Why do women exist? he wondered. Weak, passive, unreflecting creatures, whose only purpose is to kindle vile appetites in the flesh of men, while they themselves – the injustice of it – remain coldly inert to carnal desire.
Chapter Nineteen
I speak buckra talk, Grace McFarlane had said, looking Madeleine up and down with her lovely, insolent eyes. Oh yes. Mas’ Camron teach it to I.
Beautiful, independent, knowing Grace, with her polished mahogany skin and her frank, uninhibited ways. Of course she would appeal to a man like him. Wouldn’t she?
It was a wildly inappropriate thought to be having at the Trahernes’ July Ball. But then, Madeleine hadn’t expected Cameron Lawe to be there, drinking cognac in the billiard-room.
She had been with Mrs Herapath, crossing the marble entrance-hall towards the ballroom, when she had seen him, standing silently amid a throng of gentlemen.
As if suddenly conscious that he was being watched, he had turned his head, and their eyes had locked. She had known by his stillness, and by some deeper sense that she couldn’t explain, that he was sharply, intensely aware of her, as she was of him.
The next instant the moment was broken. One of the gentlemen clapped him on the shoulder, and for a second he was distracted. Madeleine seized her chance and swept on towards the ballroom.
He isn’t supposed to be here, she told herself fiercely. He never goes into Society. It isn’t fair.
For she had decided that Mrs Herapath was right. It just wouldn’t do.
And now she stood, as she had stood all evening, in the Trahernes’ enormous, shimmering ballroom, longing to be safely back home with Sophie, where she wouldn’t have to think about anything. Least of all Cameron Lawe.
It was one o’clock in the morning, and Sinclair had declared it their duty to stay until three. So far she had danced with him once, and once with Cornelius Traherne, and once with Jocelyn. She had smiled until her cheeks were stiff, and seen enough beaded trims and chiffon overdresses to give Clemency an exhaustive account of the latest importations. She had heard her first orchestra, and been astonished that they all managed to play the same tune without getting lost. She had listened to a river of Mrs Herapath’s imperious gossip, and wondered what her friend would say if she learned that she was talking to a bastard who had once posed for photographs in the nude. And she had kept a silent watch for Cameron Lawe, and been relieved and disappointed when he did not appear.
And underneath it all, she had felt a creeping unease. Looking about her at the Trahernes’ bought-in sophistication, she’d had the strangest feeling that this whole glittering masquerade might at any moment be swept away by the darkness waiting at the edges. The delicacy of Strauss might fill the ballroom, but outside the air rang with the crickets’ harsh song. In the galleries, Italian finches sang in little filigree cages, but out in the moonlight it was Patoo who haunted the trees. And through it all the soft-footed helpers glided among the guests in impenetrable silence.
But no-one else seemed to notice anything amiss, least of all their host. And why should he? According to Mrs Herapath, Cornelius Traherne had just crowned himself emperor of Northside Society by betrothing his elder daughter to an Irving of Ironshore.
And he had clearly spared no expense to celebrate his triumph. Parnassus, the first great house in Trelawny to be wired for electricity, was a blaze of light. The grounds had been newly landscaped by English gardeners, the cinnamon and pimento trees clipped to release their fragrance, and the pergolas planted with roses, stephanotis and mignonettes. The state rooms had been repanelled in satinwood, the ballroom newly floored in black and white Carrara, and the band of the West India Regiment replaced by a thirty-piece orchestra shipped out from Vienna.
An army of French chefs had been drafted in to create tortue claire, foie gras à la gelée, filet de boeuf hollandaise, and charlotte à l’italienne – and, for the traditionalists among the guests, baked black land-crabs, fricassée of ring-tailed pigeon, and lobster pepperpot. Silent helpers dispensed Margaux, Lafitte, and Pommery Extra Sec.
It was very perfection. Although, as Mrs Herapath remarked to Madeleine between the gavotte and the polka, ‘It takes more than a liveried footman to make a gentleman.’
