‘I haven’t forgotten,’ she retorted. ‘I haven’t forgotten anything.’
He threw her a curious glance. Then he said, ‘You don’t need to worry. She’ll be all right. I’ll stay with her tonight. And tomorrow—’
‘Tomorrow I’ll come up and see how she is.’
‘That won’t be necessary.’
‘Oh, I think that it will.’
He sighed. ‘You couldn’t manage it without your fiancé knowing.’
‘You leave that to me,’ she snapped. She wasn’t sure exactly how she would manage it, but she was damned if she was going to be dismissed like some servant who’d outlived her usefulness.
He put his hands on his hips and took a few paces up the track, then turned back to her. She thought he meant to remonstrate with her, but instead he said simply, ‘I think I need to apologize to you.’
She was astonished. ‘For what?’
‘That day in Kingston. I gave you a bad time of it. I overdid things.’
She thought about that. Then she raised her chin. ‘Do you know,’ she said in a cut-glass accent, ‘I rather fancy that you did.’
He laughed. ‘All right, I deserved that. In my defence, I think I was still a bit angry with you. But that’s all over now.’
She felt a gentle sinking in the pit of her stomach.
In the distance, Neptune appeared with the horses. Ben watched them for a moment, then turned back to her. ‘Seven years ago,’ he began, then cut himself off with a frown.
‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Seven years ago, what?’
Again he glanced at Neptune, who was still out of earshot. ‘Just this,’ he said. ‘I was a fool, and you were right. You were right to break it off. It would never have worked.’
Slowly she pushed herself to her feet. Then she picked up her hat and dusted it off. ‘Probably not,’ she said.
He nodded, his face grave. ‘I just thought it needed saying, that’s all.’
‘I see.’
‘Well. I’ll tell Neptune to take you back.’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
He thought for a moment, then held out his hand. ‘Goodbye, Sophie.’
She looked at it without speaking. Then she shook hands with him, and looked up into his face and tried to smile. ‘Goodbye, Ben,’ she said.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Christmas on the Northside is a strange time of year.
People celebrate in the usual way by going to church and eating too much Christmas pudding, and having Johnny Canoe parades, but there’s always a ghost at the feast: the shadow of the great slave rebellion of Christmas 1831.
The white people call it the Christmas Insurrection; the black people call it the Black Family War. Everyone knows somebody who lived through it. Everyone knows the stories. Fifty-two Northside plantations destroyed. Dozens of great houses reduced to cinders, thousands of acres of cane put to the fire. Fever Hill, Kensington, Parnassus, Montpelier; even old Duncan Lawe’s place out at Seven Hills – which two years later, in his bitterness at the emancipation of the slaves, he renamed Burntwood.
Great-Aunt May was twelve years old when she sat in the wagon beside her baleful old father, Alasdair Monroe, and watched their great house go up in flames. She saw the cane-pieces destroyed, and the sugar works at the foot of Clairmont Hill; she saw the huge boiling-house chimney come crashing down like a cathedral.
And seven weeks later, when the insurrection had been savagely crushed, she had sat beside her father again, and watched the hangings in the square. In the course of the rebellion, fourteen white people had died, and about two hundred slaves. Some four hundred more were killed in the reprisals which old Alasdair helped to orchestrate.
In the eighty years since then, Great-Aunt May had never spoken of what she’d seen – except once, to Clemency. And years later, on an overcast Christmas Eve when Clemency was being more than usually badgered for a bedtime story, she had told a thirteen-year-old Sophie.
Ever since then, Christmas for Sophie had possessed a dark undercurrent. It never felt completely real. It was a time when light and dark, life and death, past and present, danced side by side at the great masquerade.
Fraser’s death had added another layer of darkness. Christmas had become a time when terrible memories broke the surface without warning. She might be sitting at tea with Rebecca Traherne, or reading to Clemency from the fashion report in the Saturday supplement, and suddenly she would be back on the steps at Eden in her nightgown, straining for the sound of carriage wheels in the dark. She would hear the soft whisper of the bronze satin evening mantle settling in the dust. She would see the blood drain from her sister’s cheeks. And then would come that terrible, desolate, animal cry.
