The Daughters of Eden Trilogy: The Shadow Catcher, Fever Hill & the Serpent's Tooth by Michelle Paver Page B

baby was clean, fed, changed and asleep, Madeleine would sit on the spare-room bed and look out of the window. The garden was a white, humped smoothness leading down to the beach. The seals and the cormorants had gone. Everyone had gone. Perhaps there was no-one left in the world except herself and the baby – and her father, of course. But he was away in the desert, so that was no use. He was always away when they needed him. If it hadn’t been for the shell, she would have been angry with him.
    And she was surprised at her mother, too. Why had she left her all alone like this? Why had she left her to look after the baby by herself? It wasn’t fair. Mothers weren’t supposed to do that sort of thing. If it hadn’t been for the shell, she would have been angry with her mother, too.
     
    On the morning of the tenth day there was a knock at the door.
    Madeleine was in the spare room, adding coal to the fire. When she heard the noise she froze. Visitors never came to Cairngowrie House. That was why Papa had taken it, because it was isolated. So who could be knocking? The postman never knocked. And it didn’t sound like Dr Baines’s ebullient tattoo.
    She glanced at the baby. It was fast asleep after a breakfast of condensed milk, its fists soft and pink and curled, like prawns.
    Moving quietly, Madeleine went downstairs and opened the door, letting in a blast of cold, clean air that made her blink.
    An unknown couple stood on the porch: a short, plump gentleman with damp jowls, and a tiny rigid lady in a quilted purple cape and a Tyrolean hat adorned with half a dead pheasant.
    The lady had a narrow waxy face framed by old-fashioned ringlets of crimped horsehair. Her eyes were close-set and colourless, and they fastened on Madeleine with no discernible expression. ‘What’, she demanded, ‘is your name?’ Her voice was as emotionless as her gaze, but she managed to sound as if she intended to disapprove of whatever answer Madeleine gave.
    Madeleine said her name, and the lady and gentleman exchanged glances. Madeleine wondered if she had been wrong to open the door. If it hadn’t been for the shell, she would have been worried.
    The couple walked past her into the drawing-room, and after a moment’s hesitation she followed. She hadn’t been in the drawing-room since the baby had arrived, and she was careful not to look at the piano, and the piles of Amateur Photographer on the sofa.
    Briskly the lady divested herself of hat, cape, gloves and muff to reveal a grimly elaborate gown of green and violet tartan. The collar reached to the jawbone, the bodice was punishingly tight, and the skirts were festooned with batteries of bows. A bustle created an illusion of hips, while the top of the stays stood in for a bosom.
    ‘I am Mrs Fynn,’ declared the lady. ‘You shall address me as Cousin Lettice. This’, she indicated the damp-jowled gentleman, ‘is Mr Fynn – whom you shall address as Cousin Septimus. Where is your mother.’
    Madeleine said her mother was upstairs in her room.
    She waited in the hall while the lady and gentleman ascended to her mother’s room. Moments later, Cousin Lettice came back onto the landing with a handkerchief clamped over her mouth. Cousin Septimus followed, looking clammy and outraged.
    Madeleine felt obscurely at fault.
    When they were back in the drawing-room, Cousin Lettice shook out her handkerchief with a snap and tucked it in her cuff. Then she picked up the Amateur Photographer s and placed them on the footstool, and sat down rigidly on the sofa. ‘When did this occur?’
    ‘A bit more than a week ago,’ said Madeleine.
    ‘Where are the servants?’
    ‘We only had one. And she left.’
    ‘Before or afterwards?’
    ‘Um. Before.’
    Cousin Lettice looked Madeleine up and down.
    Cousin Septimus stood with his hands behind his back and fixed his pale eyes on the ceiling rose. ‘The child’, he said, ‘has not washed for days. Absolute disgrace.’
    He made it sound as