The Daughters of Eden Trilogy Page 4

  It was wonderful to burrow into the great mound of bedding, and her mother felt marvellously soft and warm to curl up against. She also smelled reassuringly of soap and eau-de-cologne – although the smell of baby still lingered in the air.

  ‘Sorry I was sick,’ Madeleine mumbled.

  She felt a gentle breath stirring the top of her hair, as if her mother were trying to kiss her but lacked the strength to reach. ‘You were wonderful,’ her mother said. ‘So grown-up. And brave. You’re amazing, Maddy. Quite, quite amazing.’

  For a while there was silence, and Madeleine thought her mother had fallen asleep. Then once again she felt the breath on her hair. ‘Tomorrow,’ her mother said drowsily, ‘when you’ve had breakfast and fetched Dr Baines, everything will be back to normal. The doctor will bring a nurse to look after us, and you won’t ever have to wash the baby again. And after that, you shall eat nothing but cake all day long, and I’ll have the biggest brandy in Christendom – and we’ll send an enormous bunch of carnations to Dr Philpott. And then we’ll put our heads together and decide how to execute Hannah.’

  Madeleine giggled.

  She fell asleep listening to the hiss and crackle of the fire, and her mother’s deep, even breathing.

  She awoke once in the night, when her mother rolled against her muttering ‘Cold . . . close the window . . . cold.’

  Half asleep, Madeleine got up to check the windows – although she knew they were shut, for Dr Philpott was very stern about draughts. The room was warm but she stoked the fire anyway, then crawled back to bed, and slept.

  She was jolted awake by the baby crying. There was no gentle drifting out of sleep. Suddenly she was awake and buffeted by cries.

  She lay on her back wondering when it would stop. She could see daylight through a gap in the curtains. She must have slept all night.

  Then she became aware of a chilly dampness down her right side, and a strange coppery smell. It must be the baby, she thought in disgust. She wished it had never arrived.

  Beside her, her mother still slept. Her face had a waxy tinge, and her expression was strangely absent. It was neither happy nor sad, but simply not there. As if she were dreaming a very deep dream.

  Madeleine touched her arm but she didn’t wake up. The arm felt hard, like a doll’s. Madeleine struggled out from under the bedclothes and knelt beside her. Gently she put her finger to her mother’s cheek. The flesh was cool and firm, like an unripe plum.

  The baby was still crying.

  Madeleine stayed kneeling on the bed. Her frock was cold and damp down the side that had lain against her mother, and when she put her palm to her thigh it came away glistening red. She shuffled crab-like off the bed and peeled back the blankets.

  Her mother lay in a great crimson stain that surrounded her like a monstrous butterfly.

  A line from Dr Philpott came back to her. Flooding is a danger, particularly during the first hours after the birth.

  What’s flooding? she thought numbly.

  This is, came the cold reply inside her head.

  The night before, her mother had assured her that the blood was ‘perfectly normal’. Perhaps she hadn’t known about flooding.

  It occurred to Madeleine that she ought to change the sheets. She couldn’t get the soiled one out from under her mother, so she left it in place and put a clean sheet on top, then covered that with fresh blankets from the spare room, and the counterpane. She pushed the soiled bedclothes out of the bathroom window as she had done the night before, and watched them land with a whump in the snow. Then she took the hot brick from the fender and wrapped it in a flannel and put it beneath her mother’s feet, to warm her up.

  The baby was still crying. Madeleine ignored it.

  Chapter Eight: After the Birth said that the mother may be given warm milk or beef tea to restore her strength. She padded out onto the landing, wondering how to make beef tea.

  The stairwell was freezing, and when she reached the bottom she couldn’t remember what she was doing there. She sat on the stairs, blinking at the pile of mittens, coat and sealskin hat which she’d left on the floor the day before. Jutting from the coat pocket was a corner of Mister Parrot’s green felt wing.

  The baby was still crying.

  On the mat by the front door she saw a letter. She went and picked it up. It was for her mother. The sender’s address was inscribed on the back in a tiny, extremely regular hand: Mrs Septimus Fynn, 24 Wyndham Street, Bryanston Square, Marylebone, London. She replaced the letter on the mat.

  The baby was still crying.

  She wondered how to make it stop. She padded back upstairs and into her own room, and changed her frock. She didn’t bother about changing her petticoats or stockings or drawers, because the blood hadn’t soaked through that far.

