The Fever Tree (17 page)

“Idle, occasionally, and careless.” Frances wasn’t sure this was quite true. She didn’t really have a clear idea of what Sarah did around the house, but she had formed the vague impression that she wasn’t working as hard as she might. Frances had caught her sleeping in the afternoons, and once she had seen her helping herself from their sugar bowl with her fist.

“Idle?” His mouth twisted, and for the first time she felt his disdain. It hit her with a small shock. In an instant she saw what he was going to say, and wanted him to stop. “Frances, how is it that you feel you can call other people idle?” He leant his shoulders back against the post. His body was blacker than the night outside, and though she couldn’t see his expression, she knew he was looking straight at her.

“Do you have any knowledge of Sarah’s schedule? I do, because I trained her. She is up before dawn to light the stove in the kitchen, rolls up her bedding, and makes my tea. She dresses while the kettle boils. Sweeps the house, sets out breakfast, makes porridge and coffee, and begins on your eggs.” He was speaking slowly, every word weighted for emphasis, and each one an accusation. “She cleans the shoes we put out, sets out your breakfast, washes up, cleans the knives, empties the slops into the pail while you eat, and carries them outside to the tub. Then she makes the bed, tidies the rooms, scrubs the floors, cleans out the fireplace, and walks over to the farm to pick up bread, milk, and supplies, which she carries back under the hot sun. Once home, she begins on lunch, cleans and trims the lamps, then there is supper, washing up, tea, clothes to mend, and the washing once a week, the mangling and the boiling, and God knows what else. And you want me to admonish her for what, exactly?”

The question hung between them. After a moment, she said, “You knew what I was when you asked me to come here.”

“I did.” There was such meaning in his words and such bitterness that she wondered what he meant.

“It’s all right for you,” she said. “You have the quarantine station, your fossils, and your insects, but what about me? What should I do all day?”

They stood together on the porch, with no words between them. The night loomed black and heavy, and the silence was broken only by the
chink chink
of a frog, which sounded like a tiny hammer being struck against a stone. The post creaked, and his body shifted away from her to look out towards the veldt, where the air still held a glimmer of light. After a few minutes, he seemed to collect himself. He turned back to her and said simply, “Frances, your dresses haven’t been starched because we can’t afford it. The starch is imported. It is expensive. Then there is the time needed to boil it up, the water used, and the expense of the fuel. I’m afraid it just isn’t practical. The truth is, we have very little, and we must conserve what we have. That means, primarily, oil, fuel, and sugar.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry that you aren’t happier.” And he walked into the house.

•   •   •

O
N
A
RARE
OVERCAST
afternoon Frances sat on the
stoep
copying a delicate illustration of a white geranium from Sowerby’s
English Botany
. She groaned in frustration. The painting was all wrong. It looked lifeless, flat on the page. Painting from the pages of a book was utterly different to painting from life. It was like trying to tickle yourself—you prodded all the right places, but you could never make yourself laugh. And she didn’t have the concentration today. Her attention kept drifting back to her argument with Edwin. They had barely spoken a word over the past week. Edwin came home in the evenings polite but withdrawn and went straight to his study, and Frances, half ashamed at having sounded so spoilt, wasn’t sure how to put things right—if, indeed, she even wanted to put things right. She closed the pages on Sowerby, gathered up her brushes, and went inside.

In the hall she heard a rustling on the roof. The beams overhead creaked. The noise was louder in the sitting room, and then she remembered—Edwin had said something about Sarah cleaning the chimney. There was silence for a moment, then a great squawk of surprise and a crashing sound erupted from within the chimneybreast. A thick cloud of black soot rained down into the grate. Frances froze. Had Sarah fallen down the chimney? She was too big, surely. There was another screech, and a frantic scrabbling. Rubble clattered onto the floor. Something was trapped inside. The noise grew louder, moving down the chimney, releasing a mountain of rocks and muck onto the floor below and pushing out great clouds of coal dust which rolled upwards into the room.

“Sarah?” Frances called out, apprehensive on behalf of the maid.

