Spoils of Eden

by Linda Lee Chaikin

  Eden waited, but he said no more. She formed fists in her lap. “Why didn’t you include me in those who would ‘die at the stake?’ ”

  “Do you need to ask me that, Eden?”

  She remained silent, mollified, then tore her gaze from his.

  “Does Zach know where Kip came from?” he asked.

  “Not through anything I’ve said. I don’t believe he’d do anything so low. Maybe in the past, but not now. There must be someone else. Someone here at the plantation? A worker who may have overheard something?”

  Rafe shook his head, looking at the message again. “The English is too good.” He paused, thinking. “Someone on the Minoa, perhaps. Though I doubt it. They’re all loyal. I’ve known them for over a dozen years. They’re paid well, and there are no grudges. I’ll make sure about it, though.”

  “Rafe, whoever did this is either afraid Kip actually carries leprosy or else has a grudge against you. Either way, it won’t change the results, even if you discover who notified the Board. You know what I must do.”

  Rafe’s gaze sharpened. “And what do you think you must do?”

  Reluctantly she turned back to the buggy and retrieved from her medical satchel the legal document, endorsed by the Board, that awaited Rafe’s cooperative signature. With her back toward him she bit her lip. Then, in a professional tone, she said, “I’m sorry, but Kip must be put under indefinite quarantine at Kalihi.”

  “No one is taking Kip.”

  She turned quickly to face him. “No baby born of a leper can be adopted—”

  “You’ve told me that.”

  “He’ll need to stay in a bungalow at the hospital grounds with some others in his situation—”

  He deftly lifted the legal document from her fingers and crumpled it, his gaze meeting hers, and tossed it back into the buggy.

  “Kip isn’t going to Kalihi, Eden.”

  “But Rafe—”

  “And he is certainly not being sent to Kalawao. He doesn’t have the disease. He’s as clean as a lily, and you know it.”

  “Of course I know it. I’m a nurse, remember? And a student of tropical diseases under Dr. Bolton.”

  “You have my highest regards, Miss Eden,” he said with a small bow. His next words came with blunt precision. “Even so, Kip isn’t going to any holding station, not if I can stop it.”

  She went to the buggy to retrieve the wadded legal paper, smarting under his retort. Sometimes his wry little remarks about her work infuriated her. He was jealous, that was all. Jealous because she wanted to excel in the study of tropical diseases so she could one day work with her father. Why couldn’t he understand that she loved her father?

  “The Board of Health has already made laws that can’t be altered without the Legislature changing them,” she said, briskly smoothing the wadded paper to cover her misery.

  “Our brilliant Legislature doesn’t even know what it’s doing half the time. The only thing they care about is keeping their power base. Look, Eden. You’ve already examined Kip for yourself. He’s clean. Noelani cares for him every day. So does Celestine. Placing him at Kalihi in quarantine will only increase his chances of contracting leprosy.”

  Her heart melted. She couldn’t help herself. “Oh, Rafe, I’m so sorry. This is such a dreadful situation. When Lana told me this morning about the message, I didn’t know what to do. I’ll make you a promise. I’ll be there working nearly every day, sometimes late into the evening. I vow I’ll not let Kip out of my sight for longer than absolutely necessary. I’ll even put a bunk in the children’s room and sleep there. I’ll protect him, I promise—”

  His reaction was sudden and startling. She was in his arms, and his heated gaze wouldn’t let go.

  “Do you think risking both yourself and Kip in any way solves my dilemma? Don’t you understand yet, Eden? It’s your protection that I worry about, as well as Kip’s. My mind was made up months ago. I’m going to adopt him. He’s mine. The moment I took him aboard ship, I made a commitment. No one is going to thwart me now. Once my heart is committed to someone, I won’t quit trying. Not with Kip—and not with you.”

  She lowered the side of her face against his chest and closed her eyes, relishing if only for a moment what seemed a restoration of their relationship, but in reality she knew that it was far from settled. She raised her face to look at him. The intensity of his gaze warmed her.

  He lowered his head toward her—stopped abruptly, and then stepped back.

