The Fever Tree (5 page)

An hour later, their clothes wet through to the skin, the girls clambered up a ladder onto the deck. A turmoil of passengers from all cabins, first down to steerage, milled together, impatient to find their berths. A woman, looking anxious, clutched her shawl and demanded to know where she would find her luggage. Casks, barrels, and crates were being loaded onto the deck by sailors whose voices carried above the racket. Wire boxes stuffed full of squawking chickens were stacked one on top of another, and a cow, supremely calm, licked the fresh paint from the balustrade.

“Miss Irvine?” Frances turned to see a florid-faced gentleman with orange whiskers bearing down on her. “Well, what about this!” he cried. “I didn’t know you were traveling on the
Cambrian
.”

“Mr. Nettleton.” She gave him her hand, and he turned to the group standing behind them at the stern.

“Liza!” He waved to his wife. “Look who I’ve found!”

Mrs. Nettleton, a friend of her cousin Lucille, was easy to spot. She was a tall woman with a manicured beauty: no eyebrows, and a neat, fashionable hat trimmed with brightly colored parrot feathers, now beading with the rain which blew in under her umbrella. The hat looked pathetically jaunty against the iron-gray sea. She was talking to a broad-shouldered gentleman whom Frances recognized as the man who had helped her in the station. He had made the train after all. Neither of them looked up, although Frances was sure Mrs. Nettleton had seen her.

“Liza!” her husband called again. “It’s Miss Irvine!”

His wife said something in a low voice to her companion, and stepped over to them. She gave Frances a thin smile. “How do you do, Miss Irvine?” She didn’t offer her hand. “I was sorry to hear about your father.”

“Thank you.”

The gentleman joined their group, gazed at her, and—when she caught his eye—winked. His eyes, dark lashed and heavy lidded, weren’t black, as they had looked in the gloom of the station, but a rich amber flecked with green, like stones glinting underwater. She smiled at him. There was an awkward silence while everyone waited for Mrs. Nettleton to make introductions. After a moment, Frances realized that Liza Nettleton, who had known her since she was a very young girl, was refusing to introduce her. She froze in embarrassment and felt a deep flush rising up her neck.

Ignoring her, Mrs. Nettleton turned to her husband. “Can you believe they still won’t show us to our cabin? I think you should have another word with the steward.”

The other gentleman ran a hand over his jaw and looked at Frances. “We have already had the pleasure of making each other’s acquaintance, but there wasn’t time to ask your name.”

“Ah, so you’ve met already,” Mr. Nettleton said, looking pleased. “Miss Irvine, this is Mr. William Westbrook. Mr. Westbrook, Miss Frances Irvine.”

Frances gave the man her hand. He didn’t look English, though his voice carried no accent. He had a well-trimmed beard, wire-black. His nose was straight and fine-boned, but his nostrils flared slightly and his mouth had a wide fullness which was curling into a smile as he looked at her. She realized he understood her awkwardness and it amused him.

“Miss Irvine is Sir John Hamilton’s niece,” Mr. Nettleton said, glancing anxiously at his wife, who was looking unhappy. Then he said to Frances, “Did I miss your name on the passenger list? Who are you traveling with?”

“I have assisted passage to Cape Town.” Her hand went to her throat, where it began to pull nervously at the soft skin of her neck. Awkward questions were sure to follow the revelation that she was traveling second class.

Mrs. Nettleton glanced over at the huddle of girls by the balustrade. “With the Female Middle Class Emigration Society?” Frances nodded. “I’ve done some charity work for them in London. A wonderful organization. In fact,” she said, laying a hand on Mr. Westbrook’s arm, “Mrs. Sambourne, who chairs the society, is a very good friend of mine.” She gave Frances a smile, both sympathetic and dismissive. “You must let me know if I can help with anything. Mrs. Sambourne asked me specifically to keep an eye on her girls.

“Now, Mr. Westbrook,” Mrs. Nettleton said in a confidential tone, leading him away, “you promised to help us with our little theatrical presentation. Do you know
The Palace of Truth
?”

He ignored her, and instead said to Frances, “Miss Irvine, you’re traveling without family?”

“Yes.”

“Then you should certainly join us for dinner one evening.”

