The Fever Tree (18 page)

On the far side of the
kraal
was a mountain of freshly shorn wool, black with flies and stinking of grease. A group of women with scarves wrapped around their heads were bagging the wool into large canvas sacks. Mevrouw Reitz was amongst them. Frances made her way over. “Can I help?”

“There’s not much in it for you but bread and cheese,” the woman said, but when Frances didn’t move away she motioned with her head to the pile of canvas sacks. Frances worked for two hours, her hands deep in the wool, her fingernails thick with grime. The fleece was coarse and matted, and it left red welts across the palms of her hands.

When the women were done, the sun was slipping below the horizon and the
kraal
floors were a pattern of long shadows. The men had finished shearing. They washed in the trough then stood stretching their backs, pushing the wet hair off their foreheads. Edwin caught Frances’s eye across the
kraal
and smiled, and she thought, We are almost friends. Then it was the women’s turn to wash, and one by one they dunked their faces in the trough, scrubbing at their hands, necks, and cheeks. The water was like balm against the heat of her face, and it ran needles of cold down her neck into her dress. Mevrouw Reitz passed around a basket of bread and cheese, and the saltiness was rich and thick on Frances’s tongue.

They walked back, just the two of them, past the empty
kraals
, the barns, and the farmhouse, under a gray sky emptied of light. A thread of cold air pushed over the earth. Edwin’s shirt was ripped and smeared with dirt and his trousers were caked in grease. There was a looseness about him. She could sense his tiredness, like hers, in the luxuriating slowness with which he walked and in the stretching out of his shoulders.

It was almost dark now. The night air held just a faint residue of light. “I didn’t know you could shear,” she said quietly.

“Why would you have known?” There was a squeak as he pulled the cork out of a small bottle and passed it to her.

“Where did you get it?” They had barely had any alcohol in the months Frances had been there.

“Mijnheer Reitz gave it to me.”

She took a sip. It was peach brandy, sweet and strong after the cheese, and it pulled on the corners of her mouth. He stopped and looked up. They stood under the canopy of the fever tree. It was darker here than the sky outside, and the birds flitted like bats between the branches. The bottle was sticky, and as she passed it back to him she saw that he had left a brown smear on the glass. She took hold of his hand and turned it over. His palm had been sliced open by a blade. The edges of the wound were clogged dry with dirt, but the center still glistened.

“Does it hurt?” Her voice sounded loud in the gathering gloom.

“It’s not deep,” he said slowly, and although she looked at his palm she could sense the weight of his hand in hers, his gaze on her, and the taut closeness of his body. “The shears get blunt as you work.”

He took his hand from her and tipped the brandy bottle to his lips, and she imagined the dark, sweet liquid gliding over his tongue.

•   •   •

L
ATER
,
WHEN
SHE
SAT
in the bedroom in her nightdress rubbing oil into her face, she felt a lump just below her earlobe. It moved backwards and forwards under her finger. She pulled a shawl from the bed and went through to Edwin’s study. He sat with a glass in a bandaged hand, the brandy bottle almost empty on his desk. His eyes were heavy with tiredness and drink.

“I can feel something. On my neck,” she said, standing in the doorway.

He pulled a chair over for her to sit. She let her shawl slip down her back, swept her hair to one side, and tilted her head so he could see it.

“It’s a tick,” he said, drawing back and looking at her with a half smile. “From the sheep.”

“Will you be able to get it out?” she asked.

“Can you keep still?”

She nodded, and he lit a match, letting it burn for a few seconds before blowing it out. Then he pulled his chair close to her and pushed one hand into her hair to hold her still. With the other he used the hot end of the match to burn the tick. She flinched when she felt the heat of the match against her skin, but the grasp of his other hand held her steady. She could smell the warmth rising from his body, the dried sweat, and the brandy on his breath. His shirtsleeve, rolled up, brushed against her mouth. For a second she wanted him to kiss her, wanted to feel him lean forward and cover her mouth with his, but he was already withdrawing his hand from her hair. He put the match down and took up a pair of tweezers, and she felt a tugging against her skin. After a moment he tapped the tick into a bottle; a swollen brown sac with orange legs.

His gray eyes settled on hers. He had consumed almost the whole bottle of brandy, but there was nothing drunk about him. He was as contained and watchful as ever. The only change was a kind of tiredness, a letting go, which manifested itself in a languorous ease. The lamp guttered, hissed, and revived. She registered as a prickling on her scalp the place where his hand had held her and her want for him to reach out and touch it again, in the same place as he had before.

“It was good of you to help Mevrouw Reitz,” he said, after a moment.

