Eden Falls (31 page)

‘
Madame? Bonjou’, madame
.’

Behind her, on the steps, Silas’s housekeeper had appeared, and her voice, low and husky, startled Eve, although it was welcome. They had met on that first visit, though they had not been introduced. Eve wished, now, that she knew her name.

‘Come,’ said the woman. She smiled a little hesitantly and beckoned for Eve to follow her, which she did.

‘My brother isn’t expecting me,’ she said, but the housekeeper merely turned and smiled again. She wore not a housecoat, nor a frock, but a long swathe of fabric in brilliant blue, wrapped and twisted around her to form a garment, which fell in folds from one shoulder to mid-calf. Her arms were thin, her ankles too, but her belly seemed softly rounded, as if she might be expecting. Her skin was glossy black and her eyes, though modestly dipped, shone with a mysterious inner light, as if she had a cherished secret. Beside her, in her pale grey frock, Eve felt leached of colour: drab and ordinary. The birds of the island – the hummingbirds, the yellowbills, the orioles – were none of them more colourful or exotic than this woman who led her up the steps and through the tall French windows into Silas’s expansive drawing room.

He was there, artfully arranged, a study in white: white couch, white linen suit, feet up on a white ottoman. For a fraction longer than was necessary, he continued to look at the newspaper in his hands before raising his dark brown eyes to his visitor.

‘Evie!’ he said, though his surprise seemed feigned, Eve thought, as if he had heard her arrival, watched her approach, then placed himself in this casually elegant attitude. ‘Justine, take my sister’s hat and bring her some lemonade,
tout de suite
.’

‘
Oui,
masser,’ Justine said, and flowed like a blue stream from the room.

‘Justine,’ Eve said to Silas. ‘Bonny name.’

He shrugged and patted the couch. ‘Sit,’ he said. She did, but she chose not to share, taking a chair opposite instead. He raised his eyebrows.

‘You’re still angry? Come, come, Evie, don’t nurse a grudge.’ He pouted at her and made unhappy eyes, as if nothing could make him sadder than this grievance she clung to. She folded her arms, sat back in her chair and watched him for a moment. He was king here at Sugar Hill, she realised; there was no one, not a soul, to puncture his self-regard. Here, in the supreme comfort of his plantation house, no one ever challenged his supremacy. Well then, she thought: she would.

‘I’ve ’ad an idea for your ’otel,’ she said, and it threw him, because he was all set to coax her back to good humour but here she was, apparently perfectly unruffled.

‘First, you need to change t’name.’ She hadn’t meant to say this – hadn’t had the thought until this very moment – but now, struck by his enduring and complacent belief in the legend of Silas Whittam, it seemed to be the key to everything.

He gave a short bark of incredulous laughter. ‘I see. And that’s the root of the problem?’

‘Yes,’ she said, undeterred. ‘Yes, I think so, in a way.’

‘Ri-ight. So, what’s wrong with the present name, pray?’

‘You,’ she said, simply and brutally. ‘You’ve named it after yourself.’

‘I named it after my company, which happens to bear my name.’

‘Aye, and I reckon that was your first mistake.’

He laughed again, without amusement. ‘So, who or what should my hotel be named after?’

‘Jamaica.’ She leaned forwards and her face was alive with her plan. ‘Make your hotel the first on the island to celebrate Jamaica: its food, its customs, its colours, its plants. That’s where success lies, Silas.’

He gave a short, explosive laugh. ‘You’ve seen our guests. Do you suppose they’ll thank us for feeding them fried green bananas and boiled okra?’

‘They might. They’ve travelled all this way, so why would they expect t’food to taste like ’ome? You ’ave Jamaican cooks in your kitchen; let ’em cook Jamaican food. Be different, Silas. Be bold.’

‘And the name of this brave new venture?’ he asked, his voice heavy with scepticism and something else too: resentment, perhaps. She waited for a moment, reluctant, suddenly, to reward his churlishness.

‘Eden Falls,’ she said finally. ‘I don’t know why it never occurred to you before. The Eden Falls Hotel.’

H
enrietta’s sentence had been reduced to three months on account of the time she’d already spent in prison, and, until she had fully recovered from her fall, she would be allowed to remain in hospital. Meanwhile, if she was quiet and submissive the three months might well be reconsidered: six weeks, perhaps, or eight. This was what the solicitor told Tobias, and what Tobias duly relayed to his mother, who merely closed her eyes, as if shutting out the distasteful facts of her daughter’s current existence.

‘Quiet and submissive might be too much to ask,’ Isabella said. ‘She’s had a lifetime of being exactly the opposite.’

‘You should visit her,’ Tobias said. ‘You both should. You’ll see how changed she is.’ They had recovered indecently quickly from the shock of Henry’s continued imprisonment, he thought. An awkward silence ensued. Tobias sighed.

