And once again, Evie smelled stephanotis. Heavy and sweet, like at a burying. What was wrong?
A couple of days before, Ben had told her that she’d made a mistake about that red-haired girl; that it wasn’t meant as a warning for him, but for Sophie.
If she’d been wrong about that, then what else had she got wrong-side and tangle-up? Had she been wrong about old Master Jocelyn, too?
She thought back to that day at Fever Hill, when she’d sat in Miss Sibella’s dog cart and watched old Master Jocelyn following Sophie up the croton walk. Sophie and little Master Fraser.
She felt a faint tickling on her bare ankle, and looked down to see a small green devil-horse – a praying mantis – crawling up her leg. Thoughtfully, she brushed it off with her hand.
And suddenly she knew what was wrong, and the knowledge was a cold certainty in her belly. Old Master Jocelyn hadn’t been following Sophie. Not Sophie.
She grabbed her mother’s arm. ‘Something’s wrong. We’ve got to get to Eden, quick-time.’
Sophie was shaken awake by a frightened Clemency. Fraser was ill. She didn’t know what to do.
‘How ill?’ mumbled Sophie, still heavy with sleep.
‘I’m afraid I don’t know, dear.’
‘Clemency—’
‘But I don’t.’ She stood by the bed like an ineffectual ghost, twisting her waxy hands and shaking her head so violently that her dyed grey braids brushed against Sophie’s face.
But she was right about Fraser. When they reached the nursery he was thrashing about in the bedclothes, and battling against a terrified Poppy, who was trying to hold him down. Belle was curled up on the other bed, sucking her toy zebra’s ear and staring at them with great dark eyes.
As Sophie leaned over Fraser, a cold kernel of fear settled inside her.
He lay in a strange, stiff curve, as if he wanted to curl into a ball, but couldn’t. His eyes were screwed shut against the light, and his breathing was fast and shallow. ‘It hurts!’ he moaned, pummelling Poppy with his fists.
‘Where, darling?’ said Sophie. ‘Tell me where.’
‘All over! My head and my tummy and all over! Aunt Sophie, make the hurts go away!’
Sophie took his small fist in hers. It felt cold. What did that mean?
She glanced at the nursery clock. A quarter to two. Two hours before, he’d had nothing worse than a tummy-ache.
‘I knew something like this would happen,’ whispered Clemency, wringing her hands. ‘I knew that if I left Elliot on his own he’d be angry—’
‘Not now,’ snapped Sophie.
‘It hurts!’ screamed Fraser. He threw off the bedclothes and would have fallen out of bed if Sophie hadn’t caught him. In the glow of the lamplight she saw a bright pink rash splashed across the smooth, poreless skin of his calves.
God, she thought. What’s that? ‘Clemency,’ she said without turning round, ‘take Belle and go and sleep in the servants’ quarters.’
‘What, darling?’
‘I said take Belle right now, and go and sleep in the servants’ quarters, and don’t come back till I tell you. D’you understand? Tell Braverly and Susan to stay with you, and not to come inside.’
‘But darling—’
‘For God’s sake, Clemmie, whatever this is, it could be catching!’
Clemency’s hands crept to her throat.
‘Poppy,’ said Sophie over her shoulder. ‘You run and wake Moses and tell him to saddle Master Cameron’s horse and ride as fast as he can and fetch Dr Mallory. As fast as he can, d’you hear? And he’s to tell Dr Mallory it’s an emergency, and to come at once. And he’s to send a man for Dr Pritchard, too, and another down to Parnassus to fetch Master and Mistress. Now go!’
Poppy fled.
Please God make it the measles, Sophie said to herself over and over, when they’d left her alone with Fraser. Let it be the measles or mumps, or something else that we know how to fight.
He was still thrashing and moaning, but slightly quieter now, since she’d moved the lamp to the other side of the room. He had no fever, and he was not delirious. As she tried to raise his head to help him take a little water, he gave an involuntary twitch and kicked her thigh. ‘Sorry, Aunt Sophie,’ he mumbled.
‘Doesn’t matter, darling,’ she told him, smoothing back his hair from his forehead.
