December 18th Had a strange complaining visit from a Mr Drummond, overseer at Waytes Valley. He told how yesterday he was on his way to Pinchgut when he met a well-made Negro wench on the road. She agreed to go with him among the bushes, but when they got there she desired payment first, upon which he pulled out his purse of knitted blue silk. As he was holding it rather carelessly, the girl snatched it out of his hand and ran away, and he has not seen her or the purse since. Nor would he know the girl again, for she wore a kerchief pulled down low on her head. He said he lost five shillings, and sought compensation from me, saying that the girl must be mine. I denied this with all vehemence, & he went away. I then questioned Congo Eve, but she said she knew nothing about it, though she looked at me with excessive impudence.
December 19th This past sennight I have put my Field Negroes to cutting copper wood on Pinchgut Hill, & now have one hundred & 16 cart-loads stacked ready beside the boiling-house. I was walking back from the works just after shell-blow, well satisfied, when I saw Congo Eve talking to Strap by the Pond. She was smiling & touching his cheek with her hand. Had him flogged, & both nostrils slit. Cum Congo Eve in dom., sed non bene. Illa habet mensam.
‘Evie! Evie!’
She raises her head blearily, as if from a dream.
It’s her mother, calling her to supper. She gets up and shuts the book, and brushes off her skirts. She’s not sorry to go. It’s getting dark, and there’s a swampy, destroyful feel of duppies about the place.
With Congo Eve in the house, but it was not good. She had her courses. Just reading it makes her feel dirty; as if Cyrus Wright has left little spidery stains in her memory.
When she reaches the yard, her mother glances up from the hearth, sees the book in her daughter’s hand and gives her a small, proud smile. Grace McFarlane never did herself learn to read, but she dearly loves to see Evie with a book. ‘What did Miss Sophie want?’ she asks as she hands her daughter a bowl of steaming fufu.
Evie shrugs. ‘Nothing. Just to visit.’
For a while they eat in silence. Then Grace says, ‘You know, you’re better not spending time with her, girl.’
Evie blows on her fufu and frowns. ‘Why not?’
‘You know why. She’s from a different class of ideas and life.’
‘Mother, I’m a teacheress, not a maid. I can spend time with who I like.’
‘That all very well. But it does no good to go meddling with carriage folk. You know that.’
Evie sets her teeth. All her life she’s been hearing this. And it’s specially hard coming from her mother. ‘Meddling with carriage folk?’ she says quietly. ‘But Mother, you’re the one who did that. Not so? You “meddled” with a buckra gentleman, and—’
‘Evie—’
‘– and I’m the result. Not so, Mother? You went with a buckra gentleman, though you never would tell me his name.’
Grace gives her a black hard look, but Evie’s blood is rising and she don’t care. ‘So please don’t tell me who I can’t spend time with, Mother. I’m half white. I can—’
‘Half white is no white,’ snaps Grace. ‘Don’t you know that yet?’
Evie can’t take any more. She throws down her bowl and quits the yard, slamming the bamboo gate behind her. She gets all the way to the aqueduct before she even realizes where she is – or that she’s got the journal of Cyrus Wright clutched under her arm. Her heart is pounding.
Now what to do? It’s getting dark. Mosquitoes are humming roundabout, and swallows flitting down to drink. Should she catch some peenywallies and put them in a jar, and read some more by the light?
Reading some more is the last thing she wants to do. But because she’s so angry, it’s exactly what she will do.
And once again, she can find nothing about her namesake for several pages. It’s as if Cyrus Wright became disenchanted with everything but sugar planting and coffee growing. Or maybe he was ashamed. Whatever the reason, it’s two years before there’s another mention of Congo Eve.
September 13th, 1819 Still no rains; heat excessive strong. Had set my Field Negroes to collecting mahoe bark for rope-making, when Job cut his leg. It swell’d with the guinea worm, so I sent him to the hot house. Congo Eve troublesome in running to visit him & supper him, so I had to restrain her yet again with a collar & chain about her neck. She is perverse & will not help herself, but always must defy me.