Mrs. Nettleton frowned, two fingers pinching the fabric of Mr. Westbrook’s coat. “A lovely idea and well meant, but I’m not sure Mrs. Sambourne would approve of you making favorites of her girls.”

“Nonsense! You know Miss Irvine, and I’m sure if I speak to the captain he would allow her an invitation to dine with us in the first-class saloon.” He looked at Frances with a warm, open smile, and his eyes shone conspiratorially. He was being kind, but he was also enjoying frustrating Mrs. Nettleton’s finer social principles, and Frances couldn’t bring herself to join in the joke. There was no pleasure in being used as bait to rile Mrs. Nettleton. She was stung by the woman’s reluctance to introduce her, and it had reminded her all at once of the humiliation attached to emigration. You didn’t leave England without leaving Society.

“Thank you, but I’m afraid Mrs. Nettleton is right. Dinner wouldn’t be possible. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

As she left, she heard Mrs. Nettleton say, in a voice that dropped to just above a whisper, “Mr. Westbrook, you must promise me not to start up any kind of flirtation. It would be too unkind. You can’t imagine how difficult it is for some of these girls. Mrs. Sambourne tells me . . .”

Frances had hoped that traveling to South Africa would be a fresh start, an escape from English Society, but the
Cambrian
offered no more protection than her uncle’s drawing room.

T
here was a squall out at sea and the ship was kept in port for two days waiting for better weather. Entertainments were planned for the voyage. A weekly paper was started called the
Cambrian Argus
, and a concert was decided on by two elderly ladies in first class. They held auditions in the saloon, and Frances, wanting to keep her thoughts away from her father, went along. They declared her a nice little player, and gave her permission to practice on the pianoforte in the music room at four o’clock every day.

On the way to her first practice, a voice called to her from the stairwell. “Miss Irvine?” She turned. A man was standing above her, coming down from the deck. The bright day made him into a shadow. Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the light. It was Mr. Westbrook, his square jaw set to one side and his dark brows bunched into a frown.

“Are you cross with me?”

“Cross?”

“You thought I was making fun of you yesterday.” He walked down the steps until he was standing beside her, quite close, in the small well at the bottom of the stairs. That was clever of him, to have read her so closely.

“And you weren’t?”

“It’s not an easy journey to make, to a new continent, by yourself.” He leant a hand on the wall above her. She could feel the heat rising from his body. He blocked out the light from the stairwell, and they stood together in near-darkness. “I remember feeling very alone when I first went to Africa.”

It was a long time since someone had offered her any comfort, and the ease with which he understood her made her want to confide in him. She shrugged her shoulders and smiled. “To be honest, it probably makes no difference whether I am in South Africa or England.”

He considered her for a moment. “Irvine. Is it Irish?”

“Yes,” she said, bristling at the question. “My father was Irish.”

“A merchant?”

“No. A shopkeeper. He made and sold furniture.” She wasn’t going to dress it up for him. Let him think what he liked.

“Some of my greatest friends are Irish. Wonderful drinkers.”

She laughed. “Yes. My father had a talent for it.”

“It wasn’t your father who started Irvine & Hitchcock?”

“Yes. That was him.”

She steeled herself for him to say something pointed about her father’s losses, but instead he said, “What a coincidence. So it was your father who started up the Charity for the Houseless Poor?”

Frances nodded. “I didn’t find out about it until he died. He never talked to me about his public work. Do you know the charity?”

“A little. Your father was generous with his success. He had a reputation for being openhanded. This particular charity is unusual, you see, in that anyone is allowed through the door, regardless of sex, race, or criminal history. I’m partly Jewish, so I like the idea of a charity that doesn’t discriminate. It houses some six hundred people every night who would otherwise be on the streets. Well, we donated some money, and were invited to dinner. Your father seemed a very charismatic man.” He looked at her kindly. “You must have been proud to be his daughter.”

She hadn’t been proud, not for a long time. There had been recrimination and disapproval from all sides in the aftermath of his death, and she realized with a surge of relief that she had been waiting for someone to name the qualities of the man she had respected and adored.

“There are lots of people who would say otherwise,” she said.

