The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (50 page)

And the worst of it – what frightened her most – was that she
wanted
to do it. All she had to do was squeeze the trigger – a single movement of one finger – and Sophie would be safe, and she would be free.

‘Do you realize’, he said, ‘that you’ve just signed your own committal papers? Do you?’

‘Go away,’ she said.

‘A deranged, half-naked woman pointing a weapon at her own husband? Do you know what they’ll do to you? They’ll lock you up for ever. You’ll spend the rest of your life in a straitjacket.’

‘Go
away
,’ she whispered.

‘A straitjacket,’ he repeated, and started towards her.

She took aim and fired.

Cameron found her in a clearing, curled up beneath an ironwood tree. In the green shade her face had an underwater pallor. He thought she was dead.

Then she opened her eyes and gave him a dark, unfocused stare, and the world tilted back into place.

He left his horse and fell to his knees beside her and gathered her into his arms. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘my God.’

He felt her fingers digging into his back, her breath warm on his neck.

‘You’re shaking,’ she said.

‘No.’

‘Yes. You are.’

He tightened his grip. He didn’t want to let her go. He wanted to tell her what it had been like to see her lying there dead, but his throat had closed, and he couldn’t get out the words.

She twisted out of his arms and touched his face with her fingers. Then she saw the scab on his ribs. ‘What’s this?’

‘Nothing. I – got in a fight.’

She looked at him with solemn eyes, and he wondered if she was in shock. He had read that when people are in shock their pupils dilate. But her eyes were too dark to tell.

She wore only some kind of cambric undergarment, its elaborate pin-tucks and satin ribbons bizarrely at odds with the scratches on her arms and shins. Her feet were bare. She had taken off her boots and placed them neatly by her head.

‘A fight?’ she said. ‘When? With whom?’

He took off his shooting jacket and put it round her shoulders. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s all right now. It’s all right.’ He knew that he was saying that to reassure himself.

For hours he had lived with the terror that she was dead. From that first moment when he’d stumbled down to the edge of the sink-hole and seen the pale, crumpled muslin at the bottom, and thought it was her. Then tracking Sinclair, knowing that his brother was tracking her.
Why
had he wasted so much time at the sink-hole? Why had he given Sinclair a head start?

Still sick with relief, he went to his horse and unhooked the water bottle. When he gave it to her, she took it in both hands and drank with the concentration of an animal. Her fingers were raw and crusted with blood, and round each wrist was a narrow cut that mystified him.

He tried to imagine what she had been through; how she had managed to get out of that hole on her own. My God, he thought, any man who calls them the weaker sex doesn’t know women.

He took out his handkerchief and soaked it in water, and cleaned her hands as gently as he could. He seemed to find it far more painful than she.

He said, ‘I heard a shot.’

She nodded.

‘What happened?’

She sat back on her heels and clasped her arms about her waist, and he realized that far from being in shock, she was hanging onto her composure by a thread. ‘I thought I could kill him,’ she said. ‘It turned out that I couldn’t. I’m not – not who I thought I was. So I shot the tree instead.’

He followed her glance and saw a branch of wild almond hanging brokenly about fifteen feet up.

He scanned the empty clearing, and felt a prickle of unease. There was nothing to indicate that it had happened as she’d said. No sign that Sinclair had been in the clearing: no tracks, no horse manure, and most telling of all, no gun. That branch could have snapped in a strong wind or a heavy rain; that shot could have come from anywhere. Sound does strange things in the Cockpits. Besides, where would she have got a gun? It didn’t make sense.

‘What happened then?’ he said.

She hunched her shoulders against the memory. ‘He was terrified. He didn’t realize that I’d missed on purpose. He ran back to his horse and rode away.’

‘Where? Where did he go?’

‘I don’t know. Didn’t you meet him on the path?’

He hesitated. ‘Perhaps he took a different one. There are several in this part of the forest.’

She was watching him as he said it, and he saw the understanding dawn in her face. ‘You don’t believe me,’ she said. ‘I’m telling the truth. He was here.’

‘I know. I—’

‘Why don’t you believe me?’

