The Fever Tree (2 page)

W
hen Frances’s parents first married, her father had lived as close to respectability as he was able. They had a small cottage in St. John’s Wood, no carriage, and a maid who worked overtime to keep the house from turning itself inside out. On Frances’s sixth birthday, her father hired a carriage. It was a sky-blue day, the streets glistening with the previous night’s rain, and they splashed through the wide-open spaces of Kensington, past half-erected streets and fields churned to mud under the wheels of builders’ carts; past timber merchants, rubbish piles, and brick kilns that gave off the hot, stuffy smell of a bread oven. Everywhere were the sounds of construction; the shouts of workmen and the clinking of buckets being drawn up scaffolding. Her mother must have been sickening already because Frances remembered her excitement was tempered by concern for her pale face and bruised eyes, which squeezed shut each time the coach jolted on the potholed road.

They pulled up outside a large, stucco-fronted terraced house, and her father introduced her to a short, stocky Irishman with a wide smile and the same softly guttural accent as his own. “Kerrick, you’re to do whatever Frances asks of you.” And Kerrick had introduced her to the two grays, who nibbled at her fingers with soft, whiskered lips and breathed hotly into her hair. When she asked who the house belonged to, her father had laughed and said it was their own.

Eight months later, her mother had died, and the house which had seemed to promise happiness became a place of mournful reproach. Frances suspected her father was grief stricken, but it was hard to be sure. Once the funeral was over he never discussed her death, and though there were things about her mother that she wanted to know—why her lungs were diseased, and whether she had been in pain—she didn’t have the courage to ask. On her father’s instructions, every trace of her mother was removed. Wardrobes were emptied, photographs were taken down, and the morning room was cleared of her letters and diaries. The long drawing room, where Frances had imagined elegantly dressed women rustling in front of the gilt mirrors, was shuttered up. Her father worked a great deal and came home infrequently. His life was orchestrated around business, and on the rare occasions he brought guests back to the house, they were clients who sat with him in his study, smoking and talking, with the door firmly closed.

There was a tutor who came every morning and taught her mathematics, geography, and a little Latin. He introduced her to watercolors, teaching her the fundamentals of painting, and she ruined reams of paper before she learned that, with color, subtlety is everything. Her nurse spent long afternoons in the playroom embroidering cushions for her niece’s trousseau. She tried to coax Frances to do the same, but never insisted, because Mr. Irvine had told her not to press his daughter into anything she didn’t care for.

Frances stalked the house in the afternoons, finding odd corners to sit in, where she let her thoughts drift with the dust through the high-ceilinged rooms. When she thought about the house as an adult, she saw it from the strange perspectives she had inhabited as a child. A cupboard door warped with age, so that she could pull it shut from the inside, or the dining-room table like the roof of a coffin, rough and unvarnished on its underside, with the curved bow legs of the Georgian chairs boxing her in like the muscled calves of so many guests.

Her mother’s family, the Hamiltons, lived in Mayfair, but she didn’t meet them until a few years after her mother had died. They didn’t approve of her father, with his Irish blood and poor connections, and they refused to acknowledge Frances. Her father, she learned later, had persisted in trying to reconcile the families in the hope that the connection would benefit her, and eventually they relented. When Frances was nine she was invited to visit her cousins Lucille and Victoria. She was nervous and didn’t think she had made a good impression, but the invitation was repeated, and thereafter she went to see them once a month, though it was understood that the visits would not be reciprocated.

At dinner one evening, a few months after meeting the Hamiltons, she looked up to find her father staring at her. She was chewing a piece of meat off the end of her fork. His lip curled with distaste. “Frances, have you forgotten your manners?”

She was conscious of having done something wrong, but she wasn’t sure what it was.

“Your knife. You don’t care to use it?”

She looked down at her knife and colored. She hadn’t used it before, not for eating, but he had never minded until now.

“Christ!” He brought his fist down on the table, making her jump along with the candlesticks. “The Hamiltons are right. You’re ten years old and you eat like a little savage!” She put down her fork and stared at him, mortified. Most of her life was spent trying to avoid disappointing him. “If I had wanted you to have the manners of a factory girl, I would have sent you to live with your cousins in Manchester!”

