Mr Rhodes closed the book with a snap, and Elizabeth exclaimed sweetly, ‘Oh, Mr Rhodes, Mama will be so disappointed that you did not enjoy her little story.’
The book described the fictional adventures of Trooper Hackett of the BSA Company expeditionary force, and his whole-hearted participation in the slaughter of the Matabele with machine-gun fire, the pursuit and shooting down of the fleeing survivors, the burning of the kraals, the looting of Lobengula’s cattle and the rape of the young Matabele girls. Then Trooper Hackett is separated from his squadron and spends the night alone on a wild kopje, and while huddled over his camp-fire a mysterious white stranger comes out of the night and joins him at the fire. Hackett remarks, ‘Ah, you have been in the wars, too, I see,’ leaning forward and inspecting the stranger’s feet. ‘By God! Both of them! And right through – you must have had a bad time of it!’
And the stranger replies, ‘It all happened a very long time ago,’ then the reader is left in no doubt as to whom he is dealing with, especially when the author describes his beautiful gentle countenance and his all-seeing blue eyes. Abruptly the stranger breaks into a florid injunction to young Hackett.
‘Take a message to England. Go to that great people and demand of them: “Where is the sword that was given into your hand, that with it you might enforce justice and deal out mercy? How came you to give it up into the hands of men whose search is gold, whose thirst is wealth, to whom the souls and bodies of their fellow men are counters in a game, men who have transformed the sword of a great people into a tool to burrow for gold, as the snouts of swine for earth nuts?”’
It was little wonder, Ralph smiled to himself, that Mr Rhodes pushed the book away and wiped the hand that had touched it on the lapel of his rumpled Norfolk jacket.
‘Oh, Mr Rhodes,’ murmured Vicky, angel-faced and wide-eyed. ‘At the least you must read the inscription that Mama dedicated to you.’ She retrieved the discarded volume, opened the flyleaf and read aloud, ‘“For Cecil John Rhodes, without whose endeavours this book would never have been written.”’
Mr Rhodes rose from his seat with ponderous dignity.
‘Ralph,’ he said quietly. ‘Thank you for your hospitality. Dr Jim and I will be getting on to Bulawayo, I think. We have spent too long here as it is.’ Then he looked across at Jordan. ‘The mules are well rested. Jordan, is there a moon tonight?’
‘There will be a good moon tonight,’ Jordan replied promptly, ‘and there are no clouds so we will have a good light for the road.’
‘Can we be ready to leave by this evening, then?’
It was a command, and Mr Rhodes did not wait for a reply, but stalked out of the stockade towards his own tent, and the little doctor followed him stiffly. The moment they were gone, the twins burst into merry tinkling laughter and hugged each other ecstatically.
‘Mama would have been proud of you, Victoria Isabel—’
‘Well, I am not.’ Jordan’s voice cut through their hilarity. He was white-faced and shaking with anger. ‘You are ill-mannered and silly little girls.’
‘Oh Jordan,’ Vicky wailed and seized his hands. ‘Don’t be cross. We love you so.’
‘Oh yes, we do. Both of us.’ Elizabeth took his other hand, but he pulled away from them.
‘You do not have any idea in those giddy little heads how dangerous a game you are playing, not only for yourselves.’ He strode away from them, but paused for a moment in front of Ralph. ‘Nor do you, Ralph.’ His expression softened, and he placed his hand on Ralph’s shoulder. ‘Please be more careful – for my sake, if not for your own.’ Then he followed his master from the stockade.
Ralph pulled the gold hunter from the inner pocket of his waistcoat and made a show of inspecting it.
‘Well,’ he announced to the twins, ‘sixteen minutes to clear the camp. That must be a new record even for you two.’ He returned the watch to his pocket and put one arm around Cathy’s shoulders. ‘There you are, Katie my love, there is your home again without a single stranger.’
‘That is not quite the case,’ murmured a soft Kentucky accent, and Harry Mellow rose from the log he had been using as a seat and removed the slouch hat from his curly head. The twins stared at him for a startled instant, then flashed each other a look of complete accord and a remarkable transformation came over them. Liza smoothed her skirts and Vicky pushed back the dense dangling tresses from her face and their expressions became grave and their comportment ladylike.
