He’s a coward, thinks Ben. That’s what it is. He’s a sodding coward. Only good for ruining horses.
‘Lend me your mount,’ says Master Alex calmly, ‘there’s a good fellow.’
Ben snorts. ‘As if I would.’
Master Alex studies him for a moment, then brushes off his hands. ‘Watch yourself, my lad. No sense in talking back to your betters. Now lend me your mount and we’ll call it quits.’
‘I’m not your lad,’ snarls Ben. ‘I never was.’
Beside him, Trouble keeps looking from one to the other, twitching her ears and trying to follow, in case they’re giving her an order.
That makes Ben feel sick. Sick and ashamed. Because this is his fault. If he hadn’t spent so much time schooling her, Master Alex would of never ridden her in the first place. She’d be just another fair-to-middling little carriage horse trotting happily along in front of Miss Sibella’s dog cart, and looking forward to a snooze and a bit of sweet hay for her supper. He done this to her. Each man kills the thing he loves.
A movement at his shoulder, and he turns to see Master Alex walking off down the track. It seems he’s given up on getting a ride home, and decided to hoof it. ‘Oi!’ shouts Ben. ‘Where d’you think you’re going?’
‘Home,’ calls Master Alex without turning round. ‘Not that it’s any business of yours.’
‘What about Trouble?’
‘What about her?’
‘You can’t just leave her. You got to finish her off.’
‘I’ll send a boy to do that.’
‘But that’ll take hours! Look at her. You can’t leave her in this state.’
But Master Alex just waves an irritable hand and keeps going.
Ben thinks about fetching him back, then gives it up as a bad job. It’s Trouble he’s got to think of now.
She tries to move towards him, but of course she can’t. She just lies there trembling. Watching him. Please don’t leave me, she’s asking him.
‘Don’t worry, sweetheart,’ he tells her. ‘I’m not going nowhere.’
He takes out his knife and keeps it behind his back as he walks over to her, talking all the time so as not to frighten her. When he gets up close, he puts his free hand on her wet, shivering withers, and moves it gently up her neck, under her mane. She’s boiling hot and running sweat. That idiot must of ridden her like a madman. ‘All right, sweetheart,’ he murmurs. ‘Soon be over now.’ His eyes are stinging, and there’s a lump like a bit of meat in his throat, but somehow he manages to keep his voice steady. More or less.
She’s got her ears down, looking at him with her great, dark, velvety eyes. She’s trying to tell him how much it hurts. She’s telling her friend. The one she trusts to make it better.
He moves his free hand up to her forelock, then down to cover her eye. For a moment that he’ll never forget he feels the long, bristly lashes trembling under his palm. Then he raises his other hand and brings the knife up under her ear, and with a single thrust he drives it deep into her brain.
For a moment, she stiffens, then a shudder goes through her. He kneels beside her, stroking her cheek and watching the great velvet eye glazing over, and murmuring, ‘All right now,’ over and over again. The hot blood bubbles over his thighs. Black spots dart before his eyes. He feels dizzy and sick, and suddenly very, very tired.
‘What the devil d’you think you’re doing?’ says a voice.
Ben blinks. Who’s that? It’s like it’s coming from a very long way away.
‘Who gave you permission to kill my horse?’ says Master Alex, behind him.
In a daze, Ben turns and squints up at him.
Master Alex has retraced his steps, and is standing about a yard away: hands on hips, sun at his back, face dark against the glare.
‘I – I done you a favour,’ mutters Ben. ‘You left her—’
‘That’s my property. Who gave you permission?’
Wearily, Ben stands up. He glances down at the knife in his hand. How did that get there? He drops it in the dust. He’s so tired. So sodding tired. Why can’t Master Alex stop yapping?
‘I said, who gave you permission?’
‘Shut up,’ mutters Ben. His hand is sticky with blood. It’s already turning black under his fingernails. Clumsily he wipes it off on his thigh.
‘You think you’re special, don’t you?’ says Master Alex. ‘For some reason which entirely eludes me, you actually think you’re entitled to speak to your betters as if . . .’
