Eden Falls

by Sanderson, Jane

  He did as he was bid, and she said, ‘Good boy,’ again. ‘Now, get your hands right in there, and rummage about so that the spices colour the meat.’ She showed him what she meant and he copied, revelling in the squelch of the fresh, cool meat in his palms. ‘That’s the way,’ she said. ‘That’s the way to curry goat.’

  She was pleased and so he smiled with equal pleasure; he loved Ruby almost as much as he loved Roscoe. He was sleeping at Ruby’s house for the time being, sharing Roscoe’s narrow bed. He slept in the warm lee of the older boy’s body, curled up like a cashew nut in the space Roscoe made for him, listening to stories about a clever, tricky spider called Anansi; they were mesmerising tales, but always, always, Angus fell asleep before the end. He didn’t mind, though: it meant that Roscoe would have to tell him again. Angus couldn’t imagine a nicer way to go to sleep, or a nicer bed to sleep in, or a better friend than Roscoe.

  Ruby watched him for a while. She marvelled at his capacity for happiness, which she supposed was common to all children, not just to this child. He grabbed the simple joys from each new day, and if he asked about Eve it was because Ruby had mentioned her first. For now, Angus had a new normality and he was satisfied with his stand-in family of Ruby and Roscoe, and a cast of interesting extras – Scotty, Maxwell, Wendell – who provided additional entertainment. Just as well, thought Ruby, because his actual family members were a dead loss. Silas paid him little heed, so Angus paid little back, and Seth was kind but oddly formal; he always seemed to be stuck for something to say.

  Batista, busy with the cleaver at the butcher’s block, raised her voice in song, and the sound of the blade splitting bone provided a sort of grisly percussion. Angus glanced at Ruby, alarmed. Batista, alone among the kitchen regulars, scared him without ever meaning to. She had a way of rolling her eyes back in her head when she spoke to the Lord. Also, she puffed and wheezed and sometimes tried to grab him as he passed, then said, ‘Why you torture me li’l man?’ when Angus dodged her fat arms and refused to let her squeeze him. Angus thought it impossible to like Batista, although Roscoe did and Ruby too. Perhaps, Ruby told him, he would grow to like her, given time. This he doubted very much. She staggered into the kitchen now, heaving with both hands the tin pail of unspeakable goat parts, and Angus cut her a wary glance. Ruby, catching it, laughed and rubbed his hair, then said, ‘Here comes Batista with the fifth quarter of the goat, all washed and ready for the pot,’ and Angus looked down sternly at the basin of meat and spices, cross with Ruby for trying to meddle. He would not look up, he thought, until Batista was busy, or gone. Seeing this, Ruby laughed again and left him to it. She had work to do before she left for Sugar Hill.

  Ruby had been about the same age as Angus when her mammy taught her what to do with the fifth quarter of the beast – the bits, her mammy told her, that the slaves used to get because no one else had any use for them, and more fool them. Now she followed the method in precisely the way she was taught as a girl, tipping the contents of the bucket into a five-gallon pan of boiling water. Never, ever – she could hear her mammy’s grave voice even now, in her head – put meat and its bones into water that was cold.

  ‘It sit there like something evil and gather scum,’ she had said. ‘Skimming the scum off of soup is about as low as a girl can go, and you’ll never, ever, catch it all.’

  What Mammy said Ruby did; she did it now, standing at arm’s length so the rolling boil didn’t splash and scald her. With the new addition the tempest was temporarily becalmed, so she waited a minute before adding green bananas, hot peppers, carrots, turnips, chochos, yam, thyme, more scallions and four flamboyant, generous pinches of sea salt. The head of the goat rose magisterially to the surface of the water so she pushed it down out of sight with a wooden spoon. Three hours from now this would be mannish water, a hot broth that was reputed to grow hairs on a young man’s chest and put snap in an old man’s celery. Ruby, who needed neither of these benefits, simply liked the taste; it recalled innocence, childhood, a mother’s love. It also made enough to feed a village, and the hotel’s guests would sup but a fraction of it, served to them – sieved and sieved again to a dark, clear broth – in earthenware beakers, the like of which none of them had ever used before. There was plenty of porcelain in the cupboards, of course: the soup could have been served in Royal Doulton so fine you could see the shadow of your hand through it. But this was the Eden Falls Hotel, where fine china, like beef en croute and sole Veronique, was a thing of the past. This formula – perverse, perhaps; brave, certainly – had proved to be a winning one. By offering the guests nothing at all that was familiar Eve had succeeded in pleasing them. Each meal had become an adventure. The handful of guests who baulked at goat and yam and ackee were offered a plain griddled steak, or spit-roast baby chicken, but these dishes carried with them the taint of woefully limited horizons. There was a new and infectious spirit in the dining room, and a new informality too. Napkins were tucked into collars; occasionally, cutlery was abandoned for the sensuous pleasure of picking up a pork rib and sucking it clean.