‘You may present the young gentleman, cousin Ralph,’ said Vicky in accents so refined as to make Ralph glance at her to confirm it was the same girl speaking.
When the mule coach drove through the outer gates of the stockade, there was one member of Mr Rhodes’ party who was not aboard.
‘What did you tell Mr Rhodes?’ Cathy asked, hanging onto Ralph’s arm as they watched the coach rolling away, a dark shadow on the moon-silver road.
‘I told him that I needed Harry for a day or two more to help me lay out the development for the Harkness.’ Ralph lit his last cheroot of the day and they began the leisurely stroll around the camp that was a little ritual of their life together. It was their time of contentment and delicious anticipation, the time when they talked over the events of the day just past and planned for the one ahead, at the same time touching each other as they walked, her hand in the crook of his arm, their hips sliding against each other, a closeness which would soon lead naturally and sweetly to the wide soft cot in the bell tent.
‘Was that true?’ Cathy asked.
‘Semi-true,’ he admitted. ‘I need him for longer than a day or two, more like ten or twenty years.’
‘If you succeed, you will be one of the few men to get the better of Mr Rhodes, and he will not like it.’
Ralph stopped her and commanded. ‘Listen!’
From the inner stockade there was the orange glow of the fire and the sound of a banjo being played with such rare skill that the limpid notes shimmered and ran into each other; like some exotic birdsong, it rose to an impossible crescendo and then ceased so abruptly that the utter stillness trembled in the air for many seconds before the night chorus of the cicadas in the trees, which had been shamed to silence by the vaunting instrument, hesitantly recommenced. With it mingled the patter of soft palms and the twins’ unfeigned exclamations of delight.
‘He is a man of many talents, your Harry Mellow.’
‘The chief of them is that he can spot gold in a filled tooth across a polo field. However, I have no doubt your little sisters will come to cherish others of his accomplishments.’
‘I should send them to bed,’ Cathy murmured.
‘Don’t be the wicked elder sister,’ Ralph admonished, and the music started again, but this time Harry Mellow’s soaring baritone led and the twins picked up the refrain in their true clear voices.
‘Leave the poor creatures alone, they have enough of that at home.’ Ralph led her away.
‘It’s my duty,’ Cathy protested half-heartedly.
‘If it’s duty you are after,’ Ralph chuckled, ‘then, by God, woman, I have another more pressing duty for you to perform!’
He lay stretched out on his back on the cot, and watched her prepare for bed in the lamplight. It had taken her a long time to forget her upbringing as the child of Christian missionaries and to allow him to watch her, but now she had come to enjoy it, and she had flaunted a little before him, until he grinned and leaned out of the cot to crush out the cheroot, then lifted both hands towards her.
‘Come here, Katie!’ he ordered, but she hung back provocatively.
‘Do you know what I want?’
‘Not, but I know what I want.’
‘I want a home—’
‘You have a home.’
‘With thatch and brick walls, and a real garden.’
‘You have a garden, the most beautiful garden in the world, and it stretches from the Limpopo to the Zambezi.’
‘A garden with roses and geraniums.’ She came
to him, and he lifted the sheet. ‘Will you build me a home, Ralph?’
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘When the railroad is finished.’
She sighed softly. He had made the same promise while he was laying the telegraph line, and that was before Jonathan was born, but she knew better than to remind him. Instead, she slipped under the sheet, and strangely his arms, as they closed around her, became home for that moment.
In the southern springtime on the shores of one of the great lakes that lie in the hot depths of the Rift Valley, that mighty geological fault that splits the shield of the African continent like the stroke of an axe, there occurred at that time a bizarre hatching.
