‘Nobody ever made better,’ Ralph agreed, and twirled his thick dark moustache, ‘and nobody is likely to, not until Mr Rhodes builds his railroad.’
‘Did Mr Rhodes send the money?’
‘In good gold sovereigns,’ Ralph told him. ‘I have carried them in my own saddle-bags.’
‘All we have to do is get Lobengula to accept them.’
‘That, Papa, is your job. You are Mr Rhodes’ agent.’
Yet three weeks later the wagons still stood outside Lobengula’s kraal, their loads roped down under the tarpaulins while Zouga waited each day from early morning until dusk in front of the king’s great hut.
‘The king is sick,’ they said.
‘The king is with his wives.’
‘Perhaps the king will come tomorrow.’
‘Who knows when the king will tire of his wives,’ they said, and at last even Zouga, who knew and understood the ways of Africa, became angry.
‘Tell the king that Bakela, the Fist, rides now to Lodzi to tell him that the king spurns his gifts,’ he ordered Gandang, who had come to make the day’s excuses, and Zouga called to Jan Cheroot to saddle the horses.
‘The king has not given you the road.’ Gandang was shocked and perturbed.
‘Then tell Lobengula that his impis can kill the emissary of Lodzi on the road, but it will not take long for the word to be carried to Lodzi. Lodzi sits even now at the great kraal of the queen across the water, basking in her favour.’
The king’s messengers caught up with Zouga before he reached Khami Mission, for his pace was deliberately leisurely.
‘The king bids Bakela return at once, he will speak with him at the moment of his return.’
‘Tell Lobengula that Bakela sleeps tonight at Khami Mission and perhaps the night after – for who knows when he will see fit to talk with the king again.’
Somebody at Khami must have put a spy-glass on the dust raised by Zouga’s horses, for when they were still a mile from the hills, a rider came out to meet them at full gallop, a slim figure with long dark plaits streaming behind her lovely head.
When they met, Zouga jumped down from his saddle and lifted her from hers.
‘Louise,’ he whispered into her smiling mouth. ‘You will never know how slowly the days pass when I am away from you.’
‘It’s a cross you make us both carry,’ she told him. ‘I am fully recovered now – thanks to Robyn – and still you make me loiter and pine at Khami. Oh, Zouga, will you not let me join you at GuBulawayo?’
‘That I will, my dear, just as soon as we have a roof on the cottage, and a ring on your finger.’
‘You are always so proper.’ She pulled a face at him. ‘Who would ever know?’
‘I would,’ he said, and kissed her again, before he lifted her back into the saddle of the bay Arab mare which had been his betrothal gift to her.
They rode with their knees touching and their fingers linked, while Jan Cheroot trailed them discreetly out of earshot.
‘We shall have only days longer to wait,’ Zouga assured her. ‘I have forced Lobengula’s hand. This matter of the rifles will be settled soon and then you can choose where you will make me the happiest man on earth, the cathedral at Cape Town perhaps?’
‘Darling Zouga, your family at Khami has been so kind to me. The girls have become like my own sisters, and Robyn lavished care upon me when I was so ill, so burned and desiccated by the sun.’
‘Why not?’ Zouga agreed. ‘I’m sure that Clinton will agree to say the words.’
‘He has already, but there is more to it. The wedding is all planned, and it is to be a double wedding.’
‘A double wedding – who are the others?’
‘You would never guess, not in a thousand years.’
They looked more like brothers than father and son, as they stood before the carved altar in the little whitewashed church at Khami.
Zouga wore his full dress uniform, and the scarlet jacket, tailored twenty years before, still fitted him to perfection. The gold lace had been renewed to impress Lobengula and his indunas, and now it sparkled bright and untarnished, even in the cool gloom of the church.
Ralph was dressed in expensive broadcloth with a high stock and cravat of watered grey silk that on this hot June day brought beads of sweat to his forehead. His thick dark hair was dressed with pomade to a glossy shine, and his magnificent moustache, twirled with beeswax, pricked out in two stiff points.