“I’m not sure she noticed. Sometimes I feel she can barely bring herself to look at me.”

Edwin gave a low laugh. “She told me she thought you were coming along well.”

“Did she?” Frances smiled, easily able to imagine the Boer woman casting judgment. There was a small silence. She thought she ought to stand up and leave, but there was something in Edwin’s stillness which made her feel obliged to offer something more. As if he were waiting for her.

“Do you ever think about England?” she asked.

“Not as much as I should.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “I think about my family. I worry that they don’t have enough to live on, and that I send them too little. But I don’t miss living there.”

“Your brothers have work, don’t they?”

“In factories, yes.” He leant back in his chair. “Not much of a life.”

“It’s been a cold winter.”

“Yes.”

The frozen rivers, the pinched, frostbitten faces, the gray cities teeming with people—it seemed worlds away from the hot, quiet closeness of the room in which they sat and the miles of empty veldt outside.

She spoke into the silence, needing to unburden herself. “I dreamt last night that I was in London, in my uncle’s house.” The dream had disturbed her, though she wasn’t sure why. “I had a plant with me, a cutting from a tree which I had taken from Rietfontein. I wanted to show it to my cousins, but when I took it out of my pocket I realized it was dead. It had shriveled up into a spiny knot of thorns.”

“Were you upset?”

“I was devastated. I cried like a child.”

His eyes were clear as he looked at her. “Because you wanted them to see it, or because it had died?”

“That’s just it.” He had identified the thing which was bothering her. “It wasn’t just because I wanted them to see it. I was upset because it was no longer alive and somehow it was my fault.”

He didn’t say anything, and she felt a wave of sadness come over her. She bit her lip to hold back the tears, and after a moment stood up and moved out of the room.

F
rances sat on the
stoep
watching the two men walk out of the veldt towards her. They were still far off, their figures no more than dark silhouettes against the sinking sun. Mangwa was crunching the balustrade between his teeth, occasionally curling his upper lip in distaste. She ought to have stopped him an hour ago—already there was a pile of wood chippings and paint on the floor—but it seemed pointless. The little house was crumbling into the veldt, with or without his help.

The heat made Frances lethargic, but she stood up as the men drew closer and pushed the zebra’s muzzle away. She couldn’t help admiring him. His brown fur was beginning to give way to the rippling, glossy coat of an adult zebra, and his body had the compact strength of a wild animal. He butted her with his nose, nibbling at her clothes with his lips, which tickled her skin and made her laugh. It was her husband, she realized, taking in the knapsack slung over his shoulders, walking with a man she didn’t recognize. Frances had been sure that she would know Joseph Baier in an instant—that the influence he had exerted over her life would single him out for her—but in fact she looked at him blankly until Edwin introduced them.

He was a small man who carried too much weight, and he arrived on their doorstep panting in the heat. His eyes, sunken into folds of pink flesh, darted about with surprising speed, disconcertingly at odds with the heavy softness of his body. He must have been in his fifties, but his bulk gave him a false youthfulness. An infant’s chubbiness smoothed out the lines on his face.

“So, Mrs. Matthews,” he said, eyeing up the cracked plaster and warped floorboards. His voice was a nasal whine. “This is quite a change, isn’t it?” He paused on the word “change,” giving it an unquestionable emphasis of disdain, while at the same time smiling quickly as if he were turning a knife in a pig, hoping it would squeal.

“From London? Yes. I can’t get used to the heat.”

“No more gilt taps and lace curtains.” He moved as he talked, thrusting his hands in and out of his pockets, adjusting his necktie and looking around the room like a prospecting landlord. He had a restless, unsettled manner. “Aren’t you Sir John Hamilton’s niece?” he asked.

Frances knew a little about Joseph Baier from listening to William. He was a Jew from the East End who had been one of the first to the diamond fields and made a vast fortune. She imagined he enjoyed parading William around the fields: the educated, cultured boy whom he held in check with his vast reserves of money.

“He dropped in at the quarantine station,” Edwin said quietly, when Baier was washing in the trough outside. “We’ll have to put him up for the night.”

“What do you do, Edwin, with such a delicate wife?” Baier asked over supper. “Keep her caged up here like a bird while you go around saving lives?” Frances supposed the power Baier wielded at the Cape allowed him to say anything he liked. It occurred to her that he might allude to her relationship with William. He looked like the kind of man who might do it just for his own amusement.

“She keeps herself very well without my help.”

“I’ve always thought women aren’t so different from your beloved kaffirs. Loath to work and with a strong sense of their own entitlement.” Baier laughed, nudging the mealies around on his plate. “And, of course, they can’t always be trusted.”