He hired a governess to solve the problem. Miss Cranbourne arrived with a military sense of purpose. Every aspect of Frances’s life came under scrutiny. According to the governess, she frowned when she concentrated, slouched when she walked, and ruined her fingernails with chewing. Her voice was too shrill—a sign of willfulness—and she spent too much of her time painting and daydreaming. For every minute of the day there was a task. There were lessons in letter writing, flower arranging, portrait drawing, cross-stitching, and crocheting. Etiquette manuals were learned by rote. She embroidered cushions and slippers, fashioned bell pulls, painted fire screens, and modeled a whole basket of fruit out of wax. She pressed flowers and learned their Latin names. She acquired hairpins, fancy brushes, and combs, and learned about ringlets, frizettes, and braids and how to pile her hair on top of her head in a bandeau. For her freckles—the result of a slow and enfeebled circulation—she was prescribed cold baths, applications of buttermilk, and a bowl of carrot soup for breakfast. The sun was strictly off-limits, and the windows in her bedroom were draped with muslin.

Frances applied herself to the new governess’s regime, if not to please Miss Cranbourne, then to please her father, and because she knew her cousins would tease her less if she shared some of their accomplishments. She found most aspects of her new life stifling, but there was one introduction for which she was genuinely grateful. Miss Cranbourne suggested her father buy a piano, and he agreed. Her mother, he told her, had been talented. Twice a week, a teacher came and unraveled the music like a foreign language, and as Frances played, she could feel the house flickering to life, becoming for a moment the place it might have been had her mother lived.

•   •   •

S
HE
WAS
THIRTEEN
YEARS
OLD
when Edwin Matthews came down from Manchester to stay with them in London. It was hot that summer, and London sweltered. The smell of sewage came in from the streets, milk turned sour and curdled in their tea, and the air outside was choked with smoke. Her father hated the heat. He complained in the evenings that it was like living in Rome, and Frances remembered the pictures she had seen of a Roman caldarium, its floor a burning panel of hot marble.

“I’d like you to make him feel at home.” Her father pushed his plate away, leant back in his chair, and lit a cigar. Now that it was evening, the window to the street below was slightly ajar, and a breeze stirred the gauze curtains. “And I shouldn’t try to talk to him about his mother.” Frances knew already, without having to be told, that dead mothers weren’t appropriate conversation.

She had never heard of Edwin Matthews before. He was a distant cousin, had been born in Manchester, and at sixteen was three years older than Frances. His mother had drunk herself to death, leaving her husband with five boys. His father, a steelworker, had written to Frances’s father asking for sponsorship. Edwin was hardworking, he said, and might do well in the right hands.

He arrived by train on the hottest day of the year, wearing a blue wool jacket stained under the arms where he had sweated through. He stood on their doorstep with his trunk of books and an air of extreme self-consciousness: a tall, slim boy with very pale skin and hands so fine-boned they might have been a girl’s. His face looked hot and shiny. Pimples had erupted on his forehead, and they crept down his nose. When Kerrick—in shirtsleeves—tried to relieve him of his jacket, he shook his head, a rush of color turning his cheeks scarlet.

Her father had told her he might be uncomfortable in a London house, and he was right. Edwin looked as though he was scared to breathe in case he knocked something over. He took his shoes off before walking upstairs, he opened doors with extreme caution, and he was able to sit for hours reading a book without moving a muscle except to turn the page. He was scrupulously tidy, scrubbing his hands before every meal until they looked raw.

That first night, she remembered, he had almost burnt the house down. He’d never seen how to work a gas lamp, and he blew the flame out when he went to bed. Frances woke up to Kerrick shouting, hammering on Edwin’s door, telling him not to light a match but to come straight out. She stood at the top of the stairs and watched him apologizing. His pajamas were too small for him, and his skinny ankles poked out of the bottom. He glanced up the staircase and saw her watching. His face twisted in embarrassment.

Despite his social unease he was perfectly self-contained, preferring to spend time alone studying than in company. He reminded Frances of a child she had read about in a newspaper who never said a word until he was eight and then one day at breakfast began reciting
King Lear
. Edwin wouldn’t try anything unless he was sure of it first, and he watched their household with meticulous care until he could mimic how they talked, walked, answered callers, and drank their tea. Within a few weeks he had all but smoothed out the accent which would remind people he was Irish. All this, she realized later, was crucial education. He couldn’t have hoped to have a successful practice when he was older unless he learned to mingle with Society.

At supper, her father would ask him about the family. There seemed to be hundreds of relations, and she couldn’t keep track of the names: Irvines, Matthewses, O’Rourkes, Dohertys, Connellys, O’Donnells. They each had a different story, and her father would draw Edwin out of his shell, encouraging him to give his opinion on the famines of his father’s generation, the pomposity and greed of English landlords, the slums in Manchester, and the lucky ones—the émigrés who had escaped to America. It was a bleak picture they painted, and Frances didn’t want anything to do with it. She had scarcely known that she was Irish until Edwin had come to stay, and now he was contaminating them with his talk of filth and desperation.

