The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth Read Free Page A

yanked the horse’s head round and dug in his spurs, and the great hind hooves churned the snow inches from her feet, and the silver tail flicked stingingly across her face.
    Her legs buckled and she sat down heavily in the snow. She stayed breathless and unmoving as the officer rode away, as he was swallowed up by the dark beneath the trees. And behind her the crow thudded down onto the gatehouse roof, and filled the air with raucous laughter.

Chapter Two
    It was just beginning to get dark when Madeleine climbed down from Mr Ritchie’s wagon and started along the coast path.
    It was snowing, and the icy wind made her head ache. For the first time in her life her beloved stretch of beach felt unwelcoming. No fat seals greeted her from the rocks. No graceful fulmars wheeled overhead. A trio of cormorants scudded past, but their emerald eyes glanced off her and swept on, like the beam of the Corsewall lighthouse. It felt as if the officer’s ill-will had spread to them.
    To her surprise, Cairngowrie House was silent and dim when she let herself in. Hannah must have forgotten to turn up the gas. That made it doubly hard to manage the button-hook with her cold-numbed fingers, and by the time she had struggled out of her boots she was fighting back tears of rage. She tugged off her hat and coat and mittens and left them in a soggy heap in the hall, then padded angrily into the drawing-room.
    It was empty, and only feebly lit by the dying fire. Muttering, she dragged the piano stool to the nearest gasolier and climbed on top to reach the chain. The drawing-room flared into life. Then she shovelled coal onto the fire, spilling most of it on the hearth. Then she wondered what to do next.
    The clock on the mantelpiece said four, but there was no sign of tea. There was no sign of anyone. And she had been counting on tea to make things normal again.
    When she thought about the officer she had a horrible churning feeling of guilt and bewilderment and loss. She should never have gone to the Forbidden Kingdom. She should never have told him her name. But why had he been so angry?
    She went to the piano and scowled at the photograph of Eden in its tortoiseshell frame. Did Eden have something to do with it? It had certainly landed her in trouble before.
    The photograph showed a luminous, ruined house in a jungle of palms and breadfruit trees. Creepers trailed from the broken verandahs. A tree-fern sprouted from a window like a shattered monocle. A graceful double curve of steps swept down into what had once been a garden, and at the foot stood a tall, fair-haired blur which was Papa. He had moved just as her mother exposed the plate.
    Eden didn’t look dangerous, but it was. Madeleine knew, for she had grown up with it: her mother talked of it all the time. Her family, the Durrants, had built it long ago on the edge of the virgin forest, but in the end misfortune had driven them to abandon it, and now the forest was taking it back again.
    In Eden everything is wilder and more alive than anywhere else. The sun shines more fiercely, the rain strikes harder, and the leaves are so green that it hurts your eyes. Oh, it’s a dangerous place, Maddy. In Eden good and bad and beauty and ugliness are all tangled up together. There are hummingbirds so lovely that you can’t look at them for long; and moonflowers which only bloom for a single night, and are so fragile and pale that they’re like the ghosts of flowers; and beautiful evil-looking plants whose poison can strike you dumb. And deep in the forest there stands an enormous silk-cotton tree with an entire world in its branches, and the black people say that it’s haunted. And the house itself is part of the forest again now, for no-one has lived in it for years and years, so it’s fearfully overgrown.
    At Madeleine’s first and last foray to Sunday School three years before, Miss McAllister had cut short her recital at that point. Oh no, dear, she had said, not overgrown. God would