September 15th Mr Monroe’s wife brought to bed of a daughter. He has named her May. It is his seventh child by his wife, though of course he has very many Mulattos borne for him by his Negro females. Job still in the hot house, very fever’d & troublesome in calling for his sister. I myself have a scalding urine, & fear it is a dose of the clap. Took 4 mercurial purging pills & a cooling powder on advice of Dr Prattin. He suggested that I physick myself at the hot house like my Negroes, he thought it a good jest. I did not. Cum Congo Eve, stans, in the curing-house. To my supper had a stewed turtle with a pint of porter.
September 17th Job dead of a locking on the jaws. Congo Eve almost out of her senses, & would hear no reason. Had to collar her again. Gave the Negroes leave to bury the body behind the bee houses.
September 26th Much havoc in the night. Against my orders, Strap held a Negro nine-night for Job down at the village, & Congo Eve slip’d from my house & went to it. I follow’d her in the dark, & there espied a vast many people with drumming & strange music, & Strap playing on a Banjar. Saw Congo Eve at work with her Obiah. Then she & Strap danc’d the Negro Motion they call the shay-shay, a most revolting sight: much slow winding of the hips, but with the upper body still. I broke in on them, brandishing my musket & greatly vex’d. Had Congo Eve flogged, 29 lashes, and have this afternoon sold Strap to Mr Traherne at Parnassus for £43, a loss of £2. Then I took Strap’s Banjar & shewed it to Congo Eve, & chopped it all to pieces in front of her with my cutlass. She threatened to make away with herself, & since then has said no more to me. Mr Monroe is right when he says that the Negro’s lack of moral faculties keeps him in subjection to his passions. To my supper had two broiled pigeons, very fat & sweet. Cum Congo Eve supra terram in Pimento Walk, bis.
Evie puts her hand inside her dress and grips the little bag of warm green silk like a talisman.
Day has just commenced to light, and the peenywallies in the jar are dead. Soon her mother will come out of the house and start waking up the fire, and wonder why her daughter is up so early.
She can’t read any more. Her heart is beating so hard that she feels sick. Reading the close-written pages has made her head ache.
The Negro’s lack of moral faculties keeps him in subjection to his passions. What lies people tell to excuse the wrong they do.
Around her the birds are waking up. A flock of jabbering crows settles in the ackee tree. Ground-doves peck the dust. She looks about her at the tumbled cut-stone, still streaked with black from slave time, when old Master Alasdair burnt the village after the great Rebellion.
In this place where she is now, Strap lived, and Job, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others. Here Congo Eve danced the shay-shay in defiance of Cyrus Wright. Are their spirits still here? Are they watching her now?
Quickly she swings her legs off the wall and jumps to her feet. They’re nothing to do with her. Congo Eve is nothing to her. Any time she wants to get away from this, she can. Any time. All she has to do is say the word.
Quickly, so she can’t change her mind, she runs up the path to her mother’s place, hugging the book to her breast. She creeps up the steps – quietly so as not to wake her mother – and fetches her little wooden writing-box from under the bed. Then she makes her way out to the end of the yard, and seats herself on her grandmother’s tomb under the garden cherry tree. She takes out her pen and ink and a sheet of her special notepaper, and swiftly writes: I shall be taking the air in Bamboo Walk tomorrow, at four o’clock. EM. Then she seals it with a little stump of sealing-wax.
This has nothing to do with Congo Eve, she tells herself.
In fact this only proves how different things are now: that these days a mulatto girl can receive admiration and respect from a buckra gentleman.
Without returning for hat or shoes she runs out of the yard, and takes the path round the old Pond, and heads due west through the cane-pieces of Alice Grove. She runs all the way to Pinchgut Hill.
When she reaches it, the settlement is just waking up. Dogs and goats are nosing around in the dust. Cooking-fires are smoking. There’s a good fat smell of coconut oil and fried breadfruit and cerassee tea.
Nobody is surprised to see her dropping by, and nobody wonders when she collars little Jericho Fletcher and draws him behind a jackfruit tree for a private talk. She can trust Jericho. He’s clever and quiet, and he has a shy little-boy admiration for her.
