‘I will have to ask you to make a deposit,’ Silver made one last effort.
‘How much will you need?’
‘Forty thousand pounds.’
Ralph opened his cheque-book on the edge of the desk, and took one of David Silver’s pens from the rack. The squeak of the nib was the only sound in the hot little office, until Ralph sat back and fanned the cheque to dry the ink.
‘There is just one thing more,’ he said. ‘Nobody outside these four walls, nobody is ever to know that I am the principal in this transaction.’
‘You have my word.’
‘Or your testicles,’ Ralph warned him, as he leaned close to hand him the cheque, and though he smiled, his eyes were such a cold green that David Silver shivered, and he felt a sharp pang of anticipation in his threatened parts.
It was a typical highveld Boer homestead set on a rocky ridge above an undulating treeless plain of silver grass. The roof was of galvanized corrugated iron which had begun to rust through in patches. The house was surrounded by wide verandas, and the whitewash was discoloured and flaking from the wall. There was a windmill on a skeletal tower behind the house. The vanes blurred against the pale cloudless sky, spinning in the dry dusty wind, and at each weary crank of the plunger, a cupful of cloudy green water spilled into the circular concrete cistern beside the kitchen door.
There was no attempt at a garden or lawn. A dozen scrawny speckled fowls scratched at the bare baked earth, or perched disconsolately on the derelict Cape wagon and the other ruined equipment that always seemed to ornament the yard of every Boer homestead. On the side of the prevailing wind stood a tall Australian eucalyptus tree with the old bark hanging in tatters from the silver trunk like the skin of a moulting serpent. In its scant shade were tethered eight sturdy brown ponies.
As Ralph dismounted below the veranda, a pack of mongrel hounds came snapping and snarling about his boots, and he scattered them yelping and howling with a few kicks and a hissing cut from his hippo-hide sjambok.
‘U kom ‘n bietjie laat, meneer.’ A man had come out onto the veranda. He was in shirtsleeves with braces holding up the baggy brown trousers that left his bare ankles exposed. On his feet, he wore rawhide velskoen without socks.
‘Jammer,’ Ralph apologized for being late. Using the simplified form of Dutch, which the Boer called the taal, the language.
The man held the door open for Ralph and he stooped through it into the windowless living-room. It smelled of stale smoke and dead ash from the open fireplace. The floor was covered with rush mats and animal-skins. There was a single table down the centre of the room, of heavy crudely fashioned dark wood. There was a single hanging on the wall opposite the fireplace, an embroidered copy of the ten commandments in High Dutch script. The only book in the room lay open on the bare table-top. It was an enormous Dutch Bible with leather cover and bindings of brass.
On leather-thonged chairs, eight men sat down the length of both sides of the table. They all looked up at Ralph as he entered. There was not a man amongst them younger than fifty years old, for the Boers valued experience and acquired wisdom in their leaders. Most of them were bearded and all of them wore rough hard-worn clothing, and were solemn and unsmiling. The man who had greeted Ralph followed him in and silently indicated an empty chair. Ralph sat down and every shaggy bearded head turned away from him towards the figure at the end of the table.
He was the biggest man in the room, monumentally ugly, as a bulldog or one of the great anthropoids is ugly. His beard was a grey scraggly fringe, but his upper lip was shaven. His face hung in folds and bags, the skin was darkly burned by ten thousand fierce African suns, and it was lumped and stained with warts and with the speckles of benign skin cancer, like the foxing on the pages of a very old book. One eyelid drooped to give him a crafty suspicious expression. His toffee-brown eyes had also been affected by the white sun glare of Africa, and by the scouring dust of the hunting veld and the battlefield, so they were now perpetually bloodshot, sore and inflamed-looking. His people called him Oom Paul, Uncle Paul, and held him in only slightly less veneration than they did their Old Testament God.
Paul Kruger began to read aloud again from the open Bible before him. He read slowly, followed the text with his finger. The thumb was missing from his hand. It had been blown off by a bursting gunbarrel thirty years before. His voice was a rumbling basso profundo.
