The Fever Tree (32 page)

The woman drew down the corners of her mouth in an expression of distaste, and Frances wondered if all the nurses here knew that she had left Edwin for another man.

“Frances?” Anne was standing on the porch behind her.

“Have you seen Edwin?” Frances asked. “It’s urgent. I need to find him.” Her hands were clasping and unclasping at her sides, and she felt hot and overwhelmed.

“He’s not here,” Anne said.

“When will he be back?” she asked, trying not to sound desperate.

“Frances, you’re not well.” Anne took her hand and led her away into the cool shade of a smaller tent which acted as a kind of reception. She was looking at her strangely.

“What is it?” Frances asked, putting a hand to her hair. “Why are you staring at me?”

“I think you should sit down.” Anne pointed to a hard-backed school chair and poured her a glass of water. Frances’s hand shook slightly when she took the glass. After a few sips she felt calmer. “Have you seen Mariella?”

“Mariella?” Anne’s mouth twisted in dismay. “Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard?” Her voice echoed in her head as if she were underwater.

“Mariella died last week.”

Frances felt the shock deep in her stomach. She took in air and asked, “Of what?”

“Smallpox.”

“Was she here?”

“Not until it was too late.”

“But I told Mr. Fairley to send for Edwin.”

Anne asked sharply, “When were you there?”

“I don’t know. About two weeks ago.”

“You’ll have to be quarantined, Frances.”

She shook her head. “Anne, don’t you remember? We were all vaccinated. In Cape Town.”

“And it didn’t help Mariella. They’ve had problems maintaining stock of efficient vaccination. Sometimes it can be unreliable in this heat. We’ve all been revaccinated here at the hospital.” Anne put a hand to Frances’s forehead, her face concerned. “Have you been feeling all right? You’re quite hot.”

But Frances shook her head. She felt fine. She was fine. Just a little warm. “I feel all right, honestly; it’s just traveling in this heat. It’s worn me out. I don’t understand why Mr. Fairley didn’t bring her here sooner?”

“He paid a fortune for a doctor who was quite convincing. He promised Mr. Fairley it wasn’t smallpox. By the time she got to us it was too late.” Frances had an image of Dr. Robinson, shabby and mercenary, drinking whiskey in their tent. She nodded. It made sense. She should have known that George might not listen to her. Everyone mistrusted Dr. Matthews.

“Anne, I need to speak to my husband. Do you know where he is?”

“He’s in Du Toit’s Pan, at one of Baier’s compounds. There’s a bad outbreak there. He won’t be back until much later. But Frances, you can’t leave.” Anne put a hand on her arm. “I’m afraid you really will have to be quarantined.”

But Frances was already moving away from her, ducking under the canvas, out into the glare of sunlight. Anne called after her, running to keep up. The sanitary police looked up as she ran past them, waiting for Anne to tell them to stop her, but the girl let her go. Frances didn’t turn her head to look back. She kept walking briskly towards town, and soon she realized she was on her own.

Mariella was dead. Her friend was gone, and she was partly to blame. When the realization came it was brutal, and she found herself standing in the road, eyes squeezed shut to hold back the shock of it. William had been right about one thing. She was always blaming others when she should have been taking responsibility for herself. If she had listened to Edwin, Mariella would probably still be alive.

It took her two hours to walk to Du Toit’s Pan, and an intense thirst raged through her as she walked. By the time she found the Baier compound the sun was low in the sky and she was worried he might have already left. A high wire fence surrounded a shabby, dirty-looking yard, and two natives with rifles patrolled the wire, stirring up dust with their boots. A few horses were tethered to a post outside. She asked at the door if Edwin Matthews was there, and the man at the gate signed her in and nodded her through. The yard was a bare, flat patch of red earth, littered with cigarette butts, rusting tins, and broken bottles. There was a row of large canvas tents across one side and a few corrugated huts on the other. A white official lounged outside one of them with his legs sprawled out and his head thrown back, asleep. The late-afternoon sun shone in a deep golden strip across the yard, glinting off the iron roves, the wire fence, and the tips of the men’s rifles. She had never been inside a prison, but she imagined this was what it would feel like.

There were no natives in the yard—they were still working the mines. It was utterly quiet. She stepped inside the first tent. She couldn’t see anything in the dark. The air was hot and tasted of sickness. She pulled her shawl over her nose and mouth. Edwin had said you could tell smallpox just by the smell. After a moment her eyes adjusted and shapes began to emerge from the gloom. There were no beds, just rugs which stretched in lines across the wooden boards. A groan rose in the still air, and she stopped. When it came again her heart thudded darkly but she couldn’t turn away. The man was lying on his back, naked, without a blanket. His body was covered in a close rash of white spots, startlingly luminous on his dark skin, as if he had been flecked with paint. She watched him put a hand near his face to brush away the flies which crawled over him.