‘Here’s a quattie for you,’ she tells him. ‘You’ll get another if you run as quick as a black ant and give this note to who I say. To who I say, mind, and nobody else. Understand?’
Jericho gazes up at her with his shiny black ackee-seed eyes, and solemnly nods. For a moment Evie feels a twinge of guilt at using a child. But then she reminds herself that he’ll get his two quatties, and with them he can achieve that impossible dream of buying the longed-for hobby-horse.
She gives him the first quattie and the note, and closes his hand over both. ‘Run quick,’ she whispers, ‘quick now. And give this to Master Cornelius Traherne.’
Chapter Eleven
A slumbrous afternoon at the clinic, and not a patient in sight. Dr Mallory had gone off in disgust, leaving Sophie on her own. She sat by the open door at the rickety little table, struggling to concentrate on Diseases of the Lungs.
But the words conveyed nothing to her. It had been five days since her conversation with Evie by the aqueduct, and still there had been no word of Ben. Perhaps Evie had changed her mind about passing on the message. Perhaps he’d left Trelawny, or taken ship back to England, or Barbados or Panama or America.
She had no means of finding out, except to ask Evie again, and she was too proud to do that.
She rested her chin on her hands and heaved a sigh. What was she doing here? What did she want? These days she couldn’t concentrate on anything. She felt constantly dissatisfied: edgy and tearful, and full of vague yet insistent longings. At times she found herself envying Madeleine – for being beautiful, for having a husband who adored her – even though she’d never envied her before. What was wrong with her? What did she want?
One thing, though, was painfully clear. She didn’t want the clinic. It had been a huge, humiliating mistake.
Bethlehem itself was a pleasant little place. A typical smallholder’s settlement, it lay about three miles east of Eden great house, and a mile south of the Martha Brae. A cluster of wattle-and-daub houses thatched with cane-trash enclosed a dusty clearing containing a whitewashed Baptist chapel, a breadfruit tree, and the small tin-roofed barrack which Dr Mallory had commandeered for his clinic. Surrounding the village was a tidy patchwork of banana walks, coffee plots and provision grounds, reaching east to the cane-pieces of Arethusa, and north to the river and the edge of Greendale Wood.
The people were friendly but stubborn, and, as Cameron had predicted, reluctant to betray their own bush-doctors for a ‘doctor-shop’ where they couldn’t buy Calvary powder or dead-man oil. Most days, Sophie had little to do except dole out cough linctus, and dig the occasional jigger out of a pickney’s foot.
She wouldn’t have minded if it hadn’t been for Dr Mallory. A clever, bitter, distressingly fat widower, he detested the practise of medicine, and had only become a doctor because God had told him to. He made no secret of resenting Sophie’s presence, even though it had been his own idea that she should help him. His chief delight seemed to be in criticizing her – in the guise of giving ‘friendly advice’ – and covertly ridiculing her lack of medical experience.
‘I fear, Miss Monroe, that for you our little clinic is beginning to pall? No, no, I quite understand. How inadequate we must seem after your London hospitals!’ He knew very well that her only experience of hospitals was three days as a volunteer at the Cheltenham Working Woman’s clinic. But when she reminded him of that, he always pretended to have forgotten.
The clinic had become a battle of wills between them. Dr Mallory clearly expected her to throw in the towel, while she was just as determined to deny him the satisfaction. So every afternoon she grimly drove east past the Maputah works, then turned north down a cane track and crossed the trickle of Tom Gully, which marked the boundary between Eden estate and Bethlehem village.
There Dr Mallory would greet her with an ill-tempered grimace, she would throw him a determined smile, and they would settle down to wait for the patients who rarely came. After an hour or so, Dr Mallory would take himself off to his little house for a rum and water and a nap, and Sophie would get out a book.
This afternoon, the village was more than usually quiet, for it was market day, and most people were away. Through the open door Sophie could see an old man sitting under a pawpaw tree at the far side of the clearing, polishing his Sunday shoes with a handful of shoeblack hibiscus petals. A couple of pickneys cantered past, playing pony and driver. Cling-clings chattered on the bamboo fences. Chickens pecked the dust. Beneath the breadfruit tree, Belle squatted on her haunches and admonished her toy zebra, Spot. She had conceived a passionate devotion for Sophie, and had badgered her mother until she was allowed to accompany her aunt.