“Papa, he’s barely civilized,” she told her father when she was alone with him. Edwin had bad manners—he didn’t use the butter knife and he heaped the sugar into his mug with his dessert spoon. Her father had turned very still, but she carried blindly on, trying out the word her cousin Lucille had given her. “I don’t want to sit at the table with an Africanoid.”

The slap—the first and only time her father hit her—stunned her. She felt as if she had been branded. He stalked out of the room, leaving her standing in his study, mouth open in shock, her cheek burning hotter by the second. They never discussed it afterwards, but she realized then that there was a difference between her and her father. Perhaps it had always been there—but Edwin had been the one to show it to them.

In the evenings, after supper, her father liked her to play the piano. Edwin watched with the fascination a collector might bestow on a fine piece of china. Afterwards, he would ask her father if he could play chess with Frances in the library. She would have liked to say no, but her father always assented on her behalf. These were the only times she heard Edwin speak confidently. He talked to her with the careful deliberation one uses to instruct a child, taking a methodical interest in her strategy, laying out the fundamentals of the game until she could put up a sustained defense. He coached her with patience, ignoring her determined silences, and when she toppled her king in defeat, wanting to have the game over with, he would talk her through, with pedantic satisfaction, how she might have won. When she looked up from the board, he would be watching her with unguarded curiosity, as if she were an equation which, when solved, might bring him some advantage.

She remembered resenting his intrusion into their lives, and when he left at the end of the summer for school, she was relieved to have him gone.

A
month after her father had returned, Frances drove across London to a ball given by the Hamiltons. It was a filthy night, and the carriage lurched through the streets, its shutters closed against a driving rain. She was apprehensive and tried not to fidget as Lotta, cursing under her breath, struggled to fix a hairpin that had come loose. The pin was restored, and after a few minutes the clatter of horses’ hooves on wet cobbles gave way to the slow crunch of gravel. There was a slamming of coach doors and shouts of exasperation as people found themselves drenched in the dash from their carriages to the house. Kerrick appeared at the door and bent dripping over the step, and Frances caught sight of the grand villa, light pouring out of the bank of tall windows on the first floor. It was always strange to arrive here as a guest. It was the house her mother had grown up in, and this, coupled with her natural shyness of large groups of people, made her nervous. She took a deep breath to steady herself before wrapping up her skirts and running for the steps of the portico, where powdered footmen in livery chosen for their handsome muscularity shook water out of their tailored jackets.

Guests jostled for space in the huge hall, their voices echoing off the flagstones. Women, still cocooned in furs, streamed water like ducks, their faces shiny from the cold. They were arriving in large, boisterous groups, straight from dinner parties, and Frances realized she was the only person who seemed to have come alone. The dressing room was a clamor of greetings and exclamations, the pitched voices of a swirling, glittering array of girls all talking at once. She gave her jacket and shawl to Lotta and glanced at herself in the long mirror. Red hair, impossible to control, was softened by a dress of white-spotted Brussels net. The fabric had been ordered from Paris on advice from a dressmaker, a dour woman with pinching fingers and a mouth crammed full of pins. She had claimed an intimate knowledge of what was fashionable, but Frances regretted having trusted her. Standing amidst the sleek figures of the other girls, she could see her skirts were too full and old-fashioned. She looked dowdy, as if she were already married. Two girls giggled as they walked past, clutching each other’s arms, and Frances envied them. She didn’t want to face the ballroom alone. She caught her eye in the glass and reminded herself that this was meant to be fun.

A sweeping curve of stone led up to the ballroom on the first floor, and she stepped into a swell of sound. Musicians, stationed behind a line of marble columns, were playing a polka. The floor was awash with a kaleidoscope of dresses, sweeping in, around, and away. Crystal chandeliers glittered from an ornately plastered ceiling, and white roses and purple violets had been woven into swags which hung between the curtained windows. A butler walked up and down the line serving champagne in silver flutes, and she took a glass in a gloved hand and brought it, clouded and cold, to her lips. She would need introductions in order to fill her program of dances, but there was no sign of her aunt. Frances had never had a flirtation with a man before, let alone been courted, and she was a little in awe of the ease with which Lady Hamilton orchestrated her daughters’ string of male admirers.

She caught sight of her elder cousin, Lucille, a porcelain beauty with pale skin and dark blue eyes. Her head was bent slightly to listen to a friend, and her embroidered fan fluttered open and closed like the flickering tail of a cat. Frances paused, unsure whether to make her way over. There was a kind of brilliance to Lucille’s social confidence which could throw Frances off-kilter. She had a natural instinct for the nuances of Society, and she never looked more relaxed than in the midst of a crowd.

