Eden Falls Read Free Page A

sycophancy that he had gifted to Silas a small fleet of refrigerated ships. With these, Silas had prospered and grown, wealth coming swiftly and easily as he sailed between Bristol and Port Antonio. He’d bought an old sugar plantation – they were going for a song by the time he was in a position to cast an acquisitive eye across Jamaican soil – and replaced the cane with bananas. In this way he had truly made his fortune, for the fruit he shipped was now his own, and the powerful growers no longer his concern. The hotel had come later, when he realised that his cargo ships could be equipped for passengers; or, rather, that luxury passenger liners could be equipped for cargo. He bought Eden Hill and, with machetes and manpower, had vanquished the jungle. The hotel had been built to Silas’s precise specifications and its grounds meticulously landscaped; now, where ferns and vines had once romped in unchecked abundance, there were lawns and herbaceous borders immaculately planted with English flowers. It was the garden of a proud colonialist, not the garden of a plantsman. The indigenous blooms – the poincianas, the alamandas, the trusty plumbago – were cast aside in favour of hollyhocks, delphiniums and Michaelmas daisies, whose pale hues seemed paler still in the unrelenting yellow light of the Jamaican sun, or the periodic onslaughts of warm tropical wind and rain.
    A long path zigzagged down the terraces to the wrought-iron gateway at the road and as Ruby approached it from one direction a man was coming towards it from the other. He carried a great wooden box of provisions on his head and moved lethargically, like a soul burdened not with vegetables but with all the cares of the world. His face, when he saw Ruby, bloomed into a wide smile.
    ‘Good morning Maxwell,’ Ruby said, her words clipped and bright.
    ‘Miss Ruby,’ Maxwell replied, talking in the same way that he walked: slowly, lazily, taking all the time in the world. ‘How de pickney?’
    ‘Roscoe is very well, thank you.’
    She smiled at the porter and waited with him while he leaned his lanky frame against the gate and lifted the box from his head. He placed it on the road at his feet and they both looked down at it: asparagus, carrots, celery, mushrooms – English vegetables shipped over from Bristol’s costermongers as if nothing grew in the fertile soil of Jamaica. Maxwell gave Ruby a look: a languid, disdainful roll of the eyes. The twisted cotton cotta looked ludicrous with the box gone, but he left it on his head anyway, and dipped into the pocket of his baggy trousers for a tin of Red Man. Ruby said, ‘Maxwell, that tobacco is turning your teeth the colour of wet mud,’ but he chuckled and with gracious irony held out the open tin to her as if she might be tempted to nip out a portion, as he had done, and pop it into her pink and white mouth.
    ‘It rots your body from the top down,’ she said sternly, and he laughed again, a full-throated, drawn-out, Jamaican laugh. He liked Ruby. She was full of advice that he hadn’t asked for, but she wasn’t as prim and proper as she made out. She was built for love, was Ruby, with her wide, slanting eyes like a cat and her beautiful round backside. When, like this morning, providence brought them to the hotel path together Maxwell always let Ruby go in front, waving her on in a gentlemanly manner then feasting at his leisure on the sight of her lovely buttocks, which moved against the fabric of her dress like two ripe mangoes in a bag.
    ‘Shall we?’ she said now, indicating the gate and the upward path.
    Maxwell bent down, his long body folding itself in two, then, with a fluid, seamless movement, unfolding again to lift the box up and onto his head. ‘After you, Miss Ruby,’ he said and she nodded approval at him, pleased by his manners.
    Halfway up the path, where it diverged so that kitchen staff and tradesmen could make their final ascent to the hotel’s back door out of sight of