And Cornelius’s great-great-grandfather had known all about that, for he had been a blacksmith. ‘Yes, my dear, a blacksmith. Isn’t it killing? His name was Owen, I believe. Sailed for Jamaica in 1714, bought a swathe of cheap Government land, and set about “bettering himself”, as these people do. Kowtowed to the Monroes, the Lawes and the other first families, sent his sons home to become gentlemen, and purchased slaves by the shipload. And imported fresh batches every three years.’
And when he died, his son had left the estate with an overseer and gone back to England to live off the revenue, and his heirs had followed suit. It was only in 1832 that the Christmas Rebellion had summoned Addison Traherne back to Jamaica, to view the blackened ruins of Parnassus, and four thousand acres of cane turned to ash.
At ‘home’ the Government had pushed through the Emancipation Bill, and in Jamaica the slump had set in. And as blacks could no longer be forced to work for nothing, the columns of the Gleaner had filled with notices of bankruptcy. Soon estates could be had for the price of a dinner service.
And Addison had looked about him and seen that the only men to prosper were the money-lenders, so he had become one himself. The family motto was Deus mihi providebit: God will provide. ‘But in the meantime,’ as Mrs Herapath paraphrased behind her fan, ‘I intend to help myself. And if that means profiting from other men’s ruin, then so be it.’
Once he had risen to the top of the pile, Addison had set about consolidating his grip on Jamaican Society. By now his one mistake was some years in the past, when he’d overreached himself by offering for the foremost Beauty of the island, the imperiously lovely May Monroe, and been summarily rejected. ‘My dear, of what can he have been thinking? His people were blacksmiths, for heaven’s sake! Can you imagine her consternation? I don’t believe she ever forgave him. Or any of the Trahernes. Indeed I’m not at all sure that she hasn’t been blaming poor silly Clemency ever since.’
But Addison had worn his rejection lightly, and made a brilliant marriage to a Barrett of Cinnamon Hill and then to a Palairet of Greendale – finally expunging his youthful humiliation by betrothing his daughter Clemency to May’s great-nephew Ainsley. He’d survived to see his oldest son Cornelius marry a Hall of Tryall, then a McFarlane of Caledon (both of whom died conveniently young), and finally the enormously wealthy Rebecca Sammond of – ‘of Lombard Street, I’m very much afraid. And they do say that her grandpapa absolutely changed his name. From Salomon.’
But although Mrs Herapath might deplore the ‘aquiline’ turn of Rebecca Traherne’s nose, not to mention Cornelius’s ‘rather vulgar’ penchant for very young girls of whatever class or shade, her disapproval was voiced discreetly, behind her fan. There wasn’t a Society household in Trelawny which was not in debt to the Trahernes, and that included herself.
‘But the singular thing’, she went on, shaking her head so that her startling dragonfly headdress seemed about to take wing, ‘is that young Irving seems actually to have fallen for little Davina. Isn’t that killing? I hear old Meredith wasn’t too keen at first, but his boy absolutely threatened to run off and join the Legion, so what could he do? Oh look, there they go now. She’s underbred, of course, and that figure won’t last, but one must admit that they’re rather sweet.’
Madeleine gave her a strained smile. She knew it was ungenerous, but she had no desire to gaze fondly upon a young couple who were ‘so very much in love’. Davina Traherne was only two years younger than herself.
The waltz ended, and Madeleine watched the Irving boy leading his fiancée to a little gilt sofa, and bringing her a rosewater ice and gazing into her eyes, and generally getting as close as he could before a score of watchful relations.
Suddenly an image came to her of Be
n Kelly kissing the little skivvy in the Portland Road. It was disturbing and inappropriate, but she couldn’t shake it off. She remembered the way their jaws had moved. The glitter in their eyes when they drew apart.
She turned to find Sinclair watching her from across the room. His gaze was cool and unsmiling, and she returned it in kind. In his dress coat he looked severely beautiful, but there were shadows beneath his eyes. Despite the chloral he had not been sleeping well, and there were nights when he awoke ten times, and knelt on the floor to check beneath the bed for charms. And in some way that she didn’t understand, he blamed her for his malaise, although when she asked him, he always professed not to know what she meant.
