Eden Falls (38 page)

Ruby sat down between the boys. ‘How clever of you,’ she said. The crayfish popped and fizzed over the fire, and their fanned tails began to blacken at the fringes, so Roscoe took the plate from the jug and flipped the shellfish onto it, then he bopped Angus lightly on the head with the singed end of one of the sticks. ‘One more turnabout before breakfast?’ he said. ‘Let the crayfish cool?’

And Ruby watched them swim, Roscoe leading, Angus following, like a duckling after its mother. Roscoe kept to the shallows and swam smoothly, with barely a break to the surface of the water, while behind him Angus’s limbs went like the clappers and his face was all motion, laughing and gasping. He was a different child, thought Ruby, to the one yesterday who’d screamed for his mother as she was lifted away from him in a sheet wrapped about her like a shroud: a different child, yet the same. He had forgotten, for the time being, that all was not well. He’d remember soon enough. For now, though, she would leave the magic of Eden Falls to do its work, and she allowed herself to savour the moment: their laughter, the sublime beauty of the lagoon, the salt smell of cooked crayfish and the benediction of the morning sun.

By the time they left the falls a bank of cloud as wide as the horizon had begun to move with stealth and speed across the sky, and the dust and leaves on the lane were whipping against their ankles. Angus walked most of the way, skipping and dancing as if the wind had him in its clutches too, but when Roscoe carried on towards school Ruby picked the little boy up and he curled and clung to her with his hands laced tightly behind her neck and his skinny legs wrapped around her waist. His skin against her own was translucent; on his wrists and at his temples blue veins showed through and this made him seem fragile, though Ruby supposed he was no more so than any other little boy of three. They were almost nose to nose and she studied his face at these close quarters: heart-shaped, like Eve’s, but darker-eyed, and his hair was darker too. Perhaps he took after his daddy in this regard.

‘Where’s my mam?’ Angus said, although he knew.

‘At Sugar Hill, where your uncle lives,’ Ruby said.

‘But I want ’er.’

‘I know you do.’

‘Can I see ’er?’

‘Soon, but not yet.’

He pouted, his young face clouded by thwarted wants; he was about to cry. But then Seth appeared on the terrace above them and called down – pompously, irrelevantly – that there was a severe storm forecast, high winds and heavy rain, and at the same moment the darkening clouds burst and in a matter of seconds Ruby and Angus were drenched by a torrent of warm rain, implausibly heavy, as if a sluice gate had opened high above them.

Angus, thrilled and entirely distracted from his imminent lament, pushed at Ruby until she released him, and then he zigzagged up the garden towards Seth, who hurried inside. Ruby followed, keeping her usual, languid pace, and instead of heading off to the kitchen, she walked into the hotel via the main entrance, expecting that Seth would want news of his mother. But when he saw her at the open door of the office he affected puzzlement and said, ‘What is it, Ruby?’

‘I just came from Sugar Hill, where I’m nursing your mother.’

‘Indeed. Mr Silas will be here soon, thank you.’

She raised her eyebrows. He strived so desperately for dignified authority, but he always looked like a boy in a gentleman’s suit. Angus sat cross-legged in the leather chair and sucked the end of a pen thoughtfully, as if he was writing a letter and found himself stuck for a word. His wet shorts would mark that soft hide seat, thought Ruby; well, let them.

‘I wonder if you quite understand the gravity of the situation,’ she said to Seth.

For a few moments they stared at each other, but Seth was resolute. He was conscious of a dangerous blurring of boundaries caused by his mother’s sudden illness and the speed with which they had all had to act. Ruby’s bush medicine was doubtless soothing as far as it went, but hardly the thing on which they all should now depend; she should not be given the status of a medical practitioner. It was Seth’s duty to restore order, to reassert his position – and hers – in the simple hierarchy, whatever heroics Ruby Donaldson might feel she had performed. This, he was sure, was what his uncle would expect of him. Often enough, Seth had heard him say, ‘Iron fist, my boy; anything less and they’ll run rings round you.’

‘Thank you, Ruby,’ Seth said again. ‘Mr Silas will inform me of developments. For now, your place is in the kitchen.’

She laughed at him, flatly. ‘Have a care,’ she said, turning to leave. ‘Your heart is turning to stone.’