With a tact which Sophie appreciated, Madeleine rarely enquired about the clinic. Cameron, however, was more outspoken. ‘Sophie, it’s been what, two weeks?’ he’d said after dinner the night before. ‘Isn’t it time to call it a day? After all, old Mallory doesn’t need you, and you don’t need him, and heaven knows the blacks don’t need either of you.’
He was right, of course. But how could she back down now, after making a stand about it? Was this to be yet another of her famous ‘about-turns’?
Belle’s voice outside the door cut across her thoughts. She was asking someone just beyond Sophie’s line of vision to take a look at Spot’s hoof. ‘It’s wobbly because Fraser pulled it,’ she said. ‘Aunt Sophie gave me some carbolized dressing.’
‘Dressing’s not much use for a broken cannon bone,’ said Ben.
Sophie’s heart jerked.
‘What’s a cannon bone?’ said Belle.
‘The bit above the fetlock,’ said Ben. ‘It’s broken all right. Flopping about all over the place.’
Very quietly, Sophie got to her feet and backed away from the door. She moved to the high louvred window, and stood on tiptoe to peer out.
He was squatting down to Belle’s level in the shade of the breadfruit tree. He wore his usual breeches and topboots and a collarless blue shirt, but instead of his groom’s cap a battered straw hat lay beside him in the dust. He was frowning and turning the zebra in his hands.
‘Will he get better?’ asked Belle, standing before him with her hands clasped behind her back.
He shook his head. ‘Best make an end of him.’
‘Oh. What does that mean?’
‘Put a bullet in him.’
Belle blinked. ‘You mean I ought to shoot him?’
He handed the toy back to her. ‘Best thing for him. He’ll never walk on four legs again.’
‘But if I carry him.’
He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. If you want to carry a stripy horse all day, that’s your lookout.’
She nodded, and hugged Spot under her chin. ‘Actually he’s not a stripy horse. He’s a zebra.’
‘What’s a zebra?’
‘Um. A sort of stripy horse.’
Ben smiled.
It was the first time that Sophie had seen him smile – really smile – since he was a boy. It made her want to cry.
Standing there with her hands on the window sill, she felt a sudden shattering rush of feeling for him. It took her breath away. It made everything clear.
He mattered to her. He always had. Ever
since that first day in the photographer’s studio, when he’d stood at bay before Madeleine’s imitation gun: a whip-thin alley cat of a boy who’d snapped and snarled, and then been reduced to captivated silence by a gilded horse on the binding of a book. He mattered to her because his mind worked the same way as hers, and because he could sense what she was feeling, and because – because he just did.
And now at last she understood why she’d never been attracted to any of the young men she’d ever met; why she’d simply felt that it wasn’t possible to develop a regard for them. It was because they weren’t Ben.
The window sill was rough beneath her hands, and she clung to it. This was what Madeleine had warned her about. She felt dizzy and shaken. And hopelessly sad.
She couldn’t tell him what she felt. She couldn’t tell anyone. No-one must know, because it was impossible. Even she could see that.
There is nothing you can do about this, she told herself, and the truth of the words settled inside her like a stone. There is nothing that can be done.
Holding her breath, she watched him reach for his hat and look about him, then make for the door.
Quickly, before he spotted her, she drew back from the window and sat down, and bent over her book.
When his shadow cut across the doorway, she glanced up, and made what she thought was a creditable job of appearing surprised. She was on the verge of tears, and she was sure that it showed in her face – but if he noticed, he made no sign. He just stood in the doorway and gave her his unsmiling nod. ‘Can I come in?’
She clasped her hands together on the book, and nodded.
He tossed his hat on the medicine trolley, and went to lean against the opposite wall, glancing about him at the bottles and jars on the shelves. He moved with his usual wary grace, and for an instant she felt a flicker of sympathy for poor fat Dr Mallory, who’d probably never had a graceful moment in his life. ‘So this is the clinic,’ he said.
The Daughters of Eden Trilogy Page 52