Eden Falls (17 page)

But what she loved best was her medicine garden: fever grass, vervine, wild sage, cow’s foot, cerassee, aloe vera, pulsey, toona, sage, jack-in-the-bush – all of them had their place and their calling. They fascinated her, their particular strengths and properties, and sometimes people came to her for her apothecary’s skill with them. Ruby could make a treatment for any ailment, and while she couldn’t promise that the poultice wouldn’t smart or that the infusion would taste pleasant – the boiled leaves of the cerassee plant made a particularly disagreeable drink – she believed ardently in their healing powers. When they didn’t work she was apt to blame the patient for their lack of faith.

‘Sit,’ she said now, not wishing to sound peremptory, but nevertheless slightly out of patience and sympathy with the silent, suffering Justine, who lowered herself onto the broad porch step. Scotty watched from a distance, with a vague but persistent sense of foreboding. Whether or not she was an obeah woman, she was certainly from Martinique, and that was enough, in Scotty’s book, to make a man wary. He squatted under a cashew tree and took out his tobacco tin, but he had the women in range. Edna, released from the cart, joined him under the tree to escape the flies, and, feeling companionable, he passed her a plug of tobacco, which she took from the palm of his hand with her whiskery lips.

Ruby knelt at Justine’s feet, and with a cloth and a bowl of boiled water she swabbed the bloody wound, a jagged gash of about two inches long, just below her right knee.

‘What happened?’ she asked Justine now, looking up into the woman’s face, which was taut with the effort of not yelping in pain. ‘Did someone push you to the ground?’

Justine shook her head. She opened her mouth to speak at last, then seemed to think better of it and closed it again. She stuck out her good leg and mimed a small sideways lurch, then gave Ruby a nod of encouragement, inviting her to guess the charade.

‘They tripped you up? Is that it?’

Justine nodded energetically and smiled, a brief, beautiful smile that appeared and was gone, like a moment of sunshine in a sky heavy with clouds. Ruby took up a small sharp knife and sliced a spiny-edged leaf from the aloe vera plant. She pared back the edges of the cut end, revealing as much as possible of the pale jelly inside. Of all her healing plants, this was the one she most revered: the workhorse of her medicine cabinet, the cure-all. She applied the jelly directly to the wound and Justine winced, though she held her leg steady. Ruby sliced again, further along the leaf, and again applied the sap.

‘There.’ Ruby sat back on her heels. ‘I’ll bandage that, then we’ll drive you up to Sugar Hill.’

She made to stand, but Justine suddenly reached for her and held her by the wrist, holding her so that their faces were level. Scotty stood and stepped out from under the arching canopy of the cashew tree, but Ruby knew the woman meant no harm: it was evident in her face.

‘Mercy, Madam,’ she seemed to say. ‘Mercy.’

Ruby, a little perplexed, said, ‘Mercy?’ and Justine smiled again, but shyly.

‘Thank you. Very kind.’

Her voice was faltering and a little hoarse, as though she wasn’t at all accustomed to conversation. Perhaps, thought Ruby, the world was a quiet place when your neighbours took you for a voodoo priestess, and when your native patois wasn’t much use on the island you called home. She pitied Justine: pitied her isolation, her situation, up there on the Sugar Hill plantation. There was a man, of course, a husband, Ruby assumed, or perhaps a brother; she didn’t know. He was much older than Justine and far less exotically attractive: lined and just a little stoop-shouldered, though perhaps he was blessed with a beautiful character, which in Ruby’s opinion was a far rarer and more valuable quality. She mistrusted physical beauty in a man: she had learned that it counted for nothing.

Down by the tree, Scotty watched as Ruby fetched a strip of clean, white cotton and wound it around the gash in the Martiniquan’s leg. She was brisk and tender at the same time, and the sight of her provoked in him a queasy nostalgia, whisking him back thirty years to a scene from his childhood: his mammy fixing up a cut on his forearm with the same expression of concentrated kindness. He looked away, and shook his head to dispel the picture, because memories of his mammy always led to memories of his daddy, an inveterate, rum-soaked wife beater.

‘Ruby, come,’ he said now, his voice edged with impatience. ‘I don’t got all de laang day to sit waiting for you.’

