Free The Fever Tree by Jennifer McVeigh Page A

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