Down in the street, the milkman’s pony paused from long habit outside their door, and waited in vain for Sophie to run down the steps with a carrot.
Madeleine crumpled the letter and threw it across the room. She took a fresh sheet of writing paper, and Lettice’s fountain pen. Dear Mr Lawe, she wrote. I accept your offer. Yours, Madeleine Finlay.
Part Three
Chapter Thirteen
Jamaica, March 1895 – five months later
Cameron is back in his cell at Millbank prison.
It’s the first day of his sentence. He’s lying on the planks in the cold and the stink, and the ceiling is pressing down on him and the black sand is blowing in from the desert, and somewhere down a distant corridor a child is crying. Black sand stops his mouth and sugars his eyes. He can’t see. Can’t find what he’s looking for. Doesn’t know what it is. And all he can hear is that black sand hissing, and that lost child crying in the dark.
He took a shuddering breath and woke up.
It was dawn. He was lying in his own bed on the verandah at Eden. The sky showed a cool, fresh blue through the hole in the roof. He breathed in, and smelled the metallic sweetness of wet red earth.
He lay listening to the musical ring-ring of the river-frogs, and the buzz of the crickets, and the sugarbirds and grassquits squabbling in the tree-ferns near the house. Usually this was his favourite time, when he was at his most optimistic, and all things seemed possible. But the dream had left an aftertaste of longing and regret that he couldn’t shake off.
He wondered why he’d had it again. It only came when things went wrong. When croptime was late, or there was a fire in the boiling-house. What was it this time? Was it because Sinclair was back in Jamaica? Or was it simply that Eden was haunted – and, as he’d once heard a cane-cutter say, you can’t make peace with ghosts.
He heard the click of claws across the tiles, then felt a blast of hot breath on his shoulder, and Abigail’s rasping tongue. She climbed on top of him, he pushed her off, and she clattered away to chase ground doves in the garden.
He rolled onto his side and wrapped the pillow round his head. He was almost as exhausted as when he’d dropped onto the mattress five hours before. For the past three months he’d been racing to get in the cane before the rains made the tracks impassable, and now it was piled high in the works yard, and the mill and the boiling-house were running day and night, and he and his men were red-eyed with fatigue.
A few minutes later, Abigail was back to complete the wake-up ritual. Again she clambered on top of him, and when he could no longer breathe – for she was big even for a mastiff – he pushed her off and sat up.
He pulled on his nightshirt, grabbed the old sheet he used for a towel, and made his way down the steps and through the dripping garden to the river. Abigail bounded ahead of him, startling a flock of white egrets out of the giant bamboo and making the emerald plumes nod and scatter raindrops.
The river was green and opaque and stingingly cool when he dived in. He trod water, and watched Abigail bend one stocky foreleg to drink. Moses was leading the horses down from the stables, with a trio of pickneys skipping behind him in the hopes of a ride. Cameron was dismayed to find that he could take no pleasure in any of it. Again that strange, indefinable sense of loss.
He had bought Eden to make his peace with Ainsley’s ghost, but it hadn’t worked out that way. Perhaps the blacks were right: perhaps duppies are angry creatures – to be fled, and not appeased.
But he couldn’t leave Eden now. He had fallen in love with her. She was beautiful, dangerous and infuriating: a chaotic and wayward nymph. Sometimes, in his black moods, he would ask himself what he was doing here. Why didn’t he just give up and let her slip back into the wilderness of sweetwoods and guango trees where she’d been dreaming away two decades of oblivion before he found her? But in the end he always stayed.
Abigail’s impatient bark dragged him back to the present. God, why couldn’t he shake off that dream?
Back at the house he shaved, flung on clothes, and forced down a plate of ackee and saltfish, which his cook served every morning in the mistaken belief that he liked it. In fact he hated it, for it reminded him of prison, but it was too late to tell old Braverly now. He was as sensitive as a girl about his cooking, and it would only send him off on a ganja-fuelled spree that would land him in Falmouth jail. So Cameron gritted his teeth and ate his saltfish.
