The Fever Tree (8 page)

“You’d have your children looked after by a kaffir? Perhaps you shouldn’t answer that question until you have children.”

“And perhaps you, Mrs. Nettleton, shouldn’t ask that question until you have met a kaffir,” William retorted.

Mrs. Nettleton turned scarlet and was silent.

Mrs. Musgrave fondled one of her dog’s ears thoughtfully and said, “I read a letter in
The
Times
which said that babies can take on the pigmentation of their nurses. Their skin turns oily and cloudy just as if they were little savages. An English mother testified to it being true.”

William gave a dry laugh. “What’s true is that the English mother you speak of must have had herself tupped by a black ram.”

Mr. Musgrave’s appreciative chuckle broke up the awkward silence, and the stewards arrived with platters of food. It was nothing short of a banquet, and Frances was astonished that the same kitchen which produced such a meager spread for the second cabin was capable of such extravagance. There was a tureen of turtle soup and another of vichyssoise, poached salmon with hollandaise, a lobster salad, and afterwards a joint of veal, roast guinea fowl, and potatoes parmentier. Frances, fed up with baked tripe and boiled beef, had been looking forward to eating well, but she was suddenly sickened by such an ostentatious display of indulgence. Who was she trying to fool, sitting here in first class? It amused them to turn over the politics of her fall in fortunes, but where did that leave her? And then there was William, sitting opposite her, and the sinking realization that anything she might have hoped for between them had almost certainly been extinguished by the revelation that she was engaged to be married. It was all she could do to accept a bowl of soup.

The conversation roamed from the climate at the Cape to the problems of giving parties. Native servants, Mr. Musgrave was maintaining, were a particular problem because they couldn’t help but indulge themselves at their master’s expense, often arriving at the table nothing short of drunk. “Of course,” he said, wiping hollandaise from the corners of his mouth, “the raw native is like a child. He needs to be guided, and that means keeping the bottle firmly out of his reach.”

“It also means protecting him from the Boers,” said Mrs. Musgrave. “The way they treat their savages is a travesty. The sooner we take over the Transvaal the better.” Frances wasn’t even sure she knew where the Transvaal was, and she had a hazy idea of a Boer as a kind of white savage.

“The Boers were there long before us, farming the land, pushing back the native tribes,” Mr. Nettleton said. “It all seems rather unfair to me.”

“Yes, dear,” said Mrs. Nettleton, “but the Boers are complete heathens. They’re little better than the Irish.” She shot a furtive glance in Frances’s direction. “They don’t even believe in a collective state.”

“I rather like that idea of theirs,” William said. “It’s astonishingly romantic for such a practical people.”

“It may be romantic, but it is also absurd. How can you run a country without central government?”

“Essentially, you’re right,” William said. “They are uneducated and superstitious, they refuse to wash, and they stink to high heaven. Most of them don’t pay taxes, and their roads are nothing short of atrocious. And yet I can’t help but admire their courage. They left Holland, gave up all the comforts of the civilized world—in essence, turned their back on Enlightenment—to trek into the heart of Africa. They wanted the right to live simply and honestly, without interference. Each man the master of his own world. Did you know that the smallest Boer farm is six thousand acres? Their land is poor, often little more than desert, but the Boer isn’t afraid of hardship. They believe in old-fashioned values, which we city people, who lean so heavily on the state, have forgotten.”

“Such as?”

“Family, hospitality, the right to self-governance.”

“I agree with family and hospitality, but I’ll quite happily forgo self-governance,” Mrs. Nettleton quipped, but she had missed the point. There was something whimsical and endearing in William’s yearning for freedom. Frances was taken by his idea of finding a corner of the world where you weren’t beholden to anybody. It reminded her of her father poring over his maps, dreaming of the untouched places of the earth.

When the jellies had been gored and the iced oranges were pooling their syrup onto the tablecloth, coffee was served. Mr. Nettleton suggested a game of cards, and Frances was relieved to excuse herself. She got up to leave and the men rose with her. She waited a moment for William to acknowledge her, but he was talking to Mr. Musgrave about fishing, and barely interrupted the flow of his conversation to wish her good night.