Both of them were rigid with expectation, staring fixedly at the altar candles which Clinton had hoarded for such an occasion, and lit only minutes before.
Behind them one of the twins fidgeted with excited anticipation, and Salina pumped up the little organ and launched into ‘Here comes the Bride’, while Ralph grinned with bravado and, out of the side of his mouth, muttered to his father, ‘Well, here we go then, Papa. Fix bayonets and prepare to receive cavalry!’
They turned with parade ground precision to face the church door, just as the brides stepped through it.
Cathy wore the mail-order dress which Ralph had brought up from Kimberley, while Robyn had lifted her own wedding dress from its resting place in the leather-bound trunk and they had taken in the waist and let down the hem to fit Louise. The delicate lace had turned to the colour of old ivory, and she carried a bouquet of Clinton’s yellow roses.
Afterwards they all straggled across the yard. The brides tottered on their high heels and tripped on their trains, clinging to the arms of their new husbands; and the twins pelted them with handfuls of rice, before running ahead to the verandah where the wedding board was piled with mountains of food and lined with regiments of bottles, the finest champagne from Ralph’s wagons.
At one end of the table Ralph loosened his stock and held Cathy in the circle of his arm and a glass in his other hand as he made his speech:
‘My wife—’ he referred to her, and the company hooted with laughter and clapped with delight, while Cathy clung to him and looked up at his face in transparent adoration.
Then when the speeches were ended, Clinton looked across the table at his eldest daughter. His bald head shone with the heat and excitement and the good champagne.
‘Will you not sing to us, my darling Salina?’ he asked. ‘Something happy and joyous?’
Salina nodded and smiled, and lifted her chin to sing in her gentle voice:
‘However far you go, my love,
I will follow too.
The highest mountain top, my love,
Across deepest ocean blue.’
Louise turned her face towards Zouga, and when she smiled the corners of her dark blue eyes slanted upwards and her lips parted and glistened. Below the tabletop Clinton reached for Robyn’s hand, but his gaze stayed upon his daughter’s face.
Even Ralph sobered, and sat attentively while Cathy laid her cheek upon his shoulder.
‘No arctic night too cold, my love,
No tropic noon too fierce.
For I will cleave to you, my love,
’Til death my heart do pierce.’
Salina sat very straight on the wooden bench with her hands in her lap. She was smiling as she sang, a sweet serene smile, but a single tear broke from her lower lid and descended, with tortuous slowness, the velvet curve of her cheek, until it reached the corner of her mouth.
The song ended, and they were silent for a long moment, and then Ralph pounded on the table with the flat of his hand.
‘Oh bravo, Salina, that was superb.’
Then they were all applauding, and Salina smiled at them and the single tear broke and fell to her breast, to leave a dark star upon the satin of her bodice.
‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Please excuse me.’
And she stood up and, still smiling, glided down the verandah. Cathy sprang to her feet, her face twisted with concern, but Robyn caught her wrist before she could follow.
‘Leave her be,’ she whispered. ‘The child needs to be alone a while. You will only upset her furth
er.’ And Cathy sank back beside Ralph.
‘Shame on you, Louise,’ with forced jocularity, Clinton called down the table. ‘Your husband’s glass is empty, are you neglecting him so soon?’
An hour later Salina had not returned, and Ralph’s voice had become louder and even more assertive. ‘Now that Mr Rhodes has got his charter, we can begin to assemble the column. Cathy and I will start back tomorrow with the empty wagons. Heaven knows we will need every pair of wheels, and I thought old King Ben would never take those rifles off my hands.’
But Cathy was for once not drinking in every one of his words; she kept looking down the verandah, and again she whispered to Robyn, who frowned and shook her head.
‘You talk as though the whole affair was arranged for your personal profit, Ralph.’ Robyn turned from Cathy to challenge her new son-in-law.
‘Perish the thought, Aunty.’ Ralph laughed, and winked at his father down the length of the table. ‘It’s all for the good of Empire and the glory of God.’