The egg masses of Schistocerca gregaria, the desert locust, that were buried in the loose earth along the edge of the lake, released their flightless nymphs. The eggs had been laid in unusually propitious conditions of weather and environment. The swarms of breeding insects had been concentrated by unseasonable winds upon the papyrus banks of the lake, a vast food supply that heightened their fecundity. When the time came for them to spawn, another chance wind pushed them en masse onto a dry friable terrain of the correct acidity to protect the egg masses from fungus infection while the mild humidity drifting up from the lake ensured perfectly elastic egg-casings from which the hatching nymphs were able to escape readily.
In other less fortuitous seasons the loss and wastage might be as high as ninety-nine per cent, but this year the kindly earth rendered up such a multitude of nymphs that it could not contain them. Though the hatching ground was almost fifty square miles, the insects were forced to crawl upon each other’s backs in layers and drifts and banks ten and twenty deep, so that the surface of the desert seemed to become a single seething organism, monstrous and terrifying.
The constant agitation and stimulation of contact with their siblings wrought a miraculous change in this teeming tide of nymphs. Their colour turned from the drab desert brown of their kind to a vivid orange and metallic midnight black. Their metabolic rate surged and they became hyperactive and nervous. Their hind legs grew longer and more powerful, their wings developed with startling rapidity, and they entered the gregarious phase. When they had moulted for the last time and their newly fledged wings had dried, the last chance fluke of weather occurred. The tropical clouds along the valley escarpment blew away, and a terrible sun beat down upon the crawling mass of insects, the valley became an oven, and the entire swarm of mature locusts took spontaneously to the air.
In that baptism to flight, the heat that their bodies had sucked up from the baking earth of the valley was increased even further by their muscular activity. They could not stop, and they winged southwards in a cloud that eclipsed the sun, and stretched from horizon to horizon.
In the cool of the evening this mighty cloud sank to earth and the trees of the forest could not bear their weight. Branches as thick as a man’s waist snapped off under the clinging masses of insects. In the morning the rising heat spurred them into flight once more, and they rose to darken the heavens and left the forest stripped bare of its tender spring foliage, so that the empty twisted branches looked like the limbs of cripples in a strange dead landscape.
Southwards the endless flights poured across the sky, until far below them the silver ribbon of water that was the Zambezi river glinted dully in the shadow of their passing.
The whitewashed walls of Khami Mission Station burned in the noon sunlight with the eye-aching brilliance of bleached bone. The family dwelling, surrounded by wide shaded verandas, and roofed with thick dark thatch, stood a little apart from the church and its attendant buildings, but all of them seemed to crouch below the line of wooded hills, the way that chickens huddle below the hen when there is a hawk in the sky.
From the front steps of the house, the gardens stretched down past the well to the little stream. At first, nearer the house, there were roses and bougainvillaea, poinsettia and banks of phlox, that formed bright bold slashes of colour against a veld still brown from the long dry winter just passed; but nearer the stream the fields of maize were tended by convalescents from the mission clinic, and soon on the tall green plants the immature cobs would begin to set. Between the rows of corn the earth was hidden beneath the dark green umbrella leaves of new pumpkin plants. These fields fed the hundreds of hungry mouths, the family and servants and sick and converts who came from all over Matabeleland to this tiny oasis of hope and succour.
On the veranda of the main house, at a bare hand-planed table of heavy mukwa wood, the family was seated at the midday meal. It was a meal of steaming salted maize bread baked in the leaves and washed down with maas, the cool thick soured milk from a stone jug, and, in the opinion of the twins, the grace that preceded it was disproportionately long for such frugal fare. Vicky fidgeted and Elizabeth sighed at a volume that was carefully calculated not to exceed the knife edge beyond which it would attract her mother’s wrath.
Doctor Robyn St John, the doyenne of Khami Mission, had dutifully thanked the Almighty for His bounty but was going on, in conversational tones, to point out to Him that a little rain soon would help pollination of the immature cobs in the field and ensure a continuation of that bounty. Robyn’s eyes were closed, and her features were relaxed and serene, her skin was almost as unlined as that of Victoria’s. Her dark hair had the same russet highlights as Elizabeth’s, but there was just a fine silver mist at her temples to betray her age.
