Eden Burning

by Belva Plain

  “I have no doubts on that score, Uncle Herbert.”

  “I don’t understand why I never knew anything about it,” Julia complained.

  “Because Richard asked me to keep the transactions between ourselves. What his reasons were, I never asked. Had no right to ask.” Herbert addressed Francis. “I bought it all for my son, for Lionel. I plan to retire. I’ve raised sugar and bananas for a quarter of a century, and that’s long enough. Now let sugar and bananas support me. Next year this time, maybe before that, Julia and I will have a little place in Surrey. We’ll raise a few roses, have a flat in London near young Julia, and maybe spend a winter in Cannes. Who knows?”

  “You’ve worked hard and you deserve it,” Francis said. It seemed to be what he was expected to say.

  “You don’t know how hard. The worldwide Depression began early in the West Indies. In 1923 sugar brought over twenty-three pounds a ton. By 1934 it brought five pounds. We had hunger and riots here. Fire and blood. Then the unions came. Can’t blame the workers, it was inevitable. But they’ve grown too powerful, on your back, clawing at you. The last ten years or so—” He shook his head. “And you’ve got nature to fight. Floods. Hurricanes.” He ticked off on his fingers. “Dampness. Spoilage. The trick is to diversify on export crops. I’ve put in a lot of cocoa. Lionel’s put in sea island cotton and arrowroot. He’s a better businessman than I am, and I’ve not been too bad, I think I can say that without being immodest. So I’ll leave it all to my son. He was born here and he knows this life like the back of his hand. His wife does, too.”

  “Kate is like a man,” Julia said sharply.

  Herbert laughed. “Hardly! What you mean is, Kate knows agriculture. She gets along with the workers, which is a great help to Lionel.”

  “It’s a good thing he keeps a rein on her,” Julia said, “or she’d give everything away to the workers.”

  “You know, she always reminds me a little bit of your Tee.”

  “Of Tee? Nonsense! Tee was always quiet. Kate’s got opinions about everything.”

  Herbert was chastened for the moment. “I meant, the way they both care so much about animals and growing things. I remember Tee was like that.”

  “You don’t know a thing about Tee! What do you know about her? Come to think of it, I know very little about her myself.”

  Marjorie and Francis looked at one another. Herbert changed the subject.

  “So you want to sell Eleuthera, Francis?”

  “My parents need the money.”

  “I should have thought,” Julia remarked, “that your father would have made a fortune with all the money from these properties. Investing in growing industries.”

  “Apparently,” Francis said dryly, “he invested in ones that didn’t grow.”

  Poor Father! Fortunate for him that he did not have to confront Julia face to face!

  “It won’t be easy to dispose of,” Herbert said. “It’s on the wrong side of the island, you have to go over and around Morne Bleue. As the executor when old Virgil died, I had the devil’s own time knowing what to do. For a while I had it rented to a fellow who thought he could make it pay, but he gave up and went back to England. It’s been lying fallow ever since.” He stood up and walked to the other end of the veranda. “Come here, Francis. Look over this way. Thirty-three tons of sugarcane per acre every year. Machinery, that’s what makes it possible. Eleuthera’s mills, in Virgil’s time, still used cogs of the lignum vitae that had come over in sailing ships. The old man never put ten cents into modernizing. That’s why it’ll be hard to sell.”

  Francis sighed. “I’ll get what I can, that’s all I can do. I want to put something aside for my mother and Margaret. You’ve seen Margaret, so you know what the need is.”

  Herbert laid a hand on Francis’ shoulder. “You’re a good son. Talk to Lionel after the wedding. He’s got a head for business.”

  “If you haven’t brought anything to wear, Marjorie, I can lend you something for tonight,” Julia said. “We’re practically the same size.”

  “Thank you, but I think I’m equipped.”