‘Nevertheless the people be strong that dwell in the land, and the cities are walled and very great: and moreover we saw the children of the Anak there … And Caleb stilled the people, and said: Let us go up at once and possess it, for we are well able to overcome it.’
Ralph watched him intently, studying the huge slumped body, the shoulders so wide that the ugly head seemed to perch upon them like a bedraggled bird on a mountaintop, and he thought of the legend that surrounded this strange man.
Paul Kruger had been nine years old when his father and uncles had packed their wagons and gathered their herds and trekked northwards, away from British rule, driven on by the memory of their folk heroes hanged at Slachters Nek by the Redcoats. The Krugers trekked from the injustice of having their slaves turned free, from the English black circuit courts, from judges who did not speak their language, from taxes levied on land that was theirs and from the foreign troops who seized their beloved herds to pay those taxes.
The year had been 1835 and on that hard trek Paul Kruger became a man at an age when most boys are still playing with kites and marbles. Each day he was given a single bullet and a charge of powder and sent out to provide meat for the family. If he failed to bring back a buck, his father beat him. He became, by necessity, an expert marksman.
It was one of his duties to scout ahead for water and good grazing, and to lead the caravan to it. He became a skilled horseman and developed an almost mystical affinity for the veld, and the herds of fat-tailed sheep and multi-hued cattle that were his family’s wealth. Like a Matabele mujiba, he knew every beast by name, and could pick out an ailing animal from the herd at a mile distant.
When Mzilikazi, the Matabele emperor, sent his impis with their long shields swarming down upon the little caravan of wagons, little Paul took his place with the other men at the barricades. There were thirty-three Boer fighting men inside the circle of wagons. The wagon trucks were lashed together with trek chains, and the openings between the wheels latticed with woven thorn-branches.
The Matabele amadoda were uncountable. Regiment after regiment they charged, hissing their deep ringing ‘Jee!’ They attacked for six hours without respite, and when the bullets ran low, the Boer women smelted and cast lead in the midst of the battle. When the Matabele fell back at last, their dead lay chest-deep around the wagons and little Paul had become a man, for he had killed a man – many men.
Strangely, it was another four years before he killed his first lion, sending a hardened ball through its heart as it sprang upon his horse’s back. By now he was able to test a new horse by galloping it over broken ground. If it fell, young Paul would land catlike, on his feet, shake his head with disapproval, and walk away. When hunting buffalo, he would mount facing his horse’s tail so as to have a steadier shot when the beasts chased his horse, as they invariably did. This unusual seat in no way hampered his control of the horse, and he could change to face ahead so swiftly and smoothly as not to upset his mount’s stride in full gallop.
About this time he showed a gift of extra-sensory powers. Before a hunt, standing at his horse’s head, he would go into a self-induced trance and begin describing the surrounding countryside and the wild animals in it. ‘One hour’s ride to the north there is a small muddy pan. A herd of quagga are drinking there, and five fat eland are coming down the path to the water. On the hill above it, under a camel-thorn tree, a pride of lion are resting, ‘n ou swart maanhaar, an old blackmane, and two lionesses. In the valleys beyond, three giraffe.’ The hunters would find the animals, or the signs they had left, exactly as young Paul described them.
At sixteen, he was entitled, as a man, to ride off two farms, as much land as a horseman could encircle in a day. Each of them was approximately sixteen thousand acres. They were the first of the vast land-holdings he acquired and held during his lifetime, sometimes bartering sixteen thousand acres of prime pasture for a plough or a bag of sugar.
At twenty he was a field cornet, an elected office which was something between magistrate and sheriff; at such tender years to be chosen by men who venerated age marked him as somebody unusual. About this time, he ran a foot race against a horseman on a picked steed over a course of a mile, and won by a length. Then during a battle against the black chief Sekukuni, the Boer General was shot through the head and tumbled over the edge of the kopje. The General was a big bulky man, two hundred and forty pounds weight, but Paul Kruger leaped down the krans, picked up the body and ran back up the hillside under the musket-fire of Sekukuni’s men.