And as if in response, an explosion of soot ripped loose from the chimney. A black ball barreled out from the middle of the cloud, whirling through the air and colliding with Frances’s chest. It was huge and soft, and it moved of its own volition. She screamed, dropping her brushes and pushing it away, but it was alive and kept coming back at her, wrapping itself around her head and enveloping her in a plume of coal dust so thick it sealed up her eyes and she couldn’t see her hands. Wings beat against her face. It was a bird, she realized, caught on her dress. They struggled against each other, the bird screeching in terror until finally it tore its claws loose and flapped away. She wiped at her eyes and looked around the room. A chicken sat in one of the chairs clucking to itself reproachfully, filleting its feathers to remove the soot.

Frances looked down at her dress. She was utterly filthy—stained black, every part of her, hands, nails, shoes, and skirts as black as if she had been dropped in a coal pit. She turned, dust drifting from her clothes as she moved. Edwin stood in the doorway behind her. She shifted uncomfortably under his gaze. “A chicken,” she croaked, half in accusation. She wiped the grit off her lips with her sleeve, realizing too late that it was as dirty as her mouth. “What was a chicken doing in the chimney?” she asked querulously.

He tried to reply, pointing at the roof, but he creased up as he looked at her, and his shoulders began to convulse with laughter. He put his hands over his face for a moment as if to take control of himself then, drawing in a great, gulping breath of air, he tried to speak, but as soon as he took his hands away and saw her standing there his voice broke into a deep, resounding laugh. He must have seen the whole thing. Her chest tightened. She wanted to cry, to stamp her foot and tell him to stop, but any movement—any attempt at anger—would only make her look more absurd.

“Don’t,” she said, shaking her head, but her throat had silted up with dust and it came out as another croak, and the croak sounded ridiculous, and before she could stop it she was laughing with him. She laughed until her lungs hurt and she couldn’t breathe, finally sinking to the floor in resignation, coal dust billowing from the folds of her dress.

“They use chickens to clean the chimneys,” he said eventually, wiping his eyes. “You weren’t meant to be in here.”

There was a shout from the roof, a question in Dutch thrown down the chimney by Sarah. They looked at each other; the laughter caught between them like some living creature. After a moment Edwin turned away. “
Ja
,” he shouted up to Sarah. Then gathering up the chicken in his arms, he carried it squawking outside.

•   •   •

O
NE
EVENING
Edwin brought home a mule pack. He suggested she try it on Mangwa, and Frances liked the idea. The zebra didn’t, throwing his orange muzzle into the air, laying his ears back, and lashing out with his hind feet. Edwin threw a rope around his hind legs and hobbled him, and after three days of wearing the pack, Mangwa grew resigned to the weight on his back. They took him out walking with them on Sundays, stowing her watercolors in the pack, along with lunch—bread wrapped in paper, a round of goat’s cheese, a couple of peaches, and a flask of water.

Edwin carried his shotgun over one shoulder and his knapsack on the other, crammed full of equipment. There were pocket boxes lined with cork, iron clamps, strips of gauze, and collapsible nets in different sizes. He always took with him his pocket lens, a tray of wide-mouthed vials, and a bottle of spirits. Periodically he would stop as they walked and look into the crevices of a rock or push a stone over with his foot to see what lurked beneath.

It was good to throw off her lethargy. They would walk to the river or the
kopje
, and while Edwin searched for insects or fossils, Frances would paint fragments of the landscape: the spines of a prickly pear, an ironstone boulder with dense, glistening surfaces, or the leaves of a shrub whose curious shape appealed to her. And as she painted she found the edges of a contentment she hadn’t felt since she was a young girl, before the arrival of Miss Cranbourne, when she had been left to interpret the world without interference from others.

She enjoyed using her muscles. Her legs firmed up, she thought about William less, and she found she had more energy. Soon it wasn’t enough to go out only on Sundays, and she began to get up with Edwin at dawn, pushing herself out of bed in the dark. They ate a quick, hushed breakfast by candlelight. When he left for the quarantine station, she would step out into the veldt. This was her favorite time of day. She reveled in the cool of early morning, the sky still cold and desaturated but the earth glowing orange as if bathed in fire.