His face was a mass of ulcers weeping fluid, and his eyes were swollen to cracks where the pustules had grown together. He moaned again. He was asking for water. There were no glasses that she could see, just a rusted barrel in the corner of the tent. She dipped a tin into the tepid water and carried it to the man, who took it from her, his dry fingers brushing hers, gulping thirstily. The next tent was the same, and the one after that. The stench in each was overwhelming. These men were clearly dying. No one could see them and deny it. Where were the doctors and nurses to look after them?

Frances stood in the yard, swaying slightly, her mouth dried up with thirst. Her hands were heavy at her sides, fat with blood, and she felt unsteady on her feet. Bright spots danced in front of her eyes. She could hear men talking on the other side of the yard. She walked towards the corrugated huts. One had a half-door at the front and looked as if it served as a canteen. It was empty, but she could hear voices coming from behind it. She stepped past the sleeping official, down the shaded alleyway between the huts, and into a sheltered inner courtyard.

Initially, all she could take in was Edwin. She was transfixed by the sight of him. He stood half turned towards her, the evening sun turning his hair the color of copper. He was holding a woman to his chest. Frances could see her shoulders trembling. He stroked a hand over her hair and pressed his lips to her forehead. It was Sister Clara. She wasn’t wearing her nurse’s cap, and her white pinafore was crumpled and filthy. The thick blond plait which swung down her slender neck had worked loose of its knot and was unraveling into glossy curls down her back. It took Frances a moment to realize that Sister Clara was weeping. Only when someone cursed did Frances look past them, and then she wished she had never come at all. A knot of bodies lay piled one on top of another as if for a bonfire. Four sanitary police were untangling them. Limbs, hands, and faces were contorted into the impossible positions of acrobats. They had been thrown together haphazardly, a jumble of broken fingers and snapped spines. It looked like the remains of a massacre, except the bodies were blistered with the pox.

Edwin looked up and caught her eye. She willed him to say her name, or to acknowledge her in some way. But instead he pushed Sister Clara gently away from him. “Get her out of here,” he whispered, loud enough for her to hear, and Sister Clara turned and saw her standing there.

The nurse approached.

“Edwin,” Frances said, but he turned away from her. She tried to walk towards him, but he seemed suddenly to be a long way off. She said his name again and managed to walk forward a few steps, but before she got to him her legs gave way from under her.

T
he next moment, someone—a woman—was talking to her, saying her name, and shaking her lightly on the shoulder. Frances forced her eyes open. The room was full of shadows. Light filtered dimly through cracks in the iron roof above her. She was lying on the floor of a hut. Immediately in front of her were the legs of a table and a pile of dirty blankets. She couldn’t recollect how she had got here. Someone must have carried her inside. She felt dizzy and thought she might be sick. Her mouth stung and her throat had tightened. She was struggling to breathe. Sister Clara was crouched beside her, half supporting her body, holding a glass of water to her lips.

“Where is my husband?” Frances asked, pushing her hand away. She needed to speak to him; needed to tell him that she had been wrong. She tried to sit up, but her head swam and she was instantly and violently sick, vomiting a thin stream of bile onto the ground. It burnt at the back of her nostrils, and her mouth turned sour. When she swallowed, it felt as though her throat were full of broken glass. She lay back down again, chest heaving, on the floor.

“He’s asked for you to be taken to hospital,” Sister Clara said in her low, melodic voice, and even then Frances noticed how perfect she was: the porcelain lines of her face, the soft mouth, the intelligent eyes. The anxiety she had felt at William’s house, when she thought of Edwin running the smallpox hospital with this woman, came flooding back, and she recognized the feeling now as jealousy. It was possible that Edwin loved this woman. He might always have done, long before he came back to London and was coerced into proposing to Frances. After what seemed a long while, she was lifted by two men onto a stretcher and carried outside to a cart. Darkness had fallen, and the yard was full of men—native men, with picks and axes, carrying lanterns and swilling beer, calling to one another under the blackening sky.

The stretcher was placed in the back of the cart. She could smell the grease of the mules, and something else, metallic, like blood left out to dry in the sun. She shut her eyes to keep the nausea at bay, but it was no good. The cart lurched into motion and her mouth filled with saliva. She forced herself up, doubling over, her stomach gripped by a series of rapid contractions.

She was taken to the smallpox hospital. Flickering candles marked out the stretchers which lay on the floor in rows on either side of a pavilion. It was hot under the canvas, even at night. The place smelt of carbolic acid, and beneath it there was a stench of putrefying flesh. Two nurses lifted her onto an empty stretcher, and she wondered if her predecessor had come out alive.