  “I prefer to wait until you’re sure your own sweet little heart is committed—not to Kalawao or to your honorable father, but to me.”

  She came rudely awake. “Committed? I’ve been committed to you since you were seventeen, and you know it! But I have a calling … and I must go through with it to see where it leads me.”

  “It will lead you to greater risk. Was Priest Damien able to escape leprosy during his service on Kalawao? Do you think Doc Bolton will escape as he handles diseased limbs and fingers day after day?”

  She turned away, plucking some of the nearby purple blossoms. “We’re all very careful. We’re trained.”

  “Never mind. The Board’s in error if they think sending you here with soft talk will cause me to sign Kip over. If Bolton wants to discuss the matter with me, he can come here himself.”

  Soft talk! She whirled. “It won’t be Dr. Bolton who comes. It will be a Honolulu policeman! They arrested a man just last week for trying to run away with his wife. He’d been told to bring her to Kalihi, but he refused. Now she’s in quarantine and he’s being held at the police station.”

  “Very merciful of your kindhearted doctors and nurses to use health laws to intimidate and force cooperation. There’s something to be said about the power to imprison people in outdoor cages while it’s decided whether or not they’re lepers.”

  Eden was stung into silence. How true! She could not endorse the corruption that occurred, as in past days under Arthur Murray Gibson, “the one-man cabinet” of King Kalakaua. Even now, injustice was displayed in certain decisions made by both the Board and the throne. Eden was offended by the “bounty hunters” who were rewarded financially for reporting anyone they could find who might have a visible sore, wound, or lesion. And if those reported didn’t turn themselves in to the leper station at Kalihi for quarantine, the Honolulu police would arrive at their huts with rifles to arrest them. Eden found it distasteful to see frightened people locked up at the leper station for weeks and sometimes much longer, on the mere suspicion of having leprosy. If the lesion in question were designated leprosy, then papers were issued by the Board and the new leper was banished to the Kalawao colony, near Kalaupapa on Molokai Island.

  Eden had never been more shocked than when she first arrived at Kalihi and met the leprosy patients she wished to help. They were not typical hospital patients, but internees. Many of them were being held against their will, men taken from families, women from young children. They weren’t kept in comfortable, clean hospital rooms, as she’d thought, but in wired huts, like prison cells. Some were in actual metal cages on the grounds of Kalihi. Ethnicity appeared to have nothing to do with their treatment. Whether the suspects were Hawaiians, hapa-haoles, haoles, or Chinese, the law prevailed. Men and women, old and young, married and single were incarcerated. The first time she’d seen the situation—especially the small children taken from parents—it had broken her heart. In her mind these children were already doomed to die, which actually seemed more merciful than years of dreadful existence on Molokai.

  Some of the apparent hardness of the Board of Health could be traced to certain Honolulu businessmen working on the mainland to promote sightseeing holidays amid Hawaii’s tropical beauty. These businessmen, fearing that growing publicity over leprosy in the islands would hinder annexation, had urged King Kalakaua and Walter Murray Gibson to purge Hawaii of every known leper.

  Firmness came into Rafe’s voice. “Is this what it means to live in the Kingdom of Hawaii—to have a few
greedy haoles manipulating weak kings who’d rather gamble and drink than rule with authority and wisdom? I, for one, don’t care to have a pack of laws, rules, and regulations that benefit the few in power. I’ll take a republic where individual rights are protected by a constitution. Where the freedom exists to protest self-imposed authorities who want to ramrod their wills through the Legislature.”

  Eden turned away.

  “You can tell the Board what I said when you go back there tomorrow. If it’s the last thing I do, Eden, I’ll fight that law of non-adoption until I see it discarded. It’s a law that needs to be booted out of Hawaii and anywhere else that claims to be a civilized Christian community.”

  It hurt deeply as she realized he saw her as siding with the enemy, infringing on individual rights, taking away the baby he had learned to love. Even her role as a compassionate nurse with the red cross proudly displayed on the front of her pinafore no longer merited his respect. Mention of helpless children taken from parents and placed in perpetual quarantine made her feel she was becoming stern and pitiless. Was this how he saw her, then? And the work she’d been proudly engaged in?

