The Daughters of Eden Trilogy Page 18

  ‘I can’t! I can’t!’ gasped Sinclair, collapsing beside her.

  They lay side by side, staring into the darkness, while outside the young owls hooted and the crickets rang in their night song.

  ‘It’s this confounded heat,’ he muttered. ‘It saps my vitality.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Madeleine. ‘The heat is very trying.’

  ‘Ever since we arrived I have been out of sorts. The over-seasoned food. That filthy Negro charm.’

  Madeleine turned to look at him. ‘It was only a bird’s egg. I’m not sure what it could have—’

  ‘You never try to understand. Your only response is to contradict and to ridicule.’

  He got up and went to the looking-glass. His reflection was pale and drawn, and when he passed his hands over his throat he left faint red marks. ‘This is your fault,’ he said without turning round.

  She made no reply.

  ‘I should have known it would turn out like this,’ he said. ‘You are just like him.’

  ‘Like whom?’

  But she already knew. These days, his brother was never far from his thoughts. It was as if her encounter at Mrs Herapath’s had reawakened all his boyhood fears.

  ‘You are coarse,’ he said, still regarding his reflection in the looking-glass. ‘You have no life of the spirit.’

  She sat up and pushed her hair behind her ears. ‘So this is my fault. Because I spoke to your brother. Once. A week ago.’

  He raised a hand for silence.

  ‘Sinclair—’

  ‘We will not speak of it again.’

  ‘I think we must.’

  ‘No! You will do me the courtesy of obeying. In this if in nothing else.’

  The following day, it was as if their talk had never happened, except that the atmosphere of unspoken censure was even worse than before. Great-Aunt May looked quietly pleased, Clemency retired to her bed with a sick headache, and Jocelyn affected not to notice anything amiss. Clearly he was reluctant to interfere.

  At last the rains came. Every afternoon, great silver downpours rattled the slates, pounded the lawns, and made the carriageway run red. In the humid shadows of the great house, Madeleine and Sinclair circled each other with a cold courtesy that set her teeth on edge.

  Four interminable weeks dragged by. Four weeks of silences and denials, and little pained smiles. Eventually she could stand it no longer. She must have it out with him or go insane.

  She chose a teatime when Jocelyn was in his library and Sophie was asleep, but Clemency and May would both be present. She needed witnesses. That might make it harder for Sinclair to evade her as he had always done before. It might also help to keep her temper in check.

  The weather was blustery, so tea was laid in the drawing-room, a dim mahogany chamber dominated by a Winterhalter portrait of the eighteen-year-old May in presentation dress. On a sofa beneath it sat the present-day version: nearly sixty years older but no less narrow and uncompromising, in a savagely tight gown of rigid dark-grey moiré, and the ever-present grey kid gloves. Clemency, an insubstantial shadow in white muslin, sat on her right, and Sinclair on her left. They reminded Madeleine of a woodcut she had once seen of the Spanish Inquisition.

  ‘I’m not sure what crime I’m supposed to have committed,’ she said as she stirred her tea, ‘but I really do think that this has gone on for long enough, and that I should be given a chance to lodge a defence.’

  Clemency froze with her cup halfway to her lips, her extraordinary young-old face a mask of fright.

  May serenely finished pouring, and handed Sinclair his tea.

  He nodded his thanks to her, then gave Madeleine one of his meaningless little smiles. ‘There is no question of a defence,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ said Madeleine. ‘Then we are agreed that I’ve committed no crime.’

  Clemency threw her a horrified look and shook her head. May’s gaze slid from Sinclair to Madeleine, and back again.

  ‘You know,’ said Madeleine, ‘I didn’t intend to speak to your brother. At first I didn’t even know who he was. It was a chance encounter. And one which I’ve no desire to repeat.’

  In fact, that was a lie. Today was Cameron Lawe’s day for visiting the graves, and all morning she had been wondering whether to go and confront him. She knew it would be the height of folly, but over the weeks the suspicion had grown that he had seen something in her face which had jogged his memory. She kept picturing him alone up there at Eden, with all the time in the world to think and to remember. One way or another, she needed to know.