A high fever coursed through her, and her mouth broke out in ulcers, but after a few days it subsided. She felt as if she was recovering but then remembered that Mariella had said something similar. It was agony to swallow, as if she had a nest of stinging bees caught in her throat, and when she touched her lips she saw that her hands were covered in a rash of fine red spots. An acid fear seeped into her stomach. Sister Clara came, holding a bedpan.

“Where is Anne?” Frances asked, reluctant to have this woman, who was so close to Edwin, handle her body.

“They’re short of nurses in Kimberley Hospital,” Sister Clara said, levering the bedpan underneath Frances. “She has had to go back.” Frances swallowed thickly. It would be harder without Anne.

“And my husband?” she asked, looking at her hands and trying to keep the emotion out of her voice. Edwin still hadn’t been to see her. “Will he be coming to the hospital today?”

“The disease has spread to one of the villages outside Kimberley. He has had to go there to vaccinate.”

Frances released a thin stream of urine into the metal dish.

“Why do I feel better?” she asked, when Sister Clara had removed the pan.

“This is the first stage. I’m afraid you’ll get worse before you get better.”

“If I get better.”

“You’ve a good chance. The previous vaccine you were given should help.”

Frances pressed her. “How good a chance?”

The nurse gave her a straight look. “About two-thirds of our patients survive.”

•   •   •

A
FTER
TWO
DAYS
, her skin began to itch and burn, and the rash of red spots, which had seemed innocuous before, swelled into bloated pustules. Blisters erupted on the palms of her hands. She waited for Edwin, but he never came. The fever returned, more strongly this time, and the world fractured like glass into a thousand shining pieces which wouldn’t fit together. The blisters spread down the inside of her arms, across her stomach, and over the soles of her feet. They began to swell and grow and were hard to the touch. When she felt them, round and firm beneath the surface of her skin, she became convinced that they were egg sacs and would hatch, each one disgorging a million translucent spiders crawling over her body.

Her skin felt too small for her body, shriveling and crackling like a roasting chicken, leaving the raw flesh beneath. The pain was excruciating, as if a butcher were easing it off with the tip of a sharp knife, and she couldn’t stop herself from whimpering. Her eyelids, swollen and raw with pustules, closed up, trapping her in the dark. Her mouth felt as if it had been scraped raw, and her whole body was on fire. The moaning of other patients troubled her sleep, and the sweat under her arms smelled like the juices of decaying meat.

Time passed slowly, then frighteningly fast. She woke once in the night, and it seemed as if it had been dark for a year and the sun would never rise, and when she woke again it was dusk and the light was fading. She dreamt she was drowning in a pool of thick, sluggish blood. Edwin was standing nearby and she tried to call to him, but she couldn’t keep herself afloat for long enough. The blood ran down her throat into her lungs, bloating her stomach and suffocating her shouts into scarlet, foaming gulps. She woke up shouting his name. The nurses came, looking concerned, but they didn’t seem to understand her when she spoke. Her sentences became long, slippery things which didn’t make sense, and they hushed her into quiet.

Some time later the fever broke, and she was conscious of herself again as a fixed being with a mind and a body separate from each other. It was possible to think clearly. She was able to open her eyes a little, and she lay for a long time, exhausted, staring at the canvas walls which glowed yellow under the beating sun.

“Good, you’re awake,” Anne said, crouching down beside her stretcher.

Frances managed a faint smile. “I thought you were working back at Kimberley Hospital?”

“Just for a week,” she said, holding out a cup of water. Frances lifted herself onto one elbow and took it from her. It was good to see a familiar face. The metal beaker clinked against her teeth, and the sores in the corners of her mouth were needles of pain as she opened her lips to drink.

“And my husband? Is he here?” she asked, lying back on the stretcher, exhausted from the effort of sitting up.

Anne began straightening the bedsheet, and Frances realized her friend was embarrassed. She must know what had happened with Edwin. “He left for Cape Town yesterday evening. The governor had asked to see him personally.” Frances blinked back her disappointment and watched Anne pull an envelope out of the pocket of her pinafore. “He left you this,” she said, handing it to Frances. The paper was dry and sharp against the sores on her fingers. Anne stood up, but turned before she walked away. “Your skin, Frances, it will heal. It won’t be as bad as it seems now.”

Frances slipped the letter out of its envelope, and a flutter of banknotes fell onto the sheet. She gazed at the writing on the thin paper.

I have written to your relations in England letting them know that you have been unwell, and that the climate in South Africa doesn’t suit you. Your aunt will no doubt agree to take you in on the same terms as previously agreed. Enclosed is enough money for your passage back to England, and for a few weeks’ stay at the sanatorium in Cape Town so you can recover before the journey. I shall return to Kimberley in three weeks. It would be best if you were gone before then.

