Frances stood absolutely still, trying to close down her emotions before realization seeped like poison into the heart of her. Her body registered the cheee cheee cheee of cicadas from the bushes behind the road and the woman prancing down the street glucking over her handful of coins. If she stayed very still, perhaps she wouldn’t have to feel the pain. But when the brass band rumbled into life for another song, a cry tore from some animal place inside her. She walked back to the carriage, her mouth salty with tears. One thought turned over and over again in her mind, and she kept sounding it out for truth. She had never heard William laugh as he had with Eloise—an easy, spontaneous chuckle born of affection—and this simple thing shattered her reality. It was clear to her suddenly, like waking from a dream, that she didn’t know William at all—the simple tenderness with which he held Eloise’s hands, the honest friendship between them as he bent to hear her whisper. In an instant she had seen a collusion between them which she and William had never shared. It would have been easier if Eloise’s attraction had been her beauty, but this was something different. She knew nothing about William’s life. How could she have believed he might have chosen to spend it with her? She let herself imagine, with a stab of pain, where the carriage was taking them. To another grand house, a party perhaps, where William would catch Eloise’s eye over the heads of the other guests.
Frances climbed back into the cab, and the driver called to the horses in a short staccato, until they were trotting back through the quiet streets, their hooves clopping on the dry earth. The truth was that William had thrown coins at her as if she were a beggar, and that dismissal—no, worse—his failure to recognize her presence in the dark, when she had known him in an instant, mortified her. All the pain she had felt on leaving England—her father’s death, her uncle’s rejection, the sense that she didn’t belong—had been soothed by William. Now she felt the old terrors crowding in on her. Perhaps her uncle was right to have refused to take her in. The way she had behaved on the ship proved she was anything other than worthy of respect. Self-loathing engulfed her. Even William had reminded her about the dangers of seduction, and she had blithely ignored him.
She sat in the back of the cab, her hands clasped together, gulping back a sadness that spilled out of some dark place inside her.
Nineteen
The Karoo. One hundred and fifty thousand square miles of barren, unforgiving landscape. It took them four days to cross it in an ox wagon. They had a strong wind at their backs, bellowing heat like a furnace. The skin on Frances’s face became soft leather. She choked on dust and ground her teeth, but by the end of the first day the wagon had shaken the fight out of her. She sat with her eyes fixed on a gap in the canvas, watching the sliver of road taking her away from Cape Town. Her only consolation was that Edwin no longer lived in Kimberley. She would never have to see William again.
The wagon was crammed with goods. Spades and metal sieves hung down from the roof, and the canvas sides were lined with pouches holding tins of sardines, bottles of water, boiled hams, and flasks of whiskey. Equipment had been crammed under the benches. There were coils of rope, a box of wood screws, and a pair of oilcans bound together with straps which rubbed against the backs of her calves. Occasionally the wagon would hit a boulder or a tree stump and a tin of currants or ginger preserve would roll out from between the seats.
On the second morning, the wagon stopped to pick up a tawny, long-limbed Dutchman with a soft-rimmed hat and a square black beard, who folded himself onto the bench opposite. He carried a cockerel in a wire cage, which he stowed underneath his seat. It preened its feathers and clucked disapprovingly. The wagon lurched its way over the pitted road, and Frances watched the man’s knees bob about his ears. He revealed a mouth full of unsteady teeth, and she smiled back at him.
The rich, fertile lands around Cape Town had given way to a vast desert. The Dutchman, perhaps sensing her unhappiness, kept sweeping his hands over the shimmering expanse. “Zebra,” he would say, enthusiastically, pulling his beard, “wildebeest, impala, kudu.” And she understood he must have been talking about many years ago, because in all the miles they traveled she didn’t see a single wild animal, only the bleached bones of livestock by the sides of the road.