“Darling Frances,” Lucille said when she approached, her eyes glancing over her dress. “Have you come all on your own?”

“Lotta is waiting downstairs,” Frances said, though it didn’t really answer her cousin’s question.

“And how is your father?”

“Well, thank you.” This wasn’t strictly true. He hadn’t been himself since he had come back from Manchester, but Frances didn’t feel like discussing his health with Lucille.

“Ha!” Lucille’s lips parted in triumph. “I knew he’d take the news all right. He’s not the only one invested after all. Though Mother was convinced he’d have some kind of . . .” Lucille opened her hands to imply an unnameable catastrophe.

“What news?” Frances asked. Lucille, with her sensitive ear for Society gossip, always seemed to know something that Frances didn’t.

“You don’t know?” Lucille arched her finely drawn eyebrows and considered Frances. Not for the first time she felt as though she were being scrutinized under a microscope, Lucille marveling at her naïveté as if she had discovered the attributes of some strange new species.

“Oh—just some minor skirmishes over railway stocks,” Lucille said eventually, shrugging. “Nothing serious, I’m sure.” She smiled, conciliatory, then glanced across the room. “Isn’t that your cousin, who stayed with you all those summers ago?”

Frances followed Lucille’s gaze, trying not to be surprised by her singular ability to place everybody in a room. Dr. Matthews was standing on his own, staring straight at her. His hair was combed back from his narrow forehead. He held her gaze for a second then looked away. She felt a flicker of irritation at finding him here and hoped he wouldn’t try to dance with her.

“I suppose Mother felt obliged to ask him,” Lucille said, “out of loyalty to your father.”

“He’s a doctor now,” Frances said, feeling somehow responsible, “living at the Cape.”

“You’ve seen him?”

“He came to our house a few weeks ago.”

“What is it with the Irish? You extend a charitable hand, and they’re forever nipping at your heels.”

Frances opened her mouth, but before she could say anything her cousin said, “Oh, Frances,
please
.” She placed a hand on her arm. “You shouldn’t take everything so seriously.”

“Frances?” It was her aunt, interrupting them to introduce her to a corpulent man in his fifties who was sweating so profusely that his hair stuck to his forehead and moisture ran in beads down his neck.

“Never married, but not for lack of funds,” Lucille whispered in Frances’s ear as he led her away to dance.

“Too damned hot,” the man wheezed, smiling at Frances as he stuffed his gloves into his pocket and clasped her hand in a moist, fleshy palm. He guided her over the floor, scanning the faces of the other guests over her shoulder. “Some notable absences this evening.”

“What do you mean?”

“The bust-up over the Northern Pacific Railway.” He smiled at her. “It’s sent a few worthy gentlemen back to their beds.”

When the same man tried to insist on dancing with her again an hour later, Frances feigned dizziness. She wandered into the adjoining room. Here was a glut of food. Tables piled high with jellies, biscuit towers, cherry trifles, and myriad cakes in lurid colors. There were carvery boards carrying morsels of guinea fowl, slabs of ham, and slivers of cold tongue. A vast salmon looked as though it had been picked apart by a cat, the soft pink flesh torn away from underneath its silver skin. Men and women sat in small groups, grasping tiny silver forks and dabbing at their mouths with white triangles. It would be awkward to sit and eat on her own. She thought about leaving the ball, but that would mean admitting that she hadn’t enjoyed herself. She wanted just a few minutes alone. The door to the library stood slightly ajar across the hallway, and she crossed over to it and stepped inside.

The walls were paneled with gray oak, and shelves stretched in arched alcoves from floor to ceiling. Rows of neat, leather-bound volumes were stacked side by side in perfect symmetry. She walked across an intricately worked Turkish rug to one of the two sash windows that looked out onto the back of the house. The shutters had been closed. Frances lifted one of the latches with a click and folded it open. It swung smoothly on its hinges, the heavy wood surprisingly light in her hand. She leant her head against the glass for a few moments, enjoying the cool firmness against her forehead. From the quiet of the library she could hear the steady rolling of a waltz, the ripple of voices when the music stopped, and the rhythm of steps on the marble floor when it started up again.

