‘Sophie’s making one of her about-turns,’ said Cameron with a laugh. And Maddy smiled at him, and helped her little sister to find a place for the potted duppy tree on the verandah, where it gradually died.
Then Maddy said, what about growing something which grows on duppy trees, instead? So they bought a book on Jamaican orchids, and Cameron took Sophie into the forest behind the house to find her first specimens.
Thinking of that now as the train rattled through the hill pastures on its way to Montego Bay, Sophie felt a sudden uprush of love for them both – and a tug of concern. She needed to see for herself that they were happy and well. She needed to dispel the vague impression which she’d gathered from Maddy’s last letter that something wasn’t quite right.
Pushing the thought aside, she turned her head and watched the pastures slipping past. Acid-green guinea grass rippled in the wind, dotted with ambling white Hindu cattle. On a dusty red track a black woman carried a basket of yams on her head with easy grace.
I’m home, thought Sophie. She still couldn’t believe it. For three years she had dreamed of coming back to Jamaica. She’d been dizzy with homesickness every time another letter arrived from Eden. Then suddenly it all seemed to happen in the blink of an eye. School was over, and she was on her way out from Southampton. Now, here she was on the last leg of the journey. Kingston was far behind them, and Spanish Town and Four Paths. Such well-loved names. The hours she had spent as a child, lying on the Turkey rug in her grandfather’s study at Fever Hill, gazing up at the great tinted map.
On the opposite seat, Mr van Rieman cleared his throat. ‘According to this,’ he said, tapping the journal in his hand, ‘the Jamaican sugar planter is fast becoming an endangered species. It says that since the slaves were freed, hundreds of plantations have been turned over to cattle, or simply abandoned.’ He regarded Sophie over his wire-rimmed spectacles, his small eyes bright with the pleasure of finding fault. ‘I take it, Miss Monroe, that such will not be the fate of your brother-in-law’s estate?’
She shook her head and smiled. ‘Somehow Cameron always manages to keep Eden afloat.’
‘Indeed,’ said Mr van Rieman, looking slightly put out.
‘Eden,’ said Mrs van Rieman brightly. ‘What a lovely name.’
Sophie threw her a grateful look, and almost forgave the fact that for most of the journey the Americans’ small, baleful son Theo had been surreptitiously kicking her leg whenever his mamma wasn’t looking.
The train pulled into Appleton for the lunchtime stop, and they stepped stiffly down into the blaze of the November sun. Jamaica broke over them like a wave. Pickneys raced about between people’s legs. Higglers crowded the platform, plying their wares. Butter-dough! Paradise plums! All sort a mango! Paperskin, Christmas, cherry-cheek!
Sophie breathed in the spicy scent of the red dust, and the familiar rhythms of patois. Mrs van Rieman clutched her husband’s arm and bemoaned his choice of holiday destination. She’d never seen so many darkies in her life.
Mr van Rieman led the way to the Station Hotel with the air of a missionary tackling darkest Africa. Twice he voiced his astonishment that Jamaica possessed no proper guidebook of its own. Plainly any country which lacked its own Baedeker hadn’t yet dragged itself clear of the swamp of barbarism.
Luncheon was awkward, with the van Riemans questioning Sophie in ringing tones, while the rest of the dining-room listened with open ears. Sophie swallowed her pride and answered as best she could, for the Americans had been kind to her when they’d met in the ticket office at Kingston – albeit politely appalled at the notion of a young lady of nineteen travelling alone.
‘If I have this right, Miss Monroe,’ said Mrs van Rieman, ‘you’re ten years younger than your sister, who has two darling little children?’
Sophie’s mouth was full of pepperpot, so she could only nod.
‘And what about you?’ said Mrs van Rieman with an arch twinkle. ‘Any sweethearts yet?’
Sophie gave her a fixed smile. ‘No,’ she replied. A woman at the adjacent table threw her a pitying glance.
‘Miss Monroe is above such trivial concerns,’ put in Mr van Rieman with ponderous wit. ‘Miss Monroe is a bluestocking! She intends to study medicine.’
