarse; it prickled her skin even through her clothing. She shifted position to relieve the irritation, though it barely helped, and the springs beneath the thin mattress creaked and complained, which only served to remind her how difficult it would be to sleep. She thought she could not endure another night here, and the certain knowledge that she must gave her, at last, a small spark of resistance, enough to lift her just far enough out of her passive state to consider her options, which she decided were four: escape, suicide, endurance or protest. The first two she ruled out immediately, having no wish either to live life as a fugitive or to cease living life at all. The third she rejected too, because although it was, strictly speaking, possible, it was also unthinkable. That decided, she concentrated her mind on the fourth and final option, and found it a simple matter, after all, to settle on a plan.

  That evening, when dinner arrived from the Ritz, Henrietta refused to eat it. There was a duck breast with crisp, salty skin and a puree of parsnip, but she let it congeal on the plate in front of her, then sat silently while the women next to her and opposite took turns with their forks, devouring Henrietta’s superior food along with their own stewed beef shin. They were welcome to it. She took no water either, and the emptiness she felt by lights out had an ascetic, religious quality that gave her renewed purpose and inner strength. The following day she returned untouched her porridge and her tin mug of tea, and at lunchtime she watched her potato soup grow cold without once picking up the spoon. At this point a canteen warder realised what was going on and alerted the prison governor to the fact that they had a refuser on their hands. By mid-afternoon the entire prison population seemed to know that Lady Henrietta Hoyland had decided to neither eat nor drink until she was released.

  Ulrich had been invited for supper with his aunt. It was supper, not dinner, because they were to eat late, following Tristan und Isolde at the Royal Opera House. Liese von Hechingen, the aunt, had once met Richard Wagner on a holiday in Sicily, and this had made her an authority on the man and his music.

  ‘He was writing Parsifal, you know,’ she said imperiously. ‘As I recall, he worked better in the mornings than the afternoon, and he told me Palermo was just far enough away not to be a distraction to him.’

  A footman slid up to the table, offering a large dish of softly scrambled eggs. Aunt Liese took half of the contents without ceasing her flow.

  ‘It must have been the fifties, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Late fifties. But he completed it much, much later. Such a brilliant man. He called it not an opera but ein Buhnenweihfestspiel. Uli, was ist das in Englisch?’

  Ulrich said, ‘It really doesn’t matter, Aunt Liese,’ but he smiled at her, so that his rebuff wasn’t too unkind and Isabella saw yet another reason to love him.

  Peregrine, Isabella’s stepbrother, took what was left of the scrambled eggs and said, ‘Is that what we heard tonight, then? Parsi-what-not?’

  Isabella would have liked to say, loudly, that she was unrelated to the very stupid son of the duke, but instead she said, ‘No, Perry. We saw Tristan und Isolde.’

  ‘Almost five hours of it,’ Clarissa said meaningfully.

  ‘It was a long time to sit,’ Ulrich said, although he had held Isabella’s hand in the dark and she had stroked his skin with her thumb, so the duration of the opera had not seemed excessive to either of them. Everyone waited, quietly, for the footman to return with a replenished dish, and when he did, Ulrich took a modest portion for himself. There was a small silver pot of beluga caviar beside his plate, with the tiniest silver spoon imaginable. He dotted his plate, admiring the startling contrast of the black glistening against the creamy yellow, then furtively licked the spoon and found, when he looked up, that Isabella’s mother was watching him closely. The duchess was an exacting woman, he had discovered: keen to identify one’s shortcomings. He tried to disarm her with a smile but she only inclined her head gravely, as if to say the jury was still out, the verdict as yet unknown.

  ‘So, our renegade relation is back in the news.’

  This was Peregrine, who often spoke with his mouth full and did so now. Of all his dreadful characteristics, thought Isabella, this was surely the worst. She glared at him and he blinked back. Amandine, Peregrine’s wife, said, ‘Renegade relation,’ and tittered.

  ‘What’s that you say, Perry?’ barked the duke. Clarissa had banned his ear trumpet from the table, so Archie always missed a good deal of what was said.

  ‘Henrietta, Papa,’ Peregrine said, cupping his hands to make a megaphone. ‘Back in the newspaper. Starving herself to death in the clink.’

  Isabella and Clarissa exchanged a look of perfect sympathy and united distaste. They knew about this latest development; Tobias had been to see them, bearing the news with remarkable sangfroid. The authorities wouldn’t be prepared to watch her waste away, so she’d soon be back home, he had said. In that case, Clarissa had murmured, why didn’t all prisoners refuse their food all the time? Tobias hadn’t known how to answer so he had said nothing, only drummed his fingers on the arm of the couch and looked thoughtful. That was this morning, when Henrietta was already a day and a half into her fast. Clarissa, who herself subsisted on less food than a sparrow, was concerned not so much for her daughter’s health as for her increasingly degraded reputation. Peregrine’s crowing pronouncement was, she believed, one more nail in the coffin of Henrietta’s future prospects.

  ‘Good Lord!’ Archie shouted. ‘Why would the gel do that?’

  Peregrine, full of eggs and toasted brioche, sat back in his chair and laced his fingers across the swollen expanse of his stomach. ‘It’s what these suffragettes do, Papa,’ he shouted. ‘Ups the ante, y’see. Martyrs to the cause.’

  ‘I believe Henry just wants to come home,’ said Isabella. ‘Toby says she’s not angry any more, just desperately unhappy.’

  ‘Well, put it how you will, she’s a damned embarrassment to the family and I’m jolly glad she’s not a Partington,’ Perry said. Amandine swelled with wifely pride and Isabella, who had always found it easy to cry, fought the onset of tears because Peregrine was not worthy. ‘I’m jolly glad she’s not a Partington too,’ she said passionately, driven not so much by loyalty to Henrietta as loathing for Peregrine. ‘Because then you’d be my actual brother, and that would be more embarrassing than anything Henrietta has done.’

 
Ulrich laughed. Peregrine stood up.

  ‘Outrageous,’ he said. ‘I will not be insulted at my father’s table.’

  Clarissa could not abide bad manners, whatever provocation may have preceded them. ‘Please sit down, Peregrine,’ she said evenly. ‘Isabella, you must apologise at once.’

  Isabella held her tongue. She looked at Ulrich, who offered a smile of warm encouragement and then spoke calmly into the hostile silence.

  ‘From what I understand, those campaigners for women’s suffrage who have broken the law are political prisoners and deserve to be treated differently – more respectfully, one might say – from common criminals. Lady Henrietta has been treated abysmally by the judicial system, and I think she is quite justified in taking this latest course of action. If she were my sister, I should be proud.’

  Ulrich had never met Henrietta, and had only a scant understanding of the details – it was not something Isabella wished to discuss – but he spoke with the authority of a barrister, although he was no such thing. Somehow, he had bridged the chasm that had opened between Clarissa’s demand for an apology and Isabella’s unspoken yet evident refusal to oblige; he had fogged the issue, and with great éclat. Isabella pressed a hand against her heart, for she thought it might burst. That she deeply resented her older sister’s attention-hogging conduct was, for now, neither here nor there. Ulrich had managed to confer nobility upon Henrietta’s actions, and by so doing had got Isabella off the hook. She wondered if anyone had ever loved another human being so entirely as she loved Ulrich von Hechingen.

  Peregrine, purple faced, had nevertheless reclaimed his seat. The wrong done to him had not been righted; his indignant fury had not been assuaged. However, a platter of crêpes Suzette had been carried into the dining room, and their buttery fragrance immediately distracted him from his ire.