The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth (29 page)

Once he had risen to the top of the pile, Addison had set about consolidating his grip on Jamaican Society. By now his one mistake was some years in the past, when he’d overreached himself by offering for the foremost Beauty of the island, the imperiously lovely May Monroe, and been summarily rejected. ‘My dear, of what can he have been thinking? His people were
blacksmiths
, for heaven’s sake! Can you imagine her consternation? I don’t believe she ever forgave him. Or any of the Trahernes. Indeed I’m not at all sure that she hasn’t been blaming poor silly Clemency ever since.’

But Addison had worn his rejection lightly, and made a brilliant marriage to a Barrett of Cinnamon Hill and then to a Palairet of Greendale – finally expunging his youthful humiliation by betrothing his daughter Clemency to May’s great-nephew Ainsley. He’d survived to see his oldest son Cornelius marry a Hall of Tryall, then a McFarlane of Caledon (both of whom died conveniently young), and finally the enormously wealthy Rebecca Sammond of – ‘of Lombard Street, I’m very much afraid. And they do
say
that her grandpapa absolutely changed his name.
From Salomon
.’

But although Mrs Herapath might deplore the ‘aquiline’ turn of Rebecca Traherne’s nose, not to mention Cornelius’s ‘rather vulgar’ penchant for very young girls of whatever class or shade, her disapproval was voiced discreetly, behind her fan. There wasn’t a Society household in Trelawny which was not in debt to the Trahernes, and that included herself.

‘But the
singular
thing’, she went on, shaking her head so that her startling dragonfly headdress seemed about to take wing, ‘is that young Irving seems actually to have fallen for little Davina. Isn’t that killing? I hear old Meredith wasn’t too keen at first, but his boy absolutely threatened to run off and join the Legion, so what could he do? Oh look, there they go now. She’s underbred, of course, and that figure won’t last, but one must admit that they’re rather sweet.’

Madeleine gave her a strained smile. She knew it was ungenerous, but she had no desire to gaze fondly upon a young couple who were ‘so very much in love’. Davina Traherne was only two years younger than herself.

The waltz ended, and Madeleine watched the Irving boy leading his fiancée to a little gilt sofa, and bringing her a rosewater ice and gazing into her eyes, and generally getting as close as he could before a score of watchful relations.

Suddenly an image came to her of Ben Kelly kissing the little skivvy in the Portland Road. It was disturbing and inappropriate, but she couldn’t shake it off. She remembered the way their jaws had moved. The glitter in their eyes when they drew apart.

She turned to find Sinclair watching her from across the room. His gaze was cool and unsmiling, and she returned it in kind. In his dress coat he looked severely beautiful, but there were shadows beneath his eyes. Despite the chloral he had not been sleeping well, and there were nights when he awoke ten times, and knelt on the floor to check beneath the bed for charms. And in some way that she didn’t understand, he blamed her for his malaise, although when she asked him, he always professed not to know what she meant.

What was it about her that horrified him? Why had he married her?

Suddenly the music was loud in her ears; the ballroom hot and airless. She had to get out. She muttered an excuse to Mrs Herapath and went through into the gallery.

It was almost as crowded as the ballroom. She descended the steps to the lower terraces. They were quieter, but the ladies and gentlemen among the potted orange trees were not eager to be noticed. Tonight, everywhere she looked she encountered courting couples. She left the terraces and finally reached a pergola which opened onto the lawns, and was mercifully empty.

She took a deep breath, but still felt breathless. The air was warm and still, and heavy with the scent of cinnamon and stephanotis, and the bitter haze from the Spanish braziers that kept the mosquitoes at bay. Across the lawns, banks of white tea-roses glowed in the moonlight, and strings of lanterns flickered in the trees. The night-song of the crickets was a clear, pulsing ring.

Above her head, through gaps in the pergola, she glimpsed the people on the upper terraces. They seemed a world apart: golden and unreal, like some glittering
tableau vivant
.

She snapped off a stephanotis flower and crushed its waxy white petals in her palm, staining her white kid evening glove, and releasing a heavy, funereal perfume. Again that image came to her of Ben kissing the girl in the Portland Road. The glitter in their eyes. The way their jaws had worked.