  Eden’s resolve tightened. “You seem to have forgotten,” she choked, “that I am a victim of this same law. My mother was taken from me, from my father, and from the safety of her home. She was forced onto a boat to Kalawao. For years I never knew what had happened to her. Don’t think that I have no compassion for the weak and abused.” She whipped around to run toward the house when he overtook her.

  “Eden, darling, please forgive me.”

  Once again, as in the past, she was in his embrace, and this time she clung to him, holding back tears, wanting him to understand and support her, yet knowing that she must not lose control of herself and be left vulnerable to every sentiment that could come sweeping her way.

  “I know you’re on Kip’s side.” He spoke warmly into her hair. “I only wish you were on mine.”

  Oh Rafe, but I am! she wanted to cry out. I am! And yet the words she believed and wanted to say were held bound and chained.

  Someone was coming, riding the lane from the plantation house on horseback to where she and Rafe stood beside the buggy. Rafe released her, and Eden turned to see who it was.

  Zachary rode up and drew his reins. He looked from Eden to Rafe and must have recognized that matters between them were strung to the breaking point. Rather than looking satisfied over Rafe’s difficulties as he would have two years earlier, he looked genuinely disheartened.

  “Oh,” he said wearily, “sorry to interrupt like this.” He looked over at Eden. “Grandfather’s already arrived. He’s up at the house now and sent me to call you up.”

  Eden stood, numb.

  Zachary refocused on Rafe who stood with hands on hips. “Hope you don’t mind, Rafe, but your plantation house seems to have been commandeered as the meeting hall.”

  For a moment Eden felt as though a storm had swooped through her mind, scattering her wits to the four winds as she remembered with a jolt, Candace, Keno, Grandfather, and Oliver P. Hunnewell. She had failed to warn Candace in time.

  “Already arrived?” She put a hand to her forehead as if she could make herself come up with an answer to the dilemma. “But you said he wasn’t arriving till this afternoon.”

  “The steamer must have arrived early. He surprised us all.”

  “But I never warned Candace,” she said. “I needed to speak with Ambrose, then Rafe, and … ”

  “Let’s not worry about it,” Rafe said calmly. “Candace is mature enough to hold her own with Ainsworth. She’s not a child, and Eden isn’t responsible for making matters work out for everyone. Is Townsend here with you?”

  Eden believed Rafe was thinking of his mother, Celestine, having to face Townsend. She was reluctant to legally end their marriage, despite Townsend’s widely known infidelities. After his son Silas arrived, shining the spotlight on Townsend’s earlier sins, her acquaintances advised her to divorce him, but she believed that something drastic could still happen and change him. “Life is meant to be endured,” she often said. “Not every heartache can vanish with a magic wand. I’ve been taught that God’s grace is abundant and that we can, in Him, endure whatever He allows to confront us. I was wrong to marry Townsend. I knew he was not faithful to God, so why should he be faithful to me? Now to jump out of my situation and expect to reap holiday cheer is immature.”

  “No, he stayed behind at Kea Lani,” Zachary said. His voice turned sarcastic. “But his number one son, Silas, is here. Silas, that most seasoned and intelligent ‘windfall-of-a-son’ who arrived so unexpectedly from who knows where, is somewhere around, sneaking about, no doubt, with a deck of cards in his pocket.”

  Rafe showed interest for the first time. “You need to be cautious in what you say aloud, Zach.”

  Zachary jerked a shoulder to show his rebellious mood. “I have no proof yet, but I’ll get it before this is over. And a whole lot more before I come out with it all. He says he’s from Sacramento, and his mother was from the old silver rush in Carson and Virginia City. I think he’s lying.”

  “Be careful,” Rafe said again.

  If Zachary’s mood was any indication, the meeting between Townsend and his two sons at Kea Lani hadn’t accomplished any good. Eden wondered if Ainsworth’s sudden arrival had prevented the meeting.

  “Ainsworth has a solid reason for coming here,” Zachary said mysteriously.

  Rafe shot a glance toward the plantation house, yet remained silent.