Light and dark, past and present, life and death. Not real, not real.
Now here she sat in her ballgown beside Alexander – this man who overnight had become a stranger to her – as the phaeton made its way slowly up the carriageway towards the great house on Fever Hill.
It had been seven days since that strange meeting with Ben up in the Cockpits, and since then she had led a double life. Polite, sleep-walking days at Parnassus were punctuated by wild rides into the hills to see Evie. No-one seemed to notice her absence. Nothing seemed real any more.
She turned and regarded Alexander. He was in a difficult mood, for Cornelius had taken the hated Lyndon in his brougham, and relegated them to the second carriage; but not even ill humour could spoil his good looks. He had chosen the Sailor for his costume, and the tight white uniform with its rich gold braiding suited him to perfection. No wonder, she thought, that Evie fell in love with him.
She still couldn’t quite believe it. Two days before, she had taken Evie some books, and found her swiftly regaining her strength – and with it, her anger. An unguarded word about Parnassus had slipped out. Sophie had guessed the rest.
Evie and Alexander. All those visits to Kingston ‘on business’. Of course.
Evie had lifted her chin and given her a look of cool defiance from which she couldn’t banish the anxiety. ‘If it’s any comfort,’ she’d said, ‘it started long before you met him in London.’
‘I don’t need comfort,’ Sophie had replied. ‘It’s just – unexpected. That’s all. I don’t even mind. I really don’t.’
But in the days that followed, she discovered that that wasn’t entirely true. She did mind. She minded that she’d been so wrong about him. She minded that she’d been so easily taken in. She minded that he’d only ever been after her money.
And what breathtaking hypocrisy! Calmly to caution her against the impropriety of befriending a mulatto girl, when he himself had impregnated that same girl, and then thrown her aside.
My God, she thought, as the phaeton trundled up the carriageway, how did everything get so twisted? Here you are with this weak, mendacious, unfaithful man, whom you intend to jilt as soon as decently possible after Christmas – here you are, making your way to Fever Hill, for a masked ball to be given by Ben. None of it makes sense. It isn’t real.
The press of carriages was great, so their progress was slow. She turned her head and tried to lose herself in the flickering lights strung between the royal palms. Ruby, saffron, sapphire, emerald. She caught a glimpse of the great house on the hill, ablaze with electric light. That couldn’t be Fever Hill. Not Fever Hill. Not real, not real.
They passed the pond and the aqueduct, and the creeper-clad ruins of the Old Works. Without warning, torches flared amid the tumbled cut-stone. A dark figure cut across the flames, bare-chested and inhuman in a fearsome bull-horned mask. She caught her breath. Suddenly it was seven years ago, and she was back at the Jonkunoo Parade at Bethlehem, looking for Ben. Not real, not real.
‘Apparently,’ said Alexander beside her, ‘our Mr Kelly is letting the estate workers have their own parade – at the Old Works, if you please. Given that the beggars burnt it to cinders in the rebellion, I call that confoundedly poor taste.’
Sophie did not reply.
She remembered the smell of pimento smoke at Bethlehem; the gnawing dread that she would never find Ben.
But that was then, she told herself, and this is now. That’s all over. That’s what he said.
She hadn’t seen him since that day in the hills, for he’d contrived to be away whenever she visited Evie. But she was glad of that. She didn’t want to see him again. And she didn’t want to see him tonight. What was the point? It was all over now.
‘Your grandpapa’, said Alexander, cutting across her thoughts, ‘would never have permitted a thing like that.’
‘A thing like what?’
‘A Johnny Canoe parade down at the Old Works. Haven’t you been listening?’
She looked down at her lap and realized that she’d been clenching her fists. Alexander didn’t yet know that she knew about Evie. But he seemed to have sensed the change in her; he seemed determined to needle her into conversation.