Then another image took over. Grace McFarlane. Beautiful, independent, knowing Grace.

She shredded another flower and ground its petals beneath her dancing slipper, and wondered what it would be like to be kissed by a man.

I wish I was old, she thought savagely, with everything behind me. I wish I was old and terrifying, like Great-Aunt May.

Like a sorceress summoned by an incantation, Great-Aunt May appeared on the upper terrace. She looked magnificent, in a forbiddingly tight gown of pewter
peau de soie
, with an aigrette of jet crowning her iron-grey hair, and long, narrow gloves of glacé kid.

‘Brought up to snare a duke,’ Mrs Herapath had told Madeleine at supper. ‘Punishing childhood. Punishing. Backboards. Tight-lacing. Governess used to make her practise walking across a ballroom for hours. Sandbag on the head. New dancing slippers. And you know how treacherous those satinwood floors can be.
How
she didn’t break an ankle I’ll never know. But you see, it was all part of the plan. Her destiny. To be presented at Court and become a Beauty, and snare a duke. And in the end, she managed everything but the duke. Turned out they were in short supply that Season. Or some such thing. At any rate, she didn’t “take”.’

Looking up at her now, Madeleine caught a glimpse of what had shaped the old despot. The predestined match had failed to appear, so she had resolved to have no-one. The world had robbed her of her birthright, and she had decided to despise the world. Everything she did expressed her disdain. The savage tight-lacing. The collars boned to the jaw. The rigid adherence to form. All taken to such extremes that they became an act of contempt for the very conventions she purported to honour.

I wonder if I’ll end up like that, thought Madeleine. A fearsome old witch who hasn’t touched another human being in fifty years.

Her throat tightened. Her eyes grew hot.
One must admit that they’re rather sweet. And so very much in love.

She ground another flower beneath her heel, and left the pergola and went out onto the lawn.

About thirty feet ahead of her, a man was walking up and down in the moonlight, smoking a cigar. She knew him instantly by his height and his fair hair and the set of his shoulders.

He turned his head and saw her, and for a moment they faced one another in silence.

She had wanted to see him again, but not like this. Not when she was in this strange angry mood, on the brink of tears. Slowly, not wishing to appear in retreat, she turned and walked back into the shadows beneath the pergola.

Then it occurred to her that far from indicating rejection, her behaviour might be taken as provocation. The unhurried turn, the bared nape of the neck. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair. Was that what she had become? An unhappy wife ineptly flirting with her own brother-in-law?

Setting her teeth, she quickened her pace through the pergola, across the lower terrace, round the west wing, and into the gardens at the front of the house.

A flight of shallow steps led down into a sunken parterre overlooking the carriageway. She found a bench near the steps, and sat down. The parterre was bordered with clipped lime trees and planted with English lavender and yellow allamanda. From where she sat, an avenue of stately royal palms led down to the sea, with torches staked in between. In the distance she could just make out the pale glow of the beach, and beyond it the lights of a steamer approaching Falmouth.

Apart from the torches, there were no illuminations. There didn’t need to be. Moonlight flooded the parterre with silver-blue radiance. She was not invisible.

She wondered if he would follow her; if he thought that she wanted him to. Well she did, didn’t she? That was why she was here. It was a sordid parody of the sort of coy hide-and-seek in which a courting couple might innocently indulge, but which this time was being played out between a married woman and her less than respectable brother-in-law.

Again she felt the pressure of unshed tears. Not
now
, she told herself.

She turned and watched him appear at the corner of the house, as she had known he would.

He made no pretence of finding her by chance. He walked swiftly through the garden and down into the parterre, halting at the foot of the steps about six feet from where she sat.

‘Please go,’ she said. ‘I don’t wish to talk to you.’

‘Then why did you come out here?’ he said in a low voice. ‘You could have gone back into the house. But you didn’t. You knew I’d follow you.’

She did not reply.

She watched him put his hand on the balustrade, and run his fingers over the lichen-crusted marble.