There were no hedges, fences, or walls to break the space, no markers of civilization to demarcate boundaries, only line upon line of dried-up riverbeds choked with sand. The vastness of the landscape unnerved her. How could you tell where the civilized world began and ended? They passed cattle kraals and ostrich camps and, occasionally, farmsteads. Native huts, like swollen beehives, were scattered across the plains. Looking out from the back of the wagon, she spotted children, so dirty their race was indistinguishable, scrambling in the dust, arms outstretched for a piece of bread, or coins. Some of the Boers had built dams, which had shriveled in the heat to murky, muddy pools. Bright green mimosa trees clung to their edges.
The dust was everywhere. It rose in great ocher clouds from the road, obscuring the glare of the sun. It crept into every crevice of the wagon, worked its way under your fingernails, and gritted in your teeth. Her lips cracked in the dry heat, and when she licked them they stung and seemed to pull too tight across her mouth.
Once, she heard the fast thundering of hooves and excited shouts from their driver. “Hallo! Goede reis!”
It was a Cape cart from Kimberley, going by at twice their speed. Their horses were lathered and muscular. Two young men, Europeans, grinned and waved as they swept past. Frances buried her face in her shawl so she wouldn’t be seen. All her money had been spent on the boarding house in Cape Town, and the ox wagon was the only form of transport she could afford without writing to Edwin for money.
She had a letter from William in her pocket, and his words turned over and over in her mind, like the treadmill at Breakwater Prison. It had arrived the morning after she had seen him in Cape Town.
Frances—I can barely bring myself to write this, after everything that has passed between us, but—loveliest—here is the truth of it. There is no possibility of us being together. Baier refused to consider the idea of us being married. He is wrong. Utterly wrong. But I need him, Frances, more than perhaps I thought. I know you will understand when I say there are things I want to do in Africa—important things—and I need his help to begin them. If I want to make a difference at the Cape—and I believe I can—then I must first make a success of myself in the industry, and to do that I need his backing.
You can’t imagine what this decision has cost me. I have had to be ruthless with myself, and with you, my dearest, and I will pray that you forgive me, because I can’t stand the thought of you thinking about me with anything other than affection.
It was the letter she had dreaded, and it only made her love him more. The fact that he respected her enough to be honest with her made the finality of his words even harder to bear. He would marry another woman, not her, and she would never hear from him again. Yet despite the horror of imagining life without him, the letter soothed some of her fears. It reminded her that they had shared something real, and she allowed it to erase the image she had of him laughing with Eloise. He had tried to argue with his cousin in her favor, and of course she understood why in the end he had agreed to give her up. He was ambitious. She had always known it, and she didn’t want to be the one to hold him back. Yet in siding with William against herself, she was acknowledging her own worthlessness, and she felt this as a subtle shame which crept over her, sapping her mind of strength. Enclosed with the letter was a thin, gold chain which she wore threaded around her neck. The cool weight of the metal against her skin was a constant reminder of what she had lost.
At sunrise on the third day they passed a herd of cattle, at least five hundred strong. The herders whistled and shouted, flicking their whips over the animals to keep them moving, but the cattle were walking skeletons, heads bowed low, rasping their tongues across the side of the wagon in the hope of leeching some moisture from the wood. An adolesce
nt calf, bones propping up a tent of skin, swayed at the edges of the herd, then collapsed on its side. A herder picked it up by the tail until it found its front feet and began to walk again. It took the wagon an hour to nudge its way through. The cattle jostled and pushed the oxen and brought with them a boiling cloud of black flies. They sensed the body heat within and crawled over the canvas like fat lice.
The old man opposite squashed one expertly with the palm of his hand, and held it up for Frances to see. There was a searing pain on her calf, and she had to lift her skirts to sweep them off her legs. It didn’t take her long to start killing them, and her palm turned crimson with blood.
At noon they arrived in Jacobsdal, a small dorp on the banks of a river with a straggle of houses and a church with its shutters battened down against the howling wind. It was a bleak place, hardly a town at all, just a street etched out in the dust as if some tired old colonial at home had drawn a line on the map with a ruler. A few corrugated shacks were scattered along the sides of the road. It was deserted. Everyone must have moved on to the diamond fields.