She turned to look at him in surprise. She couldn’t ever remember being ticked off by Scotty. Beside her Justine hauled herself upright. She was taller than Ruby, and the white cotton headscarf twisted into its front knot gave her another couple of inches still. She said, ‘Sorry, sir,’ in her unpractised voice, and began to make her way down the path towards the cart, carrying herself with great dignity despite the pronounced limp. Scotty, feeling a little ashamed, brought Edna out of the shade and backed her into position. Ruby reached the cart and gave him a subtle nudge, undetected by Justine, who was stoically levering herself back into the seat.

‘Mr Hitey-Titey,’ she said, and he bestowed his easy smile on her, enjoying the joke.

The cart bumped on, and though Justine was again entirely still and quiet beside Scotty, the mood had somehow loosened and lifted, so that when Ruby began to hum an old tune, a plantation song, Justine joined in, though with a shy backward glance, as if permission might be needed. Then Scotty pitched in too, supplying the lyrics in a surprising baritone, and they travelled for a while in this holiday spirit, until Sugar Hill drew closer and, as if by prior agreement, everyone fell silent.

The track took them in a curve through the banana fields, the broad flat leaves towering above and around them like glossy green parasols, and the workers, the pickers and the carriers, stared with frank curiosity at the passing cart. Ruby had spent her days here as a girl, working in the lee of her mother, bearing on her head a towering pile of bananas and walking in stately procession to the Rio Grande where boats waited to carry the fruit to Port Antonio. For a while she had been content enough. By the end, she hated every square inch of the Sugar Hill plantation. Now, although she fought it, a knot of hard anxiety had formed in the pit of her belly; how odd, she thought, that a tract of land could have such an effect, as if she’d come face to face with Silas Whittam himself, on an empty lane, in the dead of night.

The bungalow that Justine shared with Henri occupied a corner of flattened land at the foot of the final sweep of the track to Silas’s residence. The two of them walked back and forth to the house so often that ruts marked out their path on the shingled track. Outside their own dwelling there was no garden, but two dusty chickens scratched half-heartedly at the baked earth and a pot of Scotch Bonnet peppers brought a splash of colour to the drab porch steps. Scotty brought Edna to a halt and Ruby clambered off the cart, dragging Justine’s basket of vegetables with her. Justine lowered herself gingerly from the seat. Up the hill, the great house could just be glimpsed through the trees that surrounded it: a small corner of the western end of the house, its long sash windows glinting wickedly in the afternoon sun.

‘You’ll be all right now,’ Ruby said to Justine, and it was a statement, not a question. She was anxious to be on her way. Justine nodded.

‘
Vous êtes très gentille
,’ she said. ‘Very kind.’

Ruby shook her head. ‘It was nothing. Be careful next time you come to the market.’ This made it sound as though Justine’s own carelessness was to blame for her injury, so Ruby added, ‘I mean, be wary.’

Justine nodded.

‘Do you have friends here?’ Ruby said, finding herself unable to simply spring up into the cart and be gone. The pickers nearest to them moved about their business, keeping their distance. Somewhere, someone was singing. Justine laughed sadly.

‘No friends, only Henri.’

Ruby looked about her. Everywhere there were people. ‘No one?’

Justine shrugged. ‘They fear me,’ she said in her faltering voice. ‘And they believe I am…’ She paused here, reluctant to help spread the rumour by repeating it now. ‘Quimbois woman. Obeah woman.
Mais pas vrai
,’ she added. ‘A lie.’

There was a pause. Ruby wondered if Justine had given them cause for mistrust. There was, however, nothing sinister about her appearance, apart from the blood on her dress, and that had been spilled at the hands of ordinary rogues in the market place.

‘They don’ like masser,’ Justine said. ‘
Mais
they think masser like me.’

Ruby nodded, understanding at once. There were no advantages to being a favourite of the boss, especially this particular one, who was known to value his banana plants above the people who grew, picked and carried them.

‘And does he? Like you, I mean?’

Again, Justine shrugged. ‘Sometimes,
oui. Et quelquefois non
. I mean, sometimes, no.’

She spoke without self-pity and gave Ruby a rueful half-smile.

‘Well,’ Ruby said. ‘You know where I live. You have a friend now.’

Behind her, Scotty sucked his teeth and gave a low hiss of disapproval. Justine glanced uncertainly at him then she seized Ruby’s hands and squeezed them hard in a wordless gesture of gratitude, before stooping to pick up her basket and turning towards her house.