‘Apparently,’ he went on, watching her, ‘our Mr Kelly has brought his family out for Christmas. Isn’t that sweet? Although of course, the fact that they’re dead does rather put a dampener on things.’ He paused. ‘I hear he’s got the coffins up at the hot-house ruins. Just beyond your family Burying-place.’
‘I know,’ she said with an edge to her voice. ‘Sibella heard it in town three days ago and told us all about it. Don’t you remember?’
‘Ah yes, so she did. Darling Sib. She seems to have developed quite a fascination for our handsome Mr Kelly.’ Lightly, he slapped his gloves against his thigh. ‘It must have been devilish tricky, getting the blacks to handle the coffins at all. Don’t you think?’
Again she did not reply.
‘And I hear there’s even talk of a mausoleum. I call that vulgar in the extreme.’
‘Other people have mausoleums,’ she said.
He smiled. ‘I knew that in the end you’d leap to his defence.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘My darling, I wonder you can even ask, when you’ve been meeting him in secret up in the hills.’
Ah. So that was it. She turned and met his eyes.
He was still softly slapping his gloves against his thigh, and looking very slightly pained. ‘I’m sorry I had to bring it up,’ he said, ‘but I thought it for the best.’
‘How did you know about it?’ she asked. ‘Did you have me followed?’
‘Does it matter?’
Slowly she shook her head. After what he’d done to Evie, none of it mattered. And yet, ridiculously, she felt guilty. She had lied to him, and she’d been caught out. ‘If it’s any consolation,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t an assignation. There’s nothing between me and Mr Kelly.’
‘I never for a moment imagined that there was. The problem is,’ he added delicately, ‘other people won’t see it that way.’
She looked down at the mask in her lap. It was a deep midnight blue, like her gown, and edged in tiny brilliants. She couldn’t wear it now. She was sick of masks.
What is the point, she wondered, of waiting till after Christmas to have it out with him? Why not do it now and get it over with?
She raised her head. ‘I went into the hills to help Evie,’ she said calmly. ‘Do you remember Evie? Evie McFarlane?’
He took that without a flicker.
‘She needed help,’ she went on. ‘You see, someone – some man – has let her down rather badly.’
‘So she ran off into the hills?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Good Lord, the things these people do.’
‘Alexander,’ she said wearily, ‘let’s do away with the pretence. I can’t marry you. I know about Evie.’
Another silence. He ran his thumb across his bottom lip, then gave her a small, rueful smile. ‘Well? And what of that?’
She blinked.
‘I’m most awfully sorry if I’ve hurt you, old girl,’ he said gently, ‘but what you must understand is that it didn’t mean a thing. Those sorts of affairs never do.’
‘It meant something to Evie.’
‘Well it oughtn’t to have done. She knew perfectly well what she was about. And I never made her any promises.’
‘Does that make it all right?’
‘It makes it – well, it makes it the sort of thing which happens all the time. Everyone knows that.’
When she did not reply, he took her hand and squeezed it. ‘You want to punish me. I understand that. And I admit, I’ve been most frightfully wicked. But now I’ve been punished, and I promise that I’ll never do it again. No more wild oats. I shall be the most faithful spouse in Christendom. You have my word.’
She opened her mouth to reply, but he put his finger lightly to her lips.
‘Be reasonable, my darling. Forgive us our trespasses, and all that?’
‘No, you don’t understand—’
‘Sorry to be a bore, but I really think I do. And I think you ought to forgive me my little trespass, as I forgive you yours.’
‘You – forgive me?’ she said in disbelief.
He smiled. ‘Well of course.’
‘For what? I told you, there’s nothing between me and—’
‘But there was, though, wasn’t there?’
Again she met his eyes.
‘Seven years ago,’ he went on, still in that gentle, apologetic tone, ‘you – how can I put this without descending to indelicacy – you knew the man, in the Biblical sense.’
She swallowed. ‘How long have you known?’
He gave a little laugh. ‘How very like you not even to attempt to deny it.’
‘Why should I? How long have you known?’