‘When will the hurts go away?’
‘Soon. Soon. When the doctor comes.’ She felt a pang of guilt at deceiving him. It would be at least two hours before Dr Mallory got here; and Dr Pritchard, in whom she had greater faith, would arrive some time after that. Two hours, and she was useless to help him. All she could do was try to reassure him, and get him to sip a little water, while she rifled through her Introductory Primer on Diagnostic Medicine with mounting desperation.
And always at the back of her mind was the gnawing dread that this might in some way be her fault. What if she’d been here all the time, and could have spotted some subtle sign of impending illness, and sent for the doctor straight away? What if she’d stayed at home and looked after him, as Madeleine had begged her to?
The wide grey eyes gazed up at her with total faith. When she set down the book on the bedside table, they followed her every move. She tried to smile.
His face contorted. ‘It hurts!’
‘I know, darling,’ she murmured, sitting on the edge of the bed and taking him in her arms and stroking his hair. ‘I know, I know, and I’m so sorry.’
He twisted away from her and punched the pillow.
The rash was worse. It had spread all over his legs and arms, and when she raised his nightshirt she saw with horror that it now covered his whole body. How could anything spread so quickly?
A terrible thought gripped her. She reached for the book, and turned to the index at the back. The words blurred and shifted, and she couldn’t find what she was looking for. Then she had it. Brain fever . . . see Meningococcal Disease; also Meningitis.
Dawn was commencing to light when Evie and her mother reached Eden. By the look of things, Master Cameron and Miss Madeleine had just gone inside, for the carriage was still at the door, and the horse had its head down, blowing hard.
In an instant, Evie took in all the wrongness of the house. Miss Madeleine’s bronze satin evening mantle dropped in the dust and trampled under the horse’s hooves like a body. Miss Clemmie and little Missy Belle standing in the carriageway in their nightgowns, wide-eyed and frightened. Moses hanging on to the horse’s bridle like he couldn’t let go, and old Braverly swaying and muttering psalms, and Poppy and Susan keeping up a wake-dead moaning in each other’s arms.
And there in the doormouth sat Sophie, rigid on the threshold in her dressing-gown, her lips bluish-grey, her eyes staring into darkness.
‘Sophie?’ said Grace.
Sophie raised her head and tried to find the source of the sound, as if she was having trouble focusing.
‘Sophie,’ said Evie, going to sit beside her and putting her arm round her shoulders.
‘It was brain fever,’ said Sophie. Her voice sounded flat, as if she had nothing left inside. ‘Dr Mallory came, and Dr Pritchard, and they said—’
At that moment from inside the darkened house came a terrible, wrenching scream. Evie had never heard such a sound in her life. It was like some animal having its innards ripped out.
Sophie’s face crumpled. ‘I was holding him,’ she said. ‘I was holding him. And he died.’
Chapter Sixteen
Sophie was busy in her room when there was a knock at the door, and Cameron asked if he might come in.
She was surprised to see him, for it was the middle of the afternoon, and he’d left for the works straight after luncheon. ‘I thought you were at Maputah,’ she said.
‘I was,’ he replied from the doorway. His eyes went to the packing-cases around her, but he made no comment. ‘I wonder, do you have a moment?’
She glanced at the folded blouses in her arms, and put them on the
bed. ‘Of course. Shall we go out onto the verandah?’
He nodded, and stood aside to let her pass.
She wondered if he too was aware of the new formality between them. They even moved differently. Her mourning gown of dull black parramatta seemed to impose on her a rigidity of which even Great-Aunt May would have approved, while Cameron had developed an unconscious habit of touching the black armband on his sleeve, as if it were a bruise.
Apart from Scout, they had the verandah to themselves. Madeleine was lying down in her room, and Clemency was reading to Belle in the nursery.
Cameron took one end of the old cane sofa, and Sophie the armchair opposite. Scout heaved himself up and trotted over to his master, and then slumped down again at his feet.