She discovered that if you looked closely at the veldt it transformed itself into a living, breathing thing. The black, lichen-covered rock gleamed green and flickered out a tongue. Two small bushes, indistinguishable from the surrounding scrub, quivered then blew across the plain—ostrich chicks. A clump of brown and yellow soil stirred, thrust out a leathered neck, and ambled, undeniably tortoise-like, towards the dam. And the silence resolved itself into the checkered sound of insects, the beating of wings, and the wind feeling its way through the grasses. Once, a scorpion scuttled out from between the crack in a rock. She watched, fascinated, as ten miniature, translucent copies of the mother climbed off her back in military formation. If Edwin had been there, he would have scooped them into a tin and forced them into a bottle of alcohol, where, dangling lifelessly, they could be examined without risk.

They walked back one Sunday the two miles from the river past a termite mound which had been freshly raided. Soil had been turned over and flung about in rich, orange clumps. Edwin picked up something that looked like a rock and held it up for her to see. It was a perfectly preserved bulbous frog, mummified in a block of earth.

At home, Edwin filled a glass jug full of water and dropped the frog into it. Frances watched, interested but doubtful. The earth crumbled away to the bottom and the frog sank. Then, after a moment, a ripple. The water trembled, a leg paddled, and an eye blinked open. It was a miracle, and she laughed, delighted.

“It might have been there for years,” Edwin said. “Hibernating. Waiting for rain.”

“You mustn’t kill it,” she said, putting a hand on his arm. The thought of Edwin pickling this creature, after its long wait in the sand, seemed impossibly sad.

Edwin looked at her curiously.

“Let me paint it,” she said, “then we can let it go.”

The next day, Frances painted their bullfrog. It sat squat at the bottom of a glass bowl blinking at her through heavy-lidded eyes. Mangwa was dozing in the shade. The silence was punctuated by the whisking of his tail as it swept over his back.

It took time to capture him. She had never drawn an animal before, only plants, and he kept moving about, so she had to get a sense of the muscularity of his body imprinted in her mind before she could begin putting her impressions on paper. His body from nose to tip existed on one plane, except for the marbled eyes. His skin was gnarled and granular, like a barnacled rock. She fed him the flies which Sarah caught for her in a little jar. When they fell on the surface of the water he extended his legs in a fluid kick and slid them off the surface with a lick of his tongue. Finally, satisfied with her drawing, she poured him out into the dam and watched him paddle his way into the gloom.

Frances was unsure whether Edwin would like what she had done. She thought it would hardly please the eye of a naturalist.

“It’s very successful,” he said, holding it up to the light and smiling at her. She was pleased. Edwin wasn’t someone to give praise lightly. “But see the feet,” he said, pointing. “You need to be a little clearer. I can’t see here how many toes he had. And did you catch sight of the tongue?” She nodded. “Good. Well you should draw that on the side, as a separate detail.”

Edwin began to give her specimens to draw: beetles, lizards, and flying insects, and in return he let her set them free.

•   •   •

T
HE
EWES
WERE
SHEARED
at the beginning of April, before the lambing started, and on the Sunday Edwin was drafted in to help. Frances walked up to the farm in the late afternoon. She could hear the sheep from a long way off; a cacophony of bleating rising up into the still, hot air. The grasses on the veldt were so dry they turned to dust when she stepped on them, and the ground had begun to crack with thirst. Summer was all but over, and the rains still hadn’t come.

The men were working under the full glare of the sun. Two of them managed the sheep in the
kraals
, filtering them into the hands of the others, who waited with shears, the blades huge in their hands and dull like zinc. She leant on the fence of the nearest
kraal
, watching. The men were so crusted with dirt, their hair caked to their heads with dust and sweat, that it took her a moment to make out which one was Edwin. He stood with a ewe thrust between his knees, one hand holding both her legs and the other sloughing the wool off her swollen belly. He was talking to her in a low voice, and she lay in a stupor, her eyes half shut, her breath coming in short pants. When he flipped her upright she darted forward, a white bundle of shorn, naked angles, to join the flock. The men at the gates fed another one through to him, and the process started again. He had a quiet confidence, she realized, not just in the way he handled the ewes but in every aspect of his life. He never seemed to doubt himself. It was as if he didn’t require anything, or anyone, to be complete. Frances blinked the dust out of her eyes and shifted her weight off the fence. He was whole and content as he was, and this was attractive but also faintly threatening.