‘Dear Lord,’ she said, ‘in Your wisdom You have allowed our best cow, Buttercup, to lose her milk. We submit to Your will which surpasses all understanding, but we do need milk if this little mission is going to continue to work to Your glory—’ Robyn paused to let that sink in. ‘Amen!’ said Juba from the far end of the table.
Since her conversion to Christianity, Juba had taken to covering her huge black melon-sized breasts with a high-buttoned man’s under-vest, and amongst the necklaces of ostrich shell and bright ceramic trade beads around her neck hung a simple crucifix of rolled gold on a fine chain. Apart from that she was still dressed in the traditional costume of a high-ranking Matabele matron.
Robyn opened her eyes and smiled at her. They were companions of many years, since Robyn had rescued her from the hold of the Arab slaving dhow in the Mozambique channel, long before the birth of any of the children, when both of them had been young and unmarried; but it had only been shortly before his destruction by the Company forces that King Lobengula had at last given his permission for Juba’s conversion to the Christian faith.
Juba, the little Dove – how she had changed since those far-off days. Now she was the senior wife of Gandang, one of the great indunas of the Matabele nation, brother of King Lobengula himself, and she had borne him twelve sons, the eldest of whom was Bazo, the Axe, himself an induna. Four of her younger sons had died in front of the Maxim machine-guns at the Shangani river and the Bembesi crossing. Nevertheless, as soon as that brief cruel little war had ended, Juba had returned to Khami Mission and to Robyn.
Now she smiled back at Robyn. Her face was a glossy full moon, the silky black skin stretched tightly over the layers of fat. Her dark eyes sparkled with a lively intelligence, and her teeth were a perfect and unblemished white. On her vast lap, within the circle of her arms, each as thick as a man’s thigh, she held Robyn St John’s only son.
Robert was not quite two years old, a thin child, without his father’s rugged bone structure but with the same strange yellow-flecked eyes. His skin was sallow from regular doses of anti-malarial quinine. Like many infants born of a mother on the verge of menopause, there was a quaint old-fashioned solemnity about him, like a little old gnome who had already lived a hundred years. He watched his mother’s face as though he had understood each word she uttered.
Robyn closed her eyes again, and the twins who had perked up at the prospect of a final amen glanced at each other, and slumped with resignation.
‘Dear Lord, Thou knowest of the great experiment upon which Thy hum
ble servant will embark before this day ends, and we are certain of Your understanding and protection during the dangerous days ahead.’
Juba’s understanding of the English language was just sufficient to follow this injunction, and the smile faded from her face. Even the twins looked up again, both of them so troubled and unhappy that when Robyn sounded the long-awaited ‘Amen’, neither of them reached for the platters or jugs.
‘Victoria, Elizabeth, you may begin,’ Robyn had to prompt them, and they chewed dismally for a while.
‘You never told us it was to be today,’ Vicky spoke up at last.
‘The young girl from Zama’s kraal is a perfect subject, she started her chills an hour ago, I expect her fever to peak before sundown.’
‘Please, Mama.’ Elizabeth jumped up from her seat and knelt beside Robyn with both arms around her waist, her expression stricken. ‘Please don’t do it.’
‘Now don’t be a silly girl, Elizabeth,’ Robyn told her firmly. ‘Return to your seat and eat your food.’
‘Lizzie is right.’ Vicky had tears in her green eyes. ‘We don’t want you to do this. It’s so dangerous, so horrible.’
Robyn’s expression softened a little, and she placed one narrow but strong brown hand on Elizabeth’s head. ‘Sometimes we have to do things that frighten us. It’s God’s test of our strength and faith.’ Robyn stroked the lustrous dark hair back from Elizabeth’s forehead. ‘Your grandfather, Fuller Ballantyne—’
‘Grandfather was touched,’ Vicky cut in quickly. ‘He was crazy mad.’
Robyn shook her head. ‘Fuller Ballantyne was a great man of God, there were no limits to his vision and courage. It is only the mean little people who call such men mad. They doubted him, as they now doubt me, but as he did, I shall prove the truth,’ she said firmly.