  “I thought you would be. I can tell the minute I lay eyes on someone. I like your wife, Francis. She’s our kind. Life on this island,” Julia continued, as they went upstairs, “has changed just dreadfully since the war. Before then you’d never go to Government House in the evening without black tie. Or to dinner at each other’s houses, for that matter. Oh, but my grandmother used to tell me about real elegance! Why, the thermal baths on Nevis were more fashionable for Londoners than anything in Europe! They’d spend the whole winter at the Bath Hotel. That was a hundred years ago, of course. Well, things change and we must change with them. Tonight, though, you’ll be meeting some of the oldest families on the island. I do wish Julia would come home, it’s four o’clock, she’ll be frazzled for the wedding—”

  Her voice was still ringing in the upstairs hall when Marjorie and Francis closed their door.

  “Well!” Marjorie said. “She’s quite a character, your grandmother!”

  “Is that all you’d call her?”

  “But Herbert is rather sweet, I think.”

  “He’s a decent sort. I don’t know how he stands her, but he doesn’t seem to mind.”

  “I’m curious about the daughter-in-law. Obviously, she isn’t Julia’s favorite person.”

  “If she’s like my mother, as Herbert said, I can see why. They’d be oil and water.”

  Marjorie sat down to take off her shoes. “Funny that your mother never talks about all this, when it’s so spectacular. It really is spectacular, don’t you think? All these servants! I haven’t counted, but we’ve certainly seen five since lunch. I love the way the chambermaid walks around in bare feet, don’t you? Your grandmother showed me the original kitchen, detached so it wouldn’t heat up the house. The paneling downstairs is perfect Adam. You wouldn’t see anything finer in England.” She flipped a brush through her short hair. Her face sparkled. “This house was a wedding present to a bride in 1778, did you know? Her father had the marble for the floors brought from Italy, and all the silver, the Crown Derby porcelain, came from—”

  Francis was amused by her enthusiasm. “You’d like a house like this, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes, if you could transplant it to Connecticut or someplace. This is a million miles from nowhere. I should hate it.” She took a dress from the closet and held it up. “Darling, does this look all right for a wedding? Thank goodness I threw it in at the last minute. Will I do for tonight?”

  He looked at her. She was perfection. He would never get used to having her, never believe the marvel of it.

  “Oh yes, you’ll do, you certainly will.” His voice was thick in his throat. “Pull the spread off the bed, will you?”

  “Francis! Whatever—there’s no time!”

  He looked at his watch. “We’ve an hour and a half. Pull the spread down.”

  EIGHT

  In the lofty rooms of Government House, above the bride and groom, above Lord Derek Frame and Lady Laura, above the diamonds and the silks, hung the stern portraits of the regime: Victoria, wearing stomacher and diadem; Elizabeth the Second, youthful and grave; generals and admirals and judges in white perukes. An orchestra played “Tales from the Vienna Woods.” The champagne was presented in fluted glasses on silver trays.

  “What a pleasure to see champagne served properly,” Julia exclaimed. “I hate those flat things. They’re only fit for sherbets.”

  “This is absolutely fantastic,” Marjorie whispered. “Could you ever have imagined a place like this, Francis?”

  “You must be Francis and Marjorie,’ someone said. A hand in a long kid glove touched theirs. “I’m Kate.”

  Francis looked down, far down, at a small girl with a freckled face. Red-brown hair lay on her shoulders, too much hair for such a little person. Her wide eyes, with very clear whites, were alert and amused.

  Lionel stood behind her. “I’ve been hunting for you
everywhere in this crush. You’re Marjorie. I always knew you’d find yourself a stunning wife, Francis.” His gaze encompassed Marjorie from slippers to earrings.

  “No more than you did,” Francis answered with proper gallantry.

  Marjorie said, “I can’t believe we only arrived this morning! It’s dazzling. Another world.”

  “My wife thrives on excitement,” Francis remarked tenderly.

  “I wish I had six pairs of eyes.” Marjorie’s own were brilliant. “That wedding dress! I thought mine was something—but this!”

  “It belonged to me,” Kate said. “Mother—my mother-in-law—had it altered for Julia. My father had no money, so Mother Tarbox bought it for me in Paris. It weighs a ton and the satin sticks to your back. Lucky for Julia it’s a cool night.”

  “But I am sweating,” Lionel announced. A large man, not much younger looking than his own father, he ran to early fat. “Shall we find a table outside before they’re all taken?”

