The Fever Tree (36 page)

She tried to laugh, clenching her jaw to stop her teeth from chattering. “Not brave, foolish. I’d no idea the storm was going to be so bad.”

He stood up, placing a candle and a box of matches on the edge of the crate. “Light it only if you have to. I’m going now, to get help.”

“But it’s still raining.”

“It’s slowed down a little.”

She didn’t want him to go, but he was already moving across the room. It was dangerous outside on the ice. What if he didn’t come back? What if he decided to leave her here to die? The idea that he might hate her enough to do this filled her with sudden horror. She stood up, keeping a hand to the wall for balance. “Edwin. Can you forgive me?” Her question was spoken into the dark. She couldn’t make him out.

After a moment, he said, “Is it a question of forgiveness?”

“Every day I wake up wishing it could have been different. Wanting to start over again.”

“You have started over,” he said gently. “You should be proud of what you have achieved.”

But she wasn’t proud. All she felt was a profound sadness. He left, and she sat down against the wall. Her skirts stuck to her legs, soaking and cold. The water had risen above her ankles, swilling over her thighs. It was logical to think she might die here. She hadn’t imagined it was possible to feel cold like this. It was as if the flesh had been stripped from her bones and ice was being held against her raw nerves. It burnt.

•   •   •

S
HE
OPENED
HER
EYES
with a jolt. Edwin was crouched over her, slapping her awake. She was stretched out on her back, staring at an opal sky. She couldn’t feel her body, but she could see it, lying perfectly motionless. The shivering had stopped. The veldt was silent. It wasn’t raining anymore. Edwin said her name, over and over, until she blinked at him and tried to shift her muscles into recognition, but he was already stripping the wet clothes off her, pulling them from her body. He dressed her in a woolen shirt and thick cotton trousers, sitting her upright, pushing her arms through the sleeves as if she were a child. The surface of her skin was entirely numb. She could hear the rustling of fabric, but like a porcelain doll she felt nothing, just the vibrations, the movement as he picked up each limb in turn.

He brought a bottle to her lips. She drank and felt her body firing into life. The sky turned mauve, then azure blue. She didn’t think she had ever seen anything so beautiful. Ice floated on the surface of the flood. He wrapped her in blankets. They were on a cart, she realized, as it began to move. There was the sound of oxen splashing through water. The land as far as she could see was white, and the sun, beginning to rise, sent shards of light glittering across its surface as though the veldt were made of quartz.

•   •   •

A
FIRE
WAS
CRACKLING
, fiercely hot. Where was she? Not in her attic room. Edwin was sitting on a chair by the bedside, watching her. When he saw she was awake he leant forward, picked up her wrist, and took her pulse. Her skin prickled, hot with fever. She couldn’t bear his professional concern.

“When I was sick,” she said, feeling herself ripping open from the inside, “with smallpox. You never came.” She had felt so alone, and so close to death, but it was only now that she felt the full force of his rejection. “You didn’t care if I lived or died.” Tears coursed down her face, over her mouth, onto the pillow. She knew that he would abandon her as he had done before, and she wasn’t sure that she could bear it a second time.

His fingers pressed into the soft part of her wrist, burning tunnels into her flesh. “Frances, I did come. I sat through the night with you. I didn’t leave until I knew you were going to pull through.”

A gulping, tearing sob ripped through her. “You didn’t want me to die?”

He put her wrist down on the bed and smiled. “No. I didn’t want you to die.”

“I should have trusted you.” Her voice was choked with tears. “But I was scared. Of what Baier would do to us. Of your determination. Of all the terrible things I had seen in Kimberley.”

He put a hand to her forehead, stroking the scarred skin. “Frances,” he said softly, “it’s not your fault.” And his words, and the touch of his hand, unburdened her.

•   •   •

S
HE
WOKE
SOME
TIME
LATER
. It was night. The room was dark, and the fire threw shadows flickering across the wall. Edwin was sitting on the bed, watching her. She could see the dark outline of his shoulders. The fire spat and burnt. Her body was hot, but her skin was wet. There was a dull ache from the wound on her cheek, and her mouth was dry. The weight of the sheets made her skin crawl. She couldn’t see his face, couldn’t read his expression. He was perfectly still, and she sensed his expectation. She swallowed, and he must have heard because he reached out a hand and touched the flannel shirt at her waist, just above the jut of her hip. Her skin froze and then rippled outwards from his touch. His fingertips tugged at her nerves, as though they were sticking on a network of ice. He nudged up the fabric, circling her rib cage with one hand. Her breath came heavily. She tried to sit up. There was a burning in her chest. His palms slid up her damp body, his skin slicing into hers. She put her hands on his belt and undid the buckle, and he waited as she slid the shirt off his shoulders. He felt entirely new to her, as if she had never touched him, and his skin against hers was like fire, obliterating everything that had gone before.