Up on the cart, with Ruby now beside him, Scotty said, ‘You be careful, Ruby Donaldson. You make friends with dat woman, you make trouble fo’ yourself.’

She cut him a withering look. ‘Superstition and prejudice is the bane of this island,’ she said grandly.

He laughed his long, slow wheeze of a laugh. ‘Superstition and prejudice,’ he said, imitating Ruby’s hauteur then shaking his head, as though the words were hilarious. ‘You mighty fine, Lady Donaldson. You mighty fine.’

He clicked his tongue at Edna and the old mule threw back her head and split the air with a jagged, doleful bray, before hauling the cart into motion and heading for home.

T
he debutante curtsey was by no means a simple, perfunctory bob, nor was it a lavishly theatrical flourish. Rather, it was a slow, graceful descent, left foot positioned behind the right, back straight, head erect, arms and hands motionless by one’s side. As the curtsey reached its lowest point the head must then be very slightly bowed, in grateful obeisance to Their Majesties.

‘The greater part of the weight must be on the right foot when descending, on the left when ascending,’ Isabella said, quoting from an old, yellowing manual that her mother had retrieved from a casket of precious things: dance cards, invitations, a pressed rose, a bundle of letters. Isabella had been surprised at the existence of the box. Clarissa was not the keeping type, she had thought. ‘Perform this action repeatedly,’ she continued, ‘slowly, and with great care, until it may be accomplished in one fluid movement.’

She dropped the book, a little carelessly given its great age, on to a side table and demonstrated a perfectly steady, perfectly elegant, perfectly restrained curtsey. Tobias clapped. Rising, Isabella took up her manual voice again, reciting now from memory.

‘In a Court curtsey, the young lady must take care never to stoop from the waist, but only to make the smallest inclination of the head at the deepest point of the curtsey,’ she said.

‘And did you manage that?’ said Tobias.

‘I did. Alicia Treaves-Desmond fell to one side and had to put out a hand to support herself.’

‘Oh Lord. Off to the Tower?’

‘She was graciously ignored, until she righted herself. Utterly shaming.’

‘I’ll say,’ said Tobias. ‘It’s hardly a task, is it?’

‘Easy for you to say,’ said Isabella. ‘I’d like to see you curtsey before the king and queen without making an ass of yourself.’

‘And I’m perfectly sure I could,’ he said. ‘It’s one of those things that sounds desperately complicated when written down, but in reality is quite simple, like trying to give someone instructions for getting out of bed.’ He adopted the same scholarly tones that Isabella had used and said: ‘Pull back the counterpane with the left hand in a sweeping motion towards the centre of the bed and, at the same moment, raise the upper body and swing the right leg towards the floor, being sure to allow the left leg to follow swiftly after.’

‘Very amusing, darling,’ said Clarissa, glancing up from her embroidery, which was only ever a device for listening to other people’s conversations while affecting not to. ‘Of course, the joke is that a manual to help you out of bed might actually be rather useful.’

Isabella laughed. Her mother was very rarely intentionally funny; it was important to appreciate her wit if you should chance to encounter it. Tobias said, ‘Unfair, Mama. Isabella, what time did we ride this morning?’

‘Up with the lark, as a matter of fact,’ his sister said. ‘We were out before the Household Cavalry.’

Clarissa looked up again. ‘When I had my Season I attended fifty balls, forty parties and twenty-five dinner parties,’ she said, in the way she had of appearing not to have registered the previous comment. But then she added, ‘And every morning I rode out before ten o’clock, to keep the colour in my cheeks.’

‘All those parties, but you met Daddy on Rotten Row,’ Isabella said, taking up her favourite family legend. ‘He cantered up alongside you…’

‘…spooking my grey mare as he did so,’ said Clarissa, supplying – as she always did – the sour to the sweet.

‘…and you rode together for a whole hour…’

‘…well, I couldn’t shake him off.’

‘…at the end of which, he said, “I would ride to the ends of the earth, simply to see your face one more time.”’

‘To which I said, “No need, we’re both expected at the Abberley’s tomorrow evening.”’ Clarissa was pink and pert, remembering her heyday.

‘I wish I’d been there to see you,’ Isabella said, with a dreamy face. She was determined that romance should blossom for her in a similarly heroic, all-obliterating way.

‘I know what you mean, Iz,’ Tobias said. ‘You were a famous beauty, Mama.’ It was a pretty compliment, but rather spoiled by the past tense. ‘Suitors galore.’