Eden Rising (The Eden Saga Book 5)

by Marilyn Harris

  Slowly Susan lowered the lamp, and in its descent she saw for the first time the sprawled tips of a man's boots, the laces undone, the edges curled loosely back. No one could walk in such footwear. The best that could be accomplished would be a kind of shuffle. As she knew that the frail hand was feminine, she knew also that the disreputable boots were masculine. It was a man buried inside the abandoned tarpaulin, which she saw now was a heavy and well-worn dark gray cape, voluminous, either designed initially for a larger man or worn now by a diminished one.

  By lowering the lamp again and drawing a few steps closer, she saw a bare expanse of ankle inside the undone boots, pitifully thin and diminished, like a child's.

  This wasn't Mr. Eden. Though grievously wounded and spiritually weakened by the horrors of the war which had overtaken him in the Crimea, nonetheless that Mr. Eden had managed to impart a bewildering strength at the height of his illness. Lying on the simple cot at Scutari, his right shoulder swathed in bandages, his eyes riveted to the ceiling, he had resembled a fallen giant only momentarily disabled, perhaps merely catching his breath before he would rise again.

  Not so this man, whose head and face she had yet to see clearly. The ravages of something were too clearly visible in his extremities, in the undone boots, the thin white ankles, the sprawled legs, the manner in which he clasped the woman to him, as though she were his only source of life.

  “Mr. Eden?” she murmured, and raised the lamp in search of shoulders, head, face, that strikingly handsome countenance which had converted the normally stern nurses of Scutari into giggling schoolgirls.

  Nothing.

  She stepped closer and extended the lamp in search of the top half of the man and found a new specific. The cloak here was hooded. Someone had found the late-night wind and the confrontation with God a chilly business and, though perhaps death had been the object of the evening, the chill of living had prompted him to lift the hood and secure it and, in this tortoise-like position with the woman clasped in his arms, sleep rather than death had overtaken him and, with the protective barrier of the brick wall blocking them from the wind, they both had relaxed in their warm cocoon, not bothering to inform anyone that their passage into the next world had been temporarily postponed.

  “Mr. Eden?” she called out again, thinking to rouse him and get them both moving toward the trapdoor and the protection of the castle. “Mr. Eden, please. You must...

  Before she could deliver herself of the imperative, she saw the gray cape stir, or rather saw something within it stir, not precisely an awakening, for she doubted if the stupor into which he had fallen could accurately be called sleep.

  She stepped back and held the lantern steady and watched his head lifting heavily from the chest, as though invisible weights were attached to the chin. Nothing else moved save that slowly lifting head, the cloak falling farther back, the configuration of snarled and matted hair blending with the frayed edges of the cape and hood and, on one side, made even more complex by the obscured face of the silent woman.

  Susan held her position and her breath and thought of Lazarus and wondered if this was a resurrection or merely prelude to a true death.

  Then all at once the lifted eyes surfaced from their black pools. The lips, chafed and dried from crying out to heaven, met and painfully parted; the lower cracked, and a small thin stream of red ran slowly down into the beard. The lips moved again as though the speaker thought he had spoken and was amazed that there was no reassuring sound vibrating in his ear.

  She considered speaking to him but wasn't certain that he saw her clearly or at all. “Mr. Eden?” she murmured again, bending closer. “Can you...?”

  But she never finished, for all at once his arms, lost in the gray and voluminous cape, strengthened, tightened, grasped the female form more closely to him, and at the same time his eyes made direct contact with Susan's, proving that he did see her and was capable of communication.

  “Help... her,” was what he whispered, and in the slant and angle of his features Susan saw nothing which reminded her even vaguely of the John Murrey Eden of Scutari.

  Before he made the tortured plea again, Susan placed the lamp close by and started to honor his request. But suddenly it occurred to her that whatever help she might be capable of giving would be useless as long as Mr. Eden maintained his death grip on the woman.