Afterwards, they lay looking at each other. She touched his face, wondering at the feel of him under her fingertips. He watched her for a moment, then said, “I should have been more honest with you, right from the beginning. I hated myself when I heard you were sick. I had been angry with you for so long, but I barely knew it.”

“And are you angry now?”

“No,” he said, smiling, taking hold of her hand and drawing her towards him.

•   •   •

S
HE
SLEPT
AND
WOKE
AGAIN
, each time putting out a hand to feel for him and going back to sleep only once she knew he was there. Fingers of light crept into the room. She watched him dress. He put a hand to her cheek. She let him go without speaking. There would be time for talking later. She slept again, and when she woke it was broad daylight and her fever had gone. On the table by the bed was a gold ring. She turned it over in her hand. It was her wedding ring. Edwin must have kept it with him all this time. Smiling, she slipped it onto her finger.

•   •   •

M
EVROUW
R
EITZ
was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes. When Frances came in, she looked up and beamed, enfolding her carefully in her arms. Frances was surprised by this sudden show of affection. She had thought she might be blamed for Piet’s escape to the cottage. After all, she had been the one who had taken him there.

“Is he all right?” Frances asked.

“Thanks to you. If you hadn’t gone after him . . .” She opened her hands in a gesture of futility.

“We were lucky that Edwin was there.”

“Yes. But you knew where to find Piet.” The older woman squeezed her hand. “You must take it slowly for a few days. Make sure you recover. And I want you to know, there will always be a position for you here.”

“Thank you.” Frances smiled back, but she didn’t want to think about that now. Edwin was here. What had happened between them in the night—the things he had said and the way he had touched her—had changed everything. “And my husband? Has he already eaten?”

Mevrouw Reitz looked at her strangely. “Yes. Did he not say good-bye?”

Frances swallowed. Her sense of things was falling away from her. Mevrouw Reitz scraped the potato peelings from the sink. Frances would be asked to take them out to the pig later.

“He was gone by five o’clock. I was lucky to catch him. I said he was foolish to ride out with all this flooding, but he was in a hurry to get to Cape Town.”

She had given him the last of herself. She felt empty. Used, and burnt up. All the strength she had stored up since she came to Rietfontein was being torn from her. There was no future that she could imagine without him. She felt the weight of the ring on her finger and wondered why he had left it, if he didn’t want them to be together. She told herself that he would come back for her, but it seemed like little more than a fiction invented to console herself.

•   •   •

T
HE
AFTERMATH
OF
THE
STORM
, like the relief that follows a near tragedy, gave way to a hysteria of storytelling. The overseer had been looking for Piet when the storm came. He hid from the hail under a rocky outcrop. The hailstones came down on all sides, sealing him up behind a wall of ice. He had to hack out an air vent with a stone to stop himself from suffocating. Three hundred sheep had been lost on a neighboring farm. They had been left out in an open
kraal
when the hail came down, and the stones had butchered them all. The veldt was littered with dead animals: birds, snakes, and antelope killed by the onslaught. The roof had been ripped off the dairy, and the shutters on the house swung uselessly on their hinges. But the mood was joyous. Frances watched, and in their smiles and laughter she saw reflected only her deep sadness.

The ice melted, and the dam filled to bursting, but the walls held. When the rains had disappeared, the plains broke out into flower. It was spectacularly beautiful; a carpet of yellow blooms sweeping over the earth. Grasses thrust up green and succulent from the ground, and the veldt came heaving into life. The air throbbed with the hum of insects, and butterflies washed over the flowers in swirling white clouds.

Frances constantly thought back to their night together. It had seemed to her at the time that Edwin had unfolded a part of himself, and let her come close to him. That he had found something in her that he needed; a place in her that satisfied him. But now she began to doubt herself. She remembered his hands on her body. Had they been kind, not passionate? Was it possible that the feeling of communion had been all hers? Perhaps he had tried to love her out of a feeling of duty but had found, in the end, that it was impossible.

Summer turned into a mellow autumn, the weather cooled, and from her room in the attic she could see the swallows leaving in droves. Her heart ached with disappointment, and she wondered if she should leave with them. Go back to England.

•   •   •

T
HEN
,
ONE
DAY
, two months after the storm, a letter arrived for her. She recognized the handwriting. It was from Edwin. Her hands shook as she tore open the envelope.

Frances. Forgive me for taking so long to write to you. We have had enough false starts, and I wanted to settle things in Cape Town first. My work in Kimberley has earned me the respect of some, and they have asked me to take up a position in the government here. There is a house with a view of the sea, and a fig tree in the garden. You once asked me if we could start again. If you are still willing, then don’t write back. Leave Rietfontein and get the next coach to Cape Town.