After breakfast he left Abigail to guard the house, and rode to Maputah, where Oserius had been supervising the works overnight. He stayed all morning, and dealt with a build-up of trash outside the mill, a broken hogshead in the curing-house, and a fight between warring boilermen.
As the morning slipped away, his frustration deepened. It wouldn’t take years to haul Eden into the present: it would take decades. The mill was still powered by the centuries-old aqueduct from the Martha Brae, and completely at the mercy of the weather. Oxen still toiled with agonizing slowness to bring in the cane. Who was he deceiving? Over at Parnassus, old Addison Traherne had laid down a tramway twenty-five years before. Even the works at Fever Hill had long since converted to steam.
At midday he returned to the house for a hasty meal of curried goat, then rode over to the western cane-pieces to defuse a row between rival cutting gangs. In the heat of the afternoon, when the rain was a distant memory and the land a parched and dusty red, he rode the eight miles north to Falmouth. He hated going to town, but he’d learned that if he went when it was hot, he rarely encountered anyone he knew.
At Ryle’s he ordered kerosene and candles, at Doran’s a crate of Scotch and a box of cigars, and then settled his accounts at the saddler’s and the farrier’s. Finally he decided to make a quick call on Olivia Herapath. She usually helped to put things in perspective.
The ‘Closed’ sign was up on the studio door, but Etheline let him in and showed him through to the salon at the back. The little room was dim and fugged with tobacco smoke, and littered with yellow-backed novels. Olivia must be having one of her bad days. He decided to stay for as long as it took to lift her mood.
She was on the sofa, manifesting as one of her more alarming past lives: a terrifying old obeah-woman named Juba, who wore a strident blue and orange print robe, a blistering yellow handkerchief, and a tangle of cats’ teeth and parrot beaks across her formidable bosom. The contrast between such vivid Negro splendour and Olivia’s pasty white face was oddly affecting.
She did not look well. He noticed that the black silk mantle which festooned Hector’s photograph had been shakily rearranged, and that her sharp little eyes were rimmed with red. But the glance which she flung at him outlawed pity.
He asked if she meant to put a spell on him, and she smacked him on the chest with her obeah-stick and scolded him for staying away so long. ‘You’re on your own far too much up there,’ she declared, checking him over as if he were a stallion she was thinking of buying. ‘Young fellow like you. Deplorable state of affairs. Simply won’t do.’
Cameron gave her a slight smile and moved a copy of The Heathen Heart to make room beside her.
‘You ought to go out into Society,’ she insisted. ‘People would accept you with open arms if you gave ’em half a chance.’
‘I’m not—’
‘They don’t care what you did ten years ago. Heavens, man, this is Jamaica!’
‘I’m aware of that.’
‘Cricket. Bridge. The odd concert. Wouldn’t kill you, would it? What on earth’s stopping you?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said with perfect truth.
‘Well find out. You’re becoming just like Jocelyn. Though I know that’s a forbidden topic. In any event, you should call on me more often. And don’t look like that, you know I’m right.’
‘Olivia, you’re always right.’
She gave a fruity laugh. ‘Don’t humour me, you wretch.’ She poured him a large glass of claret and indicated the humidor on the side table. She herself was smoking Juba’s villai
nously smelly white clay pipe.
‘So,’ she said after they had both lit up.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Tell me all the gossip.’
She threw him a jaundiced look. She knew very well that he had none of her passion for gossip, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, he must do penance for his neglect. So for the next twenty minutes he did, and she made him laugh despite himself. She was shrewd and coarse as only an aristocrat can be, and she knew ‘everyone who mattered’. Small wonder that she terrorized every Society matron from Lucea to St Ann’s Bay – and that they flocked to her. For where else could they have their photographs taken and their friends dissected by a genuine noblewoman – even if she had dropped her title on marrying a commoner?