  “Please, let... she requested, aware of the incomplete nature of her request.

  For a moment he looked up at her with a bewildered expression as though in that moment too many veils of living had lifted.

  It wasn't that Susan hadn't seen the expression before. She had, frequently on the faces of dying men in the last moments of consciousness.

  Alarmed, she met his eyes and started to make inquiry concerning his needs, and realized he probably was beyond articulation, and saw his lips move again, “Please...,” and realized that it couldn't be postponed any longer, her examination of that lifeless figure in his arms.

  “May I...?” she asked, slipping her arm around the woman's neck, and felt the lifelessness, the skin already turning cold.

  Although she was supporting the woman's weight, he refused to remove his arm and merely went with her as she eased the woman back out of his embrace and gently placed her prone on the roof floor.

  Slowly Susan sat back on her heels, her hands moving aimlessly above the woman's head and face, which were still obscured by some sort of head covering, a thick black veil which fell almost to her waist and appeared to be attached to the top of her hair. The style, though certainly not the color, reminded Susan of the happiness of brides.

  But this was not a bride before her. She saw now beneath the woman's garments an outline of a leg pitifully thin, a child's waist, no visible sign of a female's anatomy, no breasts, no curve separating waist and hips. Someone either had forgotten to eat or had lacked sufficient interest, and now the only flesh remaining on the body was just enough to hold the skeletal structure together, and in some places even that was stretched dangerously thin.

  Look upon the face, she urged herself, that barometer of human endurance and suffering, and accordingly she reached for the hem of the mysterious black veil, her every movement gentleness itself, when suddenly coming from him she felt a restraining hand, and looked up as he clasped her wrist with a grip from which she could have easily broken free, but she didn't, fascinated by both the fact of restraint and the hand itself, as skeletal in its way as the female form, yet filled with surprising strength and soiled.

  “I must see,” Susan said soothingly to the restraining hand, “if I am to - ”

  “N-no,” came the faltering protest.

  “Mr. Eden, if she can be helped, let me...”

  She was going to say “try,” but then there was no need. There was only a moment's indecision; then slowly his hand slipped from her wrist, fell the short distance to the roof floor, where it lay unmoving at a disjointed angle, like a marionette with loosened strings.

  She waited to see if he would speak further, either in protest or instruction. It was while she was searching his face, waiting for verbal communication, that she saw tears, not many, and he made no attempt to wipe them away, as though he didn't even know they were there, or didn't care.

  Seeing him thus, she experienced a sudden wrenching sensation. “Mr. Eden, please,” she comforted, reaching out for the hand that continued to lie lifeless upon the roof floor.

  She started to say more, then changed her mind and moved back in order to lift the veil. All about her now was that musty smell, as though someone had dressed hastily in garments which had been stored in old trunks with never a thought of wearing them again. The odor seemed to emanate from both. She looked at the spent, thin female figure. Was this thin shell the remains of one of the dazzling beauties she'd seen downstairs in the massive painting of the women of Eden?

  As her hand laid the veil back over the woman's head, Susan's first instinct was to look away. But it would serve no purpose to lo
ok away, for what she saw before her surely was a distortion of light and shadow, and on this false hope she reached for the lamp and brought it closer and held it near the woman's face, and that proved to be the most foolhardy gesture she'd made all evening.

  Nothing, no human sin or series of sins, would warrant such hideous mutilation, and at last she forced herself into a brief examination of what once had been a woman's face. The eyes were gone, the sockets empty save for two deep pools of loose and useless flesh. Then, as though the act of blinding had not been enough, there were deep ridges of scar tissue which cut in peaks and valleys down both sides of her face, a curiously symmetrical damage, as though the weapon had known about symmetry and respected it.

  Without warning her horror began to diminish and was replaced by an even more painful emotion, pity. But neither was negotiable on this cold roof. So confirm the woman's life or death and let her rest in one world or the other.