Cathy waited until they were once more embroiled in amiable argument, and then she slipped away so quietly that Robyn did not notice until Cathy reached the end of the verandah. For a moment she looked set to call her back, but instead she made a move of annoyance and addressed herself to Zouga.
‘How long will you and Louise remain at GuBulawayo?’
‘Until the column reaches Mount Hampden. Mr Rhodes doesn’t want any misunderstanding between the volunteers and Lobengula’s young bucks.’
‘I will be able to send up fresh vegetables and even a few flowers while you are at the king’s kraal, Louise,’ Clinton offered.
‘You’ve been too kind already,’ Louise thanked him, and then broke off, and an expression of deep concern crossed her face.
They all turned hurriedly in the direction she was staring.
Cathy had returned and climbed the verandah steps. She leaned against one of the whitewashed columns. Her face was the muddy yellow of a malaria sufferer, and her brow and chin were blistered with droplets of sweat. Her eyes were tortured, and her mouth twisted with horror.
‘In the church,’ she said. ‘She’s in the church.’ And then she doubled over, and retched with a terrible tearing sound, and it came up her throat in a solid yellow eruption that soaked the virginal white skirts of her wedding gown.
Robyn was the first to reach the church door. She stared for only a moment and then she whirled and hid her face against Clinton’s chest.
‘Take her away,’ Zouga ordered Clinton brusquely, and then to Ralph. ‘Help me!’
The garland of pink roses had fallen from Salina’s head, and lay below her on the floor of the nave. She had thrown a halter rope over one of the roof beams, and she must have climbed up on the table that Robyn used for her surgery.
Her hands hung open at her sides. The toes of her slippers were turned in towards each other in a touchingly innocent stance, like those of a little girl standing on tiptoe; but they were suspended at the height of a man’s waist above the flagged floor.
Zouga had to look up at her face. The rope had caught her under one ear and her head was twisted at an impossible angle to one side. To Zouga her face seemed swollen to twice its normal size, and it was mottled a dark mulberry hue.
At that moment a merciful little breeze came in through the doorway and turned her slowly on the rope to face the altar, so that Zouga could see only her lustrous golden hair which had come down and now hung to her waist. That was still beautiful.
Cathy Ballantyne had never known such happiness as the months spent in the British South Africa Company camp on the Macloutsi river.
She was the only woman among nearly seven hundred men, and a favourite of all of them. They called her ‘Missus’, and her presence was eagerly sought at every social activity with which officers and men diverted themselves during the long term of waiting.
The harsh conditions of camp life might have daunted another newly married girl of her age, but Cathy had known no others, and she turned the hut of daub and thatch that Ralph built for her into a cosy retreat with calico curtains in the glassless windows and woven grass native mats on the earth floor. She planted petunias on each side of the doorway, and the troopers of the column vied for the honour of watering them. She cooked over an open fire in the lean-to kitchen, and her invitations to dine were eagerly sought after by men who subsisted on canned bully beef and stamped maize meal.
She glowed with all the attention and excitement, so that from being merely pretty, she seemed to become beautiful – which made the men cherish her the more. Then, of course, she had Ralph, and she wondered some nights as she lay awake and listened to his breathing, how she had ever lived without him.
Ralph had the rank of major now, and he told her with a wink and an irreverent chuckle, ‘We are all colonels and majors, my girl. I’m even thinking of making old Isazi a captain.’ But he looked so handsome in his uniform with fragged coat and slouch hat and Sam Browne belt, that she wished he would wear it more often.
With each day Ralph seemed to her to become taller, his body more powerful and his energy more abundant. Even when he was away down the line hustling up the wagons, setting up the heliograph stations, or meeting with the other directors of the British South Africa Company in Kimberley, she was not lonely. Somehow his presence seemed always with her, and his absence made anticipation of his return a sort of secret joy.
Then suddenly he would be back, galloping into camp to sweep her up and toss her as high as if she were a child, before kissing her on the mouth.
‘Not in public,’ she would gasp and blush. ‘People are watching, Ralph.’
