Death Brings a Shadow Page 12

  She felt an odd, rolling sensation beneath her foot, as though she’d stepped on something round. A thimble dropped by the maid? She looked down, but the light was poor and she saw nothing.

  Maybe I’ve picked up a splinter, she chided herself, aware of a slight stinging sensation. That’s what you get for wearing thin slippers, Prudence.

  But when she searched for the offending bit of wood, tweezers and needle at the ready, she couldn’t find it. There was a red spot that itched when she touched it. Sandspurs, she decided, wedged into her shoe and rubbed against the skin when she and Geoffrey scurried into the shelter of the dune. She rubbed cream on the angry-looking area and decided not to worry about it. The fingers she’d touched to the irritated spot also began to itch. She rubbed more cream on them.

  Almost as soon as she’d turned out her light, Prudence was asleep.

  The eighteen-inch snake, brightly banded in red, yellow, and black, slithered off the second-floor veranda and down the trellis where night-blooming jessamine turned its fragrant white flowers toward the moon. It had lain inside the small woven grass basket in which it had been transported until it managed finally to dislodge the lid. A shy creature, the snake waited to make its escape until it thought it was alone.

  And then something heavy had stepped on it.

  * * *

  Prudence couldn’t breathe.

  She jolted upright in her bed, gasping but unable to draw enough air into her lungs. The early dawn was barely visible through the curtains, but there was enough light to tell that there seemed to be two of everything in her room. Prudence tried to call out, but the words wouldn’t come. She heard the slurred cries of a drunkard, and knew she was listening to her own desperate voice.

  Sliding to the floor, hauling herself up by one of the bed’s oak posters, she staggered to the door, wrenched it open, and tumbled into the corridor. She lay there, beating feebly on the Oriental carpet runner, desperately aware that she wasn’t making enough noise to summon help.

  Before she lapsed into unconsciousness Prudence thought she heard the sound of a door opening farther along the corridor and her name being called. Then everything went black.

  * * *

  Geoffrey never left her side during the first few critical hours. He held her upright in his arms when lying down proved too much for her struggling lungs and whispered constant encouragement even though it wasn’t at all certain she could hear.

  By mid-morning, they knew the worst. Prudence had been bitten by a coral snake. Reclusive, seldom seen outside the deep woods, it had somehow crawled into her bedroom and lain there, hidden and deadly, until her foot found it.

  One of the gardeners spied the beautiful but highly venomous reptile trapped in the cape jessamine bush growing along the wall beneath her window. Injured too badly to escape, it had twined itself into the thick foliage where a ray of sunlight made its jewel-like colors gleam. He cut off its head and burned it.

  Philip dispatched a man to the telegraph office on the mainland. The closest doctor was in Savannah, a full day’s journey away.

  Abigail came out of her seclusion to sit at Prudence’s bedside, silent tears streaming down her face.

  There was nothing any of them could do to stave off the inevitable.

  Geoffrey sent for Queen Lula.

  She was a tall woman, light brown in color, dressed in all the shades of the rainbow, enormous gold hoops hanging from her ears, arms encircled by dozens of bangle bracelets.

  “Ain’t nothing gonna do no good if the bite’s deep enough,” she said, cocking her head to one side as she listened to the convulsive, whooping breathing and ran her long, sensitive fingers over the muscles in Prudence’s arms and legs. Then she examined the angry spot on her patient’s foot, pushing and prodding, pinching the skin until it swelled and reddened.

  It was all Geoffrey could do not to snatch her hand away, but Queen Lula was the only thing that stood between Prudence and certain death. The best of the voodoo practitioners augmented their spells with primitive but often effective medicines.

  “I don’t see no marks where the fangs went in,” Queen Lula said.

  Geoffrey pointed to a pair of delicate satin slippers lying beside the bed. The soles were made of thin Spanish leather.