‘I’m only thinking about it,’ said Sophie quickly. ‘There’s a clinic near my brother-in-law’s estate, and I thought I’d try to get some experience there, and see if I like it.’ She flushed. There was no need to tell them all that. But she always talked too much when she was embarrassed. It was one of her besetting sins.
‘I believe you spent your early childhood in London?’ said Mrs van Rieman. ‘Then you came out to Jamaica, as you had family here?’
Again Sophie nodded. Then, because she was nearly home and feeling a little reckless, she said, ‘Also I was ill, and Maddy thought the tropics would do me good. I had TB.’
There was a small silence.
‘Tuberculosis,’ repeated Mr van Rieman with a ponderous nod. His wife put her hand to her throat. The other diners applied themselves to their food.
‘Tuberculosis of the knee,’ Sophie explained. ‘That’s what made me interested in medicine. But I’ve been free of it for the past seven years. There’s no danger of infection.’
‘Of course not,’ said Mrs van Rieman faintly.
The waiter arrived with a bowl of fruit. Sophie reached for a naseberry, and little Theo made to do the same. His mother snatched his hand away. She gave Sophie a nervous smile. ‘Too acid,’ she murmured.
Sophie wished she’d pleaded a headache and stayed on the train. Or at least kept quiet.
Beside her, Theo kicked the table leg in a repetitive tattoo. ‘Did you have a splint?’ he said loudly.
‘Theo, hush,’ whispered his mother.
‘But did you?’
‘Yes,’ said Sophie. ‘A big clumpy iron one that I had to wear all the time for two years. I hated it.’
‘Were you always falling over?’ said Theo with a hint of contempt.
‘Not to begin with, because I wasn’t allowed to get up. I had to lie on the verandah and read. After that I had crutches. Then I fell over.’
‘Do you limp?’
‘Theo!’ said Mrs van Rieman.
‘No,’ lied Sophie. In fact she did limp a little, when she was tired or self-conscious. But she wasn’t going to tell that to the entire Station Hotel. They were already feeling sorry enough for her as it was: the sickly, bookish younger sister without a sweetheart.
‘If you never took the splint off,’ said Theo, ‘how did you wash?’
‘That’s enough,’ snapped Mrs van Rieman, and the subject was dropped.
As they rejoined the train, Sophie considered offering to move to another compartment. But she guessed that that would only embarrass the van Riemans. So instead they all settled back into their seats with self-conscious smiles, and Sophie gazed out of the window and longed for home.
Gradually, the cattle pastures gave way to cane-pieces. They were in sugar country now, and the heavy scent of molasses drifted in through the window.
Someone’s starting crop-time early, she thought. She breathed in deeply. The smell of home.
The familiar names flashed past. Ginger Hill, Seven Rivers, Catadupa. And far in the distance, she glimpsed the eerie blue-grey humps of the Cockpits: a harsh wilderness of treacherous sink-holes and oddly conical hills which had fascinated her as a child. Her pulse quickened. On the other side of the Cockpits, with its face to the sea, lay Eden.
The train halted at Montpelier for the final rest-stop, scarcely ten miles from Montego Bay. Mr van Rieman hurried off to the third-class compartment to consult his courier, and Mrs van Rieman went inside the station building to use the facilities, leaving her son – plainly with some misgivings – with Sophie.
They waited at the top of the station steps in the shade of a big silk-cotton tree, and watched the small-town bustle and the ox-wagons trundling past, piled high with sugar cane. Then Theo
resumed the attack. ‘How did you wash?’ he said with quiet insolence.
‘I didn’t,’ said Sophie without turning her head.
Theo digested that. ‘I bet that’s an untruth,’ he muttered.
Sophie did not reply.
‘I don’t like Jamaica,’ said Theo.
‘I’m not surprised,’ Sophie replied. ‘It’s a very frightening place for a little boy.’
‘I don’t mean that I’m scared,’ retorted Theo.
‘Well, you should be. Jamaica’s full of ghosts.’
Theo blinked.
‘Some of them live in caves in the hills,’ she said calmly, ‘but mostly they live in trees like this one behind you.’
Theo jumped. ‘You’re making that up,’ he said belligerently. ‘It’s just an old tree.’