Cameron ran his hand over his armband, and tried not to look at the gap between the lime trees where Fraser’s swing used to hang. He’d lost weight, and his eyes were bloodshot. He looked exhausted. January was the busiest time of the year, when the works at Maputah and Fever Hill had to run twenty-four hours a day or the cane would spoil, and bankruptcy would follow hard on bereavement. Sophie wondered when he found time to grieve, and where he went to cry. She herself had done with crying. She had cried until she couldn’t cry any more, and now she was too hollowed out by grief and guilt to feel anything but a desperate fatigue and a longing for peace.
Cameron caught her watching him, and they exchanged tight, meaningless smiles.
‘You wanted to talk to me?’ she said.
‘I – yes.’
‘Is anything wrong?’
There was silence while they both considered that. Is anything wrong? Everything was wrong. Fraser Jocelyn Lawe had been lying out on the wooded slope behind the house for three weeks now: the first inhabitant of Eden’s new Burying-place. Clemency had said that his white marble tomb was almost as beautiful as Elliot’s, but Sophie hadn’t seen it for herself. She couldn’t bear to.
Nor had she attended the funeral. Instead she had stayed at the house, while Cameron had followed the hearse to Falmouth, and stood in the churchyard surrounded by his workers, and finally ridden back for the burying.
Clemency had been one of the few ladies to attend, along with Olivia Herapath and, surprisingly, Rebecca Traherne. The sole female representative of the Monroes had been Great-Aunt May, glacially correct in strict half-mourning. ‘Full mourning would be inappropriate,’ she had declared in response to a dauntless enquiry from Mrs Herapath. ‘The child was four generations removed from my own.’
Madeleine herself had not attended. She’d simply announced that she wouldn’t be going to church any more; that she was finished with God.
Cameron studied Sophie for a moment before he spoke. ‘Moses tells me that you’ve ordered the carriage for Monday. For Montego Bay.’
Sophie put her hands together in her lap. ‘I hope that’s all right,’ she said carefully. ‘I shall be catching the eight forty-five to Kingston. I’ll be booking a passage on Tuesday’s packet to Southampton.’
‘Don’t go,’ he said.
‘I think I must.’
He ran his thumb across his lower lip, and gave her a considering look. ‘What if you do one of your about-turns halfway there, and want to come home?’
She gave him a faint smile. ‘I don’t think I shall.’
But she sounded more certain than she felt. Half of her thought she was wrong – that she was running away when Madeleine needed her most. The other half told her that it was the only thing to do. Madeleine didn’t want her here any more. They hadn’t talked about it – they hadn’t talked at all. But Sophie could feel it. Perhaps Madeleine blamed her for Fraser’s death. Or perhaps she simply couldn’t forgive the fact that Sophie had been with him in his final hours, while she, his mother, had not.
And always at the back of Sophie’s mind was the thought of how much worse Madeleine would feel if she ever found out that on the night when her son was dying, her sister had been with Ben.
Sophie had agonized over whether to tell them, but had decided against it. Why make things worse than they already were? So instead, she’d told them only what she thought they could take: that she’d gone for a moonlit ride, and returned to the house around midnight, to find Fraser with a slight stomach ache; that she had sent for the doctors when it worsened, and stayed with him until he died. Cameron had looked at her in puzzlement, as if wondering why she thought it necessary to tell them all that. Madeleine had studied her woodenly, as if waiting for something more. Then she’d nodded once, and got up and left the room.
‘Sophie,’ said Cameron, dragging her back to the present. ‘If you go back to England now, you’ll be running away.’
‘No. No, I’ll be making it easier for everyone.’
‘Not for me,’ he said quietly. ‘Not for Madeleine.’
She shook her head. ‘She’ll be better without me. Besides, she has Clemency. And Grace.’ She didn’t need to explain why Madeleine found it easier to tolerate them. Clemency and Grace had both lost children.
‘You’re running away,’ he said again.
‘Cameron—’
‘It doesn’t work, Sophie. I know. I tried it once.’
She did not reply. Perhaps he was right, but surely she had no choice. How could she stay at Eden? She didn’t deserve it. She didn’t deserve any of it.
And yet, she wanted to be persuaded to stay. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t yet booked her passage to England.