  Then she went into the bathroom and washed. In the mirror above the basin a white-faced girl with big dark eyes and wavy dark hair stared back at her.

  The baby was still crying. But Dr Baines would come soon, she told herself. Dr Baines would deal with the baby.

  She went back into her room and sat on the bed and looked out of the window. It was snowing so hard that she couldn’t see the beach beyond the garden wall.

  Then she remembered that Dr Baines came once a week on Tuesdays, and that he’d already been the day before yesterday, which meant that he wouldn’t come again for another five days.

  She thought about going to fetch him. But that would take hours, and she had a feeling that she oughtn’t to leave the baby on its own for so long.

  She thought about taking the baby with her, but it was far too heavy to carry all the way to Stranraer. So instead she decided to wait in the house until someone came.

  Someone would come soon. And they would look after her and the baby, and – and everything. Her thoughts skittered away from what ‘everything’ meant. She was hazily aware that her mother wasn’t going to wake up again, but whenever she started to think about that, a smooth blank wall rose up in her mind, and shut it out.

  And the baby was still crying. It didn’t sound as if it would stop.

  She got up and went to the door of her mother’s room. It was cavernous and dim, for she had forgotten to open the curtains, but on the floor by the bed she spotted Dr Philpott, where he had fallen during the night. Keeping her eyes averted from her mother, she crossed the room and picked him up, then retreated to the dressing-table and pulled out the stool. Her mother’s blue velvet bonnet lay on the seat, where she had put it the night before. Madeleine put it on the rug at her feet, and sat down.

  The dressing-table was covered with the familiar clutter. She looked at the ivory brush set on its little embroidered mat, and the Japanese lacquer ring-tray, the velvet mouchoir case, the jewel casket, the pincushion, and the crystal jar of rice powder that she was sometimes allowed to play with for a treat. She looked at the porcelain pot of almond and glycerine face cream, and the open packet of Barnett’s Hygienic Wood Wool Diapers for Ladies.

  She pushed everything to one side to make room for Dr Philpott, and turned to the index at the back. After searching for some time, she found what she was looking for: Infant, Management Of – Page 57.

  She turned to page fifty-seven and started to read.

  Chapter Four

  Northern Sudan, 12 March 1884

  God, what a country, thought Cameron Lawe as he shouldered his way through the Suakin bazaar.

  Mad-eyed hillmen and greasy merchants: fawning over you one moment, and the next, only too ready to slit your throat.

  It irritated him to think that in a sense his family’s wealth had originated here, in this squalid, stinking little midden of a town. The forebears of these same Egyptians and Berberines had done a brisk trade with Jamaica’s first settlers, and for two centuries the cane-fields had swallowed up a steady stream of slaves. So where was the difference between his own forebears and these thieving heathens?

  An heretical thought, and one which he had no desire to deal with
now. He didn’t want to deal with anything. He hadn’t slept for thirty-six hours.

  Once again he cursed the vagueness of the orders which had brought him here. Report to the Muhafaza at Suakin with the utmost despatch. Why? What for? No doubt it was just another glorious army muddle which had sent him on a headlong rush for no reason at all. A freezing overnight train from Scotland, an overcrowded steamer to Port Said and then another through the canal, a dust-choked train across the desert, and finally a cramped and stinking man-of-war along the Gulf.

  And then the coup de grâce: to be transferred to ‘special duties’ with another regiment. Special duties. What the devil did that mean?

  He stopped at a saddle-maker’s for directions. Ya sayyid, ayna al Muhafaza? Which way to the Muhafaza, the Governor’s House?

  Nihaya as-suq, ya Kabtan, khud al yamtin wa tumma al yasar ’an awwal az-zuqaq. End of the bazaar, Captain, turn right, and down the first alley on the left.

  As he said it, the saddle-maker slid him a curious look. It was the middle of the afternoon, and far too hot for Englishmen.

  Unless, thought Cameron, giving the saddle-maker a cold stare, one happens to have been born in the tropics.

  As he passed a spice-grinder’s stall he caught a heady wave of cumin and cloves, and without warning homesickness had him in its grip. Wherever he turned he saw reminders of Jamaica. The dust, the glare, the gaudy robes fluttering in the furnace wind: saffron, crimson, emerald and cobalt. The clamour of voices in a hundred tongues, the teeming black and brown faces. The oiled and intricate plaits of the ebony women.