  Ruby gave the brew one final poke and the scallions bobbed like corks. ‘There,’ she said, as if this had made all the difference, and then she started to take of her apron. Angus, who wasn’t looking but had a sixth sense about these things, said, ‘Where are you going?’ although he instantly regretted it, because Batista gave one of her low, wheezy chuckles and said, ‘Pickney eyes in back of im ’ead.’

  ‘Roscoe is expecting to find you here, at the end of school,’ Ruby said, pre-empting the second question, which would certainly have been whether he could come too. ‘You mustn’t disappoint him, must you?’

  Angus shook his head gravely. ‘Is Scotty staying?’ he asked.

  Scotty said, ‘An-goose, leave de goat an play tree-four-five, mon.’ He was squatting against the wall, rattling the dice in his big hands and grinning, showing all his long teeth. Angus looked at Ruby.

  ‘When you’re finished,’ she said. ‘And only then.’

  She was just as strict with him as she had ever been with Roscoe. Yes, his mammy was sick and his daddy was far away, but no child was ever improved by over-indulgence or shirking. He nodded, and his expression was so endearingly conscientious as he returned his attention to the basin of meat that she wanted to reward him, so she said: ‘And yes, of course Scotty will stay.’

  Ruby looked at the porter, who winked at her. Batista, with a glassy expression of beatific calm, rocked back and forth in her chair and said, ‘Jesus, lawd Jesus, me comin’ soon to de pearly gates, me hear de bugle blow,’and Ruby could see that Angus had a point. The old woman, with her patois and prayers, wasn’t – to use an expression she’d learned from Eve – everybody’s cup of tea.

  When Ruby arrived at Sugar Hill Justine shrank away from the bedside with her eyes dipped, afraid of the other woman’s displeasure, but Ruby only nodded and smiled tautly. She had corralled her complicated feelings towards the housekeeper and claimed only to pity her.

  ‘Thank you Justine,’ was all she said, keeping her eyes firmly away from the swell of her belly. ‘How is she?’

  Justine said, ‘Same-same,’ without looking up.

  ‘No more blood?’

  ‘Non.’

  ‘And has the doctor seen her today?’

  ‘Oui madame, but now he gone.’ She looked up, and added, ‘to Spanish Town.’

  Ruby rolled her eyes at his uselessness. Justine, who had been backing towards the door, now slipped from the room. There was something so cowed and craven about her, thought Ruby; she should stand tall and proud, not creep about like an apology.

  Ruby turned to Eve, who lay on her side on the bed. She looked unbearably fragile: insubstantial and weightless. Her eyes were closed, her breathing shallow, and the skin of her face was still tinted parchment yellow, although when Ruby laid a hand on her forehead the heat of the fever seemed to have abated. Ruby sat beside her and tenderly stroked her head, and Eve seemed to stir, as if somehow, from
the depths of her sickness, she might be trying to make the journey back. Ruby watched her closely and said her name. Eve’s lips, pale and painfully dry, moved fractionally, although there was no sound. There was a pot of balm on the bedside table so Ruby dipped a finger into it and drew it across Eve’s mouth, rubbing the salve gently into the cracked skin. Again she stirred, but her eyes stayed closed.

  Ruby sighed, and in the quiet room her sigh sounded doom-laden, although in fact she felt some hope. There had been no bleeding since that first, terrible time, when Justine had practically had Eve laid out for the coffin, and the doctor, who had finally arrived, cross and dusty, from Spanish Town after three days’ travel in a pony and trap, had declared her to be ‘in God’s hands’. This had hardly seemed, Ruby told him, an appropriate verdict for a supposedly reputable man of science. There had followed an icy silence, which had intimidated Ruby not one jot.

  ‘We are all, when it comes to it, in God’s hands, Dr Hennessy,’ she had said. ‘What we would like to know from you is what can you give this poor lady to hasten her recovery?’