There’s more, but Ben’s not listening. He squints into the sun, and takes a swing, and lands Master Alex a short, hard punch on the jaw.
Master Alex grunts, and goes down hard in a cloud of dust.
Ben stands over him, blinking and shaking the feeling back into his hand. ‘I told you to shut up,’ he mutters. Then he walks over to Viking and unties him, and swings up into the saddle and rides away.
‘Are you sickening for something, girl?’ says Grace McFarlane with her hands on her hips.
Evie shakes her head.
‘Cho! You working too hard. Always got your nose in that damn book.’
‘I want to find out what happens,’ mutters Evie.
Grace gives a small proud smile, and shakes her head, and squats down to poke the fire. ‘You and your damn books.’
If only she knew, thinks Evie, shifting position on the step. If only she knew what her teacheress daughter is reading.
It’s nearly supper-time, and dark in the yard. But it’s not total dark, for beyond the village Master Cameron’s burning off the cane.
They always burn off the cane at night, so that they can spot the stray sparks and stamp them out. Then, early in the morning, they start taking off the crop. It’s much easier with the trash all burnt off, but you got to work quickly, before it spoils.
Lying in bed listening to them burning off the cane is one of her best memories of when she was a pickney. The sound of the men calling to each other; the crackle and roar of the flames. She used to lie in bed and picture the men bringing to life this great hungry fire-animal – but always hemming it in, never letting it escape. She used to find cane-fires oddly reassuring.
She doesn’t tonight. Tonight everything’s wrong-side and tangle-up. She’s full of worry-head about Ben. Why did she tell him about the red-haired girl? And why did she tell him then, on that particular day, when she’d been keeping silent for months? Was it chance? Or was she being used by some spirit of darkness?
Everything she touches seems to go wrong. Maybe she should get right away: out of Trelawny, and all the way to foreign. To Kingston, even. Get right away and start again.
‘Evie,’ says her mother.
‘In a minute,’ she mutters. With a sense of weary compulsion she looks down at the journal.
Six years have passed since Congo Eve lost her little brother Job, and near went out of her mind with grief. Six years since Cyrus Wright caught her dancing the shay-shay with Strap, and sold him to Mr Traherne. Since then the rains have failed once, and old Master Alasdair has sent his younger son Allan to Scotland to manage the Strathnaw estate. And Master Alasdair’s oldest son, Master Lindsay, has himself fathered a son, and named him Jocelyn.
Evie has lost count of the times that her namesake has ‘gone runaway’, and been brought back and flogged. Once Congo Eve went runaway to Caledon, to see her little sister Leah matched with a Coromantee field-slave. Twice she’s fallen pregnant. Both times she has miscarried, ‘or so she said,’ wrote Cyrus Wright, ‘though I suspect her of using foul Negro potions to purge herself.’
Now it is 1824, and there has been a small revolt at Golden Grove in the neighbouring parish, savagely suppressed. ‘Several hangings & slow burnings,’ noted Cyrus Wright, who made a point of witnessing them. ‘Cum Congo Eve behind the trash house, stans, backward.’
September 26th, 1824 Last night a hurrycane blew the thatch off the cooperage & the shingles off the Necessary House. The woods on Clairmont Hill look bare & like t
o the trees in England after the fall of the leaf. Congo Eve said it is an omen, but I replied that as my own house was spared, it must be a good one.
September 29th Found her with Strap in the curing-house. He was wearing my blue Holland coat that I gave her years back, & she said was lost. I shouted at Strap & he knocked me down & fled, but I sent my Negroes & they catch’d him. If propriety had not prevented me whipping another man’s Negro, I would have done it. As they led him back to Parnassus he shouted that I would not live much longer in a whole skin. I was much put about, & had to take brandy. Congo Eve said not a word, but would only look at me.
September 30th I have heard that Mr Traherne only had Strap flogged. Am much vex’d, for it is far too lenient. That Negro should be hanged.