  Queen Lula used the handle of a hairbrush to pick them up, then laid them on a pillowcase spread across the top of the tea table. “Coral snakes got small fangs,” she said. “Only reason folks survive is they cain’t always bite through leather. Poison on the skin but not in the blood make you real sick, but it might not kill you.” She pointed a claw-like fingernail at a rough patch on the smooth leather of one of the slippers. “See here. This where she stepped on it. Snake open its mouth and bite, but I’m not seein’ no hole where the fangs got through. He squirt out his venom all right, but it stay on the leather. Little bit get on her skin.”

  “Will she live?” Geoffrey asked.

  Queen Lula shrugged. She took a bottle of golden oil and a small pouch of dark powder from one of the pockets of her voluminous skirts and began mixing them together, muttering to herself as she stirred.

  “What is that?”

  She shook her head. Echinacea oil and powdered charcoal could be tried on just about anything. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.

  “Hold her mouth open,” Queen Lula directed.

  She spooned the blend of oil and ground charcoal between Prudence’s lips, then massaged her throat to make her swallow. When it was nearly all gone, she smeared the last of it over the spot where the venom might or might not have penetrated the skin. Then she wrapped the slippers in the pillow case and stowed them in a woven grass basket she found by the veranda door.

  “No sense leavin’ these around where a dog might get to chewin’ on ’em,” she said.

  “How long?” Geoffrey asked.

  “Change come by the time the sun go down. One way or the other.” It was the best she could do. Only a fool would try to predict the outcome of snakebite.

  The long hours of the day passed with agonizing slowness, but gradually Prudence’s struggle for breath eased. As she took in more air she began to be able to move her limbs. Her eyes opened and registered what she saw. The racing heartbeat Geoffrey could feel against his chest as he held her regulated itself.

  He only allowed himself to hope when she fell into a natural sleep in his arms. No fever. No rattling rales in the lungs. Body slumped limply against his as though she were an exhausted child.

  Queen Lula prepared to leave while the sky was still streaked with orange. “Aunt Jessa mighty fond of this chile,” she said, fingering the amulet on Prudence’s wrist. “You be sure she never take that off. Not while she be on this island.”

  “Is that what saved her?” Geoffrey asked. The question didn’t seem at all odd.

  “Mebbe,” Queen Lula said. “Only thing is, white magic don’t usually stand a chance against the black. But this be Aunt Jessa’s white magic. She was a strong woman.”

  “So is Miss MacKenzie.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Now that she was healing, Prudence was bored. And angry. She’d had more than enough time to think about what had happened to her, and it didn’t make sense.

  At her insistence, Geoffrey had searched through Philip Dickson’s library and found a thick volume on the flora and fauna of the Georgia coastal area. She’d paged through meticulously detailed and beautifully tinted sketches of native plants and trees, resident and migratory birds, large and small animals of woodland, sandy plain, marshes, and swamps. It was a fascinating world of dangerous beauty, utterly unlike the tamed nature she was used to in Central Park and on Staten Island.

  She promised herself she’d do justice to the author’s passionate erudition and all of his painstakingly accurate drawings, but for the moment the only topic to hold her interest was snakes. Specifically, the coral snake.

  She read and reread the passages detailing the habitat and peculiarities of this most beaut
iful and reclusive of serpents. She learned the rhyme meant to teach children to distinguish between the venomous coral snake and its similarly banded but harmless imitators. Red on yellow kills a fellow. Red on black, friend of Jack. It had apparently leaped into widespread popularity almost thirty years ago. Easy to remember and based on the simple observation that the coral snake’s black and red bands were bracketed by bands of yellow, it made identification rapid and certain.

  This snake usually stayed out of sight, wasn’t aggressive, and seemed inclined to bite humans only if picked up or stepped on.

  Sometimes, she learned, its victim didn’t realize he’d been bitten until hours later, when the symptoms began to torment him. When he saw double, found it impossible to speak clearly, experienced muscle paralysis, and couldn’t breathe. Death was certain and unavoidable, though the author did reluctantly report that there had been unsubstantiated accounts of survivors who swore the snake that had bitten them had been the real thing and not the non-poisonous look-alike scarlet kingsnake. The writer was clearly skeptical.