“There are lots of people who are fools. Your father was a genius in business. So what if there are men who resent him for it? A man should be judged by his achievements over a lifetime, not by a moment’s ill judgment.” He straightened up, flexing his hands so his knuckles cracked. “Besides, it’s not as if he was the only one to take a punt on Northern Pacific. I would rather achieve greatness as your father did, and lose it all at the end, than set my sights on mediocrity and risk nothing.”

Mr. Westbrook had given her father a better, more honest tribute than she had heard from anyone who had known him personally. For the first time, someone had spoken about her father’s background—that he had been born Irish and poor—not as something to be ashamed of, but as a mark of pride. The huge burden of her grief shifted, making way for something lighter. She wanted him to stay. She hadn’t had a chance to ask him about himself, but he was already moving away. “Good-bye, Miss Irvine. I wish you all the best at the Cape.”

T
he hot, crowded little cabin reeked of shame. They were cargo being shipped for export. Women without choices. Their families had thrown them out to save the embarrassment or expense of keeping them at home, and emigration was an acknowledgment of failure.

“I’d rather die than spend my life looking after other people.” Mariella unlaced her boots, lifted a foot onto Frances’s bunk, and began to unroll a stocking. Anne stood next to her, unbuttoning a petticoat. There were three girls in the cabin, and only just enough room between the bunks on either wall for the two girls to undress. Mariella grunted as she struggled to lever the stocking off her foot, and her thick, glossy blond hair spilled onto Frances’s bunk. She spent hours pinning it each morning, teasing out two ringlets with curlers heated over the fire in the fore saloon. When she took off her clothes she seemed to swell in size, her ample pink flesh springing loose from a tight corset. She was quite happy to walk around their cabin showing off the full weight of her breasts with their expanse of creamy skin and darkened, stretched areolae. Frances, unused to living with other girls, was surprised and a little revolted by this casual lack of modesty.

Anne slept in the bunk opposite. She was a petite Catholic girl with an oval face and black hair parted down the middle, which gave her the look of an Italian Madonna. Her hands were small and delicate, and always busy with a skein of wool, knitting shawls or bed socks for her mother. She looked younger than eighteen, spoke rarely, and laughed even less. Frances suspected she was homesick already. She was going to South Africa to be a nurse, and Mariella was needling her.

“Imagine breathing in other people’s diseases all day long.” Mariella stepped out of her dress, unstrapped her bustle, leant her forearms against the bunk above Frances, and waited for Anne to loosen her laces.

“There’s a man in steerage who had his arm blown clean off in the mines. Two nurses had to hold him down while they sewed his shoulder blade back in. He said their dresses were so red you couldn’t have paid for scarlet that color.”

“Mariella!” Frances scolded. Anne was biting her lower lip and looked as if she might cry.

“Well what?” Mariella bent her head to look in at her. “I should just like to know why, that’s all.”

“Not all of us, Mariella, are going to the colonies to be married,” Anne said, working on the last of Mariella’s laces.

“I shouldn’t think you’d turn down an offer if it came your way.”

Mariella wriggled out of her corset and into a nightdress. She planted a wide, pink foot on the edge of the bunk, her big toe inches from Frances’s face, and heaved herself up. “There aren’t enough men in England to go round. They’ve all escaped to the colonies. I intend to redress the balance.” Despite themselves, the girls laughed. Mariella had a way of getting at the truth.

Sister Mary-Joseph looked into their cabin to check that the girls were in their beds, and a few minutes later the ship’s bell rang, the signal for all lights to be extinguished. Frances blew out her candle. It was their first night at sea. Finally, that afternoon, the guns had sounded, the sails had been hoisted onto the yards, and they had lost sight of Southampton as it receded into dusk. The second-class berths were towards the bow of the ship, close to the steam funnel, and the room was thick with the heat of the engines. Frances, used to sleeping alone, disliked the warmth and the damp stuffiness of the other girls’ bodies. She asked for the porthole to be left open at night, but Mariella had been shocked. What if a wave came in and drenched them?

“How can you be so confident that you’ll like what you find in South Africa?” Anne asked when they had settled in darkness. “You’ve no idea what to expect.”

“No,” Mariella said, “but it can’t be any worse than what I left behind in England.”