When he set off to claim his bride, he found his way blocked by the wide Vaal river in raging spate, the carcasses of cattle and wild game rolling by in the flood. Despite cries of warning from the ferryman, and without even removing his boots, he urged his horse into the brown waters and swam across. Flooded rivers would not stop a man like Paul Kruger.
After having fought Moshesh and Mzilikazi, and every other warlike tribe south of the Limpopo river, after having burned Dr David Livingstone’s mission on the suspicion that he was supplying arms to the tribes, after having fought even his own people, the rebellious Boers of the Orange Free State, he was made Commandant-in-Chief of the army, and still later the President of the South African Republic.
It was this indomitable, courageous, immensely physically powerful, ugly, obstinate, devout and cantankerous old man, rich in land and herds, who now lifted his head from the Bible and finished his reading with a simple injunction to the men who waited upon him attentively.
‘Fear God, and distrust the English,’ he said, and closed the Bible.
Then still without taking his bloodshot eyes from Ralph’s face, he bellowed with shocking force, ‘Bring coffee!’ and a coloured maid bustled in with a tin tray loaded with steaming mugs. The men around the table exchanged pouches of black Magaliesberg shag, and charged their pipes, watching Ralph with closed and guarded expressions. Once the oily blue smoke had veiled the air, Kruger spoke again.
‘You asked to see me, mijn heer?’
‘Alone,’ said Ralph.
‘These men I trust.’
‘Very well.’
They used the taal. Ralph knew that Kruger could speak English with some fluency, and that he would not do so as a matter of principle. Ralph had learned to speak the taal on the diamond-diggings. It was the simplest of all European languages, suited to the everyday life of an uncomplicated society of hunters and farmers, though even they, for the purposes of political discussion or worship, fell back upon the sophistication of High Dutch.
‘My name is Ballantyne.’
‘I know who you are. Your father was the elephant-hunter. A strong man, they say, and straight – but you,’ and now a world of loathing entered the old man’s tone, ‘you belong to that heathen, Rhodes.’ And though Ralph shook his head, he went on, ‘Do not think I have not heard his blasphemies. I know that when he was asked if he believed there was a God, he replied,’ and here he broke into heavily accented English for the first time, ‘“I give God a fifty-fifty chance of existing.”’ Kruger shook his head slowly. ‘He will pay for that one day, for the Lord has commanded, “Thou shalt not take My name in vain.”’
‘Perhaps that day of payment is already at hand,’ said Ralph softly. ‘And perhaps you are God’s chosen instrument.’
‘Do you dare to blaspheme, also?’ the old man demanded sharply.
‘No,’ Ralph shook his head. ‘I come to deliver the blasphemer into your hands.’ And he laid an envelope on the dark wood, then with a flick slid it down the length of the table until it lay in front of the president. ‘A list of the arms he has sent secretly into Johannesburg, and where they are held. The names of the rebels who intend to use them. The size and force of the commando gathered on your borders at Pitsani, the route they will take to join the rebels in Johannesburg, and the date on which they intend to ride.’
Every man at the table had stiffened with shock, only the old man still puffed calmly at his pipe. He made no effort to touch the envelope.
‘Why do you come to me with this?’
‘When I see a thief about to break into a neighbour’s home, I take it as my duty to warn him.’
Kruger removed the pipe from his mouth and flicked a spurt of yellow tobacco juice from the stem onto the dung-floor beside his chair.
‘We are neighbours,’ Ralph explained. ‘We are white men living in Africa. We have a common destiny. We have many enemies, and one day we may be required to fight them together.’
Kruger’s pipe gurgled softly, but nobody spoke again for fully two minutes, until Ralph broke the silence.
‘Very well then,’ he said. ‘If Rhodes fails, I will make a great deal of money.’
Kruger sighed, and nodded. ‘All right, now I believe you at last, for that is an Englishman’s reason for treachery.’ And he picked up the envelope in his brown gnarled old hand. ‘Goodbye, mijn heer,’ he said softly.
Cathy had taken to her paintbox again. She had put it away when Jon-Jon was born, but now there was time for it once more, However, this time she was determined to make a more serious work of it, instead of sugary family portraits and pretty landscapes.