  Why now? he thought angrily. Why here? Hang it all, you don’t have time for this.

  But if he was honest, he knew why Jamaica was so much in his thoughts. Because on his last day at Strathnaw he had taken a farewell ride in the park, and met a little girl in the snow.

  It had taken just one word – Falkirk – and all the anger, the pain, had come boiling to the surface. There is no justice, he had thought as he looked down into the child’s fearless, eager little face. Your father isn’t ‘Alasdair Falkirk’. He’s Ainsley Monroe. Ainsley Randolph Falkirk Monroe, of the Monroes of Fever Hill, Jamaica. And this isn’t some storybook playground for you to explore. It’s the ancient seat of the family that your father dragged through the mud.

  He had been appalled at the violence of his feelings. For twelve years he had driven Ainsley from his mind. It had been an act of will. A duty. And all it took was a single word to break down the wall.

  A butterfly touch on his arm dragged him back to the bazaar, and he glanced down to see an Abyssinian girl shyly offering food, and probably more. She was holding out some infernal mess of stewed goat on dhurra bread, and murmuring in Arabic about the pasha enjoying a ‘meal’ in her brother’s house.

  She had large, liquid dark eyes and polished copper skin, and most of his fellow officers would have judged her quite handsome enough for an hour or so. Cameron gave her a look that made her flinch, and pushed on. The thought of bedding a native girl turned his stomach.

  At last the bazaar was left behind, and he walked out into the heat and glare of the Keff, the medieval jumble of flat-roofed coral houses where the army was encamped. Skeletal goats trod piles of refuse with delicate hooves. Swarms of flies – the tiny, maddening flies of the Sudan – wavered and settled and rose again.

  Beyond the Keff he saw straggling patches of yam and watermelon, and then, with brutal suddenness, the desert: a vast heat-warped plain the colour of dried blood, broken only by sharp-toothed outcrops of stark black rock.

  It was a profoundly alien wilderness, and yet he felt a perverse attraction to it. At least out there he wouldn’t be fighting homesickness as well as Dervishes.

  Down an alley stinking of turmeric and goats, he found the Muhafaza: a run-down old building of battered white coral pitted with bullet holes. Ducking beneath the lintel, he entered the shadowy interior, and came face to face with Ainsley Monroe.

  He felt as if he’d been kicked in the chest.

  Ainsley had been writing at a rickety little desk by the window, his bright gold head bowed over his papers, and lit by a shaft of sunlight from a half-open shutter. A subaltern stood at his elbow, handing him order slips and clutching a ledger to his chest.

  Of course, thought Cameron dizzily. The child in the park had said that her father was a major in the 65th. Why didn’t you think of that before?

  Ainsley raised his head and saw him, and blinked once. He dismissed the subaltern and rose to his feet. When they were alone he came round to the other side of the desk and put out his hand. Cameron ignored it. Ainsley gave him an uncertain smile. ‘My God, Cameron, but this is a fine thing!’ His voice shook with emotion. ‘You’ve grown so tall! I quite have to look up to you now.’

  Cameron couldn’t speak. At one stroke he was a boy again, shocked and bewildered when this man whom he’d loved as a brother had shattered his world. ‘Major Falkirk, sir,’ he said with a stiff salute. ‘Captain Lawe reporting for duty.’

  Ainsley gave a startled laugh. Then with an ironic flourish he returned the salute.

  It had been twelve years, but he hadn’t changed at all. Those warm blue eyes. That wide mouth always ready for laughter. Although perhaps the resemblance to his father had become less marked over time, for he seemed to have lost some of Jocelyn Monroe’s straight-backed authority. Or perhaps, thought Cameron, he never had it at all.

  He watched Ainsley take a sheet of orders from the desk and hold them out. ‘Here you are,’ he said, still absurdly smiling. ‘These are for you.’

  Cameron took the papers in silence. 61377 Cameron Lawe, Captain, ‘B’ Company, 25th King’s Own Scottish Borderers: special attachment to the 65th York and Lancasters under Major Alasdair Falkirk, until such time as the relief of Tokar has been accomplished.

  Ainsley was still smiling. He seemed unable to stop. It made Cameron’s skin crawl. What, he thought in disbelief, does he expect? Does he imagine that after what he did he has only to smile, and I’ll fall on his neck?

