The Daughters of Eden Trilogy Read online

  The next time she awakens, it’s with a start, as if she’s fallen off a step; and this time she knows exactly what’s missing. But it’s not ‘what’. It’s ‘who’.

  Sophie is in Burntwood. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Burntwood is a bad place. Naughty Sophie. Come out of there at once.

  Sophie is in Burntwood. But where are you?

  She opens her eyes and sees only white: a perfectly white room. No looking-glass, no pictures on the walls, no furniture except for this bed.

  Fragments of memory return. Sinclair sitting at his desk: his cobalt necktie exactly matching the colour of his eyes. You are ill. I have taken medical advice. I know I am right.

  Cameron looking down at her with that distant expression. I feel as though I don’t know you any more. But I suppose the truth is, I never did.

  But Sophie’s in Burntwood, and that’s a bad place. Bad place. And there’s no-one to get her out. Oh dearie me.

  And you’re not helping, are you, Maddy? Everyone’s so cross with you. Cameron. Sinclair. Even Mrs Herapath; Sinclair saw to her too. I regret, she had said in her curt, shaky little note, that in view of what your husband has told me about your extraordinary deception, I must decline all further communication.

  So everyone is cross with you and no-one will help, and it’s all down to you, Maddy, oh yes it is. You shall just have to sort it out on your own.

  Don’t want to sort it out. Don’t know how to get to Burntwood. Don’t know how to get away from Sinclair.

  What about killing him? Now there’s an idea. Lettice always said you were bad. And remember, you’ve still got Ben’s gun. It’s in the bottom of the trunk, rolled up in a pair of combinations. The eau-de-nil ones with the rosebuds round the hem. Heigh-ho.

  The door opens. She shuts her eyes and pretends to be asleep, and listens as someone comes in and stands by the bed. It must be a man, for its tread is heavy, and she can hear it breathing noisily through its nose.

  She opens her eyes a fraction, then shuts them again.

  It’s that Dr Valentine. She doesn’t like him. He was waiting for her when they got to Providence. And he’s so vain. He brushes his silver hair forward to cover his bald spot, and he deepens his voice to make it more commanding, and he obviously believes that he has a penetrating stare.

  He reminds her of a vampire. Dr Valentine Vampire, with his brushed-forward hair and his deep voice which he thinks is so commanding. But he doesn’t frighten her. She can handle him with her eyes shut. In fact she’s doing it right now, by making him think that she’s fast asleep.

  Everyone calls her a liar, and of course they’re right. She’s an expert at lying. She jolly well ought to be, she’s had enough practice. So just watch her now.

  ‘Mrs Lawe,’ says Dr Valentine in his deep, firm voice. ‘Mrs Lawe. Wake up.’

  Slowly, hazily, she opens her eyes.

  The doctor is leaning over her – commandingly, of course – and his face is so close that she can count the pores on his nose.

  She gives him a drowsy little frown, as if she has indeed just woken up.

  He pats her hand. ‘There’s a good girl. Now tell Dr Valentine how you feel.’

  Slowly, dazedly, she blinks at him. Then she gives him a weak, scared, tremulous little smile. A sort of Clemency-smile. Yes, that’s it. Let’s pretend to be Clemency.

  Out loud she whispers in a soft, trembly Clemency-voice, ‘Th-thirsty, doctor . . . Very thirsty . . . Where am I?’

  He gives a satisfied nod. ‘To be sure, to be sure, of course you are thirsty. And no doubt hungry as well. You shall have a bowl of semolina directly, and a large glass of goat’s milk.’

  How perfectly horrid, she thinks. Out loud she murmurs, ‘Thank you, doctor,’ in a grateful Clemency-whisper.

  ‘Excellent,’ he says. ‘Now you must be very good and lie here quietly, and do exactly as I say. And by and by, you shall begin to feel a great deal better.’

  ‘Yes, doctor,’ she whispers, and snuggles into the pillow and shuts her eyes. Your little Clemency-patient is so sleepy, doctor, and so confused. All this talking has tired out her poor weak brain.

  He takes her pulse and feels beneath her jaw, and she restrains an urge to bite him on the wrist. Finally, with a satisfied ‘Capital, capital,’ he leaves the room, and a moment later she hears the key turn in the lock.