He was better groomed than before, but not by much. Sophie had told her that he kept his clothes in his old campaign chest ‘because it’s Abigail-proof. Abigail, that’s his dog. Otherwise she sleeps on them.’ His dress coat did indeed look as if it had spent several years inside a chest, his waistcoat seemed to date from the previous decade, and he had mislaid his gloves.

Somehow that made it harder. If he’d been impeccably elegant like his brother, it would have been easier to tell him to leave.

He glanced up to find her watching him, and for a moment they regarded each other in silence. Then he said, ‘You ought to be careful, you know.’ He realized how that sounded, and frowned. ‘I mean, there aren’t any braziers out here. If you were bitten, you might catch a fever.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said.

‘No. I don’t think you are.’

She was horrified to feel her eyes growing hot again. She drew a ragged breath. ‘And
I
really think that you should go.’

‘I don’t want to go.’

‘That’s not gentlemanly.’

He gave her his incipient smile. ‘You know the answer to that.’

She couldn’t look at him any more. She glanced down at her fists clenched in her lap. If it weren’t for these wretched evening gloves, she could dig her nails into her palms and really give herself something to cry about.

‘Madeleine—’

‘I’m
fine
,’ she said again. And nearly broke down.

‘Please
don’t
feel sorry for me,’ she said, when she had brought herself under control.

She was asking the impossible. Watching her fighting back the tears had been horrible. He had never felt so powerless.

She wore a gown of amber silk with a low, square neck edged in black. No jewels. Just a ribbon of amber satin in her hair. And when she turned away, he saw the little smooth bumps at the top of her spine. It was a physical effort to keep from reaching out and touching her.

‘Do
not
feel sorry for me,’ she said again, wiping her eyes with her fingers.

‘I can’t help it,’ he replied. ‘I should feel sorry for any woman married to my brother.’

There was a moment of appalled silence.

He shut his eyes. What had
possessed
him to say that? It might be the truth, but it sounded facetious and cruel. Like a bad imitation of Wilde.

‘I suppose’, she said, ‘you think you can get away with remarks like that because of your past.’

‘You’re right. I apologize. I left my manners in prison.’

‘How convenient for you. But I didn’t think that ex-convicts attended balls.’

‘Only this one,’ he said. ‘Cornelius likes to hedge his bets.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Now that they had shifted to neutral ground, she seemed calmer, and more inclined to talk. Perhaps she wanted to prove that she had not, a few moments ago, been on the verge of tears.

‘I once obliged his father’, he told her, ‘by taking Eden off his hands. As there’s still a chance that I might make a go of it, I always receive an invitation.’ And I always send my regrets, he thought, and stay away. Until tonight.

My God, he thought, what are you doing? This is Sinclair’s wife. His
wife
, for heaven’s sake.

But that argument hadn’t worked before, and it didn’t work now. He had been thinking about her for months. Wondering what she thought of him, and why in God’s name she had married Sinclair.

And that strange, edgy conversation at the Burying-place had raised more questions than it answered. At first she had been frightened of him, he was sure of it. But why? Then had come that moment when she’d looked into his eyes and seen something there, he didn’t know what, and after that she hadn’t been frightened any more. Again,
why
? She had the most expressive face. But strangely, although she wasn’t good at hiding her feelings, she was extremely adept at concealing the reasons behind them. Such an astonishing mix of secrecy and directness.

And she’d cross-examined him mercilessly about Ainsley, forcing him to tell her the worst of himself. He ought to resent that, but he couldn’t. He could only remember the way she had smiled at him.
That wasn’t a very good idea
, he had said.
No
, she had replied with a slight smile,
I don’t suppose it was.
In that moment he had felt a flash of pure recognition. There was no other word for it. He had
known
the person she was. He had known that they should be together.

She brought him back to the present by remarking that she hadn’t appreciated that the Trahernes had once owned Eden. ‘I thought it was the Durrants’,’ she said, smoothing her amber skirts.

It seemed an odd topic to pick. Why should she want to know about that? Or was she still making uneasy small-talk to regain her composure?