What was it about her that horrified him? Why had he married her?
Suddenly the music was loud in her ears; the ballroom hot and airless. She had to get out. She muttered an excuse to Mrs Herapath and went through into the gallery.
It was almost as crowded as the ballroom. She descended the steps to the lower terraces. They were quieter, but the ladies and gentlemen among the potted orange trees were not eager to be noticed. Tonight, everywhere she looked she encountered courting couples. She left the terraces and finally reached a pergola which opened onto the lawns, and was mercifully empty.
She took a deep breath, but still felt breathless. The air was warm and still, and heavy with the scent of cinnamon and stephanotis, and the bitter haze from the Spanish braziers that kept the mosquitoes at bay. Across the lawns, banks of white tea-roses glowed in the moonlight, and strings of lanterns flickered in the trees. The night-song of the crickets was a clear, pulsing ring.
Above her head, through gaps in the pergola, she glimpsed the people on the upper terraces. They seemed a world apart: golden and unreal, like some glittering tableau vivant.
She snapped off a stephanotis flower and crushed its waxy white petals in her palm, staining her white kid evening glove, and releasing a heavy, funereal perfume. Again that image came to her of Ben kissing the girl in the Portland Road. The glitter in their eyes. The way their jaws had worked.
Then another image took over. Grace McFarlane. Beautiful, independent, knowing Grace.
She shredded another flower and ground its petals beneath her dancing slipper, and wondered what it would be like to be kissed by a man.
I wish I was old, she thought savagely, with everything behind me. I wish I was old and terrifying, like Great-Aunt May.
Like a sorceress summoned by an incantation, Great-Aunt May appeared on the upper terrace. She looked magnificent, in a forbiddingly tight gown of pewter peau de soie, with an aigrette of jet crowning her iron-grey hair, and long, narrow gloves of glacé kid.
‘Brought up to snare a duke,’ Mrs Herapath had told Madeleine at supper. ‘Punishing childhood. Punishing. Backboards. Tight-lacing. Governess used to make her practise walking across a ballroom for hours. Sandbag on the head. New dancing slippers. And you know how treacherous those satinwood floors can be. How she didn’t break an ankle I’ll never know. But you see, it was all part of the plan. Her destiny. To be presented at Court and become a Beauty, and snare a duke. And in the end, she managed everything but the duke. Turned out they were in short supply that Season. Or some such thing. At any rate, she didn’t “take”.’
Looking up at her now, Madeleine caught a glimpse of what had shaped the old despot. The predestined match had failed to appear, so she had resolved to have no-one. The world had robbed her of her birthright, and she had decided to despise the world. Everything she did expressed her disdain. The savage tight-lacing. The collars boned to the jaw. The rigid adherence to form. All taken to such extremes that they became an act of contempt for the very conventions she purported to honour.
I wonder if I’ll end up like that, thought Madeleine. A fearsome old witch who hasn’t touched another human being in fifty years.
Her throat tightened. Her eyes grew hot. One must admit that they’re rather sweet. And so very much in love.
She ground another flower beneath her heel, and left the pergola and went out onto the lawn.
About thirty feet ahead of her, a man was walking up and down in the moonlight, smoking a cigar. She knew him instantly by his height and his fair hair and the set of his shoulders.
He turned his head and saw her, and for a moment they faced one another in silence.
She had wanted to see him again, but not like this. Not when she was in this strange angry mood, on the brink of tears. Slowly, not wishing to appear in retreat, she turned and walked back into the shadows beneath the pergola.
Then it occurred to her that far from indicating rejection, her behaviour might be taken as provocation. The unhurried turn, the bared nape of the neck. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair. Was that what she had become? An unhappy wife ineptly flirting with her own brother-in-law?
Setting her teeth, she quickened her pace through the pergola, across the lower terrace, round the west wing, and into the gardens at the front of the house.