  Yes, doctor, she thinks as she opens her eyes, I shall do exactly as you say. I shall drink my horrid goat’s milk, and eat my horrid semolina. And then when I’m strong again, and it’s night-time and you and Sinclair and the housekeeper are asleep, I shall clamber out of that window over there, the one with the louvres coming loose, and I shall sneak round behind the croton bushes and find my trunk and my clothes and my gun, and steal Sinclair’s horse – or maybe the carriage-horse, or maybe yours, doctor, if I like the look of it – and that’s the last you’ll be seeing of me, Dr Valentine Vampire, with the commanding voice and the penetrating stare.

  She stifles a spurt of laughter.

  Is that the laudanum, making her silly? Oh well. It’s really rather nice. But watch out, Sinclair. Your wife has become a drug fiend.

  ‘Drug fiend,’ she giggles helplessly into her pillow.

  Eliphalet Tait is just about full up to the neck with wife trouble. All damn week that Phoebe’s been lip-lashing and calling him spineless salt water nigger, just because they got nothing fancy to take for Free Come party over at Disappointment.

  Well all right, he blazes into her, I go get you some fancy damn thing, woman!

  Which is why he’s been stumbling round all night long in this damn dark Providence Wood, chewing on bissy nut to keep himself awake, and trying to poach little something to sweeten her up.

  Lord God, but it dark in here! All tangle-up with hogmeat and wiss and wild pine, he near to break his damn leg! Still, his luck’s starting to sugar, for he’s just caught himself three little bald-pates, all nice and fat.

  And now he’s at the edge of the wood, looking down on buckra house in the moonshine. And he’s just deciding to go and rest up in the stables till Cousin Sukey and old Aaron come awake and he can visit with them awhile, when he walks slap into spider-web, right slap across his face.

  Now Eliphalet’s not no fool. He knows this a warning sign: that little Master Anancy spider-man trying to tell him to stay back. So Eliphalet apologizes to spider-man for messing with his place, and thanks him for the warning. And he’s just about to turn and go, when down below, out the buckra house, he sees a woman in white come creeping soft, soft, towards the stable door.

  Eliphalet near to chokes on his bissy nut. Lord Master God! Is what all this now? Buckra woman creeping about at three o’clock in the night?

  He gets down behind rockstone at edge of the trees, and peers over the top.

  Even for buckra woman, she’s walking strange: like she’s all liquored up or dizzy or took sick. He wonders if maybe she’s the wife of that pinch-mouth parson over at Fever Hill who maintains she’s gone moonshine mad.

  Hn, thinks Eliphalet. Mad, I don’t know. But she wants bad to get away from her man.

  He sees her go into the stable, then come out again riding horse – and she’s not riding it sideways like up-class buckra women always do, but just like a man.

  Peculiar strange, he tells himself. And he sits down in the deep darkness behind the rockstone to consider awhile.

  He must a fell in sleep, for when he comes awake, Brother Sun’s starting up into the big blue, and crac-cracs are buzzing roundabout, and jabbering crows are jabbering away in the thatch-palm above his head. And down at the buckra house there’s a lot, lot a trouble.

  Cousin Sukey’s outside the cook-house wringing her hands, and old Aaron’s running fast as he can for the stables, and that parson’s pacing, pacing in the yard, looking angrified and yelling for his horse.

  Eliphalet swallows hard, and stays careful still. Eliphalet, he tells himself, don’t you get tangle-up in this. You stand up soft now, and
take foot and run like black ant back to your own self yard. And you give Phoebe those bald-pates to make her sweet, and have nice little party over at Disappointment, and swallow your damn spit.

  And you keep one careful fact in that head you got. Far as you concern, you never was here at all.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The dew had been heavy overnight, so his wife’s trail was easy to follow.

  For an hour he had tracked her, and despite the heat and the discomfort he had almost enjoyed the ride, for with every passing moment he felt more certain that he would find her. She was no match for him. Instead of going north towards Fever Hill she had headed east, in a transparent attempt to throw him off the scent. Did she take him for a fool? Or did she think that he lacked his brother’s woodsmanship?