She closed her eyes. The letter was completely cold, void of sympathy or concern, and she understood now that he wanted nothing more to do with her. She folded it and laid it on the floor. Then she put a hand carefully to her face. The sores on her cheeks were turning into scabs. They were pitted and hard, and when she touched them it was like turning a tooth. They seemed to have roots which went deep into the surface of her skin. How could Edwin ever love her now? As a child, she had thought that people scarred by smallpox were erupting with maggots, as if they were rotting from the inside out.

She wouldn’t leave Kimberley until she had spoken to him. She needed to see him again, just the two of them alone in a room together, as husband and wife. But what if he forced her to leave South Africa and return to England? It would mean never seeing him again, and this was too awful a possibility to contemplate.

•   •   •

H
E
AGREED
TO
MEET
her three weeks later in a small tent adjacent to the main hospital pavilions. Sister Clara stepped out as Frances was about to go in, and gave her a warm smile. “Mrs. Matthews. I hope you are feeling better?”

“Yes, thank you,” Frances said, feeling her confidence drain away at the sight of this woman, with her austere, impeccable beauty.

Edwin was seated at a small wooden desk in the center of the tent. He stood up when she came in, holding her gaze steadily but not moving to take her hand. There was a look of huge compassion in his eyes; of integrity and honesty; that he would look any evil in the face and come out of it unchanged. Was it possible that this man had been her husband and she had blindly pushed him away? They both stood perfectly still. She was aware of her skin, pitted with scars, and of Sister Clara having stood here a few moments before. She wondered what they had discussed, whether he had looked at her with the same intensity, and whether he had liked what he had seen.

All the things about Edwin which had frustrated her before had only done so, she realized, because she had been threatened by them. His capacity for stillness; the careful way that he watched her, assessed her, tried to figure her out; his persistence in talking to her about the things he cared about; his patience in waiting for her to understand. He had known her better than anyone else; better than her father, who had seen her as an accomplishment. Edwin had dared to expose her, tried to make her more than she was, and she had hated him for it. Now she wanted to plead with him to forgive her and take her back, but she didn’t dare.

He broke the silence, gesturing to the small canvas chair facing him. She sat, remembering suddenly their meeting in London, when she had accepted his proposal. How long ago that seemed, and how different things were between them now. She had assumed that he was coercing her into marriage, against her father’s wishes, and she had resented him for it. Now she knew he had felt obliged, but the knowledge had come too late.

“Have the nurses looked after you well?” he asked, sitting down at his desk. He was too polite, and she knew he wished she had gone on to Cape Town without requesting this meeting.

“Yes, they have been very kind.”

“You were lucky. The scarring is not so bad.”

She knew this was true, but it was hard to be grateful. Her face might not have been as damaged as some, but it was still a shock to see herself in the mirror. Her eyes and nose were unmarked, but the skin which used to stretch so finely over her cheeks and forehead had turned livid and raw, the surface riveted with small craters. Anne had told her that over time the marks would lessen, but she knew her face would always carry the mottled thickness of heavy scarring. Any claim she might have had to beauty was gone.

“Have they told you to use coconut water?”

She nodded. It made her uncomfortable to hear him talking to her with the medical concern of a doctor. She wanted to have a conversation with him as her husband.

“Was your trip to Cape Town a success?” she asked.

“They’re finally taking the matter seriously, which is progress. I hope they’ll be sending an independent health inspector to visit us. We’ll see.” He smiled at her, a gentle, kind smile, but one that suggested no closeness between them. The last time she had seen him sitting at a desk, it had been at Rietfontein. He had leant over and pulled out the tick which had buried itself in her neck, and she had smelt the sweat drying on his body and felt the firmness of his hand as he held her head. She looked at his hand now, resting on the desk, and she felt a choking, maddening desire for him to reach forward and touch her, to lean into him and feel the hard warmth of his body.

She forced her eyes away, trying to bring herself back to the present, and saw his canvas knapsack leant up against the desk. “I suppose you don’t have much time for collecting insects?” she asked, remembering their walks at Rietfontein.

“No,” he said, waiting for her to come to her point.

She was silent for a moment, looking at her hands; then, unable to bear it, she glanced up at him. “Edwin, I want you to know how sorry I am. I thought I understood what I was doing. I thought I loved him. But I couldn’t have been more wrong.” How to tell him the awfulness of what she now knew about William? But he knew already. He had known all along what Baier’s world was really like. “Can you forgive me?”

His gray eyes settled on hers. “You don’t need to ask for my forgiveness.”

He didn’t say anything else, and she became desperate. “Edwin, I don’t want to go back to England.”

“Where would you go instead?”

“What if I stayed in South Africa?”

“How would you support yourself?”

“You are my husband,” she said in a low voice.

“I think you forsook the right to call yourself my wife some time ago.” His tone was cold and practical. His finality frightened her.

“Will you not give me a second chance?”

“I brought you to Kimberley.”