  A solid reason? Eden drew her left hand behind her skirt, wondering. Grandfather Ainsworth wouldn’t know that her engagement with Rafe was, as Zachary put it, “cracked in two.” “What about Oliver Hunnewell?” she asked.

  “Fortunately, he’s gone on to Hunnewell Plantation to rest for a few days. Grandfather’s giving a luau next week. Ol’Oliver will be there to begin his public courting of Candace. And guess what? Grandfather met up with someone else while in San Francisco,” Zachary announced with sudden good cheer. “It turns out they all came home to Honolulu together. Just one big, happy family.”

  “Look, Zach, stop the theatrics,” Rafe said. “You’re worrying her. Out with it.”

  “Eden’s brilliant father is here in the flesh—as gaunt and sober minded as a replica of Dr. David Livingstone.”

  Eden caught her breath. “My father? Dr. Jerome? He’s here?”

  “He is.”

  Dazed, she was nonetheless aware that Rafe tensed as he stood beside her.

  Zachary turned on the saddle to gesture his blond head toward the big house. “If I’m not mistaken, that’s Dr. Jerome coming off the lanai now to meet you, Eden.”

  Eden stared in near shock as a tall, thin figure in white came down the steps and walked in her direction.

  “Eden?” he called. “Is that you, my daughter?”

  It was, indeed, her father, Dr. Jerome Derrington. Her heart burst into unabashed joy from long-awaited expectation. With a laugh from deep in her soul, she dropped her medical bag and ran to meet him, arms open wide.

  Rafe watched Eden run to meet Dr. Jerome Derrington. They embraced and laughed. Rafe told himself that if he had thought winning Eden was difficult before her father arrived, the real struggle had only just begun. This moment would change everything.

  Rafe looked up at Zachary astride the horse, expecting to see a typical smirk, but there was understanding in his blue eyes.

  “My sympathy,” Zachary said wryly.

  Zachary drew the reins aside, and the horse did a fancy half-circle. “The Derrington patriarch wants to meet with you alone before he returns to Kea Lani,” he said of Ainsworth. “You can bank on some important new conditions being added to the privilege of entering the Derrington family. Whatever they are, you’ll need to wait and hear it from Ainsworth himself.” With a two-finger salute to his brow, Zachary rode back up the lane toward the house.

  Rafe stood in the tropical heat looking toward his plantation house. The
re was trouble ahead, and plenty of it. But he was no quitter. He would fight all obstacles to win what he wanted most. He was aware of the odds stacked against him, but that made the battle all the more important—and more interesting. What mattered was whether he was on the road of God’s purpose or a path of his own making. A sure way to lose in the end.

  Chapter Six

  Dr. Jerome Derrington

  Eden’s enthusiasm over the arrival of her father, Dr. Jerome, remained undiminished throughout the day. Thus far, she hadn’t mentioned the real reason for her visit to Hawaiiana, preferring to keep the matter of Kip and the Board of Health to herself and Rafe. Eventually, she would need to declare herself and her mission, since she could hardly keep the matter a secret when taking Kip away to Kalihi. She steeled her mind and emotions to endure what was ahead. She would need to explain to Noelani first since she was Kip’s nanny. Later that evening, when she departed with her father in the buggy for Kea Lani, Kip would need to come with her. Perhaps the best time to bring Kip to Kalihi Hospital was when her father went to the Board of Health. He would need to give a broad report of his travels and research, since he’d been under the sponsorship of the deceased King Kalakaua.

  Lunch was served on the lanai, the food arranged buffet-style on a long table with a bird-of-paradise flower arrangement. The family spent the afternoon enjoying refreshments and listening with interest while Dr. Jerome spoke of his travels.

  Jerome’s hair was thick and dark, and his long sideburns curving inward at the jawline were colored by the gray of age. His lean, craggy face, tanned and leathery from years of traversing the tropics of the world, wore a sober cast. His deep-set eyes told of a determination to achieve his goals, a single-minded spirit.

  The dozen or so comfortable cane chairs were arranged casually. Eden became aware of her father smiling down upon her with undeniable pride upon learning of her successful ongoing studies in tropical diseases. Her heart, if only for a brief moment, was that of a young daughter, beating with the need to be cherished by her father.