‘I’ve been wondering’, she said at last, ‘how long you think you’re going to get away with it.’
‘With what?’
‘With never mentioning your brother.’
Cameron’s heart sank.
‘Heaven help us, Cameron, he’s been back for nearly four months!’
‘So I’ve heard.’
‘And he’s acquired a wife.’
‘I’ve heard that too.’
She studied him narrowly. ‘You’re going to have to do something, you know.’
‘What do you suggest?’
With her stick she rapped him on the knee. ‘You’re going to have to come down out of those hills and marry someone.’
‘Olivia—’
‘That brother of yours means to give the old man a grandson. Adoptive grandson. Whatever that’s called. Anyway, he means to cut you out.’
Cameron made no reply.
‘Well?’ she said. ‘Have you seen them yet?’
‘Have I seen whom?’
‘Cameron, behave. Have you seen your brother and his new wife?’
‘You know I haven’t. I don’t see any of them. Ever.’
She snorted. ‘Well, I’ve seen them. Someone had to do it. I left my card on her the morning they arrived.’ She bared her small yellow teeth in a grin. ‘Sinclair doesn’t care for me at all, but he dared not send his regrets. He’s such a snob.’
Which, thought Cameron in amusement, was a little rich coming from Olivia Herapath, née the Honourable Olivia Fortescue of Fortescue Hall, who regarded anyone ennobled after Crécy as a parvenu. Sometimes he wondered why she made an exception for him.
There was a pregnant pause while Olivia disentangled her mourning pendant from the parrot beaks and waited for him to speak.
At last he gave in. ‘So,’ he said. ‘What do you think of my new sister-in-law?’
Her eyes glittered. ‘Now there’s a puzzle. Damned good lines, and a tolerable taste in dress – but no accomplishments! No French, no German, no music. Can’t even ride. Although I hear that Jocelyn’s been giving her lessons. But it’s frightfully odd, don’t you think? One wonders where Sinclair found her. And the most provoking thing of all is that she’s far too good for him.’
Cameron was surprised. ‘You mean you like her?’
‘I know, isn’t it singular?’ She paused to draw on her pipe. ‘For one thing, she knows her photography. Oh, yes. She’s set up a darkroom in the undercroft – she says it’s such a shadowy house that she might as well. Although who knows, perhaps it’s a means of getting away from Sinclair.’ Another puff. ‘Of course, he doesn’t approve at all, but what can he do, when she buys her supplies from a baron’s daughter?’ She shook her head. ‘Damned intriguing. Can’t make her out. Perceptive. Fearfully reserved. Bit of a temper. Prodigiously attached to some sort of invalid sister – whom I haven’t yet met. And d’you know, I rather fancy that she’s kind.’ She snorted. ‘So not at all like me!’
Cameron maintained a diplomatic silence.
‘I cannot imagine why she married him,’ she added, ‘except of course for the obvious, I suppose.’
‘You mean money?’
She inclined her head at the ways of the world.
‘Well then,’ he got to his feet and picked up his hat, ‘it seems he’s got what he deserves.’
Usually, seeing Olivia Herapath lifted his spirits, but as he rode out of Falmouth he felt only irritation and an odd sense of betrayal. Olivia was his friend, dammit. Why did she have to approve of Sinclair’s wife?
He was telling himself not to be so childish when he reached the crossroads over the Martha Brae and turned south for Eden. The heat was intense, for it was still too early in the afternoon for the land breeze, so he kept to the shade beneath the poinciana trees.
He had not gone far when he heard the rattle of wheels behind him, and turned to see a smart new trap crossing the bridge and heading west along the Fever Hill Road.
Sinclair wore a white linen suit and a panama hat – no churchman’s black for him – and he drove briskly, staring straight ahead. The young woman at his side wore an all-enveloping dust-coat of russet silk, and a wide straw hat with fluttering bronze ribbons. She was gripping the side of the pony-trap, and, like Sinclair, staring straight ahead without expression. Neither of them saw Cameron.