  Silas had been there, clutching his mouth in horror and defeat at the doctor’s verdict, as good as useless. He was an insubstantial man for all his swagger, Ruby thought. When she had stood up to the doctor, challenged his complacency, Silas had stared at her as if he hadn’t realised she was in the room.

  Dr Hennessy had ignored Ruby. ‘When yellow fever continues on to its second phase,’ he had said, addressing his words to Silas, one white man to another, ‘the chances of recovery are remote. Your sister has begun to haemorrhage due to the damage caused to her internal organs. Her vital signs are weak. By all means let your girl’ – here he indicated Ruby, without looking at her – ‘tend to her comfort and keep her hydrated. The rest, I’m sorry to say, is out of our hands. Now, I trust you have a room prepared for me? I have had an arduous journey.’

  Ruby had stepped between Silas and the doctor, and skewered him with a defiant glare. ‘My name,’ she said, ‘is Ruby Donaldson, and I am no one’s “girl”, Dr Hennessy. If you have no better advice than this, I wish for all our sakes you had been spared the trouble of coming at all,’ and Silas had opened and shut his mouth like a guppy on dry land.

  So now, Ruby thought, Dr Hennessy was gone. She wondered what he had charged for his expert opinion: a hundred times what it was worth, in any case. On the floor, at her feet, she had a loose hemp bag containing a collection of leaves picked from the trees and plants of her garden, and one or two gleaned from the roadside. She picked it up now and, holding it open, dipped her head into it and inhaled the complex, familiar, bitter aroma: ackee, soursop, liquorice bush, joint-wood, pimento, cowfoot, sage, guava, jack-in-the-bush, cerassee, thistle and elder.

  ‘Justine!’ she said then, because she knew the other woman would be only on the landing, awaiting instruction. The door opened a crack, and Justine whispered, ‘Oui, madame?’

  Ruby held out the bag. ‘I want you to take these and boil them in four pints of water, until the water has taken on the same colour and smell of the leaves. Do you understand?’

  ‘Oui madame.’ She took the bag from Ruby’s outstretched hand.

  ‘When I come back later this evening I believe Mrs Eve will be awake,’ Ruby said. Justine listened, placidly, for her part in the plan. She had utter faith in Ruby, and utter respect for her authority; she was only sad that she seemed to have lost her as a possible friend. ‘Together,’ Ruby said, ‘you and I will give her a bush bath.’

  ‘Très bien,’ Justine said. ‘Merci, madame.’

  Ruby nodded. ‘The child,’ she said abruptly. ‘When will it be born?’

  Justine furrowed her brow, as if she had never asked herself this question and was only now working out the answer. The baby signalled dangerous territory, Justine felt, and she was wary as she replied, ‘Novembre, madame.’

  ‘Will he allow you to stay?’ Ruby asked and it was evident from her tone that she herself thought this unlikely. Again Justine seemed to be considering the question, but she met Ruby’s eyes quite steadily when she answered, ‘Mais oui. This is my home.’

  ‘No,’ said Ruby. ‘This is Silas Whittam’s home. You, Justine, are merely passing through.’

  She felt vicious towards her. And she felt ashamed.

  Chapter 39

  The demolition of the glasshouses, when it had first begun, had seemed like an act of desecration, as if a temple was being razed to the ground, not a hothouse. They were surprisingly flimsy, these structures. One dismantled joist had led swiftly to another, and glass had rained down in lethal shards. The area had had to be roped off to prevent an accident. As for the plants, they had to go too. Some of them had been able to be saved; the best of the ferns and the tropical palms were carefully dug up and temporarily potted, and were now huddled together in a suntrap by the coach houses, out of place and inconvenient, like refugees from a war. But everything else had been ripped out, the roots, stalks and foliage burned on a vast smoking pyre, the blooms sent to the still room for stripping and drying, or placed in barrels of water at the end of Oak Avenue so that anyone from the town could walk up and help themselves. For a fortnight in late May carnations, freesias, lilies and orchids had flaunted their gaudy colours in front-parlour windows up and down the miners’ terraces.

  Now it was July, and the building of the new plant houses was under way, and already, from the footings and the length and depth of the beds, it was plain to see that they would be magnificent. But what was also plain was that Daniel MacLeod had lost all interest in the scheme. Indeed, the head gardener seemed to have lost all interest in everything. There were thirty-four gardeners beneath him, and it was just as well they knew their business, because there was no guidance from him. He had turned inward; everyone saw it, and it was because his wife, who had taken off to Jamaica, was ill: dead, some folk said, but this was surely only morbid speculation. Mr MacLeod brought himself into work each day, but his demeanour and bearing were that of a man bowed down by life’s burdens.