November 12th Congo Eve runaway again, to Caledon. When she was brought back, she told me with all impudence that her sister Leah has been brought to bed of a girl, named Semanthe. What of that, said I, when the whelp will be dead within the week? Not so, cried she, for this is a full Coromantee child, & not got on Leah with force by a buckra man. I said I would hear no more, but she would not be silenced, & taunted me that the child will grow powerful & strong, & will know all the arts that she & her sister can teach it.
‘Come, Evie,’ her mother says again. ‘It’s getting cold.’
Evie closes the book and stares down at the mildewed calfskin. There’s a roaring in her ears. Semanthe, Semanthe, Semanthe.
Semanthe, the daughter of Leah. Semanthe, the blind, raggity old obeah-woman who’d appeared to Evie beneath the calabash tree when she was ten. Semanthe. Her grandmother.
Congo Eve and Evie McFarlane. They’re one and the same family.
She turns and stares up at the house where she was born and raised. It’s a two-roomed house of cut-stone, and built to last. It should be. Her great-grandmother Leah put it up when she came to Fever Hill with Master Jocelyn’s young bride Miss Kitty, in 1848.
Great-grandmother Leah had been a widow by then, but she’d mortared that house herself, with red clay and molasses and powdered bones, and some special ash that she’d been keeping in a yabba for seventeen years. Ash from the ruins of Fever Hill great house, that got burnt in the Black Family Rebellion which killed her man. And when the house was built, her blind daughter Semanthe wove the roof: of good strong thatchpalm, and a spell or two, besides.
Congo Eve and Evie McFarlane. Family.
What does it mean? wonders Evie. Is it some sort of sign? Some trickified message from the spirits?
She doesn’t know. All she knows is that everything’s coming together in a wrong kind of pattern.
Her mother comes and sits beside her on the step, and stretches out her legs. Her shins are a glossy dark mahogany next to Evie’s smooth coffee-coloured skin. ‘I got something will cheer you right up,’ she says, putting up a hand and smoothing back a lock of Evie’s hair from her temple. And in the middle of her confusion, Evie is touched, for Grace McFarlane is not a caressing kind of mother.
‘That buckra boy,’ says Grace, ‘Ben Kelly, with the green puss-eye?’
Evie looks at her in alarm.
Grace cracks a smile. ‘Yesterday he punched Master Alex smack on the jaw!’
Evie’s horrified. Merciful Peace, Ben, what were you thinking?
But her mother’s slapping her thigh and chuckling, for she always did detest the Trahernes. ‘Jesum Peace, but they say Master Alex is bad vexed! He’s got a bruise the size of a john crow egg on that pretty-pretty jaw of his. And just in time for the Christmas Masquerade!’
Evie’s thoughts are teeming like black ants. Everything’s tangling together like strangler fig. She can’t see the pattern, but she can feel that it’s bad.
If she hadn’t met Master Cornelius in Bamboo Walk, she wouldn’t have gone to the clinic; and then she wouldn’t have bumped into Ben and told him about the red-haired girl; and then he wouldn’t have been shaken off balance and lost his temper and hit Master Alex.
And now this link with Congo Eve. This link which she can never escape.
What does it mean? And how does she stop the bad from coming?
With Christmas only a week away, the dawn air was cool, and Sophie’s breath steamed as she waited at Romilly Bridge.
It would be hot by midday, but now everything was deliciously fresh, and the colours sharp and clean. Black swallows dipped to drink at the turquoise river. She caught the saffron flash of a wild canary; the iridescent green of a doctorbird. Mauve thunbergia trailed from the trees at the edge of the clearing. A white egret flew past the emerald plumes of the giant bamboo.
Putting her hands on the parapet, she took a deep breath of the fresh, green-smelling air, and watched her horse cropping the ferns, and nearly laughed aloud. She felt scared and exhilarated, and appalled at what she was doing. Now and then a surge of elation made her heart swell till it hurt.
She’d hoped to find him waiting when she arrived. But of course, she reminded herself, it was a good six miles from Falmouth, and he wouldn’t find it easy to get away.
A noise behind her. She spun round; then gave a disappointed sigh. Only a ground-dove. She smiled, but the smile felt forced. Where was Ben?