‘Oh, for absolutely ever. Darling Sib put two and two together from something your sister let slip just after you’d left for England. And of course she simply had to tell me.’ He paused. ‘But all that’s beside the point, my love. The point is, you mustn’t worry. I shall never breathe a word to a living soul.’
Something about the way he said it was anything but reassuring. ‘What do you mean?’ she said uneasily.
‘It’s really quite astonishing, the double standards which the world applies to this sort of thing. Don’t you agree?’
She licked her lips. She was beginning to see where he was heading.
‘Say we were to perform a small experiment: say we were to tell the fellows at the Caledonian a little story about Miss Monroe and some dreadful low brute of a groom – and then another story about Master Alex Traherne and some pretty little mulatto girl. D’you know what they’d say? They’d slap me on the back for being a jolly good fellow and a confoundedly lucky dog; while you, my poor darling – why, you would be utterly beyond the pale.’ He shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t be able to show your face anywhere. And I shudder to think what the scandal would do to your sister, and that darling little girl of hers. People can be so horribly ill-natured.’
She opened her mouth to reply, but just then they swept up to the house, and liveried footmen ran forward to open the doors, and there was no more time for talk.
It looked to Ben as if everyone was having a bloody good time. Except, that is, for the host.
He watched old Mrs Palairet shuffling along on the arm of her nephew, a tall young lad out from England for the holidays. The old lady gave Ben a gracious nod, and the lad from England threw him a slightly long-suffering smile.
Ben inclined his head as they passed. He had no illusions that they’d accepted him as one of their own. Northside Society – the upper two hundred – had only come to his party in order to tear him to bits in its kid-gloved claws. But then a strange thing had happened. To Society’s surprise, it had found that, thanks to Austen, everything was being ‘done rather well’. So it had decided to enjoy itself instead.
Even Isaac and Austen were having a good time. Isaac – one of about a dozen fancy-dress Sailors – was chatting to a cluster of wealthy banana farmers from Tryall, and even Austen was circulating with that inborn sociability which the shyest of the gentry seems to know how to affect. He’d chosen the Doct
or for his costume, and the dark frock coat and severe black mask suited him, and somewhat disguised his nose. And as he was a good dancer, he hadn’t lacked for partners. He’d even stood up with Sibella Palairet, although he’d been too abashed to say a word.
Ben could see the little widow now, circling the ballroom with Augustus Parnell. She’d been one of the first to arrive, with her mother-in-law, with whom she was spending Christmas. Ben had been putting off talking to her ever since.
For the festivities she’d interpreted half-mourning liberally, and wore a heavily corseted creation of mauve satin, with a prettily ineffectual gold lace mask and a headdress of mauve silk lilacs. The lilacs reminded Ben of Kate’s imitation violets. Sixpence a gross, but you’ve got to stump up for your own paper and paste. He put that firmly from his mind, and drained his glass.
The little widow had spotted him watching her. Self-consciously she turned and spoke to Parnell, with a sidelong glance of studied insouciance which must have fooled no-one.
Oh, God, thought Ben wearily. He’d been putting it off for weeks, but tonight he’d have to decide. Either he must keep his promise to that old witch down in Duke Street and seduce Sibella, or he must come clean and tell her he was going back on the bargain.
It was a humiliating thought, and it made him feel more apart than ever. He looked about him at the enormous, glittering ballroom. What was he doing here? How had it come to this?
Fever Hill – his beloved old house of peace and silence and mellow sunlight – had been overrun. Everywhere he turned he saw a blaze of electric chandeliers; a brilliant blur of satin; an artificial forest of ferns and huge oriental bowls of orchids.
Those bloody orchids. He’d intended them as a little dig at Sophie. ‘Just keep the tone Jamaican,’ he’d told Austen when they were discussing the arrangements. ‘The food, the decorations, all of it Jamaican. And plenty of orchids. Make sure of that.’
That had been before he’d met her up in the hills. But since then he’d forgotten to change his instructions, so orchids were everywhere. Great showy scarlet Broughtonia; white, waxen Dames de Noce; the delicate veined petals of cockleshells.
The Daughters of Eden Trilogy Page 73