  When she finally slid a bookmark into the volume and closed its cover, Prudence lay back against the mound of pillows propping her upright in her bed, folded her hands to keep them from roaming restlessly across the coverlet, and closed her eyes to concentrate on what she had read.

  It didn’t make sense.

  But she had been taught by her father that everything in life made sense if you could just unravel the tangled knot of why and how. Why had the snake been in her bedroom? How had it gotten there? If she could answer those two basic questions, she believed she would unlock the door to a greater mystery.

  Who wanted her dead?

  * * *

  Aurora Lee and Maggie Jane Bennett felt trapped in an exasperating dilemma.

  On the one hand, they were in polite and proper mourning for a prospective sister-in-law who never actually became a member of the family. That, they felt, was as it should be and as dictated by the etiquette books that ruled their lives.

  On the other hand, that same not quite sister-in-law no longer had any use for the day dresses, evening gowns, hats, gloves, and lacy unmentionables that comprised her never-to-be-used trousseau. Which they presumed would be packed away in trunks and traveling cases to collect mildew in one of Seapoint’s basement storage rooms.

  Such a shame. Such a waste.

  Staring into their nearly empty armoires was like sitting down to a dinner of boiled peas and cornbread when you knew that a delectable feast you’d never taste was laid out in another room. So close and yet so unobtainable.

  Each of the sisters had two everyday cotton dresses, one to wash and one to wear. A mourning gown, of course, and a made-over silk evening frock that had belonged to their long-dead mother in more prosperous times. All frequently and expertly mended. What little money the family possessed was not to be wasted on a pair of spinsters. They understood why their father and brothers merited new velvet-collared coats, fawn-colored trousers, and imported English riding boots. They were men of the world, with appearances to keep up.

  But oh, those trunks and armoires at Seapoint, bursting with everything they pined for.

  It wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t fair.

  * * *

  Prudence had no idea why the Bennett sisters had decided to pay her a visit. She’d met them only twice before, once at the Dickson dinner party her second night on the island, and then again when she and Geoffrey had accompanied Teddy back to Wildacre after he failed to persuade Eleanor’s father to allow her to be buried in his family’s graveyard.

  Both instances had been unmemorable. Aurora Lee spoke entirely in platitudes and Maggie Jane giggled and simpered behind ragged fingernails.

  Still, Prudence reminded herself, they were Bennetts, presumably as capable of eavesdropping on the conversations of their menfolk as other women relegated to a status marginally above that of children. She had questions she was sure might never be answered unless she was able to flatter and cajole them into revealing what no one outside the family had a right to know.

  Keep that thought in mind, she told herself, sitting up straighter against the tufted back of her chaise longue and composing her face in a welcoming smile. What was it her father always said? Never ask a question in court unless you already know the answer. Prudence wasn’t in court, but if she ever got far enough in this on-again off-again investigation to accuse someone, she’d better have the answers to all the questions anyone could possibly ask. She had a feeling that Southern justice was a slippery concept at best, and she was definitely an unwelcome outsider.

  “We had no idea you’d fallen ill,” Aurora Lee said.

  It was highly irregular to be entertained in a virtual stranger’s bedroom, but it seemed there was no other choice. The formidable Mr. Dickson had explained that Miss MacKenzie was indisposed, but amenable to receiving the right sort of company. The sisters settled themselves into matching, satin-covered slipper chairs positioned opposite the open French doors to the veranda. The view of the beach and the Atlantic Ocean was breathtaking.

  “I do hope you’re recovering from what ailed you, Miss MacKenzie,” Aurora Lee probed.

  “I wish you’d call me Prudence.”

  Maggie Jane giggled.

  “How kind of you. And of course we would be delighted if you would also address us by our Christian names.”

  Aurora Lee has such an odd way of speaking, Prudence thought. As though she were a character from one of Miss Jane Austen’s intriguing tales.

  “Our climate does take a bit of getting used to,” Aurora Lee continued, when Prudence had still not revealed what exactly she was suffering from.