She walked up on deck and went to stand at the bow of the ship. The clock in the dining saloon had read eight thirty. She still had another half hour before she had to report downstairs. It was a clean, calm night, with just a sliver of moon hanging low in the sky. She leant her weight against the railings, listening to the rush of ocean coursing beneath the boat, conscious that every inch of progress brought her closer to the man she would have to marry.

Would she have the chance to talk to William again? She doubted it. The invitation to dinner had felt like an opportunity to get to know him better, but instead it had only pulled them further apart. And she had hated the Nettletons and the Musgraves, with their petty small-mindedness, complacent judgments, and obsequious genuflection to the rules of Society. She wanted to explain to William that she didn’t care about the man she was marrying, and that the thought of living in Kimberley with Edwin Matthews was like committing herself to a live burial. But how did she know he even cared enough to listen?

“So, a doctor’s wife.” The voice was close behind her, and when she turned William was standing beside her. He struck a match, and she caught the sweet smell of smoke. “Will he make you happy?” he asked.

She looked at him pointedly. “Can’t you guess?”

He leant on the balustrade and looked out over the water. “As far as I can see, engagement is a little like purgatory. You don’t know whether you’ll end up in heaven or hell.”

“You’ve been married?”

“Engaged. I decided not to marry her.”

“Why not?”

He laughed. “I probably should have done. She was pretty and very rich. But she never would have made me happy. I’m a bully.” He glanced at Frances. “I need someone with a bit of grit.”

A silence fell between them. She saw his cigarette diminishing and thought, Any moment now, he is going to drop it over the balustrade into the sea and leave me standing here, and that will be the end of it. He took a last draw on the cigarette and flicked it over the edge. “And I had you down as a desperate girl braving the seas to find work in the colonies.”

“You and Mrs. Nettleton both.”

He gave a short laugh. “For what it’s worth, I thought you handled her perfectly. Besides, now you know what I have to put up with every evening.”

“Yes, and I wouldn’t be paid to sit through it again.”

“It was that bad?”

She shrugged.

“I shouldn’t have invited you,” he said ruefully. Then, rubbing at his beard with his hand—“Not long ago they would have treated me the same way.”

“Somehow I don’t believe it.”

“No, really. We’re not so different, you and I. Irish, Jewish—we’re both outsiders. When I was eighteen there wasn’t a lady in London who would have so much as tipped her bonnet at me. I grew up in Whitechapel in a house with no glass in the windows and four pairs of boots between eight children.”

“And then?”

“My cousin got lucky. He had been working on a sugar plantation in Natal on the East Coast. It was backbreaking work, for a pittance. When they discovered diamonds in Kimberley, Baier packed up his tools and went to the fields. He couldn’t afford to buy anything at first. They’d had torrential rains, and over forty percent of the Kimberley mine was underwater. A working claim was more expensive than it had ever been. When the Kimberley mining board issued pumping contracts, Baier raised enough money to travel eight days with a Boer transport rider to buy a pump for sale in Victoria West. The contract brought in money, and after a few months, he had enough to invest. He bought up claims in the right places and ran them well. He paid for me to go to Oxford. Three years later, and the power of a few hundred thousand pounds behind me, I pass the test of respectability.”

“And what do you do with this newfound respectability?”

He levered himself up on top of a stack of crates so he was sitting slightly higher than her, with his legs dangling off the edge. He ran a hand through his tangled hair and smiled at her. “I work for Baier.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“The atmosphere in Kimberley is like nothing I’ve ever known. It’s on the brink of an economic explosion. Where else could I have a coffee in the morning with a digger from the Australian gold fields, lunch with a forty-niner from California, host a dinner in the evening for a handful of German speculators, and end up playing whist with a cockney trader who’s just pulled a twenty-carat diamond from the soil and is blowing his fortune lighting his cigar with a clutch of five-pound notes? It’s a filthy, debauched, lunatic place, but there’s money to be made if you know how.”

“I didn’t have you down as a materialist.”

William grinned. “I’m not ashamed to admit it.” He shook his head slightly. “I’m lucky enough to be learning from the most astute businessman in the Cape. Baier’s experience is second to none. At the moment we’re raising finance for a deal which will make us the sole importers of the new generation of steam engines to the mines.”