She found a trap to take her to Rietfontein. It was open-topped, and her shawl, pulled over her head, offered little protection against the stinging cloud of grit and sand. After a few miles the driver stopped to ask directions from a native boy herding a vast flock of sheep. Their fleeces were clogged with dirt, and their eyes shut stoically against the dust. Eventually the cart put her down at a cottage with peeling white walls and a sagging thatched roof which stood alone in the middle of a ragged plain. It was surrounded by a few fallen-down kraals whose acacia walls had blown in. Their thorns snagged on the patchy scrub. She bowed her head against the force of the wind and walked up onto the stoep.
No one answered when she knocked, so she opened the door and stepped into a narrow hall. It was quiet inside, and she stood for a moment, rubbing her eyes and shaking rivulets of dust out of her shawl. It was more of a hovel than a house, with two beams running below a roof of reeds and mud. There were no carpets on the loosely boarded floors, and the walls, roughly plastered and bare of pictures, leveled off short of the vaulted roof so that any noise made in the house would be heard in every room. Two doors opened up to the left of the hall. In the first, to her surprise, was a brass bedstead and an oversized wardrobe made of a dark, heavy wood.
Further on was a study, which smelt of alcohol and camphor. Shelves lined the walls of the room, and on them were jars and bottles of different shapes and sizes. They were mostly filled with a murky liquid out of which peered insects, frogs, lizards, and, in one, a slack-jawed snake. Their bodies, where they pressed up against the glass, were white and bloodless. There were ostrich eggs, still whole, and butterflies of startling color pinned to pieces of card. A grotesque spider with thick, sculpted legs trailing golden hair looked as though he had been pinned mid-crawl. White, fossilized bones of tiny creatures emerged from chunks of rock. On the desk were forceps, scissors, and a selection of knives. A microscope had been set up, and two or three nets leant against the wall. It was a chilling collection of specimens; a little production line of death and entrapment. She had had no idea Edwin was interested in natural history, but then there was very little she did know about him.
A few newspaper cuttings had been pinned to the wall above the desk. Frances looked more closely at them. They were political cartoons. Edwin seemed so private, she hadn’t thought of him being concerned with politics. British soldiers and diplomats were depicted with bulbous faces and thick waists. One showed a bobby, fat and smug, smoking a cigar and wielding a baton made of newspaper. He was delivering blows to a Boer with a heavy beard and unkempt hair who had his trousers round his ankles. Another showed a native, wide-eyed, being beaten by an Englishman who held a whip in one hand and the St. George’s flag in the other: “Nigger flogging, my boy, is the onerous but necessary task of Empire.” Their faces leered out at her, and she was caught off guard by their frankness.
Across the hall was a sitting room with a large chimneybreast, a crude mantelpiece, and a small dining table with four chairs. Stepping out of the back door, Frances found a mud hut which turned out to be the kitchen. A pile of oranges was heaped up in one corner, two hams hung from the ceiling, and a maid was stretched out on the floor, sleeping. She leapt up when Frances came in, startling a small ferret-like creature, which scuttled out from under the sink and stood on two feet, looking at Frances with beady eyes. It crawled closer, and Frances, thinking it might scramble up her skirts and bite her, screamed. The creature darted out of the kitchen, down the hall of the house, and into the study. She followed after it, shutting the door and trapping the animal inside. A tumble of Dutch words spilled out of the maid, and Frances shook her head to show she didn’t understand. They looked at each other in mutual confusion. The maid’s skin was blue-black, the color of charcoal, and a deep fold was etched down either side of her mouth. She wore a simple black dress, and a fraying green scarf wound around her head like a turban. Her feet were bare. After a moment she grinned at Frances, revealing a row of yellowing teeth. It was such a good-natured smile that Frances couldn’t help but smile back.
“Dr. Matthews?” Frances asked.