  “I find the sea air most refreshing.” Prudence declared.

  “It can be so difficult to maintain one’s good health after a loss like the one we all experienced. So tragic and so upsetting.” Aurora Lee did not give up easily.

  Maggie Jane sniffled.

  “You’re right, of course,” Prudence conceded. She’d been of two minds about explaining what had happened to her. If someone had put the snake in her room, would it be wise to let him know he’d nearly succeeded? Or shrewder to allow him to think his attempt had failed? The problem was that she couldn’t count on the Seapoint staff not gossiping, especially when the tidbit was so juicy.

  “I encountered a snake,” she said ambiguously, making up her mind on the spot. If there was a second try, she was more than prepared. There wasn’t a corner of the room or a fold of her sheets she wasn’t constantly inspecting.

  “How dreadful!” Aurora Lee leaned forward in sympathy. “Do tell!”

  “Was it a copperhead?” Maggie Jane asked, forgetting to duck her head and raise a hand to her mouth. “I saw a little one hiding under some pine straw once. I swear I didn’t know what it was at first. They don’t have the copperhead markings when they first hatch out.”

  Aurora Lee stared at her.

  “At least that’s what I’ve been told,” Maggie Jane amended, sheltering behind her fingers again.

  “It wasn’t a copperhead,” Prudence said. She was going to make them drag it out of her, alert for any indication that one of the misses Bennett might already know what type of snake someone had secreted in her room.

  “You have to be careful where you walk,” Aurora Lee said. “It’s best to take a dog along with you if you can.”

  “Even in your bedroom?” Prudence asked.

  The sisters immediately shook their skirts out apprehensively, eyes darting from the curtains and bedclothes that hung a good two inches above the floor to the dishes of crushed bay leaves under the bedposts. The fragrant herb was supposed to repel roaches.

  “I never heard of such a thing,” Aurora Lee said.

  “It was a coral snake.”

  Maggie Jane’s eyes widened and Aurora Lee shook her head in disbelief.

  “I’m sure it wasn’t,” Aurora Lee said. “You just let yourself get scared by a kingsnake. For no good reason
at all,” she added with smug superiority. Plainly she thought that any Yankee who took to her bed with such a flimsy excuse wasn’t half the woman a Bennett was.

  “They’re deadly,” Maggie Jane whispered. “Nobody who gets bitten by a coral snake ever survives.”

  “I said I had an encounter,” Prudence elaborated. “Not that I was bitten.”

  “You wouldn’t be lying there if you had been,” Aurora Lee said sharply. “I suppose somebody else saw and identified this supposed coral snake?” Somebody who knew what he was looking at, she meant.

  “One of the gardeners killed him,” Prudence said. “And cut off his head for good measure.” Not only hadn’t the two sisters believed her, they’d also expressed what seemed to be genuine shock and dismay at the whole idea of a coral snake in her bedroom. She doubted either of them was capable of acting out a lie so convincingly, but something about the way they were behaving hinted at an ulterior motive behind the unannounced visit.

  “I’m glad you’re all right, Prudence,” Maggie Jane said shyly.

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  “And speaking of kindnesses,” Aurora said, taking the bit between her teeth, “Maggie Jane and I have been worried to death about poor Mrs. Dickson having to pack up all of Eleanor’s clothing and personal belongings.”

  “I believe the housekeeper and maids will be doing that,” Prudence said, not sure where the comment was leading. “When the time comes.”

  “Well, of course, they’ll be doing the actual work,” Aurora Lee conceded, “but I’m sure there will be decisions that only Mrs. Dickson can make. And that will be agonizingly painful for her.” She turned encouragingly to Maggie Jane, who had been well rehearsed in what she needed to say.

  “Oh my, yes. Very painful.” Up went the hand again, but at least Maggie Jane was able to keep her eyes focused on the person she was talking to. Aurora Lee had made her practice enough. “We thought that what we might do is take that burden off her shoulders. And especially now that you’re . . . the way you are.”