He put his hand on her shoulder but she shook it off. She reached for one of her boots and threw it at him. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Now d’you believe me?’

Inside was a small Lee-Remington service revolver. In disbelief he took it out and emptied the chamber into his palm. There was one round missing.

‘It’s because I lied to you, isn’t it?’ she said, her teeth chattering. ‘I lied to you, so you don’t believe me.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘no, that’s not it at all.’

‘I told you why I lied. I tried to explain—’

‘Madeleine, look at me. No,
look
at me. What happened before doesn’t matter. None of it matters. All that matters is that you’re safe.’

She was looking at him as if she wanted to believe him, but couldn’t.

‘Sophie’s safe too,’ he told her. ‘I took her out of Burntwood, she’s with the old man. We’ll go down to Eden, and get you some food and some clothes, and then we can go to Fever Hill and see her. Everything will be sorted out.’

‘How?’ she said harshly. ‘He’ll tell them one version, and I’ll tell them another. If you didn’t believe me, why should they?’

‘He won’t be able to wriggle out of this. He—’

‘Yes he will. He’ll say I’m mad, he’ll say I’m making it up.’

‘Madeleine—’

‘He can do what he likes, Cameron. He’s the husband. He has all the power.’

‘Not after what he did—’

‘Yes! Even then! Don’t you see? What he did won’t have any consequences. It won’t
matter
. That’s how it works.’

‘Everything has consequences,’ he said.

Sinclair was enormously relieved when he reached the edge of the forest. But as he emerged blinking into the glare, he was startled to find that he didn’t recognize the way ahead. The hills were steeper than he remembered, and criss-crossed with paths no wider than goat-tracks.

Still, he thought, no harm done. A glance at the sun gave him a rough idea of a northward course, and he put his horse forward along the most likely track.

Despite the heat of the afternoon, he was in excellent spirits. The moment she had brought out that revolver, he had known that he was saved. A half-naked madwoman brandishing a gun. Even if she survived, no-one would believe a word she said. And the beauty of it was that the sister would be tarred with the same brush. Insanity in the family; who would have credited it? Poor Reverend Lawe. What he must have suffered!

In the distance he saw a black man meandering into view, and his spirits rose still further. Here was a dusky messenger, sent by the Almighty to guide him home.

The man was only a country black, barefoot and in ripped dungarees and tattered jippa-jappa hat, and so dull-witted that he took some moments to grasp Sinclair’s shouted enquiry. But he had the primitive’s sure sense of direction, and readily indicated the track towards Fever Hill, before his own path took him out of sight behind a spur.

Humming under his breath, Sinclair put his mount forward.

Poor, handsome young Reverend Lawe. All Society would sympathize after what he’d endured with that woman. It would be easy to find another wife. And she would bear him a son, and his brother would be vanquished, and he would come into his inheritance at last.

As he rounded a bend, an animal shot across the track. His horse reared, and he lost his stirrups and fell.

For a moment he lay winded, listening to his horse galloping off down the track. Then he sat up, wincing and rubbing his head. There seemed to be no serious harm done. A bruised hip, a slight contusion at the back of the head, and a scrape across the left palm. His horse, however, was nowhere to be seen.

He got to his feet and retrieved his hat, and brushed himself off.

Glancing round, he saw with a start that a little pickney girl, a mulatto, was crouching on the slope above, watching him.

A stroke of luck, he thought. Here’s just the creature to run and retrieve the horse.

He called to her to come down, but to his surprise she did not respond. He repeated the command more sharply. Still no response. Like some diminutive pagan idol she squatted on the slope, her garish yellow frock tented over her knees. He wondered if she were deaf.

He was not the man to tolerate disobedience, but for once he decided to let it pass. It was too hot to climb the slope and discipline her.

A short, uncomfortably warm walk down the track revealed that his horse was nowhere to be seen. He would have to go back and collar the pickney after all, and compel her to run for help. But when he retraced his steps, he was exasperated to find that she was no longer there. It was a confounded nuisance, but he would have to make his way on foot.

It was another hour before he could bring himself to admit that he was lost. Instead of leaving the Cockpits, he seemed to be heading deeper into them. The track had become narrow and treacherous: to his left the ground rose steeply, but to his right it fell away into a dizzying ravine. That simpleton must have pointed out the wrong path.