  He folded the paper and put it in his tunic pocket. ‘Sir, on whose initiative was this arranged?’

  Ainsley looked surprised. ‘On mine, of course.’ He paused. ‘I couldn’t believe it when I saw your name in the transport lists. It was like a gift from God.’

  ‘I want a transfer back to my own corps.’

  Ainsley’s smile faltered. ‘I’d forgotten how blunt you can be.’

  ‘I prefer to call it straightforward.’

  ‘Indeed. Then I shall be straightforward too. Your request is denied.’

  ‘On what grounds?’

  ‘I need you here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I understand you speak Arabic.’

  ‘A little, but—’

  ‘That’s more than most. I need an interpreter.’

  ‘I’d be of no use to you, sir,’ Cameron said crisply. ‘In this region they speak a corrupt version of the tongue. A sort of – bastard version. If you will.’

  Their eyes locked.

  Ainsley said, ‘You can make this easy for yourself or you can make it hard. It’s your choice.’

  ‘What if I simply refuse to serve under you?’

  ‘Then I shall have you court-martialled for insubordination.’

  Cameron wondered if he meant it, and decided that he did. Beneath the gentleness Ainsley had always had a ruthless streak. Perhaps he wasn’t so unlike his father after all. ‘Why are you doing this?’ he said.

  Ainsley gave him a hooded look. ‘I have my reasons.’

  The Arabs say that when Allah made the Sudan, He laughed.

  They’re right. Savage laughter is the desert’s natural music. The cackle of hyenas. The bark of jackals. The leathery thwap of vultures squabbling over their prey.

  But on the eve of a battle, the desert holds its breath.

  They had set out from Suakin in the chill of the night, to avoid the blistering heat of the sun, and had joined the main c
olumn at an oasis where they struck camp. It was a dreary little place, no more than a well of brackish water beneath a barren bluff – and as the sun rose, the heat quickly became unbearable. They flung up a line of zeribas with walls of thorn-scrub and camel-saddles and camped inside, the officers in tents, the men in what shade they could create from sacking and store boxes. They would rest until nightfall, march by moonlight, and engage the enemy some time after dawn.

  It was nearly six in the evening, and stillness reigned: the peculiar taut stillness before a battle. Cameron couldn’t sleep. He told himself it was just the pain in his hand, for he’d taken a sabre-cut across the palm in a skirmish during the night, but he knew it was more than that. Something ugly was churning away inside his chest.

  Eventually he gave up and went for a walk. He left the zeriba and climbed a goat-track up the bluff, and found a patch of shade beneath a boulder near the top, and sat down. The shadows were lengthening but the heat was still intense. He could feel it beating down on his helmet, pressing on his skin like a blanket.

  He sat for an hour or so, and below him the column began to wake up. Blue smoke rose from cooking-fires. Men yawned and stretched in the eerie copper light.

  Snatches of talk drifted up to him. After the scrap at El Teb, the Dervishes would have rifles and carbines and Gatling guns. And they sent boys into battle, boys of no more than twelve, armed only with sticks and the love of Allah. But they had to be killed just the same, or they’d snap a horse’s legs and be all over the rider like a swarm of flies.

  Cameron watched the red men moving about below him in the red light, and wondered how many would be dead by this time tomorrow.

  Wherever he looked, the desert stretched to the horizon. The wind whirled tirelessly over the hot, crisp ground. Black sand drifted like infernal snow. This, he thought, is what hell must be like. The world has been blasted to cinders, and this is what remains.

  And still that sordid churning in his chest. What, honestly, did Ainsley expect? Forgiveness? An open-armed welcome for the prodigal son?

  At the foot of the bluff a group of Hussars crouched in a ring, urging a scorpion into battle against a yellow tarantula. A trio of Egyptian camel-drivers wandered over to watch. As Cameron followed the spider’s delicate circling, he was suddenly back in Jamaica, nineteen years before. It was his first week at Fever Hill, and he was six years old, crying beneath the guango tree, for he couldn’t understand why his parents had gone away. Where had they gone? When would they stop being dead? He had reached the hiccuping stage when Ainsley had wandered up: a gangly fifteen-year-old, but a god to a small boy. Ainsley had pretended not to notice the tears, and had said simply, Would you care to see my pet tarantula?