Frances watched him, transfixed, her heart thudding.

“The funny thing is, Mrs. Matthews, you could show your husband any number of diamonds in Kimberley, and it would never turn his head. Turns out I was using the wrong currency.”

There was a pause where no one said anything. Edwin’s face was rigid. Something was going on between the two men which she didn’t understand.

“It’s not a question of currency. I wouldn’t do something that made me ashamed.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that! I think you would do a fair amount to keep your wife in comfort.” There was another brittle silence. “And I thought you were a man of pride!” Baier pushed his plate away carelessly, knocking it into the candlestick. Wax spilled over the table. He produced a toothpick from his pocket and began poking it between his teeth as he talked. She could see the end was wet and bloody. “The elusive man of principle turns out to be human after all. Who would have guessed you had a weakness for the finer things in life?” He smiled at Frances. “You know, Mrs. Matthews, we thought he was terribly serious. You could never get him to laugh. He was always on some campaign or other.” He paused, thoughtful, his fingers still stabbing at his gums.

“Are you still intent on saving niggers?” he asked Edwin.

“As many as I can.”

“He got quite upset in Kimberley,” Baier said, looking at Frances. “Took a shine to a kaffir girl. A nice piece of nigger flesh, but she wasn’t quite honest. We had to take her away. Got himself into quite a state about it. And there’s some in Kimberley who won’t stand for that sort of thing.”

Frances couldn’t work out why Edwin didn’t say anything. He ought to be defending himself. The man was clearly a brute, but Edwin was a coward for not standing up to him.

“And there was me thinking you had settled down, after that little debacle with the articles—”

“What articles?” Frances interrupted.

“Ah—you haven’t shown your wife? And I thought you were so proud of your journalism.”

“I wrote a series of articles defending the rights of native workers on the Kimberley fields,” Edwin said coldly, his eyes fixed on the table.

What was he talking about? Frances had never heard about any of this.

“I think I did you a favor, Matthews, bringing you here. Don’t you think?” Edwin didn’t reply, his jaw set in an effort at self-control. “It’s a bit of a backwater, but you can’t stir up trouble.”

Frances hadn’t thought Edwin was either capable or inclined to stir up trouble. Sarah brought in some rice pudding, and Baier ran his spoon through it with dismay. Then he turned to Frances. “I gather you met my cousin Westbrook on the boat from Southampton?”

“Yes,” Frances said, keeping her voice level, and wondering how much he knew. She could feel the heat rising to her cheeks.

“William is quite popular amongst the young girls in the colony.” Baier was talking to Edwin, but his gaze was on Frances, and he winked very deliberately, licking at his bottom lip as he did so. Edwin hadn’t noticed, but she felt her blood run cold.

Blustering, she changed the subject. “He talked about importing a new generation of steam engines into the mines. Apparently it will improve your business?”

•   •   •

A
FTER
DINNER
THEY
SAT
in chairs around the fire, and Baier lit a cigar. He stretched out his legs. “What’s this?” he asked, nudging his foot against the fossil which was sitting on the hearthstone.

“Part of the jaw of a reptile.”

Frances had looked at it many times, impressed by the size of the glossy teeth whose polished surfaces curved out of the rock. She had even tried to paint it.

“And?” Baier asked. “Why do you keep it?”

“Because I admire its age,” Edwin said.

“Come, surely that’s not all. You naturalists have a story behind everything.”

“The teeth indicate that it has mammalian features.”

“Which means?” Baier asked lazily, with a hint of impatience.

“That mammals have descended from reptiles. I believe this species is the missing connection,” Edwin said.

“And that’s it?” Baier laughed, incredulous. “You do get excited about the driest things. I hope all this talk of fossils interests
you
, Mrs. Matthews. Otherwise you’re in for a dreary marriage.” He laughed into their silence and drew on his cigar, and after a few moments chuckled. “Next you’ll be telling us we ought not to kill crocodiles.”

•   •   •

E
DWIN
WAS
UP
and out early in the morning. Baier had stayed the night on a makeshift bed in front of the fire, and she hadn’t had a chance to talk to Edwin yet about what had happened over dinner. The shutters were still closed when she came through to the sitting room, which was unusual. Edwin usually opened them before he went out. The room was dark and smelt of stale cigar smoke and last night’s dinner.

“Good morning, Mrs. Matthews.”

She jumped. Baier was sitting in one of the armchairs by the fireplace. She could see the balding crown of his head over the back of the chair. “I didn’t realize you were still here.”

“Did you enjoy spending time with my cousin on the
Cambrian
?” he asked, without turning in his chair to look at her. She didn’t reply, and he said, “I was hoping you might be able to help me with something.”