“What about your father? Surely you’ll miss him.”

“My father is a drunk. I worked fourteen hours a day for three years sewing buttons on coats in a factory in Bristol to support him, and when he finally found work he threw me out of the house to make room for a girl half his age.” Mariella was older than them both, and usually imperturbable. It hurt to hear her sound so bitter.

“I agree,” Anne said, breaking the silence. “South Africa has to be better. At least there’ll be work. That was the worst thing when my father died. The helplessness. Not knowing how my mother and I would feed ourselves.”

“I thought you were trained as a nurse?” Frances asked.

“Not then I wasn’t. My mother took on work as a seamstress, and earned just enough to send me to nursing school. Only for a year, though, and I couldn’t find a hospital to take me at the end of it. Too many girls with more experience.”

“But you have a position in South Africa?”

“Yes. I’ll have to start in Cape Town, but I hope to go to Kimberley eventually. There is a nurse there, in charge of the hospital. Sister Clara. She is famous in South Africa. They say she is tireless in her helping of others. Almost a saint. At the age of ten she declared that she wanted to be a missionary, and she managed it, against her parents’ wishes, through sheer determination.”

“Well, Frances,” Mariella said after a moment. “What about you?”

“What about me?” she asked, reluctant to tell them.

“We’ve both bared our souls. Now it’s your turn. What’s your story?”

“There is no story. My father is dead.” She swallowed. It was still difficult to say it out loud. “And my uncle wouldn’t take me in. I have no qualifications. There was nothing I could do in England.”

“So you took the first proposal that came your way?”

She was surprised at the ease with which Mariella understood her situation. It was strangely comforting to have it distilled into a few words. “Yes. That’s pretty much it, I suppose.”

“Well, aren’t we a cheerful bunch! We’ll have to do our best to enjoy ourselves on the
Cambrian
, while we still have a chance.”

•   •   •

W
HEN
F
RANCES
WOKE
in the night the cabin was dark. She had no idea how long she had been asleep. She could hear the heavy revolving of the screw in the engine room, the timbers of the ship grinding against each other, and then, much closer, the quick, shallow breaths of a girl crying.

“Anne?” she whispered.

The breathing stopped for a moment, then gave way with a choked sob. Frances stared out into the darkness, waiting for the room to take shape. “What is it?”

“Did you hear about the
Castle
?” Anne caught her breath. “The boatswain says it’s a mile to the bottom. It makes me feel dizzy imagining it.” Frances had heard about the
Castle
. It had hit rocks off St. Helena some time after midnight, sliding to the bottom so quickly that the crew didn’t have time to rouse the passengers from their beds. Four sailors survived.

“There’s no shame in being afraid,” Frances reassured her, but it was a shallow truth. They were all, in their different ways, fearful and ashamed. She thought about her uncle’s reluctance to take her in, the ease with which he talked disparagingly of her father, and her cousins’ embarrassment over her change in status.

“But you must be excited?” Anne’s voice was full of generous pleasure. “You’ll be married in South Africa!”

Frances didn’t reply, giving the conversation up to the throb and pull of the engines. She stayed awake long after Anne’s breathing had merged with Mariella’s into the soft, heavy rhythm of sleep. She thought about her aunt’s filthy, cramped house in Manchester and her brood of children who would have made her into a servant, always fetching, bathing, and scolding. Edwin Matthews had offered escape, and she had taken her chance, but he wasn’t so different from her uncle. He had picked his moment carefully and caught her in a cage. It might be better than living with her aunt, but it felt like entrapment, nonetheless.

And yet, there was more to it. He had managed to unsettle her. Their meeting hadn’t been as simple as she had thought it would be. She had expected him to be embarrassed by the corner he had penned her into, and had presumed he would acknowledge the awkwardness of his situation. But instead he had looked at her with a quiet expectation and an attentiveness that she found oppressive. When he kissed her he had tried to be slow and careful, his fingers barely pressing against her waist, but he couldn’t hide his urgency any more than he could hide the weight of his possessiveness, with its awful note of triumph. It was humiliating. He would want to own her completely, to expose every part of her, and she would have no choice but to open herself up to him.