‘After the ball, that is.’

‘I’ll go, but it’ll have to be Monday now,’ Isabella said. ‘Not that she’ll want to see me. She thinks me silly and irrelevant.’

Tobias, who yesterday evening had sat at Henrietta’s bedside trying to steer her through a coherent conversation, didn’t contradict Isabella, but said, ‘She’s not yet quite herself,’ which was putting it mildly. ‘She’s…’ He paused, at a loss for the words to describe his sister’s present state. Humiliated? Demoralised? These things, certainly, and also timid and querulous, quite altered.

‘Thoroughly ashamed of herself, I hope,’ cut in Clarissa. ‘The only blessing is that her father isn’t witness to all this. Now, Toby, you’ll have to excuse us: we have two hundred young people descending in a few hours’ time. Henrietta’s difficulties will have to be set aside, and since they’re entirely of her own making, my conscience is clear.’

‘Good for you, Mama,’ said Tobias, and Clarissa, who heard only what she wished to hear, smiled at him. He wandered from the drawing room, leaving them to their ecstasy of minute detail; they had no need of his input where Isabella’s dance was concerned. His own contribution had begun and ended in drumming up a few extra young men – there never did seem to be quite enough of them – from his own fund of friends: brothers of friends, generally, or friends of brothers of friends. It hardly mattered how distant the connection with Isabella; if they were bachelors under the age of twenty-five, and if their social credentials were impeccable, they could be added to the list.

A hundred debutantes required, ideally, a hundred chaps, especially if there was to be dinner. It happened, here and there, that two girls would have to be placed side by side at the table when a list was one or two men short, but such contingencies smacked of failure in Clarissa’s eyes. The whole point of every gathering was to dangle tender, debutante flesh under the noses of eligible young men. She considered any ball where there was a shortfall of white tie and tails a flop. Tobias grinned to himself at the memory of those seasons – not so very long ago – when his own name was on the list of every titled girl in London. The mantelpiece in the drawing room of Fulton House had been stacked with invitations for dances, dinners, garden parties. He went to everything, and didn’t behave particularly well either: that is, he didn’t propose marriage to anyone. He had never been able to see the appeal of these alabaster-skinned virgins whose mothers sat on the periphery of every occasion, scrutinising potential suitors like farmers at a cattle auction. His younger brother Dickie – foolish, gallant, eager Dickie – had dutifully played the game: attended the balls, fallen for girls, even proposed to one of them. But Mimi Anderson had been after a bigger fish; the second son of an earl wasn’t enough of a catch for her. That was why Dickie was now drifting around the Italian Riviera, and why Mimi Anderson was unhappily married to a buck-toothed viscount, whose father looked good for another couple of decades at least. Poor Dickie. Poor Mimi. Poor viscount.

Tobias laughed, although he was alone with his thoughts. He had wandered into the library, where he poured himself an early scotch from the decanter and rang the bell for ice. He thought about Thea, who had gone to the hospital against all her instincts and inclination. She ought to be home by now, he thought: at least, she ought to be home very soon. He closed his mind to suspicion and made himself think instead how kind it was of his wife to visit Henry; it was a mark of how affected she had been by the sight of her in a dead faint in the courtroom. Tobias hoped the friendship between the sisters-in-law might be rekindled as a result of this drama: a silver lining, as it were, to the cloud.

Once, when he and Thea were first married, the two women had been very close, and this had been the source of considerable happiness to Tobias. Their intimacy had somehow underpinned his own relationship with his wife, giving it ballast, tying it down. True, he had at times felt excluded by their mutual affection – had felt, indeed, like an occasionally unwelcome third party – but this had, at least, left him free to come and go as he pleased. Certainly it had been preferable to the enigmatic coolness that had characterised their relationship for the past couple of years. For a fellow with vast experience of women, Tobias was prepared to admit to bewilderment in this matter. He wished for harmony between his wife and sister: his own life had run smoother when this happy state had last existed.

Ballatyne, the butler, slid into the room. He was holding an ice bucket and silver tongs, which he immediately put to good use, dropping two cubes into Tobias’s glass. Tobias gave him a perfunctory nod of thanks. Ballatyne was one of Thea’s finds and the absolute antithesis of his predecessor, a most unaesthetic fellow named Munster with an expression and bearing more suited to the funeral cortège than the drawing room. This chap, on the other hand, wore his butler’s worsted tight and with panache, and his eyes were a dark liquid brown.

‘Will there be anything else, Your Lordship?’ Ballatyne had a musical Edinburgh lilt. His tidy black eyebrows lifted in gentle enquiry and a small smile played about the corners of his mouth. Tobias gave him a hard look. There was good looking and too damned good looking, and this fellow bordered on the latter.