“Help you?” She didn’t want to be in the same room as him, let alone obliged to help.

“I’ve got a long journey ahead of me and my feet have already begun to ache. Could I ask you to rub them a little? Just to get the circulation going?”

She froze. He knew about William, and he was going to use his knowledge against her. The room was completely quiet, except for Sarah sweeping the
stoep
outside. She could hear the rhythmic bristle of the broom against the wooden boards. The silence was worse than talking. It seemed to connect the two of them in something illicit.

“Are you still there?” he asked.

Like an automaton, she walked over to the chair and knelt down in front of him. He had shoes on, and she had to fiddle with the laces before she could slide them off his feet. She avoided looking up at him, but she could hear his breathing. She cradled one of his feet in her hands. The sock was warm and slightly damp against her fingers.

“You’ll want to take that off,” he said, chuckling. She froze, for a moment undecided. She wanted to stand up and walk away, but Edwin might not forgive her if he found out about William, least of all because he was Baier’s cousin. Then where would she be? She peeled off the sock. His foot was a fat spread of flesh in her palm. His breathing came heavier as she pressed her fingers into the soft, pink tissue. He wriggled his toes a little as she worked, flinching at one point when her sleeve brushed against the sole of his foot. It wasn’t until her fingers had begun to ache that he finally dismissed her. She stood up and walked out to the kitchen, shut herself inside, and vomited into the sink.

•   •   •

“A
RE
WE
HERE
because of Baier?” she asked later, when Edwin had come home.

He sat down to unlace his boots, his left hand still awkward from where he had cut it. “He offered me a position, and I accepted.”

“He made it sound as if he forced you.”

“He applied some pressure.”

“Why?”

“He wanted me out of Kimberley.”

“Because of the native girl?”

“I tried to help her.”

“How? What was Baier insinuating?”

“Good God, Frances. There was no relationship between us. This was six months ago. We’d just got engaged. I was back in Kimberley hoping to take over my old practice. I’d promised myself not to get involved in politics, but . . .” He trailed off, looking at the floor for a moment. “She was brought to me for help and I couldn’t turn her away. I offered her my house as a refuge.”

“I don’t like him any more than you do, but I should like to know what was behind the story.”

Edwin walked into the sitting room and poured himself a glass of water, then sat down heavily in one of the chairs on either side of the fireplace. She sat down opposite him and waited.

“It’s not an unusual story, really—only the details set it apart. There was a girl, a domestic. You see it all the time in Kimberley. She was Sotho, and when her tribe was destroyed in the war with the Boers she left her children and walked hundreds of miles with her brother to find work in Kimberley. It was winter, and the water froze in the pots they carried. They had a blanket which they shared at night, rolled into a ball beside the fire.”

Edwin passed his hand over his face as if the story exhausted him. “Arthur Gibbons hired her. He was a digger from London—a friend of Baier’s—with a reputation for bad luck. He lost his eye when a dynamite explosion threw a piece of shrapnel at him.” Edwin laughed wryly. “And only last year he bought a claim at New Rush. When he went to inspect it, he saw the walls had caved in and the claim was full of debris. He rejected it on the grounds that it was unworkable and bought another alongside. A week later the original claim was bought by a man who set eight natives to work on it with picks and shovels. It took the men a day to clear off the debris and start digging fresh soil, and within an hour they were shouting and waving. Gibbons looked over and saw a native holding up a diamond as big as a bottle stopper.

“Anyway, the girl—Gibbons called her Ruth—cleaned his hut, washed his clothes, and learnt to cook roast chicken, all for less money than a maid in England would get herself out of bed for. And she gave him a lot more besides.

“Last winter, Gibbons caught red-water fever. He lay in bed for months. He had never been popular. Others had died, and he might have done the same, but Ruth went out and bought him medicine, forced him to swallow fresh water, changed his sheets, and emptied his bedpan. When his
boys started coming round to the house wanting to know why he wasn’t buying, saying they would take their diamonds elsewhere, she kept his business alive by buying diamonds on credit. She knew a thing or two about stones. She bought them cheap and drove a good bargain. It was a business investment—she hoped Gibbons would reward her.

“The fever broke in October and she turned the diamonds over to him. The next morning he was gone. He had taken them all. The woman was left with debts running up to thousands of pounds. Now she is in Breakwater Prison.”

“When will she be released?” Frances asked.

“She won’t. It’s a life term.”

“But you tried to bring attention to the case?”

“I wrote a letter to the governor. Didn’t do much good. I might have taken it further but . . .” He shrugged, not finishing.

“But what?” she demanded, sensing what he was going to say.