Panic made her skin crawl. She pulled her hand out from under the sheets and looked at its whiteness in the dark, reassuring herself that she was still there, as a ship might fix its coordinates on a star. What does a person become when they have nothing left to hold on to? She sat up and, defying ship’s rules, fumbled for a candle and lit it, breathing deeply to suppress the dread which was welling up inside her.

When her mother had died she had felt limp and hollowed out, like one of the rabbits hanging up in the pantry with its guts in the sink. But her father had been there to face the awfulness of their grief and take it on himself. He stood between her and death, and she had felt safe as long as he was there. Now he was dead, and Frances wasn’t sure she could make do without him. His absence left a cold, black place inside her which seemed to be growing as the days went on, and there was no one who knew her well enough to stop it.

She reached into the shelf over her bed and pulled out her copy of Tennyson. Between its pages was a photograph. It had been, for as long as she could remember, tacked to the wall of the morning room; the only evidence of her mother left in the house after her death. Frances had taken it with her when she left, easing it out of the frame and wondering as she did so whether the last fingers to have touched the picture had been her mother’s. The edges of the photograph were curled and yellowing. Frances knew it had been taken at the zoo, on the day the first hippopotamus had arrived from Africa, and you could see the metal bars of a cage to the right-hand side of the frame. Her mother, narrow-faced and strong-jawed, clearly not a beauty but with a certain physical stature, leant on her father’s arm. She looked up at him, her mouth half open, lips curved into a laughing smile. He was looking at the photographer, but there were small dimples on his cheeks and you could tell he was trying not to laugh. What had been said in the seconds before the photograph was taken? Frances felt a jolt of pain. He was gone and their happiness could never be re-created.

She didn’t know how her parents had met, but she did have some idea about her father’s childhood. He had never discussed it with Frances, but his sister, Mrs. Arrow, who thought she was a spoilt child, had made a point of telling her how it had been for them growing up. Her father was the eldest and only surviving son of an Irish Catholic family who had emigrated during the worst of the potato famines and ended up in Manchester. He was six when they came to England. They had been farmers, comfortably well off, but in Manchester they had to make do with the ground floor of a cottage with one window and a horizon of bleak, gray stone. The four daughters, who all came later, shared the bed with their parents, and Tom, her father, had slept on the floor. They shared the yard and the outhouse with six families and a plague of rats who came inside in winter. Frances’s grandfather had gone to work for a tannery, collecting feces off the streets, and the daughters had learned to stitch by the greasy light of a tallow. Mrs. Arrow told her all this while she fingered through Frances’s clothes, her eyes assessing the vast wealth stored in the cupboards of this young girl who had never known what it was to boil huge vats of water over an open range or pick lice out of the seams of her underwear. But how did he meet Frances’s mother? Her aunt’s cool eyes told her nothing, but Frances didn’t need her for that part of the story.

The Hamiltons’ cook was getting on in years, but she had a fierce memory, and she had been with the family so long that her loyalty was oblivious to changing generations. She had arthritis, and Frances discovered that she would talk to her if she helped her with the jobs her fingers could no longer manage. So she shelled beans and listened.

“She was always Sir John’s favorite,” the cook told Frances, pounding dough on a slab of white marble. “And that’s the root of the problem. When your grandfather found out, he couldn’t forgive her. He refused to let her out of the house. Said she would marry a shop boy over his dead body.” She paused to blow out air and wipe a floured arm across her forehead. “Your father came, but they wouldn’t let him in. It was your mother who slipped out to him the next day, and she never set foot in this house again. Your grandfather wouldn’t let us speak of her, and he wouldn’t let anyone in the family visit her. Not even when she was clearly dying. It wasn’t until your grandfather passed away that your uncle felt able to have you in this house.”

The dull clang of the ship’s bell rang overhead, calling the watch, and Frances blew out the candle. Two o’clock. A cockerel, not wanting to be caught out, made a strangled cry into the dark. Something cold and hard which she didn’t recognize was beating in her blood. A thin veneer of anger had calcified around her grief. Why should she feel ashamed of her father’s bankruptcy? Why should she be banished to the colonies? She let herself imagine, briefly, the pleasure of having enough wealth to be independent.