  Sinclair put his cup to his lips, then replaced it in the saucer and set it on the side table. ‘My brother’, he said, ‘is not a respectable man. That is the reason for my objection.’

  ‘I thought he’d served his sentence,’ said Madeleine. ‘I thought it was our Christian duty to forgive.’

  ‘Thank you for reminding me of my duty,’ said Sinclair. ‘And it might interest you to learn that we have forgiven him. That we pray daily for him to mend his ways. Sadly, that has not come to pass. Therein lies my objection to your conduct.’

  ‘I don’t understand. You mean he’s done something else?’

  ‘Of course you do not understand. That is why I had hoped that you would trust my judgement in this matter.’

  ‘Can’t you just tell me what he did?’

  He hesitated. Then he turned to May and Clemency. ‘My apologies for trespassing on a matter of some indelicacy.’

  May inclined her head. Clemency looked up from her teacup in bemusement.

  Sinclair turned back to Madeleine. ‘Something happens to the white man when he cohabits with the Negress.’

  She was startled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If you will permit me to continue?’

  She folded her hands in her lap and waited.

  ‘The nature of the white man’, he went on, ‘becomes coarsened by such an association. Animalized by the imbruted cravings of the creature with whom he has thrown in his lot.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Madeleine, ‘but this sounds a little trumped up. Are you asking me to believe that you object to my having talked to your brother for five minutes because he has a black mistress? As I understand it from Mrs Herapath, that rules out conversation with three-quarters of the planters on the Northside.’

  Sinclair pressed his red lips together. ‘The wife of a man of God’, he said quietly, ‘can never be too vigilant when it comes to her character. I had hoped that you might understand that.’

  ‘Of course I do. But a few words on a verandah don’t—’

  ‘You were seen with a compromised individual. You contaminated yourself. I see nothing “trumped up” in that.’

  His cobalt gaze locked with hers, and she read in it the coded meaning. And remember how especially vulnerable you are to contamination, by virtue of your birth.

  ‘Contamination’, she said between her teeth, ‘is too strong a word.’

  He gave a merry laugh. ‘I had not appreciated that you were so learned in doctrinal matters! I had believed that I was the Doctor of Divinity with the cure of souls.’

  She felt herself growing hot.

  ‘You did wrongly,’ he said. ‘You injured yourself, and you injured me. Moreover, you—’

  ‘This is ridiculous, I didn’t injure—’

  ‘Moreover,’ he went on, raising his voice to drown out hers, ‘you injured your sister.’

  ‘Sophie? Oh now really, I can’t agree with that!’

  ‘Which matters not at all, since you are not her legal guardian.’

  Alarmed, she met his gaze. His blue eyes were glittering. He was enjoying himself.

  She glanced down at her hands, tightly clenched in her lap. She saw now that she hadn’t done anything wrong, and that he knew it as well as she. It wasn’t about that. It was about control. It was about ramming home the fact that he was the husband, and she the wife – and, as he was fond of pointing out, ‘when Man and Woman ride the same horse, Woman
must always ride behind’. Until he had her public acknowledgement of that, he would never let up. He would go on and on until she was as mad as Clemency.

  ‘Well then,’ she said, struggling to keep her voice steady. ‘Let’s bring this war of attrition to an end, shall we? I apologize. Wholly and without reservation. There. Is that better?’

  May folded her ringless fingers in her lap. Clemency laughed her noiseless little laugh and clapped her hands.

  Sinclair gave Madeleine a considering look. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Henceforth we will speak no more of this. I would simply ask that in the future you exercise greater discretion.’

  She couldn’t trust herself to speak.

  He rose, and turned to his aunt. ‘I shall be writing in my study for the rest of the afternoon. It would be a great indulgence if I were not disturbed.’

  After he had gone, Clemency gave Madeleine her propitiating smile. ‘There, now! Saying sorry wasn’t so very difficult, was it?’

  Madeleine did not reply. Her hands were still clenched in her lap. In the dim brown light they looked yellow and sere and prematurely aged.

