Excerpt from Cape Fever by Nadia Davids, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Be careful with my things, please, I cannot bear the habitual breaking of plates and ornaments that every maid seems guilty of. And remember this: if such breakage does occur after we've quarreled, I will know it to be deliberate." A sharp left. "Always knock before you enter any room and wait a moment for my response. If I don't answer, you may assume I am not there and open the door. Answer the butcher's knock only when I tell you to. I do not keep a telephone—a boastful extravagance in any home—so I will ask you to carry messages to my friends as needed. Walk, my dear, you should not have such a languid gait at your age. Up the stairs now. March on."

She trails her pale fingers on the oak banister as she ascends the stairs, and I find myself thinking of my mother's hands. Mama had me when she was seventeen, and when I look at Mrs. Hattingh, I can see easily who is younger by the face, but their hands are different. My mother rubs her palms and nails nightly with the oil she buys from the Indian shopkeeper in the District, but by day her skin cracks at the knuckles, ash gray against brown. It's the lye in the soap that does it. She's one of many washerwomen in the Quarter who spend their days cleaning, scrubbing, soaking things for the city's grand and not-so-grand houses. All day, all day, wash-wash, scrub-scrub, soak-soak, clothes, linen, curtains, soiled nappies for babies and the infirm. She works like a soldier, my mother, rising early, sleeping late, setting her teeth as though she's going into battle when she leaves for the washhouse. She does it even though my father turns a respectable trade because she refuses to believe that religious calligraphy will ever provide enough for the body despite what it may do for the soul.

Mrs. Hattingh's joints are slender where Mama's are knotted. Against the oak, my new employer's fingers have the look of the pale tapered limbs of a starfish clinging to a dark ocean rock. Some girls I know sneer at their madams, saying they have the hands of children, soft, useless, easily hurt, but I don't feel that way at all. I don't want my skin to grow gray and stripped and hard, for I have beautiful hands, like my father. His skin is only ever stained at the thumb and forefinger. His are the hands of a scholar.

Up, up the wide wooden stairs covered in part by a fitted carpet, dull gold with a scattering of faint green roses. At the end of the corridor is a blue-tiled water closet with porcelain fittings ("You will use the outhouse"); at the corridor's curve, four bedrooms, two on the left, two on the right. She walks into the first, a guest room. "This is called 'Birds.' You can see why." And I do. The orangey-red twin bedcovers match the custard-yellow wallpaper, and there are birds, birds, birds on both. They've been caught, sitting, tilting, swooping, rushing at climbing vines and each other, beaks pointing up or wide open, ready to hunt, screech, sing, dart among flowers lush with pollen. It is as though we have walked into a silent, stone-still aviary. Someone—it could only be a child—has scribbled ink onto a few of the wallpaper birds' eyes, making them blacker, sharper, so that mid-hunt, screech or song, they glare right at us.

We do not linger, she is already guiding me into the next room. "And this is 'Fontana,'?" she says, pronouncing the name with a bit of drama, pointing to the back wall, which is entirely covered with a painting of what I think is a town square in another country. In it, a beautiful fountain gushes and very old buildings are crumbling and covered in weeds. "Isn't it hideous?" she says. "A gift from my late husband's sister, sent in the months after he died, 'to bring me comfort.' It's glued on. She suggested it go in my drawing room. Imagine! One cannot account for taste, Soraya, remember that."

"Yes, madam."

We cross the corridor, but at the first of the family bedrooms, she stops and makes a show of pulling up a pocket watch, clicking it open and checking the time. "I didn't realize the hour. We'll have to return to this room on another occasion."

Excerpted from Cape Fever by Nadia Davids. Copyright © 2025 by Nadia Davids. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.