  He reached a fork in the track, and reined in. Curious. She should have turned left, heading down through the hill-pastures of Turnaround, past Stony Gap, and through the cane-pieces of Glen Marnoch towards Fever Hill. Instead she had taken the right-hand track, heading south-east up a narrow path that wound into the waterless labyrinth of the Cockpits.

  The Cockpits? Why? Was this some kind of broken-backed attempt to reach Eden across country? Or had she simply made the wrong choice and lost her way?

  He dismounted, unhooked his water bottle from the saddle, and went to rest beneath the thorn tree that marked the parting of the tracks. The patchy shade brought some relief from the relentless heat. His head was throbbing, his mouth gritty with dust. The glare off the white rocks hurt his eyes.

  He drank deeply, then moistened his handkerchief and cooled his face and neck and wrists. He glanced up the right-hand track, and saw jagged white rocks and thorn-scrub, and the towering, eerily conical hills of the Cockpits. For the first time since he had started out, he felt a flicker of real unease.

  He had always hated the Cockpits. Arid, demon-haunted, fit only for blacks. It enraged him when Mrs Herapath held forth about their ‘untamed beauty – their savage and desolate allure’. What allure? They were the mouth of hell.

  Still, he told himself, what of that? It’s such rough country, she’ll make slow progress. She can’t be far ahead now.

  He stoppered the water bottle and remounted and kicked his horse to a trot.

  The morning wore on, and the track became steeper and narrower, forcing him to slow to a walk. Twisted thorn trees clung to the slopes. Beneath them the ground was a dreary confusion of tumbled boulders and spiky wild pine and the rampant, dusty creeper the blacks called hogmeat. The crickets pulsed to the throbbing in his temples. Midges thronged the air like tiny invisible demons.

  And that constant feeling of being watched. Often he twisted round in the saddle, convinced that something was observing him from the rocks. But there was never anything there; or never anything that he could see.

  He wished Dr Valentine were with him. But the doctor had returned to town the previous evening to check on his surgery, and Sinclair had been alone when the housekeeper had roused him with the news that his wife had gone. Some time before dawn she had stolen the carriage-horse and gone. But how? And why?

  It hadn’t taken him long to come up with the answer. Somehow, she had learned the truth about the pickney’s death. Perhaps her sister had told her; perhaps she had found out by some other means. It didn’t matter. The point was, she knew. And now she meant to tell the authorities, and bring him down.

  He stood to lose everything. Position. Inheritance. Perhaps even his life. And all because of a Negro nobody and an hysterical woman.

  ‘Calm, calm,’ he whispered aloud. She can’t have told anyone yet. All you have to do is find her. Take her back. And let Dr Valentine work his magic. Depend upon it, Mr Lawe, she will be a different woman. Obedient, well regulated – and compliant.

  Ahead of him the track led down into a rocky hollow like a small natural amphitheatre, before snaking up the other side and round the crest of the hill. The hollow was puzzlingly familiar. Nothing more than a handful of thorn and calabash trees, and a tumble of enormous boulders. The rasp of the crickets was deafening in the noonday heat.

  Ah, now he remembered. Years before, he had come here on a shooting trip with his brother and the old man. He disliked hunting, but on this occasion he had bagged more than his brother, so the memory was sweet.

  He put his horse cautiously forward down the rocky slope.

  And wasn’t there, he wondered, something else about this place as well? Something vaguely unsettling? But what?

  He was trying to remember when he rounded a spur, and came upon Madeleine.

  She was sitting with her back to him beneath a calabash tree: head down, arms about her knees, as if exhausted, or taken ill. She hadn’t heard his approach, but her horse, tethered a few yards behind her, raised its head from the thistles and pricked its ears.

  Mouth dry, heart pounding, Sinclair slid from the saddle and tied his horse to a thorn bush, and moved silently forward.

  He had passed her horse and was no more than twenty feet away from her when she turned and saw him. He froze. For a moment they stared at one another in silence.

  ‘You,’ she mouthed. Her lips formed a perfect O of alarm.

  She was bizarrely dressed, no doubt having seized whatever had come to hand. A wide straw hat with white silk roses round the brim; a pair of cream calfskin ankle-boots; and a wildly unsuitable morning dress of flimsy white muslin painted with little bronze leaves. When she got to her feet, he saw how she swayed. She was still drugged. Thank God.