  ‘If he would only talk about it,’ said Mrs Powell-Hughes. The housekeeper was watching Sarah Pickersgill bottle chutney in the kitchens of Netherwood Hall. The air was pungent with the sweet-sour smell of Demerara sugar boiled with vinegar and Sarah’s fingertips were yellow with turmeric. ‘You should put that in with a spoon,’ Mrs Powell-Hughes said. ‘Terrible stuff to remove, turmeric.’

  The cook sniffed dismissively. ‘I can’t gauge t’quantity unless I do it in pinches,’ she said. ‘Mrs Adams were t’same.’

  They both were briefly silent, remembering Mrs Adams, the old cook who died of a seizure in the cold store.

  ‘I’m minded to seek him out,’ said Mrs Powell-Hughes. She was back to Daniel again, but she’d lost Sarah, who looked up blankly.

  ‘Mr MacLeod,’ said the housekeeper. ‘He won’t come in for meals, or for a brew, so I shall have to find him myself.’

  Sarah looked sceptical. ‘I’d leave well alone if I were you,’ she said. ‘He’s grown a beard.’

  ‘Well, and is that a reason to keep my distance? Plenty of men grow beards.’

  ‘Aye, because they mean to. Mr MacLeod’s grown a beard because ’e’s forgotten to shave, I reckon. That’s quite another matter.’

  Mrs Powell-Hughes saw Sarah’s point. The Daniel MacLeod she knew had always been a clean-shaven man, and now he had a wild look about him: unkempt and, she suspected, unwashed. She wondered if she might call in at that house on the common. She could find out a little more of the facts because, try as she might to disregard gossip and rumour, it was impossible not to overhear and then to worry. It would be irregular, calling in; she realised that. Then again, she’d been once before, when Anna Rabinovich married Amos Sykes and they’d held a little reception on the grass outside. She could call in one evening, perhaps. She could take a pie. That would surely be better than ambushing him in the garden. She’d seen him yesterday, with his hands thrust down into his trouser pockets, walking u
p through the kitchen garden without once glancing at the beans or stopping to pull out a dandelion, and he hadn’t looked approachable in the least. She hadn’t said hello: had slipped out of range to spare them both awkwardness. Could she summon the courage to knock on his door, then? It would be the Christian thing to do, but would it be pleasant or comfortable? These questions passed silently like clouds through her mind, and her brow furrowed as she contemplated them.

  ‘Not that long to go now,’ Sarah said, and the housekeeper knew at once what she was referring to: the regatta and their trip to Cowes.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Mrs Powell-Hughes.

  ‘I’ve drawn up menus and sent ’em on for approval.’

  ‘Yes, you said.’

  ‘As soon as Lady Netherwood gives me t’say-so, I shall start packing some non-perishables. Pity this chutney won’t be ready.’

  ‘I hope you’ve something better than chutney in mind. It’s not a parish picnic, you know.’ The housekeeper’s tone was quite altered; mention of the regatta made her sharp-tongued.

  Sarah glanced at her, amused.

  ‘Don’t whittle so much about it,’ she said. ‘It’s just a week on a boat.’

  Mrs Powell-Hughes didn’t deign to reply. It needled her that Sarah Pickersgill, born and raised in landlocked Yorkshire and with no idea what she was talking about, nevertheless presumed a worldly air whenever she spoke about Cowes, which was often. In the silence, Sarah bottled on contentedly, and because the conversation seemed to have dried up, she hummed a cheerful tune as she worked. It sounded, to the housekeeper, suspiciously like a sea shanty.

  The family had been absent all summer, but Netherwood Hall had buzzed with activity. From the attic rooms to the basement cellars there were myriad tasks to accomplish. This was a period of recovery for the house, a respite from the rigours of lavish living. During these weeks the household staff moved more freely through the corridors and entered rooms without knocking, but it was by no means a holiday. Rather, this was the time when the chipped gilt of picture frames was retouched; when the rugs were rolled and carried out for beating; when the wooden panelling was fed with linseed oil and the wooden floors waxed; when the lightly tarnished brass of the tapestry rails, high up on the drawing-room walls, could be buffed back to a high shine; when the individual crystal droplets on the ballroom chandeliers could be washed, dried and polished until each one glittered in the electric light with diamond brightness.