She put down the letter and smiled. The drought was over, and the rains had come. Her work here was done. She would begin packing her bags immediately.

The Fever Tree
first spoke to me on a dark winter’s afternoon in the British Library. The hush in the reading room was broken only by the turning of old pages and the soft tapping of keys. I was researching the history of English colonials in South Africa, and amongst the books stacked on my desk was an old canvas-bound diary. The spine creaked as I opened it, and the gilt lamp spilled a pool of light onto its thick yellowing pages. The diary had been written by a doctor at the end of the nineteenth century, and it told the extraordinary story of a smallpox epidemic that had ravaged the diamond-mining town of Kimberley. Extraordinary because—reading on—it became clear that the epidemic had been covered up by the great statesman Cecil Rhodes to protect his investment in the mines.

The disease raged for over two years, killing thousands of men, women, and children, mostly African laborers. The tragedy was that the epidemic could have been brought under control in just a few months if the doctors had quarantined and vaccinated patients instead of denying its very existence. The doctor writing the diary had fought—at great personal risk—to bring the epidemic to the attention of the authorities in Cape Town. It was later reported as “the greatest medical scandal in the long and honourable history of British medicine.” Dr. Jameson, one of the doctors who was paid to deny the presence of smallpox, went on to become prime minister of the Cape colony, as did Rhodes himself.

I could scarcely believe what I was reading. Cecil Rhodes was a man with vast colonial ambition, but nonetheless a figure generally talked about with respect. He had established the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University, an award of immense prestige. Was it possible that he had been responsible for such horrors? If so, how could history have forgotten? The smallpox scandal in Kimberley seemed to lie at the very heart of Britain’s exploitation of the resources and people of South Africa under the banner of “civilization.” It was a tale of greed and corruption, exemplifying a complete disregard for human life. But it was also a tale of courage. The story gripped me. I couldn’t let it go, and, before I knew it, I had begun to work it into the pages of a novel.

The landscape of southern Africa wasn’t new to me. A few years before, I had been to Namibia with my boyfriend (now husband). We had rented a Land Rover, filled it with enough food and water to last a few weeks, and set out to drive the length of the country from Swakopmund to the Angola border. We free-camped, and tackled the infamous van Zyl’s Pass, vertigo steep and strewn with boulders the size of oxen. We put up our tents on the crocodile-infested Kunene River and lurched into hidden valleys where the Himba still live in their beehive huts, dressed in animal hides, their skin thick with ocher, their lives unchanged for hundreds of years. We saw leopard prints by our fire in the morning, and in a dried-up river valley I touched the carcass of a giraffe hollowed out by drought and burnt to leather.

My residing memory, over and above the staggering beauty of the landscape, was the dust, which found its way into every crevice, coated every surface, and gritted in our teeth. One day towards the end of our journey, we drove past a high wire fence cordoning off a diamond mine, and I remember thinking, What would life have been like for the first Europeans who came to these desolate places to try to profit from the land?

I wanted my lead character, Frances Irvine, to mirror something of my own journey through the wilderness of Namibia and my growing sense of anger, and political enlightenment, as I came to understand the mercenary and often brutal exploitation of South Africa at the hands of the English. But what would drive her to such a place? Would she go willingly or would she be pushed? And what kind of life would await her?

Frances led me down a rabbit warren of research—a world of dust, diamonds, and disease. I read political pamphlets from the nineteenth century that discussed the million surplus women living in Britain and the emigration societies which specialized in shipping them out to the colonies to work. I dipped into guidebooks on the Cape published in 1880 and sifted through Victorian women’s magazines—turning over patterns for embroidered glove boxes and lace cushion covers—just as Frances might have done. I delved into manuals on social etiquette, cooking, botany, and what to bring on a hunting expedition to the Transvaal. I found old pictures of Kimberley, which showed women sorting diamonds, camping in the dust and filth of the town alongside their husbands. It wasn’t long before Frances emerged, a living, breathing character with a story of her own.

I went back to southern Africa one last time before I began writing
The Fever Tree
, driving from Johannesburg to Cape Town, over the vast arid plains of the Karoo, a landscape of extraordinary beauty. I spent a few days in Kimberley, and stood giddily on the edge of the Big Hole, the largest hand-dug diamond mine in the world. But what stayed with me—the indelible impression—were the quaint little Victorian towns, with their whitewashed Cape Dutch houses, and always on their outskirts the sprawling corrugated townships with their story of apartheid, disease, and poverty. I have traveled to many parts of Asia and Africa and seen disparity and hardship of all kinds, but nowhere has a place seemed as desolate as those I witnessed in South Africa. Here, in the twenty-first century, were the all-too-visible legacies of the English speculators who had mined Africa for a profit.
The Fever Tree
is my response to that history.