  Quickly she slipped her arm beneath the woman's head and lifted her clear of the mussed garments and black veil. In the process the veil fell completely away and for the first time Susan saw close-cropped stubbly gray hair, no effort made at style or grooming, the edges jagged, as though the blinded eyes had perhaps tried to direct the shears.

  As she drew the face closer, cradling the head and neck as Mr. Eden had recently done, she looked up to see his reaction to the pitiable sight which she suspected he knew by heart.

  Then she gently placed her cheek against the still lips and held it there and sheltered them both from the wind, which seemed to be subsiding, while she searched for the sensation of a more meaningful wind, a gentler one coming from the woman herself, signifying life.

  But there was nothing, and with the tips of her fingers she felt along the narrow tendon which ran the length of the woman's neck. Sometimes the pulse of life would mysteriously register there when it would register no place else.

  But nothing.

  The woman was dead, though she'd not been dead for long; Susan was certain of that. There still was a degree of warmth in her extremities, the curled tips of her fingers, the frail hands themselves, which now lay pooled and lifeless in her lap.

  Glancing at John Murrey Eden, she saw that his head had fallen heavily forward onto his chest, as though he were worn out. At first she was afraid that he had passed to unconsciousness. Then she saw his head lifting, gathering strength, until at last he was sitting upright, his face lost in the mussed and ragged beard.

  With some difficulty he found Susan's eyes, and to her despair, his lips moved again, a sad repetition of his initial request. “Help... her...”

  “I'm... sorry,” she murmured, delivering herself of a partial message. “There is nothing or no one who can help her...”

  She started to say more by way of softening the message, somehow making it more palatable. But there was neither chance nor need, for he had understood from the first, possibly even before he had made his request, and slowly he was moving again, his arms reaching out for the lifeless woman and at last effortlessly taking her from Susan, though immediately he fell back against the brick barrier and took the dead woman with him, his left hand pressed against the small of her back, his right stroking alternately her thin arm and then the stiff, butchered gray hair, his voice lost in the unorthodox union.

  All she heard clearly was, “My love...” mourned over and over again, and slowly she sat back on her heels again, forced to watch the unchanging tableau.

  She glanced toward the small square opening which led through the trapdoor to the heart of the castle. She couldn't do alone what had to be done up here. Her first task was perhaps the most difficult, and that was somehow to remove the dead woman from his grasp as peaceably as possible.

  She looked again toward the trapdoor and saw, like an answered prayer, a round head fully covered with bright red curly hair, and a pair of sturdy shoulders, which daily had grown stronger by hauling filled herring nets to boatside.

  Tom Babcock? She made a first faltering identification because he had emerged facing away from her. But then, grasping the edge of the trapdoor opening, he slowly turned, searching every shadow as closely as she was searching him. And when she saw it was him, she marveled at God's occasional readiness to oblige.

  “Tom, over here,” she called, and was aware that the wind had increased and was forced to call a second time, and this time he saw her and pulled himself quickly through the trapdoor and hesitated, once up, as though impressed with the height, the night, the fact of his presence on the roof of Eden Castle.

  “Over here,” she called again, and stood, the better for Tom to see her.

  She waited until he was less than three feet away to speak, not wanting just yet to draw Mr. Eden back to this world with the presence of a stranger.

  “Miss Mantle,” Tom gasped. “I thought you might be needing help,” he said, ducking his head in that curious way that most men addressed her, as though she were a cross between their mother and their schoolmistress.

  She nodded an affirmative yes and could have said more by way of explanation, but at that moment his eye fell on the two at her feet.

  “What...?” Tom began, and suddenly began to back steadily away.

  “Please,” Susan entreated, and reached out for his arm.

  “Is... it...?” he asked, still looking down.

  She nodded and tried to turn him away. “Will you help me, Tom?” she asked.

  Though he nodded vigorously, he repeated his half-formed question as though not believing her. “Is it...?”

  “Yes, it's Mr. Eden,” she confirmed. “Now, if you would help...”