The maid pointed towards the front door, and Frances understood that Edwin was out. What a relief. She was exhausted, and, leaving her trunk in the hall, she went through to the sitting room to rest for a few minutes. Dust rose in a little cloud from the chair when she sat. Flies crawled over the walls. The maid came in with a glass of water and a plate with two biscuits. She was heavily built and no longer young, and she moved slowly through the room. Frances drank the water but couldn’t bring herself to eat. Her mouth was dry, and a headache was unwinding from a tight coil behind her eyes. She shifted in her seat and wondered whether Edwin would be home soon and what they would talk about when he arrived. They had no experience of courtship. What did two people say to each other on the eve of their wedding?
Just the one bedroom. She had foolishly imagined having her own, retreating into her private space each night, and this was a difficult adjustment. There wouldn’t be any privacy here. She would have to sleep next to him, dress and undress in front of him, and use the chamber pot in the night. But where would she sleep this evening? They weren’t married yet. She watched a trail of ants threading across the floor, up one of the table legs, to the china plate. They inspected the biscuits before swarming over them. If this house was left long enough, the ants, the dust, and the cattle would slowly dismantle it.
Exhaustion settled over Frances’s body. Her shoulders ached and her knees were cramped and stiff. She let her head rest against the back of the chair. When she shut her eyes her body rattled and swayed with the motion of the wagon. She hadn’t thought Edwin would make a brilliantly successful doctor. He didn’t have the bedside manner for it. But he had obviously done very badly in Kimberley to end up here. This was worse than she had imagined. The same house in Kimberley would have had some of the charm and romance of pioneer life, but here they would be stuck out on the veldt, living like animals off the land. There wasn’t even a bathroom. Where would she wash? Her body ached for the luxury of hot water. Could one even feel clean in this house? Her bathroom in London, with its gilt taps and streaming jets of water, seemed an impossibly luxurious thing. It was apt punishment, she thought, for a woman who had aimed for too much. Her consolation was that at least her uncle, and her cousins, would never have to see what kind of life she was living.
She woke with a jolt. The room was in a murky half-light, and she gazed blankly at the table, at the threadbare pattern on the arm of the chair and the diminishing plate of biscuits. Her headache had cleared, but it took a moment for her mind to catch up and make sense of where she was. A fly was buzzing at the bottom of the teacup. The sun, which had been high in the sky when she arrived, must have set. With a suddenness characteristic of South Africa, the room was settling into almost instant darkness. The heat, inescapable during the day, had retreated, and Frances co
uld feel the damp of evening settling on the ground and against her skin. Voices drifted in from the kitchen. She straightened up in her chair, listening. Then she heard footsteps along the hall, and the door creaked open.
Edwin walked in, holding a lamp. “I let you sleep.”
“Thank you.” Frances stood up with crisp formality, acutely conscious that she hadn’t washed the filth from her hands and face.
He put the lamp down on the table. “Horrible weather. These dust storms come through from time to time.” There was an awkward silence while he stood looking at her. He was dressed in cotton trousers and a loose shirt. His face was damp, and drops of water clung to his hair. He must have just washed. She registered his height—he was not much taller than her—and the lean strength of his body. This was his house that she stood in, not her father’s, and it crossed her mind that she was like a package of goods delivered from England. He was remembering what he had ordered. “They don’t last long. The scenery is actually rather dramatic—you’ll see tomorrow.” He squatted down beside the fireplace, piling kindling into the grate. “We were expecting you sooner. Your ship came in last week.”
“There was a girl in Cape Town who wasn’t very well. I nursed her for a few days.” The lie came out awkwardly.
“Everyone knows everybody in this country,” Edwin said, striking a match and holding it to the kindling. It was a statement, but it carried an air of warning. She wondered what he meant by it.
The fire caught, the wood crackled, and Edwin blew into it for a moment until the smoke pulled a clear line up to the chimney. “There’s not much wood here. We have to get it shipped in.” He stood up and came over to stand in front of her. There was a smear of charcoal on his cheek. The silence in the room was oppressive; she could feel the weight of the night outside pressing in. The prospect of intimacy loomed between them. He cradled her hand. His palms were dry, and his fingers, long and thin, pressed into hers. He kissed the skin on the back of her hand, almost reverently, and she shuddered.
The Fever Tree Page 14