Justine watched Silas until he spun out of sight in his red motorcar. The taste of him was still in her mouth; he had come to her for comfort before he left, unbuttoning his trousers and pushing her gently down onto her knees. She was glad that he wanted her, glad that he needed her; certainly, she wanted and needed him. Her breath came fast and shallow at the thought of him, and she longed already for his return. She pressed her forehead against the pane to cool her thoughts and she saw Henri – poor old Henri, was how she thought of him lately – gallop round the side of the house with a rake and a barrow, running from the sudden downpour. In Jamaica, as in Martinique, rain came not gradually but in a deluge, overwhelming and complete, a veritable flood flung from the heavens; then, as suddenly as it had come, it would stop and the sun would bear down once again on the newly washed world.

From the bedroom window, Justine watched Henri; he had crouched under a cabbage palm, and appeared to be contemplating the rivulets that carved small furrows in the dusty drive. Henri had told her he would leave Sugar Hill when he could. He was lonely without her companionship. Justine understood this, and although she didn’t want him to go, neither could she offer him a reason to stay. Sometimes she imagined a life as Mrs Silas Whittam, in which Henri lived with them in the great house, passing off as her brother – which he was, in spirit and in her heart – and dressed fine and fancy. At other times this happy vision eluded her, refusing to form or slipping out of reach of her mind’s eye, while other, starker futures rose up, uncomfortable and unwelcome.

Behind her, Eve shifted in a sudden spasm of pain and called out sharply, a name that Justine didn’t know. She had turned on to her side, and when Justine went to her, Eve seemed to know her and tried to speak, but instead began to retch violently, her eyes wild with panic and pain. She vomited before Justine was able to fetch a bowl; Justine held back Eve’s hair and wiped her face, and spoke to her in a soft patois that sounded like music. When the convulsions left her and Eve dropped back exhausted on to the pillow a livid trail of blood snaked from the corner of her mouth and down into the hot, wet crevice of her neck.

Justine knelt at the bedside and uttered a few words, an ancient incantation for the spirit of this suffering woman. Then she cleaned Eve’s sleeping face and, without disturbing her unduly, remade the bed with fresh linen, so that when the spirit departed, as Justine now believed it would, the mortal remains would be respectable and Silas would know that she, Justine, had carried out her duties, precisely as instructed.

U
lrich, who was nineteen, and therefore too young, had proposed marriage to Isabella, who was seventeen, and therefore far too young. He might as well have thrown a hand grenade into the Park Lane drawing room: it could have caused no more alarm to the duchess, and perhaps, even, a little less.

The boy had asked the duke for his permission. Archie, pleased and flattered to be – for once – involved in the matters of the day, had granted it. This fact, among all the others that stacked up to represent the case against, was the one that caused Clarissa so much pain that she took to her room and refused to let Flytton so much as open the curtains, let alone dress her. She wouldn’t come out until the scheme was declared null and void. She would speak to Isabella only when the engagement was broken. She would never speak to Archie again.

Archie knew she was upset, but he hadn’t realised that he had been sent to Coventry because his wife barely spoke to him anyway, and when she did he rarely heard her. Therefore he was not, perhaps, as helpful as he might have been. Ulrich was part of the family now, as far as the duke was concerned. Permission, once granted, could not be withdrawn: a gentleman’s word was his bond. He took Ulrich with him to White’s and put the boy’s name on his account at Davies and Son, so that Uli’s tailoring would be as impeccable as his command of English. After four days of lonely languish in the crepuscular conditions of her rooms, the duchess emerged – dressed, bejewelled, magnificently chilly – to find that Uli had his own Arabian mare in the stables and his own Buick under cover in the courtyard, and that Isabella wore a Hohenzollern diamond, which was, at least, a material confirmation of the connection with the royal line.

‘Extremely distant cousins,’ Clarissa said when Tobias made this very point.

‘Which is more than we are,’ he said. ‘I should imagine Aunt Liese has telegraphed Frau von Hechingen at the schloss to warn her that Uli is marrying down.’

‘Baroness von Hechingen,’ Clarissa corrected, a stickler for correct form.

‘Oh well, there we go, splendid. German nobility, with a line to the kaiser, albeit a circuitous one.’

Clarissa sighed, feelingly. ‘I do miss your father,’ she said.