‘Actually it’s not, it’s a duppy tree. Ask anyone. Duppy is Jamaican for ghost. D’you see the folds in the trunk? That’s where they live. They come out at night and make people ill.’
Theo swallowed.
She was beginning to enjoy herself. ‘I used to believe that a duppy tree was making me ill,’ she went on. ‘But then a very brave little boy sorted things out for me, and after that I got better.’
Theo looked pale but defiant. ‘How brave?’
‘Extremely. He was a street urchin from London, and he swore all the time.’
‘What was he called?’
‘Ben.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Nobody knows. After he dealt with the duppy tree he was never seen again.’
Theo thought about that. ‘Did it get him?’
‘Quite possibly,’ said Sophie.
Theo’s shoulders were hunched, and he was staring wide-eyed at the silk-cotton tree. Sophie nearly relented and told him that in fact the urchin had been spotted shortly afterwards, working as a cabin boy on a coastal steamer. But then she remembered those surreptitious kicks, and hardened her heart.
‘What did he look like?’ mumbled Theo, scarcely moving his lips.
‘Who?’
‘The street boy who disappeared. Ben.’
She shrugged. ‘Like a street boy.’
Across the road, a young groom jumped down from his carriage to check the harness on his horses. Something about the way he moved reminded her of Ben.
Strange the way memory works. She hadn’t thought about him in ages, and now suddenly she could almost see him. Thin as an alley cat, with filthy black hair and a grimy, sharp-featured face, and narrow green eyes. The ten-year-old Sophie had been captivated. And desperate to impress him.
‘You know an awful lot about Jamaica,’ said Theo humbly.
She felt another twinge of remorse. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘there’s one thing I forgot to tell you about duppies and duppy trees. They never attack Americans. It’s against the rules.’
Theo looked up at her uncertainly. ‘But how will they know that I am American?’
‘They can always tell.’
He nodded, and some of the colour returned to his lips.
‘Come along,’ said Sophie, ‘let’s find your mamma.’ But as she took his hand and turned to go, she glanced back over her shoulder at the young groom. His master and mistress were approaching down the street, and he was waiting for them. Suddenly Sophie’s heart lifted. The young groom’s master and mistress were Madeleine and Cameron.
She forgot the proprieties and yelled her sister’s name. ‘Maddy! Cameron! Over here!’
They didn’t hear her. And at that moment a wagon laden with sugar cane trundled down the street and hid them from view.
She let go of Theo and picked up her skirts and ran down the station steps to the edge of the street. Impatiently she waited while the oxen plodded past. And as the red dust slowly cleared, she saw them across the street: beautiful, unmistakable Maddy, with her luxuriant black hair piled beneath a wide straw hat, and her magnificent figure swathed in her favourite bronze silk dust-coat. She was leaning on Cameron’s arm, and he was bending over her, and she was wiping her eyes and nodding, and trying to smile.
Sophie opened her mouth to call again – then shut it. Something was wrong. Maddy looked upset.
At that moment Cameron turned to speak to the groom, and Sophie saw with a jolt that it wasn’t Cameron at all. Cameron was tall and broad-shouldered and in his early forties, with unruly fair hair and features that could never be called refined, but that possessed great strength and undeniable charm. The man to whom her sister was clinging – clinging – was also fair-haired, but much slighter and more delicate, and only in his late twenties, like Maddy herself. Sophie had never seen him before in her life.
Her thoughts darted. Something must have happened to Cameron. Something was terribly wrong.
‘Miss Monroe?’ said Mrs van Rieman, coming up behind her. ‘The train is about to leave . . . Is something wrong?’
Sophie turned and tried to say something, but her words were drowned out by another ox-wagon. And when she looked back, and the dust had settled again, the carriage and groom and the fair-haired young gentleman and her sister had gone.
Suddenly she was desperate to get to Montego Bay. But as Mr van Rieman informed her with grim pleasure, the train was delayed. A wagon had overturned just outside Montpelier, spilling its load of logwood across the tracks. It would take at least half an hour to clear.
As Sophie paced up and down outside the train, she talked herself out of panic. After all, there couldn’t be anything seriously wrong, or Maddy would have sent her a wire. Wouldn’t she?