He only caught a glimpse of the girl as they swept past, but it was a shock. He had imagined any wife of Sinclair’s to be slight and blond, with a little pinched mouth for murmuring psalms. This girl had a chignon of rich dark hair, an olive flush to her cheek, and an extravagantly curved red mouth. She would have made a splendid model for Rossetti or Burne-Jones.
It was an unpleasant surprise to find himself admiring his brother’s choice. Despite the heat, he kicked his horse to a canter.
As evening came on, his mood steadily darkened. He spent two hours at Maputah snapping at everyone, then returned to the house for a stiff rum and water and one of Braverly’s least successful dinners. The old man’s pepperpot was legendary – it had reputedly been simmering for two generations – but tonight his eyes were yellow and wandering after too much ganja tea, and the pepperpot consisted of peppers and very little else.
Still hungry, Cameron went down into the garden and picked a couple of mangoes, and washed them down with another rum and water. Abigail heaved herself off the verandah and followed him.
The night was loud with crac-cracs and croaker lizards and the occasional hoot of an owl. Fireflies spangled the hibiscus, and the air was heavy with the scent of datura and star jasmine. Cameron hardly noticed.
Whenever he thought of his brother it was with a sense of irritation and defeat. Sinclair hated him. Cameron had given up wondering why when they were still at Winchester.
But now Sinclair was back in Jamaica. He was living with Jocelyn at Fever Hill, and driving his handsome young wife about the countryside. He had everything a man could want. He had someone to talk to, to share things with, to work for.
Next to that, what had he, Cameron, achieved in eight years at Eden? What was the point of all his efforts? Who was he doing this for?
You’re drunk, he told himself in disgust. Just another drunken planter going native out in the bush. It’s time for bed.
He turned to go back to the house, and was startled to see that he was not alone. Grace McFarlane stood at the foot of the steps, watching him. Her skirts were still hitched to the knees from the long walk up from Eden, and her children were hiding shyly behind her.
It was a shock to see her again. He wasn’t sure if he was glad or not.
Abigail, who tolerated Grace as an erstwhile part of the household, trotted over to welcome her, tail lazily swinging. The children reached out to stroke her ears, and she nosed them as if they were puppies.
‘Hello, Grace,’ said Cameron.
He caught the brilliance of her smile as she inclined her head in greeting. ‘Mas’ Camron,’ she said. ‘Lang time me nuh see you.’
‘A long time,’ he agreed.
He was not in love with Grace, nor she with him. They had settled that years ago. But they understood each other. Both lived alone and were not at peace, and from time to time they still fulfilled a mutual need for warmth.
He watched the children becoming more daring with Abigail, who wagged her tail and took their small limbs in her enormous jaws, and finally allowed herself to be chased away through the tree-ferns.
When they were gone, he turned back to their mother. ‘How have you been, Grace?’
She tilted her head in a gesture that could have meant anything, and her slanted eyes were full of secrets. ‘An you, soldierman? What I hear, you in one a your black moods tonight. Not so? Tell Grace why you get vex.’
He made no reply.
She came closer. ‘You don’ glad you breddah back.’ A statement, not a question.
He studied the strong planes of her face. The broad cheekbones, the flaring nostrils, the generous, well-shaped mouth. He thought what a shame it was that he was too dog-tired to do anything about it. A shame for her too, if she’d come all this way with any such hopes.
‘You don’ glad Mas’ Sinclair back,’ she said again.
‘Glad?’ he said. ‘What to glad fe, girl?’
She grinned. She liked it when he spoke patois. ‘Preacher-man fixing to cut you out de fambly.’
‘I don’t care about that.’
‘Hn. I care.’
‘Well you shouldn’t. I don’t have any right to Fever Hill, and neither does Sinclair. It belongs to the Monroes. Not to the Lawes.’
The Daughters of Eden Trilogy Page 14