  ‘Why did you run?’ he said.

  She backed away. ‘After what you did? How can you ask?’

  A cold weight sank within him. So now he was sure. She did know about the pickney.

  He took out his handkerchief and wiped the back of his neck. ‘You must know’, he said, ‘that you cannot run from me. You have nowhere to go.’

  She threw a rapid glance over her shoulder, and took another step down the slope, stumbling on the uneven ground.

  He held out his hand. ‘Come. I’ll take you home. We will forget all about this.’

  Like a rebellious child she thrust out her lower lip and shook her head. Her eyes had the same animal watchfulness as her sister when he’d confronted her in the gallery. Yes, he thought, she is an animal, a frightened animal. She simply needs firmness, and all will be well.

  Still holding out his hand, he took a step towards her. ‘I can’t let you tell anyone,’ he said. ‘Come, now. Be reasonable.’

  She took another step back and lost her footing, and fell to her knees in a clump of hogmeat. The ground sagged beneath her as if she’d gone into a ditch. ‘Sinclair . . .’ she said. She sounded surprised.

  ‘Come,’ he said again.

  The next few seconds seemed to stretch, and he took in the details with extraordinary clarity. He saw how the earth gently folded beneath her, and crumbled and began to fall away. He saw how she grabbed at the creepers around her with both hands. He heard the vegetable snap as they gave way, and the rattle of falling pebbles, and he saw the red dust rising to envelop her.

  She looked up at him, her face blank with shock. ‘Sinclair – I can’t—’ She clutched at the creepers and slid down, down, and disappeared into the choking cloud of dust.

  The dust was blinding, all-enveloping. He whipped out his handkerchief and covered his mouth, and dropped to his knees and crawled towards the edge. He could hear nothing but the rattle of falling rubble and his own rasping coughs.

  Through the red haze he made out a ragged hole some ten feet across, and as the dust slowly settled, he saw her at the bottom, lying in a mound of creepers and rubble. He leaned over as far as he dared. ‘Madeleine? Are you all right?’

  She coughed, and sat up, still coughing, and wiping her eyes. She touched her forehead and winced, and finally nodded. ‘I – I think so. Yes.’

  ‘The creepers must have broken your fall.’

  She sneezed. ‘What – is this place?’

  �
��A sink-hole, I think. Yes, it must be. I remember now. They’re everywhere around here. The creepers grow over the edge, so it’s hard to see them. We were never allowed to come here as boys.’

  Still probing her forehead with her fingertips, she got unsteadily to her feet. ‘That’, she said, ‘I can understand.’ She peered up at him. ‘How am I going to get out?’

  He had been wondering that himself. The walls were nearly sheer, and about eighteen feet deep. Far too deep for him to reach her by leaning over. He looked round for some creeper which might bear her weight but saw only hogmeat: as thin as knitting wool and brittle as honeysuckle.

  Then an idea came to him. Sights and sounds fell away. He sat back on his heels and wiped his face with his handkerchief.

  ‘Sinclair?’ his wife called out.

  No, he told himself. No. This is marsh-fire. A false hope sent by the Evil One to tempt the unwary.

  ‘Sinclair?’

  Unless, he thought. Unless it is not the Evil One who has put this into your mind. But God.

  ‘I didn’t push you,’ Sinclair said as he peered down at her.

  ‘Well I know that,’ she snapped, rubbing the bump on her forehead. Her head was pounding, and the laudanum was making her nauseous, but strangely, the shock of the fall seemed to have cleared her wits. She felt sharper than she had done in days. And furious with herself. Of all things, to fall down a sink-hole. Now there was nothing to do but wait to be rescued – by the very man she had been trying to escape.

  Sinclair was still peering down at her, solemn and unblinking. He gave himself an odd little shake, as if to banish some unwelcome thought, then leaned down and extended his hand as far as he could. ‘Here,’ he said. She could hear the strain in his voice. ‘See – if you can reach.’

  She reached for him on tiptoe, but his hand was a good six feet above hers. She took hold of a creeper snaking up the wall, and tried to pull herself up. She had climbed a foot or so when the creeper gave way and she fell back painfully onto the rocks. She sat up, rubbing a bruised hip. ‘It’s no good,’ she said. ‘Do you have any rope?’