A flight of shallow steps led down into a sunken parterre overlooking the carriageway. She found a bench near the steps, and sat down. The parterre was bordered with clipped lime trees and planted with English lavender and yellow allamanda. From where she sat, an avenue of stately royal palms led down to the sea, with torches staked in between. In the distance she could just make out the pale glow of the beach, and beyond it the lights of a steamer approaching Falmouth.
Apart from the torches, there were no illuminations. There didn’t need to be. Moonlight flooded the parterre with silver-blue radiance. She was not invisible.
She wondered if he would follow her; if he thought that she wanted him to. Well she did, didn’t she? That was why she was here. It was a sordid parody of the sort of coy hide-and-seek in which a courting couple might innocently indulge, but which this time was being played out between a married woman and her less than respectable brother-in-law.
Again she felt the pressure of unshed tears. Not now, she told herself.
She turned and watched him appear at the corner of the house, as she had known he would.
He made no pretence of finding her by chance. He walked swiftly through the garden and down into the parterre, halting at the foot of the steps about six feet from where she sat.
‘Please go,’ she said. ‘I don’t wish to talk to you.’
‘Then why did you come out here?’ he said in a low voice. ‘You could have gone back into the house. But you didn’t. You knew I’d follow you.’
She did not reply.
She watched him put his hand on the balustrade, and run his fingers over the lichen-crusted marble.
He was better groomed than before, but not by much. Sophie had told her that he kept his clothes in his old campaign chest ‘because it’s Abigail-proof. Abigail, that’s his dog. Otherwise she sleeps on them.’ His dress coat did indeed look as if it had spent several years inside a chest, his waistcoat seemed to date from the previous decade, and he had mislaid his gloves.
Somehow that made it harder. If he’d been impeccably elegant like his brother, it would have been easier to tell him to leave.
He glanced up to find her watching him, and for a moment they regarded each other in silence. Then he said, ‘You ought to be careful, you know.’ He realized how that sounded, and frowned. ‘I mean, there aren’t any braziers out here. If you were bitten, you might catch a fever.’
‘I’m fine,’ she said.
‘No. I don’t think you are.’
She was horrified to feel her eyes growing hot again. She drew a ragged breath. ‘And I really think that you should go.’
‘I don’t want to go.’
‘That’s not gentlemanly.’
He gave her his incipient smile. ‘You know the answer to that.’
She couldn’t look at him any more. She glanced down at her fists clenched in her lap. If it weren’t for these wretched evening gloves, she could dig her nails into her palms and really give herself something to cry about
.
‘Madeleine—’
‘I’m fine,’ she said again. And nearly broke down.
‘Please don’t feel sorry for me,’ she said, when she had brought herself under control.
She was asking the impossible. Watching her fighting back the tears had been horrible. He had never felt so powerless.
She wore a gown of amber silk with a low, square neck edged in black. No jewels. Just a ribbon of amber satin in her hair. And when she turned away, he saw the little smooth bumps at the top of her spine. It was a physical effort to keep from reaching out and touching her.
‘Do not feel sorry for me,’ she said again, wiping her eyes with her fingers.
‘I can’t help it,’ he replied. ‘I should feel sorry for any woman married to my brother.’
There was a moment of appalled silence.
He shut his eyes. What had possessed him to say that? It might be the truth, but it sounded facetious and cruel. Like a bad imitation of Wilde.
‘I suppose’, she said, ‘you think you can get away with remarks like that because of your past.’
‘You’re right. I apologize. I left my manners in prison.’
‘How convenient for you. But I didn’t think that ex-convicts attended balls.’
‘Only this one,’ he said. ‘Cornelius likes to hedge his bets.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Now that they had shifted to neutral ground, she seemed calmer, and more inclined to talk. Perhaps she wanted to prove that she had not, a few moments ago, been on the verge of tears.
‘I once obliged his father’, he told her, ‘by taking Eden off his hands. As there’s still a chance that I might make a go of it, I always receive an invitation.’ And I always send my regrets, he thought, and stay away. Until tonight.
My God, he thought, what are you doing? This is Sinclair’s wife. His wife, for heaven’s sake.
The Daughters of Eden Trilogy Page 22