‘And turning green with envy,’ he agreed, and carried her into the hut.
When he was there, everything was a breathless whirl. He was everywhere with his long assured stride and merry infectious laugh, driving his men along with a word of encouragement or of banter, and occasionally with sudden murderous black rages.
His rages terrified her, although they were never directed at her; and yet at the same time they excited her strangely. She would watch him with fearful fascination as his face swelled and darkened with passion, and his voice rose into a roar like a wounded bull. Then his fists and boots would fly and somebody would roll in the dust.
Afterwards she felt weak and trembly, and she would hurry away to the hut and draw the curtains and wait. When he came in, he would have that savage look on his face that made something flutter in the pit of her stomach, and it took all her will not to run to him – but to wait for him to come to her.
‘By God, Katie my girl,’ he said to her once as he leaned on his elbow over her, the sweat still glistening on his naked chest, and his breathing as rough as though he had run a race, ‘you may look like an angel, but you could teach the devil himself a trick or two.’
Though she prayed afterwards for strength to control the wanton sensations and cravings of her body, the prayers were perfunctory and lacked real conviction, and that lovely smug and contented feeling just would not go away.
With Ralph it was excitement all the time, day and night, when they were alone and when they were in company. She loved to watch the deference with which other men treated him, rich and famous men older than he was like Colonel Pennefather and Dr Leander Starr Jameson, who were the leaders of the column. But then, she told herself, so they should. Ralph was already a director of the Chartered Company, Mr Rhodes’ British South Africa Company, and when he sat down at the boardroom table in the De Beers building, it was in the company of lords and generals and of Mr Rhodes himself, though Ralph grinned and told her wickedly, ‘Great men, Katie, but not one of them whose feet don’t stink in hot weather – same as mine.’
‘You are awful, Ralph Ballantyne,’ she scolded, but she felt all puffed up with pride when she overhead two troopers talking of him and one said: ‘Ralph Ballantyne, there’s a man for you, and no mistake.’
Then at night, after they had made boisterous unashamed love,
they would talk in the darkness, sometimes through most of the night, and his dreams and plans were the more enchanting for she knew that he would make them come true.
Her personal rapture was heightened by the mood of the seven hundred men around her, and each day’s restraint as they waited for the word to move off increased the tension which gripped them all. Ralph’s oxen brought up the guns, two seven-pounders, and the artillery fired shrapnel over the deserted veld beyond the camp, while the watchers cheered them as the fleecy cotton pods of smoking death opened prettily in the clear dry air.
The four Maxim machine-guns were unpacked from their cases and de-greased – and then, on a memorable day, the monstrous steam engine came chugging into the encampment, dragging behind it the electric generator and the naval searchlight which would be just another precaution against night attack by the Matabele hordes.
That night as she lay in his arms, Cathy asked Ralph the question they were all asking one another.
‘What will Lobengula do?’
‘What can he do?’ Ralph stroked her hair, the way he might caress a favourite puppy. ‘He has signed the concession, taken his gold and guns, and promised Papa the road to Mashonaland.’
‘They say he has eighteen thousand men waiting across the Shashi.’
‘Then let them come, Katie, my lass. There are not a few amongst us who would welcome the chance to teach King Ben’s buckeroos a sharp lesson.’
‘That’s a terrible thing to say,’ she said without conviction.
‘But it’s the truth, by God.’
She no longer chided him when he blasphemed so lightly, for the days and ways of Khami Mission seemed to be part of a fading dream.
Then one day, early in July of 1890, the mirror of a heliograph winked its eye across the dusty, sun-washed distances. It was the word for which they had waited all these months. The British Foreign Secretary had at last approved the occupation of Mashonaland by the representatives of the British South Africa Company.
The long ponderous column uncoiled like a serpent. At its head rode Colonel Pennefather in company uniform, and at his right hand the guide Frederick Selous, whose duty it would be to take the column wide of any Matabele settlements, to cross the low malarial lands before the rains broke and to lead them up the escarpment to the sweet and healthy airs of the high plateau.