  She heard a stiff rustle of silk as Great-Aunt May rose to her feet. ‘Sinclair’, she remarked, ‘has the most perfect respect for the proprieties of any being I know. One might go so far as to call it a reverence. Others would do well to emulate him.’

  Madeleine raised her head and met her eyes. They were ice-blue and startling, with rims of angry red. ‘What sound advice,’ she said crisply, rising in her turn. ‘I think I shall take a turn about the lawns, the better to reflect upon it. That is,’ she added, ‘if I am permitted to leave the house during daylight hours?’

  Something flickered in the ice-blue gaze. ‘I was not aware’, said Great-Aunt May, ‘that you were subject to any restriction.’

  The wind had dropped by the time Madeleine made her way out onto the lawns, still buttoning her dust-coat in her haste to get away.

  After the shadowy great house it was like walking into a furnace. She didn’t care. She felt a perverse satisfaction at the thought of the ‘crime’ she was about to commit. Sinclair would be outraged. How he would enjoy that.

  Over the Cockpits she could see a thick bank of slate-grey cloud, and distant lightning flashing, on-off, on-off, like a lamp flaring in a darkened room.

  Storm on the way, she thought. Good. Let it come.

  She glanced back at the house, and caught a glint of sunlight on the upper gallery. That would be Great-Aunt May, donning her steel-rimmed spectacles. The old witch had lost no time in regaining her post.

  Take a good long look, Madeleine told her silently. This ought to give you something to talk about.

  She turned and made her way across the lawns. There was no-one about. The helpers were all in their quarters down by the river, the dogs dozing in the undercroft. Only a john crow lazily circled overhead.

  She made her way up the rise and over the other side to the Burying-place. It was a peaceful, sunny clearing: untended and seldom visited, except by Clemency. Tall coconut palms and wild lime trees enclosed a dusty green hollow, where a dozen raised barrel tombs dreamed away the decades in the long silver grass.

  It was deserted. Cameron Lawe had not yet arrived. Or perhaps, thought Madeleine with a start, he’s already been and gone. What a fine irony that would be. You decide to brave universal condemnation, only to find that you’ve missed your chance.

  She waded through the grass to the poinciana tree which shaded the tomb of Jocelyn’s young wife Kitty. Beside it, a low slab of blue slate – robbed of its inscription by the weather – made a convenient seat. A gap in the trees gave her far-reaching views to the south: down past the tangled ruins of the old slave hospital, over the emerald expanse of the nursery cane-pieces, to the cattle pastures and the distant treetops of Providence, and the blue-grey Cockpits beyond. And somewhere up there, hidden among the trees, lay Eden. With an effort of will she pushed the thought aside.

  She took a deep breath, and smelt lime blossom and spicy red dust, and the sharp green tang of the asparagus ferns among the graves. Around her the long grass buzzed with crickets. Above her head the poinciana was brilliant with vermilion flowers and alive with sugarquits.

  Some of her anger and frustration seeped away, leaving in its place a distant sadness. To her right stood the little white marble tomb of Clemency’s baby, lovingly adorned with fresh flowers every night. Elliot Fraser Monroe, died 1873, aged two days. Her half-brother. The last remaining trace of her father at Fever Hill.

  And before her she could just make out the deep Gothic inscription on her grandmother’s tomb. Time had dulled its edges, but not the pain behind it. That still shouted to heaven.

  Here lies Catherine Dorothy Monroe, née McFarlane

  1831–1850

  and with her the blasted expectations of an adoring husband.

  Death, thou hast obtained thy victory.

  She thought about the love which had made Jocelyn stay faithful to a memory for a lifetime. She thought about the love which had compelled her parents to forfeit everything they had in order to be together. She thought about her cramped and haunted existence with Sinclair.

  A breeze stirred in the coconut palms to a pattering mockery of rain. An egret sped across the sky, shining white against deepening grey.

  She put her hands by her sides and felt the hot, smooth slate beneath her palms.

  You chose this life, she told herself. You went into it with your eyes open. Now you must make the best of it.

  Yes, but how?

  She plucked a grass stem and turned it in her fingers. She had never felt so alone.

  A movement at the edge of her vision made her start. She turned to see Cameron Lawe standing at the edge of the trees, watching her.