“And when you’ve raised the finance? Will you go back to England?”

“I don’t think so. England’s no good for someone like me. I find it stifling. Business happens too slowly and it’s difficult to find opportunities. There are too many rules, too much expectation, too many Mrs. Nettletons always peering through the window to see how you take your tea. Africa has infinite potential. The rules are still being made up, by people like Baier. And it’s not just about extracting wealth. The Cape needs politicians, moneymakers, statesmen. Despite what I said about the Boers at dinner, the truth is they’re an uncivilized, land-grabbing people who despise the natives and want to throw us out. There is a need for men of a certain caliber to keep them in check. What could I ever achieve at home which would compare?”

He jumped off the crate, plunging his hands into his pockets in an effort to keep them still. “There are so many things I want to do. Places I want to see. Just imagine. There are men in Africa who have never seen a European, and animals who have never heard a gunshot. You can’t imagine the thrill of being out in the bush all day, hunting kudu on the plains or tracking a leopard in the mountains, sleeping out at night under a sky dripping with stars. It’s a brand-new land.” He smiled at her. “But what about you?” he asked. “What gets Frances Irvine excited?”

What could she say? She couldn’t remember a single thing that had happened to her before she set foot on the
Cambrian
which was worth telling. Yet William seemed to be inviting honesty.

“Mr. Westbrook. My marriage . . .” She faltered, frightened of saying how she felt. “The doctor. I barely know him.” He looked at her, his eyebrows raised in question. She went on. “I mean to say, I don’t care about my marriage. It means nothing to me.” She avoided his gaze, looking at her hands and feeling how pathetic this statement was after his own, and how obvious it was that she liked him. She thought he might not respond. He waited a moment then stepped closer, so that she could feel his leg pressing into her skirts and could smell the smoke caught in his clothes.

“Do you always do that when you’re nervous?” he asked softly, watching her hand, which had crept to her neck, pulling at the skin at her throat.

“Yes,” she said, swallowing heavily and dropping her arm to her side.

He brought the back of his hand to her cheek. “And what you’re trying to tell me is you’re not absolutely determined to marry your doctor?”

“No.” She looked up at him, her heart beating rapidly. “I mean yes. I’m not absolutely determined.”

“And you still owe me for saving your life.”

“I thought you had forgotten.”

“Not forgotten.” He grinned at her. “Biding my time.” Then he stopped smiling, and cradled her neck in one of his broad hands, and with the same hand slowly but firmly ran his thumb over her lips, pulling slightly at her lower lip so they parted. She felt herself leaning towards him, and when he bent his head she thought he was going to kiss her, but instead he whispered in her ear, “I thought emigrating girls were warned about the dangers of being seduced on board?”

“I don’t care,” she whispered back, suddenly brave.

But he dropped his hand to her shoulder and said, “Frances, it’s cold out here. You should go inside.”

He turned then and left her standing by the railings, the sea roaring down below, the ship moving imperceptibly towards Cape Town under the cover of darkness. She watched him glide like a shadow across the deck, duck his head into the stairwell, and go below.

A
hot, breathless calm settled over the Atlantic. In the afternoons she sat up on deck with Anne, trying to paint but thinking of nothing but William. She tortured herself with the thought that he didn’t care about her, then remembered with a ripple of pleasure the pressure of his thumb against her mouth. A thin haze did little to screen them from the glare of the sun, and they protected themselves with parasols and straw hats. Awnings had been strung up across the promenade deck, and the first-class passengers shimmered through the heat in white linen suits and airy dresses.

She stood one afternoon talking to Mr. Nettleton. He was one of a handful of first-class passengers taking advantage of the shade on the second-class deck. The sea was so glassy she could trace the reflection of clouds sliding across its surface. William was sitting in a deck chair just behind them, talking to the Reverend Ames.

“We’re playing
Twelfth Night
and we’re looking for a Viola. Do you know any of her lines?” Mr. Nettleton asked.

William slipped a hand under the hem of her dress and circled her anklebone. She stood, speechless.

“I’m afraid not,” she managed to say to Mr. Nettleton, and felt her leg begin to shake. William must have been able to feel it, but he kept on talking, tracing his finger in a circle across the bone, easing the leather of her shoe away from her skin with his forefinger.