She remembered this room well. Once or twice as a child, when her father was away on business, she had been sent to stay with her cousins. She had longed to be alone, but she was rarely left to her own devices. Lucille and Victoria fingered her as if she were a rare specimen to be dissected, untying her ribbons so they could tease out her cloud of red hair and pulling off her gloves to look at her freckled hands. When they grew bored, Frances wandered through the house turning over objects, opening drawers, and examining the backs of cupboards in the hope of discovering something that had belonged to her mother. Lady Hamilton disliked Frances poking through the rooms of her house. She caught her once and snatched up her hand, scolding, “Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle.” Then, twisting the skin on the inside of Frances’s wrist into a sharp pinch, she said, “I won’t have you turning everything over like a shopkeeper looking for profit.” The insult, Frances realized later, was that she was just like her father.

A thread of fresh air pressed through the seams of the window into the leathery damp of the room. There was the smell of wet grass, but when she cupped a hand to the pane all she could see was blackness and, blacker still, the dense shapes that must be trees. She pulled away from the window, and the outline of her face emerged, distorted into a milky apparition. White skin glowing in a swath of hair, her eyes black hollows punctured by circles of light. She ran her tongue across her lips, but their full curve was lost in the murkiness of the reflection. A glimmer of light from the lamp caught the edges of her narrow chin and high cheekbones. Her father had called her a pixie as a child, cradling her face in the palm of one broad hand. His fingers had smelt of warm skin and tobacco. He said she was too small and delicate to be all real. She had grown tall since then, but she had kept the fine bones and sharp angles.

There were times when her face didn’t seem to belong to her and she felt as if she were eyeing a stranger in the mirror. She couldn’t identify herself beneath its brash colors, and she resented the way it drew attention. It was too obviously Irish. People treated her differently because of it. She watched them taking in the coils of russet hair and green eyes. Girls became prickly and standoffish, boys kept a fascinated distance, and her mother’s family, for whom she was too obviously the daughter of an Irish pauper, visibly recoiled. It would be nice, for once, to blend in.

Lucille’s question nagged at her. Was her father invested in the railway? How serious could it be? She had glimpsed him at home this evening caught in a moment of distracted stillness, and it had seemed to Frances that he must have aged without her noticing. He gripped the back of a chair, pushing himself upright out of the stoop that pulled his shoulders into a gentle curve. His hair had crept back from his forehead, and his cheeks looked gaunt. When he saw her looking at him, his face transformed, mobility erasing the cleanness of the image that had presented itself to her. He smiled at her and winked, and in the effort of that expression she had felt a pang of concern and something that felt awkwardly like guilt.

She shivered. The fire had burnt down in the grate, and the logs, crumbling into ash, showed small corners of dull flame. Only two lamps had been lit in the room, one on a card table. Its varnished surface revealed a thin edge of the green felt that lined its underside. Two small, hard chairs were thrust away from the table, and a chessboard showed a game won by attrition. The second lamp stood on a large mahogany desk which sat between the windows on the far wall. The leather inlay glowed a dull taupe. There was nothing else on the desk except a small globe. She spun it carelessly and on a sudden impulse put her finger on the spinning ball. She felt it thrum under her fingers, slowing down under pressure.

“A dangerous game, tempting fate.”

Frances swung round. A slender man was standing in the doorway, framed by light. He came a little way into the room, and she saw it was Edwin Matthews. He was the last person she wanted to see. She didn’t want to talk about her father’s illness, and she didn’t want an Irish cousins’ reunion. If she was being honest, his presence at the ball slightly embarrassed her, and she realized she didn’t entirely disagree with Lucille. She didn’t say anything, hoping he might leave. He would assume, finding her here, that she hadn’t been enjoying herself, and this would give him some advantage over her, though she couldn’t exactly say why.

Despite all these things, as he walked towards her she felt a subtle pleasure in being found. He looked at her with pale, gray eyes and made a sweeping motion towards the door. “Their conversation doesn’t interest you?”

His face lacked any of the mobile excitement and flushed enthusiasm which had marked the faces of the other guests. He looked uncomfortable in his tail suit, like a bird in borrowed plumage, yet confident, as if he hoped to extract something from the situation.

“All anyone can talk about this evening is the collapse of railway stock.”

“I thought your father was an investor?”

This came as a small shock, that he knew when she hadn’t. “What if he is? My father is a careful man.”

The doctor tapped a cigarette against the back of a silver cigarette case. “Do you mind?”

She nodded her assent, and watched him lift a match from a small glass globe that stood on the mantelpiece. He struck it firmly against its ribbed edge, dipping his head to bring the cigarette to the blue flame. Despite herself, she was curious. Would a doctor from the colonies really be presumptuous enough to flirt with her? She didn’t imagine he had found himself here by mistake. He didn’t look like the kind of man who did things carelessly or arrived at places by chance. For a moment his features were hidden by a cloud of smoke. When it cleared, he motioned to the chessboard. “Do you care for a game?”