She had begun a study of the trees of Rhodesia, and already had a considerable portfolio of them. First she painted the entire tree, making as many as twenty studies of typical specimens before settling on a representative example, and then to the master painting she added detailed drawings of the leaves, the flowers and the fruits, which she rendered faithfully in watercolours; finally she pressed actual leaves and blooms and gathered the seeds, then wrote a detailed description of the plant.
Very soon she had realized her own ignorance, and had written to Cape Town and London for books on botany, and for Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae for plants. Using these, she was training herself to become a competent botanist. Already she had isolated eight trees that had not been previously described, and she had named one for Ralph ‘Terminalia Ralphii’ and another for Jonathan who had climbed to the upper branches to bring down its pretty pink flowers for her.
When she diffidently sent some of her dried specimens and a folio of drawings to Sir Joseph Hooker at Kew Gardens, she received an encouraging letter, complimenting her on the standard of her artwork and confirming her classifications of the new species. With the letter was an autographed copy of his Genera Plantarum, ‘to a fellow student of nature’s wonders’, and it had become the start of a fascinating correspondence. The new hobby was one that could be practised side by side with Jon-Jon’s bird-nesting activities, and it helped fill the dreary days when Ralph was away, although now she had difficulty keeping up with Jon-Jon, her swollen belly reducing her to an undignified waddle. She had to leave all the climbing and rock-scrambling to him.
This morning they were working one of the kloofs of the hills above the camp where they had found a beautiful spreading tree with strange candelabra of fruit on the upper branches. Jonathan was twenty feet above ground, edging out to snatch a laden branch when Cathy heard voices calling in the thick bush that clogged the mouth of the kloof. She swiftly rebuttoned her blouse and dropped her skirts down over her bare legs – the heat was oppressive in the confined gulley between the hills and she had been sitting on the bank and dabbling her feet in the trickle of the stream.
‘Yoo hoo!’ she yelled, and the telegraph-operator came sweating and scrambling up the steep side.
He was a dismal shrimp of a man, with a bald head and protruding eyes, but he was also one of Cathy’s most fervent admirers. The arrival of a telegraph for her was an excuse for him to leave his hut and seek her out. He waite
d adoringly with his hat in his hands, as she read the message.
‘Passage reserved Union Castle leaving Cape Town for London March 20th stop open envelope and follow instructions carefully stop home soon love Ralph.’
‘Will you send a telegraph for me, Mr Braithwaite?’
‘Of course, Mrs Ballantyne, it will be a great pleasure.’ The little man blushed like a girl and hung his head bashfully.
Cathy wrote out the message recalling Zouga Ballantyne to King’s Lynn on a sheet of her sketchpad, and Mr Braithwaite clutched it to his concave chest like a holy talisman.
‘Happy Christmas, Mrs Ballantyne,’ he said, and Cathy started. The days had gone by so swiftly, she had not realized that the year 1895 was so far gone. Suddenly the prospect of Christmas alone in the wilderness, another Christmas without Ralph, appalled her.
‘Happy Christmas, Mr Braithwaite,’ she said, hoping he would leave before she began to cry. Her pregnancy made her so weak and weepy – if only Ralph would come back. If only …
Pitsani was not a town nor even a village. It was a single trading-store, standing forlornly in the flat sandveld on the edge of the Kalahari Desert that stretched away 1,500 miles into the west. However, it was only a few miles to the frontier of the Transvaal, but no fence nor border-post marked the division. The country was so flat and featureless and the scrub so low, that the rider could see the trading-store from a distance of seven miles, and around it, shimmering like ghosts in the heat mirage, the little cone-shaped white tents of an army encamped.
The rider had pushed his horse mercilessly along the thirty miles from the railway at Mafeking, for he bore an urgent message. He was an unlikely choice for a peace messenger, for he was a soldier and a man of action. His name was Captain Maurice Heany, a handsome man with dark hair and moustaches and flashing eyes. He had served with Carrington’s horse and the Bechuana police, and in the Matabele war he had commanded a troop of mounted infantry. He was a hawk and he bore the message of a dove. The sentries picked up his dust from two miles out and there was a small bustle as the guard was called out.