“Please don’t be modest, Miss Irvine,” Mr. Nettleton was saying. “You should see what we have to work with. Orsino barely has one line out of three.”

William, turning his head but not stopping the exploration of his fingers over her anklebone, began to recite:

“
If music be the food of love, play on,

Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken, and so die
.”

He held her every nerve hooked by a different string, and like a puppeteer he controlled them all at will. When he tugged at them it was a delicate, painful pleasure, and her face flooded with heat.

“Westbrook, you are infuriating,” Mr. Nettleton was saying. “You refuse to play Orsino, then you trot out his lines as if they were your own.”

William laughed, turning back to his conversation, but not taking his hand out from under her dress. His boldness astounded her, with its presumption of intimacy between them. Was this courtship? She knew that by standing there she was agreeing to let herself be touched, but she couldn’t bring herself to move away. He dipped his finger between her skin and the inside edge of her shoe. Her blood beat thickly in her ears, and she felt her knee buckle. She raised her foot slightly, offering it up to him, but a second later he had removed his hand. Her face was flushed and she felt dizzy.

“Are you all right, Frances?” Mr. Nettleton put a hand on her arm.

She nodded, but he pulled out a deck chair and sat her in it.

“Don’t talk for a minute. This heat is terrible. I’ll get you a glass of water.”

The Reverend Ames was talking to William in a shrill voice. His throat bulged over his dog collar, and his cheeks had broken out in scarlet blotches. It took Frances a moment to realize that he was worked up.

“Like all men, Mr. Westbrook, you have a responsibility.”

“Thank you, Reverend Ames. Please be so kind as to remind me of my responsibilities.” William’s voice was heavy with sarcasm.

“To love and respect all men alike, be they white or black.”

“You have no notion of how I treat a man. We have never until this moment met before.”

“Speculators and monopolists. If you are not one yourself, then you work for them. Devouring the land, sparking wars, imprisoning men on the basis of color.”

“I don’t very well care what color a man is if he has a smuggled diamond in his hand. And I don’t want to upset your fine sensibilities, Reverend, but it just so happens that most of them are niggers.”

The reverend flinched. “And can you blame them for stealing? When their land has been taken from them?”

“Would you rather the Romans had never come to Britain?” William’s voice was slow and supple, and it was clear he was enjoying the discussion. “We suffered a little, but in the end they left the marks of civilization. We abandoned our mud huts, we ate fine food, we gazed on the wonders of plumbing. Would you have had us remain half savage? And look where we English were when the Romans left. Four hundred years of savagery and superstition! This is the nature of history, of progress. So don’t come over all fresh from England with your high ideals and Sunday school morals and try to teach my cousin, or myself, how we ought to live.”

The reverend opened and shut his mouth like a fish. He looked as if too many thoughts were rushing headlong for the same tunnel, jamming up so none of them could be articulated. Frances felt sorry for him. He was being humiliated, but then he was a fool for taking William on.

William drove home his advantage. “There are millions of pounds’ worth of diamonds in the Kimberley mine. And they aren’t worth anything, not one penny, to the kaffirs without a white man to trade with them. How do you expect the black man to civilize himself, to educate himself, without money?”

“Your thirst is for wealth, Mr. Westbrook, and mine is for love.”

“Love?” William interrupted, gleefully incredulous. “This can never be a question of love! How would you support our position in South Africa with love? Or would you rather we handed over Kimberley to the Boers? Have you seen the love with which a Boer beats a black man?” William leant back in his chair, kneading one side of his beard with a tanned hand. “With whose money would you educate your savages? Your own? Your love, Reverend, is an expensive operation.”

The Reverend Ames, his face puce with anger, pushed back his chair and stood up, knocking straight into Mr. Nettleton, who was carrying a tray of glasses full of ice water. They tumbled straight over the reverend and broke into pieces on the floor.

“Damn!” cried Mr. Nettleton.

“That’ll cool him down,” William quipped as the Reverend Ames took off down the deck. Frances laughed, but weakly. The conversation was unpleasant, and though William had beaten the reverend with his natural brilliance, he had hardly given him a fair hearing.