At last, after nearly forty-five minutes, they got under way again, and the train began its lumbering descent towards the plains of the north coast. They trundled through acre on acre of green cane-fields shimmering in the breeze. Sophie counted the minutes till they would reach their destination.
Mrs van Rieman exclaimed with pleasure at the view of Montego Bay spread out below them – at the tidy red-roofed houses and the royal palms, and the glittering turquoise sea. Sophie hardly saw it. Surely, surely Maddy and Cameron would be waiting at the station, just as they’d promised? And perhaps the delicate-featured young man would be with them too, and it would all be cleared up. Surely it would be cleared up.
They drew into the station in a cloud of dust and steam. The platform was thronged with higglers of every shade of black and brown, and poor Mrs van Rieman softly shrieked at Theo to stay close, and barely registered Sophie’s muttered thanks and hasty leavetaking.
Then suddenly there they were – both of them. Her knees nearly buckled with relief. There was Maddy in her bronze silk dust-coat, pushing her way up the platform steps with a brilliant smile on her lovely face – and here was Cameron coming forward and sweeping Sophie off the ground in a hug. The delicate-featured young gentleman was nowhere to be seen.
‘What a relief!’ cried Sophie, when Cameron had set her down and she could breathe again. She turned to Maddy. ‘I saw you at Montpelier. I shouted, but you were gone before I could catch your eye.’
‘Montpelier?’ said Maddy, laughing as she stooped to free her dust-coat from the wheels of a passing trolley. ‘Sorry, but it wasn’t me. Cameron, would you tell the porter to be careful with that? If I know Sophie, it’ll be stuffed full of books, and weigh a ton.’
‘But Maddy,’ said Sophie, astonished, ‘I saw you.’
Madeleine straightened up and looked at her in amusement. ‘So now I’ve got a double up at Montpelier, have I? How very exciting.’
‘But—’
‘Sophie, I’ve been shopping in Montego Bay all afternoon. Now come along. You must be exhausted. And there’s so much to talk about. I can’t believe it – three years! We’ve planned it all out. Cameron’s riding behind, so we’ll have the dog cart to ourselves. And Braverly’s making a special dinner, and the children are staying up for a treat. They’re absolutely wild with excitement. Come along!’
Chapter Two
She awoke at daybreak with a dragging tiredness, and a sen
se of unease that wouldn’t be reasoned away.
She opened her eyes and drew back the mosquito curtain, and lay watching the sunlight warming the terracotta floor tiles. She listened to the soft slap of the servants’ canvas slippers, and the chatter of the grassquits beneath the eaves. She breathed in the mingled scents of beeswax, jasmine and wood smoke. It was the smell of Eden: reassuring, but now obscurely threatened.
Stop worrying, she told herself. Just enjoy being home.
She remembered when she used to wake up in this same room at dawn, and slip down to the river to meet her best friend Evie, who had run up through the cane-pieces from Fever Hill. They would go off to one of their secret places in the woods, and ask the spirits to get rid of Evie’s freckles, and keep the bacilli out of Sophie’s knee, and watch over Ben Kelly, wherever he was.
She turned and pressed her face into the pillow. Why think of him now? It was as if her thoughts were determined to revert to the unresolved and the unexplained. The boy who’d briefly been her friend, and then left without saying goodbye. The sister who was behaving so inexplicably.
She got out of bed and went to the window, flexing the stiffness out of her knee. Her room looked east, over a jungle of huge-leaved philodendron and wild almond trees, towards the stables at the bottom of the slope. Through the green-gold fronds of a tree-fern beneath the eaves, she saw Cameron mount his horse and give a last word to Moses the groom. He wore his usual riding-breeches, shooting-jacket and topboots, and looked as he always did: hurried and untidy, but utterly capable. Surely, she thought, he’d show it if something were wrong?
Turning back to the room, she saw with what care her sister had prepared it for her return. There were new curtains of blue and white dimity, and a desk amply stocked with paper and ink; a wash-hand stand with eau de Cologne and rosewater, and, on a shelf, a substantial pile of books.
The Daughters of Eden Trilogy Page 41