‘No,’ Tobias said rudely, and he stared at his whisky while Ballatyne left the room, then, when the door closed he stood and walked to the window, sitting down on the cushioned sill to watch for Thea’s return. He saw rivals everywhere; that was his problem. He saw rivals even among the servants. This was the price he paid for the privilege of calling Thea his wife.

The ballroom glittered with diamonds; afterwards, when those who had been there relived the occasion moment by moment, the flash and blaze of precious stones remained in the memory, along with the music, the conversation, the food, the gowns. In the dancing flames of the candelabra and the steady glow of the chandeliers, arrows of diamond light darted constantly across the room like glorious, abundant fireflies. The debutantes were relatively modestly adorned with discreetly precious family jewels, but their mothers were quite weighed down, all of them rising to the challenge set by Clarissa, whom everyone knew would be wearing the Plymouth tiara. It was famous – had been famous, in fact, for decades – and was always rather resented. Garrard had made it in the 1840s for Ursula, the third duchess, and Archie, keen to avoid the disastrous consequences of a wife with a tiara-induced headache, had spent a small fortune having it adjusted to sit perfectly atop Clarissa’s head. She wore it well: regally, in fact. And all around, the very finest ancestral stones vied for similar glory, and fell fractionally, crucially, short.

At dinner Isabella sparkled with conversation. She had sought a tutorial from Tobias a few days earlier. Sometimes, she had said, there were awkward silences. At another girl’s dance one could blame the seating arrangements: tomorrow, though, she would only be able to blame herself.

‘When in doubt, talk about ghosts,’ he had said. ‘Don’t mention the weather or the food; never yet met the fellow who gives a damn. But hauntings, everyone likes.’

‘Right,’ Isabella had said, tempted to make notes. ‘What about world affairs? Should I be mugging up on Home Rule or unrest in the Balkans?’

‘Good God, no. The skill lies in being clever enough not to sound too clever,’ Tobias said. ‘Steer clear of politics, since you know nothing about it anyway, and it comes over as bluestocking. Motoring goes down well. Mug up on motors – six cylinder over four cylinder, Rolls-Royce over Daimler, you know the sort of thing. That should do it. Well, and sailing,’ he added, remembering his yacht. ‘It’s not every debutante who has a boat named for her.’

‘I wish I could have you on one side of me,’ Isabella had said.

He had smiled, thinking how very glad he was to be out of it. ‘Who do you have?’

‘Matthew Peverill and a German chap, I think. No one knows much about him, but Continentals can bring a splash of colour, Mama says, and I think he’s connected to the Hohenzollerns so…’ she trailed off, and shrugged.

‘That middle aitch is silent, darling,’ Tobias said.

‘Oh! Well, thank you. One less trap to fall into,’ she said and then grimaced at a sudden new thought. ‘Gosh, I do hope he doesn’t resemble the kaiser.’

‘The kaiser’s not bad looking, apart from the moustache and the withered arm, and they’re not hereditary.’

‘Well anyway, the connection’s rather tenuous, to be honest. He’s a cousin of a cousin of Wilhelm, or some such. Mama’s making the most of it, naturally. You’d think he was next in line, to listen to her.’

‘And does he speak English?’

Isabella’s face fell. ‘Gosh,’ she said. ‘I should jolly well hope so. They all do, don’t they? It’s not as if anyone else speaks German.’

He did, of course, speak English. Very well, with just enough of an accent to single him out as interesting, but not so much that listening to him was a strain. His name was Ulrich von Hechingen, and he had an endearing habit of looking directly into Isabella’s eyes when she spoke, as if there was nothing or no one quite so fascinating as she at this immense gathering. They didn’t talk about ghosts, motorcars, or yachting, and yet their conversation was easy and lively. He was the oldest son of a Bavarian count – he didn’t mention the kaiser and Isabella thought it vulgar to ask – but he described a Romanesque family castle on a rock, with turrets and towers, such as Rapunzel might have recognised. She told him about Netherwood Hall and made him laugh with stories about her childhood that she hadn’t known were funny until she saw them again through his eyes. His dark blonde hair was Brilliantined into submission, but Isabella could see that it curled, or would curl, if allowed to. His eyes were navy blue, and between his two front teeth was a narrow gap, which, as imperfections went, was of no account; if anything, it rather added to his appeal. Isabella turned reluctantly to Matthew Peverill after the consommé and for the duration of the
filet de truite
, and worried all the while that Ulrich would forget her before the
mignon d’agneau
; each peal of laughter from Helena Lalham, next-door-but-one, prodded at her confidence like the sharp tip of a small knife. But then there he was, turning back to Isabella as she turned to him, and his smile radiated interested warmth.