  “And the other? Who is...?”

  “I don't know,” she said. “Where's Reverend Christopher?”

  “Downstairs,” he said.

  “And Mr. Bates?”

  “Oh, he’s right over...” He seemed to jerk his head in the direction of the trapdoor. She glanced in that direction and saw that he was right, saw the scarecrow head just emerging through the opening, where he too swiveled about and at last found them and, apparently impervious to time or circumstance, called out at top voice, “What is it? You must come down, now. We can’t have the place filled with...”

  Choosing to ignore him, she drew near to Tom and asked, “If I can get him to release her, can you carry her...?” She halted in mid-sentence. Where did they take corpses in Eden Castle? “...to the kitchen court?’’ she concluded weakly.

  “’Course,” Tom said with new and reassuring eagerness, and at least seemed to relax a bit. “And him,” he asked, “what about Mr. Eden?”

  She had no ready answer. They would deal with him later. For now, the first order of the day was —

  “I say, miss, did you find him or has the peacock long since flown the coop?”

  “Please!” she shushed as she drew close to Bates, who appeared to draw back until he was pinned against the opposite side of the opening, as though she were a contamination. She bent down the better to speak without being overheard. “He’s here,” she whispered, trying to see beyond Bates’s gaunt shoulders down into the narrow stairwell itself, still searching for Reverend Christopher. He would know what to do with the fact of death. But he was no place in sight, and Susan took the only course open to her. “He’s here,” she repeated, “but he’s not alone.”

  “Of course he’s not alone!” snapped the old man, as though he could just barely tolerate her presence. “Anyone could see that clearly from below. The question is, who?”

  Susan overlooked the sarcasm in his voice. “It’s a woman,” she described quietly, “frail and older than Mr. Eden — or at least she appears...” She paused before going on. “And her face is...”

  “Oh! My heavens! That would be Lady Harriet!”

  “Who is she?”

  Bates seemed to soften. “His aunt,” he said patly, too patly. “Perhaps his aunt,” he said again, emphasizing the “perhaps.” “At least that was the general opinion. His father’s brother
’s wife.” He peered up at Susan, confirming her suspicion that he was relishing this opportunity to reveal something. “Though some claim they were lovers.”

  Shocked, Susan stared at him. Had the old man lost his mind, to speak so casually of such matters? “I am sorry, miss.” He grinned. “You did ask a question. I was only trying to oblige.”

  “She... must be removed.” Susan added, trying to clear her mind of all matters but the most essential.

  “Removed where?” Bates demanded. “They got up here. I say let them get down.”

  Then suddenly he was saying nothing, all his energy concentrated on pulling himself up through the trapdoor. As he labored, she asked if he had any information on the curiously missing Reverend Christopher.

  “Where do you think he is?” Bates retorted, still brushing the dust from his trousers, the wind whipping his white hair into a froth. “To fetch help — though I entreated him no. We mustn't have the castle overrun, you know.”

  “The woman is dead,” Susan said bluntly, her voice low but sure. Anything to end the old man's senseless rambling.

  “I... beg your pardon?”

  “I said the woman is dead. I'm certain, Mr. Bates.” And then, before the man could challenge her, she asked, “What happened to her face?”

  He spoke only two words, though they were so incredible that Susan was certain she'd heard incorrectly.

  “Self-imposed,” was what he had said.

  “I... don't...”

  “She inflicted the damage on herself. But what matter now,” he added with admirable largesse, “if the woman is dead.”

  At that moment Reverend Christopher's face appeared, red-cheeked and puffing. “Susan, what...?” he gasped.

  “Over there,” she said.

  Bates swiveled his head. “Is he...?”

  “Not dead,” she said, and heard movement coming from beyond the trapdoor and looked over to see three men emerging onto the roof.

  “We was sent, Miss Mantle,” said the first man to reach her, “to help fetch Mr. Eden back down. If you'll just tell us...”