Inside the house a door opened and closed, and they both turned to see Madeleine in her long, rust-coloured Japanese dressing-gown walking across the hall on her way to the bath-house. Cameron watched her until she’d gone.
‘How is she?’ asked Sophie. ‘I mean, really?’
Cameron shook his head. ‘I don’t know. She won’t talk to me. That is, she talks to me, but she isn’t there.’
It was true. Madeleine sleep-walked through the days. She had bouts of activity when she would sew mourning gowns and run the household, but then she would abruptly wilt, and go to her room and sleep for hours. To Sophie she was kind, if a little distant, but she rarely met her eyes.
To everyone’s surprise, it was Clemency who’d kept the household from falling apart. Hopelessly ineffectual when Fraser was ill, she knew exactly what to do now that he was dead. She didn’t even seem perturbed at leaving Elliot for so long. She simply handled everything with a brisk, unflinching pragmatism which never faltered. After all, she was used to dead children. She’d been living with one for thirty years.
So while Cameron struggled to bring in the cane, and Madeleine sleep-walked through the days, Clemency took everything in hand. She gently persuaded Cameron to halt all estate work on the day of the funeral, so that the men could pay their respects. ‘They’ll expect it, Cameron dear. Tradition matters at times like these.’ She deftly settled the funeral arrangements. ‘It’ll have to be a mahogany coffin; after they turn five it isn’t done to bury them in white.’ She ordered yards of black parramatta, bombazine and crêpe, and set Grace to making aprons and armbands for the staff. She sent Sophie to Falmouth to buy visiting-cards and writing-paper with precisely the correct depth of black edging. And she wrote dozens of beautiful little thank-you notes for the flowers which poured in. ‘Flowers to Eden,’ Madeleine remarked with a wan smile. ‘I never imagined that would be necessary.’
Most important of all, on that first appalled and disbelieving morning, Clemency had sent for Olivia Herapath to take the mourning photograph. They took it without Madeleine’s knowing. ‘But it’ll be such a comfort to her later,’ Clemency told Sophie in her breathless whisper. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to see it, dear? So beautiful and so very like. In his sailor suit, with his favourite lead soldiers, and that new kite that you gave him. Are you sure you won’t see it? Well then, at least take a lock of his hair. I nearly forgot about that, but clever Grace reminded me just as they were closing the coffin.’
But Sophie had recoiled in horror from the little ivo
ry envelope containing the carefully folded blue tissue paper. She didn’t want mementoes. She didn’t need them. She saw him all the time.
She saw him in her dreams, and as soon as she woke up. She saw him when she opened the Introductory Primer and read the passage which she’d first turned up in the glow of the nursery lamp. No microbe can kill more quickly . . . we are wholly at a loss to explain why some patients suffer only mild infections, while others succumb to the acute fulminating form in a matter of hours. In other words, Belle had caught only a slight fever, while Fraser had died.
Across the verandah, Cameron watched a croaker lizard scuttle along the baluster. Sophie wondered if he was angry with her; if he blamed her for his son’s death. But he didn’t look angry. Just exhausted and quietly devastated.
The lizard dropped from the baluster and moved towards the mouth of a drain. Scout gave a grunt and shot after it, his claws scrabbling on the tiles. The lizard disappeared down the drain. Scout grunted in disgust, and trotted back to his master.
‘Cameron,’ said Sophie quietly.
He turned to her, and tried to compose his features into a smile.
‘You do understand why I have to go?’
He hesitated. ‘Sophie – it wasn’t your fault.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because’, he said evenly, ‘you sent for the doctor as soon as he became ill. Sooner than anyone else would have done. And you did everything for him – everything that could be done.’
Sophie sat in silence, and her eyes grew hot. She wanted to believe him. If she could believe him, she could remain at Eden. Perhaps she could even see Ben again.
‘I don’t say this to make you feel better,’ Cameron said with an edge to his voice. ‘I say it because it’s true.’
‘And if I’d been with him all the time? If I hadn’t gone out and left him—’
‘He’d still have died.’
‘How do you know? How do you know?’
The Daughters of Eden Trilogy Page 58