  Fountains of flowers gushed out of stone jardinieres along the steps into the gardens. Rowers ringed the silver candelabra on the tables. Lionel led them to a table where two or three people were already seated and made the introductions.

  “Mrs. Lawrence and Miss Lawrence, Mr. and Mrs. Prentice, from London. Father Baker. My nephew, Francis Luther, and his wife, Marjorie Luther.”

  The British ladies chirped. Father Baker remarked, “You seem more like brothers than uncle and nephew. Not that you resemble one another.”

  “There are only four years between us.”

  “So you’ve come all this way for the wedding,” one of the ladies said, making conversation.

  “Actually we didn’t know the wedding was tonight. Francis came on business,” Marjorie explained.

  She was literal, Marjorie was. For some reason her reply irked Francis; he was not in the humor for explanations. Lionel leaned across his wife toward Francis.

  “Father tells me you want to sell Eleuthera.”

  “Yes. Do you want to buy it by any chance?”

  “I? No, no! I’ve got all I can handle. But someone will, if you let it go cheap enough. I wouldn’t be discouraged,” he added kindly.

  “I’m not. At least not yet,” which was not quite the truth.

  “Virgil was fifty years behind the times. But Eleuthera was a poor choice for sugar in the first place. The family’s first ancestor picked it out, I can’t imagine why. Colonial plantations were usually situated near a harbor, or at least with good road connections to one. But it must have had some meaning for that old pirate,” he said almost affectionately. “It certainly had for Virgil. He loved the place.”

  “It is beautiful,” Kate said. “It is like a poem. A dream.”

  “A dream!” cried Lionel. “Good Lord!”

  “There is an engraving of Eleuthera, made in the eighteenth century,” Kate said, ignoring him. “The house is in the background. In the foreground it shows a sugar wain drawn by sixteen oxen, eight before and eight behind, to hold the weight going downhill.”

  “Kate is a history buff,” Lionel explained.

  “So am I, after a fashion,” Francis admitted.

  “Then you ought to see those engravings,” Kate said. “There is another one, showing some imported deer in a fancy enclosure. There was a lot of extravagant living on these places once.”

  “A lot of heavy eating, drinking, and other things,” Lionel added.

  Kate smiled. A separation of two front teeth gave a certain good humor to the smile. Not really pretty, though, Francis thought.

  “Kate is a music buff, too,” Lionel said. “She plays the piano like mad. And that’s not all. She rides a horse like the wind, can handle a sailboat, and on top of all that, she plays Lady Bountiful to the Negro.”

  The girl’s smile left her face as though a rough hand had wiped it away.

  Why is he doing this to her? Francis wondered and looked to Marjorie, who was always tactful in awkward situations. (She had, for instance, known how to “handle” Margaret at some difficult moments.) But Marjorie was involved now with the British lady and an elderly gentleman who had joined the group and was pressing a diagram of some sort into the tablecloth with his fork.

  Father Baker spoke up. “Kate has a working conscience. She has been a great help to me in many ways.”

  “With all respect, Father,” Lionel said, “I can only agree up to a point.” A fine spray of saliva came through his loose, wet lips. “It is all a matter of how much and how far. Back in the eighteen seventies, I’m told, my own grandfather predicted most of the troubles we’re having today. He always said”—Lionel looked around and lowered his voice—“said that the trouble would start with the mixed race. They have the intelligence of the white man and the temper of the Negro. With a little more encouragement of the kind some people give them, they will steam up the lowest elements and dispossess us.”

  “I believe you exaggerate,” Father Baker answered.

  “I believe not. Oh, I don’t think we’re going to have communism here, at least not for a long time. They’re too busy organizing in more important places than this, like Jamaica and Trinidad. But look, they want one man one vote now, and that’ll be the worst mistake ever made, letting people without property have a say in spending public monies. But we’re going to have it, no doubt about that, and it’s something to worry about. Why even the middle-class, educated browns are worried! You can’t tell me they aren’t, although they may not always admit it. Take a man like Dr. Mebane, he’s a fairly wealthy man…. There he is, by the way, coming down the stairs.”