He stopped to rest by a thorn tree. The air shimmered with heat. The glare off the white rocks pained his head. The rasp of crickets assailed his ears – and behind it, a great, watching silence that he found peculiarly disagreeable.

Once again he struggled to his feet, and this time his heart leapt to see a man on the track, some distance ahead. He was saved: the man was white. True, he was as ragged and filthy as any backwoods black, but he was a white man none the less.

‘You there!’ Sinclair shouted. ‘Come down here at once!’

To his consternation, the man made no move to obey. He stood on the track with his hands at his sides, silently watching.

Outraged, Sinclair started up the slope towards him. But as he drew nearer he saw that the ‘man’ was in fact just a boy: dark, scrawny and sharp-faced, and with an unsettling resemblance to the urchin from Fitzroy Square.

Which, he told himself angrily, is arrant nonsense. It’s just that they all look alike.

But he couldn’t help glancing about him for that other one, the hunchback with the flame-coloured hair. And for one unnerving moment he even thought he saw him, some twenty yards behind. But it was only the little mulatto girl who had watched him earlier.

This time she was accompanied by two tall blacks: hill Negroes, by the look of them. Relief washed over him. Now there were grown men to assist him instead of children.

He turned to find that the white boy had also been joined by blacks: a full-grown male, and three squat and ancient Negresses. The male was unremarkable, except that he resembled the simpleton who had pointed out the wrong path; but the Negresses were hideous. They wore the gaudy headkerchiefs and strident yellow and green print gowns so beloved of their kind, and their skin was so black that he couldn’t make out their features. Faceless black totems, they sat on the path: their stubby arms clasped beneath their enormous breasts, and their horny feet stuck out, the soles showing obscenely pink.

A scatter of pebbles behind made him spin about, and he overbalanced and nearly fell.

Some thirty feet above him, another Negress stood looking down with her hands on her hips. She was younger than the others, and slender; but although her skin was mahogany, not sable, the glare was too bright to make out her face.

‘You there!’ he shouted. ‘Come down and help me at once!’

She made no reply. She just stood there with her hands on her hips, a pose he found both unsettling and astonishingly insolent.

He wondered why she felt entitled to behave with such freedom towards a white man, and opened his mouth to administer a sharp rebuke.

But as he did so, she began to pick her way down the slope towards him, and as she drew nearer, he recognized her. And understood.

Chapter Thirty-Five

March 1896 – eight months later

The service had ended and the congregation was filing out. Madeleine was preparing to make her usual swift retreat to the carriage, when Jocelyn put out his hand and touched her wrist. ‘One moment, my dear.’

She turned and looked at him, and knew immediately what he would say. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t.’

‘Just talk to him,’ he said gently.

They drew aside to make way for Clemency and Sophie, and watched them leave the church and disappear into the glare of the porch, their heads already turned to one another as they embarked on the sermon and the congregation, and whatever other thoughts they had been prevented from sharing by two hours’ enforced silence.

Madeleine said, ‘You promised you wouldn’t engineer a meeting.’

‘And I have not,’ said Jocelyn. ‘But since this is the only time when you go out, there’s a good chance that he’ll be here.’ He paused. ‘After all,’ he added, and the corners of his mouth turned down in his version of a smile, as they often did when he mentioned Cameron, ‘it’s what I’d do.’

She opened her reticule, then snapped it shut again. ‘What do you think I should do?’

He sighed. ‘I don’t know, my dear. I don’t know what you want. What I do know is that this – reticence – of yours, this unwillingness even to see him, isn’t making either of you happy. You’re both in pain. And I’d very much rather that you weren’t.’ He frowned and tapped his cane on the flags, as if he’d just made a damaging admission. ‘So yes, I think it would be a capital idea for you to have it out.’

What he hadn’t said was that her ‘reticence’, as he called it, was hurting him too. He had no son and no legitimate heir; all he had were two illegitimate granddaughters and one adopted son whom he was gradually allowing himself to love again. It would mean the world to him if she married Cameron.