  What was he thinking? Was he remembering that long-ago meeting in the snow?

  She rose to her feet and stared back at him across twenty feet of silver grass and barrel tombs. Her heart was hammering against her ribs. ‘I’d quite forgotten’, she lied, ‘that it’s your day for visiting.’ Her voice was steady, but she had to clasp her hands together to stop them shaking.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said.

  ‘I expect you’d rather be alone.’

  ‘No, no, I—’

  ‘But you’ve come all this way, and brought flowers.’ She coloured. That sounded bizarrely like a hostess greeting an unexpected guest.

  He frowned at the flowers in his hand: an artless bunch of large spiky white blooms and heliconia, its great scarlet claws tipped with gold. The white ones were ginger lilies. A memory surfaced of something her mother used to say. At Eden there are ginger lilies as big as your hand, and moonflowers that only bloom at night . . .

  Not now, she told herself fiercely. She was horrified to feel her throat beginning to tighten.

  ‘In fact,’ he said, still frowning, ‘I did rather wonder if you’d be here.’

  A cold wave washed over her. ‘Why? What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I suppose – only that I hoped you might be.’ He tossed his hat and riding-crop in the grass and ran a hand through his hair. ‘I’m sorry, that wasn’t very proper. But it’s the truth.’

  She didn’t know how to take that. What did he mean? Had he recognized her?

  He was looking down at the flowers in his hand, his face unreadable. Over the past ten years he seemed to have learned how to hide his feelings. But she still sensed in him that capacity for violence and tenderness that she had sensed as a child. If he knew her secret, he would be a formidable enemy.

  To break the silence she said, ‘How did you get here? I didn’t see you arrive.’

  He gestured over his shoulder towards the old slave hospital. ‘There’s a track down there. It joins the road up to my estate. That’s where I left my horse.’

  ‘Ah.’ She realized that she was twisting her hands together, and that he had noticed. She thrust her hands into the pockets of her dust-coat. She said, ‘Sophie tell
s me that I was rude to you the other day.’

  ‘No, no,’ he said unconvincingly.

  ‘She says that I practically cut you dead.’

  For a moment some of the tension left his features, and he gave her that incipient smile which seemed habitual to him. ‘Your sister has strong views.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, she does.’

  He hesitated. ‘Those crutches of hers. What is it, polio?’

  ‘Tuberculosis of the knee.’

  ‘Ah. And – is she—’

  ‘Getting better. Oh yes.’ But she sounded more certain than she felt. Over the past weeks, Sophie’s progress seemed unaccountably to have slowed.

  She watched him approach the tomb on the other side of Kitty’s, and cast last month’s shrivelled flowers into the asparagus ferns, and place the ginger lilies at the head. He seemed ill at ease. Was that because he had been having doubts about her? Or was it more innocent than that? Had he simply lost the habit of polite conversation?

  She watched him studying the tomb. The inscription read: Alice Amelie Monroe, née Vavasour, 1821–83. What, she wondered suddenly, had Jocelyn’s mother to do with Cameron Lawe?

  ‘She was my great-aunt,’ he said as if she’d spoken aloud. ‘When I was a boy, she was a widow, living up at Providence. She used to swoop down and snatch us away from our lessons, and take us for long rides in the hills. I adored her.’

  ‘So does that mean – was your mother a Vavasour?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry, I thought you knew that.’

  ‘Sinclair never speaks of his parents.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Vavasour was a Huguenot name. Like Durrant. It was an unsettling feeling to know that they both came of the same stock.

  ‘In Jamaica,’ he explained, ‘everyone’s related to everyone else. For instance, Jocelyn married a McFarlane, whose grandmother married a Traherne, whose daughter married a Barrett, whose cousin married a Durrant—’ He broke off.

  ‘And the Durrants’, she supplied, ‘bring us neatly back to the Monroes.’

  There was an awkward silence. She shut her eyes. What self-destructive madness had prompted her to blurt that out?

  When she opened them again, it was to find him studying her face. Here it comes, she thought. She lifted her chin and met his eyes. Let’s get this out in the open, she told him silently. I dare you to remember.