She walked down to the riverbank and snapped off a stem of scarlet heliconia. She tossed one of the big gold-tipped claws into the sliding current. By the time you’ve thrown them all in, she told herself, he’ll be here.
He wasn’t.
Perhaps he hadn’t received her note. Perhaps Great-Aunt May had taken it into her head to change the habit of a lifetime, and go for an early morning drive.
Or perhaps, she thought with a sudden sense of falling, perhaps you’ve made a mistake. Perhaps when he kissed you it was just the impulse of the moment. After all, why should he want to see you again? He’s so good-looking, and you’re not nearly pretty enough. And you limp.
‘How do you know he isn’t after your money?’ Cameron had said with his customary bluntness the night before, when he’d asked her to take a turn with him in the garden after dinner.
‘You only say that’, she’d retorted, ‘because you don’t know him.’
‘And you do?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure?’
She did not reply. Until he’d said it, the thought of money hadn’t occurred to her. She knew that that was naive, but she also knew that it hadn’t occurred to Ben, either. They didn’t think of anything but each other. And especially, they didn’t think about the future. How could they? They didn’t have one.
She and Cameron had walked on in the blue moonlight, while Scout crashed around in the bushes, and the ratbats flitted across the stars. She glanced at Cameron smoking his cigar, but couldn’t read his mood. When he chose, he could be inscrutable.
Suddenly he stopped and ground out the cigar under his heel. ‘The thing is, Sophie,’ he said evenly, ‘I won’t have Madeleine hurt. I won’t let anyone do that. Not even you.’
She caught her breath. ‘I wouldn’t hurt Madeleine,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t ever do that.’
‘But that’s precisely what you will do if you persist in this.’
‘Cameron—’
‘You’ll cause a scandal, and that inevitably will—’
‘Why must there be a scandal?’ she said.
‘Sophie, be practical! We live in a real, imperfect world. Not the world as you might wish it to be.’
‘But if we’re ever to make it better, surely—’
‘I won’t have Madeleine hurt for a theory,’ he cut in with a firmness that made her blink.
And suddenly, as she stood there looking up into his face, she felt an overwhelming loneliness. This man before her loved her sister so much that he would do anything to keep her from harm. He would die for her if he had to. Did Ben feel like that about her? Did she feel like that about Ben? Did she really love him? Was this how love felt? How would she know? How would she know?
At the edge of the clearing, someone was coming. Sophie
froze.
This time it wasn’t a ground-dove. It was a small boy pickney on his way to school. Barefoot, in patched but scrupulously clean calico shirt and shorts, he was kicking an unripe mango before him like a football, and whistling between his teeth.
He caught sight of Sophie and gave her a brilliant smile. ‘Morning, Missy Sophie,’ he called politely.
She forced an answering smile and returned the greeting.
When he’d gone, she watched the dust settling softly back to earth.
It was getting warmer. The rasp of the crickets was gathering strength. A mongoose emerged from a tangle of hogmeat and gave her a sharp, indifferent stare. As she watched it slip away into the ferns, something tightened in her chest.
He isn’t coming, she told herself, and the words thudded in her heart.
He isn’t coming.
One of the darkies stamps on Ben’s knee, and pain unfolds like a black flower.
Pain like that probably means it’s broken, he tells himself. So if it’s broken anyway, and if they just keep hitting you there, you’ll be all right.
But of course they don’t.
They came on him on the Arethusa Road as he was heading back from a ride: three big, silent darkies he’s never seen before. Which stands to reason. Master Alex couldn’t get the lads from Parnassus to beat up one of their own.
They came up behind him and yanked him off Viking and dragged him into a cane-piece. He managed to give one of them a good bash in the ribs and another a broken cheekbone before they brought him down. But they know what they’re about. Measured. Precise. Nothing too visible – that bash in the face was a mistake – and they don’t got coshes, which is something, as it probably means they’re not out to kill.
The blood’s salty-sweet and gritty in his mouth. He can smell their sweat and hear them grunt, but he can’t see much on account of all the blood. Still, he can see something – red flashes and a bit of guinea grass – and that’s good, because it means his eyes aren’t burst.
The Daughters of Eden Trilogy Page 55