  Francis saw a dignified brown-skinned man descending the stairs with a brown-skinned woman in an elegant dress.

  Father Baker observed wryly, “Quite true. You need not fear confiscation by Dr. Mebane.”

  “No, fortunately not. His son,” Lionel told Francis, “his son is supposed to be brilliant.”

  “He is,” Father Baker said. “He was my pupil.”

  “He’s got a law degree and will run for office, they say. God knows what’s going to happen. Maybe it will turn out all right. It’s all confusing, to say the least.”

  “You are a colonialist,” Kate said deliberately. “You are living in the wrong century and I’m sorry for you. You would have been so much happier in the eighteenth.”

  Lionel, laughing, patted his wife’s cheek and stood up. “If you all will excuse me, I’ve people I ought to be talking to. A little politicking. See you later.” He leaned over, whispering to Francis, “Don’t take the priest too seriously. He’s a fuzzy thinker. Bit of a rabble-rouser.”

  “I’m afraid,” Father Baker remarked when Lionel had gone, “that we are boring you with our affairs, Mr. Luther. We island people tend to think we’re so important and all the time we’re so small.”

  “No.” Kate was stubborn. “We are important. We’re a microcosm of the entire world and what is happening to it.” Abruptly, then, she changed her tone. “But if you’d rather hear of romance on such a romantic night, I can tell you the tales my great-grandmother told me. She lived until I was ten and she loved to talk about her youth, about quadrilles and mazurkas and traveling theatrical companies from France. In those days many of the older families still spoke French at home. I could tell you about the staircases—there still are a few on the island—built so wide that three ladies in hoop-skirts could walk down side by side.”

  She puzzled Francis with her sarcasm and her passion. He didn’t know whether he liked her or was sorry for her.

  Marjorie had freed herself from the elderly British pair.

  “Oh, that’s delicious, Kate! And do you live in an old house, too?”

  “Very old. It’s called Georgina’s Fancy.”

  “There has positively got to be a story to a place with a name like that.”

  “There is, quite a story. The builder was a rich man, of course. He sent his sons to England to be educated, as they all did. One of the sons brought back a bride, Georgina.
She was very young, and it’s said she never wanted to come here to this far, lonely place. She was terrified of the slaves and with good reason, as it turned out, because she was raped and murdered in a slave revolt. Ten houses were burnt that night and their owners massacred before the revolt was put down.”

  “Good God!” Marjorie cried, shivering.

  “There’s a portrait at our house which we think is hers, a kind of imitation Gainsborough of a young girl in an ankle-length dress and black laced slippers, carrying a little dog.”

  “You’re giving me goose bumps,” Marjorie said.

  “Yes, can you picture it? The sultry darkness, everybody sleeping, she in a great four-poster bed, and then the slaves creeping in at the windows, carrying machetes, no doubt. And they must have had torches, to fire the house.”

  “Savages!” Marjorie breathed.

  “Yes. And yet one can understand. She must have been an ancestor of yours, Francis. Of course! Georgina’s Fancy was a Francis estate! She might have been your great-great—don’t know how many greats—grandmother. Or aunt, anyway.”

  It had grown quite dark, a violet evening. From a pond somewhere not far off frogs began to throb and trill. Two boys drew up chairs to Father Baker’s side and talked about cricket. A young woman across from Marjorie started a conversation about auctioning the contents of a French manor house. Francis glanced at his watch. It was not yet time to leave. But it had been a long day and he was suddenly tired. Marjorie and the other woman changed to the subject of cars, or maybe it was cigars. The frogs and the orchestra drowned the words.

  Kate Tarbox lit a cigarette. He ought probably to talk to her, since the man on her other side was busy with somebody else.

  “Do you have children?” he asked, and was immediately shocked at himself for having forgotten about the miscarriage that had prevented her attendance at his own wedding.

  She replied quietly, “No.”

  Then he said, “Well, you certainly seem to keep busy with public affairs, don’t you?” Oh, Lord, worse and worse! He was saying all the wrong things.