‘Don’t blame Archie for this, Mama. Izzy would have won Papa’s permission in a heartbeat. She had him in the palm of her hand.’ Still though, he privately thought it a bit rum that Ulrich had gone to the duke. He felt it an unfortunate omission that his own assent hadn’t been sought. But Tobias, unlike his mother, didn’t bruise easily, and in any case it was difficult to imagine a more likeable cove than Ulrich, who certainly seemed to adore Isabella.

‘I just feel…’ said Clarissa, then stopped to press a limp hand to her pale brow. Tobias waited.

‘I just feel,’ she continued, ‘that this is folly. She is so young!’

‘Headstrong,’ Tobias said. ‘Make her wait, perhaps?’

Clarissa brightened. ‘Yes. At least a year, perhaps two.’

‘Well, certainly one, at any rate. We would all suffer frightfully if Izzy was thwarted for longer than that.’

The duchess straightened her shoulders and tilted her delicate chin. ‘She shall wait a year, or there will be no wedding,’ she said, as if it were her idea entirely. ‘Excellent.’ Tobias could see the improvement in his mother’s spirits at this proposed assertion of her authority. For himself, he thought Isabella might just as well get on with it. Tobias was not the sort of fellow to put obstacles in the way of anyone’s desire.

‘Still, though,’ said Clarissa, a little wanly, ‘I should have been more involved from the outset. It’s a mother’s job to steer her daughter towards the right match.’

‘Well, who wrote the table plan, on the night of Izzy’s ball?’

She nodded, taking his point. She had been thinking, when she drew up the seating arrangements, of the Peverill boy on Isabella’s left. He was heir to a dukedom, although the seat was in Cornwall, which was a bore.

‘I believe you were very clever, Mama,’ Tobias said. ‘Extremely prescient.’

She narrowed her eyes at him, searching for mockery, but found none. He merely smiled and raised his teacup as if it were a champagne flute.

‘Prost!’
he said.

Clarissa frowned, not sure what he meant by this, but she felt a little more cheerful anyway. Archie’s presumption had been beyond the pale and he was far from forgiven, but Isabella’s conquest, she was prepared to accept, could certainly be seen in an agreeable light. At the very least, she thought, it detracted attention from Henrietta, whose name was in the newspapers yet again.

Her elder daughter’s hunger strike in Holloway Prison had prompted not mercy, but the opposite; after twelve days of starvation, Lady Henrietta Hoyland was to be forcibly fed. The pressmen had fallen on the story like crows upon carrion, and Christabel Pankhurst, wishing with all her heart that she and Henrietta could swap places, did the next best thing and publicised the outrage for all she was worth. It was a call to arms, she said; the government had declared war on women.

None of the family was quite sure what force-feeding involved – a question, perhaps, of insisting very firmly that she eat, ventured Thea – but they were told that Henrietta’s health, which had been severely jeopardised by starvation, would now improve, so they tried, on the whole, to consider it a good thing. Certainly, when Thea saw her Henrietta had looked horribly peaky. She had gone to the infirmary with Anna Sykes and found Henrietta unable to summon the energy to move. Thea and Anna had sat in near silence on either side of the hospital bed while Henrietta lay between them, flat as a runner bean and staring at the ceiling.

When she got home Thea had told Toby that she wouldn’t visit again if Henry couldn’t make an effort. She had placed an artful hand on her belly, to remind him – as if she needed to – that in her new condition she mustn’t be made to do anything she didn’t wish to do. Clarissa hadn’t visited since Henrietta was incarcerated, and Isabella, who at least had intended to visit her sister, was now engaged to be married, which apparently precluded any unpleasant duties of any kind. Then, yesterday, a matron, acting on instructions from the governor of Holloway, had politely and respectfully turned Tobias away from the hospital with the gentle advice that family members should wait until Lady Henrietta’s condition was ‘stable’ before visiting her again. Tobias had accepted this, though he had thought it sounded a little fishy; and then today he had opened the
Telegraph
to see an item on page three detailing the horrors of the ‘daily ordeal’ that Henry was now facing, as described to them by Miss Pankhurst, who apparently had inside information. It sounded simply ghastly, and Tobias was sure she must be mistaken, or simply whipping up alarm for the sake of publicity. She had gone on to denounce the prison authorities as barbarians before denouncing in a similar vein the king, the prime minister, the home secretary and any other fellow who had ever disagreed with her.