Yesterday's Promise (14 page)

“I take it you have doubts about the gold find?”

Mornay spread a hand expressively. “My father died on the journey, as did the Hottentot, Sam, who is reported to have led them to the deposit. Only your uncle made it out alive, so how can one say for sure?”

“Because my uncle spoke to me about it many times before his death,” Rogan stated, placing his boots on the porch floor and resting his elbows on the table between them. He met Mornay's gaze steadily, narrowing his eyes. “And I'm going to find it.”

Mornay was quiet a moment, brows lifted with a debonair expression. “Ah?” was all he said, but it gave away enough that Rogan grinned.

“And what's more, you don't fool me at all,” Rogan said, standing. “And I think it is only recently that you have had serious thoughts on the matter. I suggest that what affected you was the sizable amount of money that my brother Parnell Chantry was willing to pay you to sketch your recollection of the trek north by your father and my uncle in 1877. He came to you at the request of Sir Julien Bley for De Beers Consolidated.”

“Ah, monsieur, the sizable amount, as you English say, should it not have been as great as the renown due my father for his brilliant guidance?”

Rogan looked at him a moment, then sat down on the edge of the porch. “I suggest that the amount you were paid was due more to the possible size of the gold deposit than to any of your father's due renown.” He smiled. “I want to trek north of the Limpopo, Mornay, as soon as possible, traveling on the same route your father led Henry.”

Mornay, an unhurried man, considered his words before answering. “You are at odds with the Company, then?”

“Let's be forthright, Mornay. The BSA and I have competing goals. You and I both know there is gold on the Zambezi. And the BSA knows it as well. But I intend to stake the claim first on the deposit discovered by my uncle years ago. It's no secret I'm green when it comes to the ways and wiles of this great land. I'll need an experienced guide to bring me into Mashonaland. A guide who isn't afraid of Sir Julien Bley and Rhodes's company.”

Mornay chewed the end of his cheroot while studying Rogan. Then he looked at Derwent, who sat quietly but alertly.

“So this is the monsieur you claim is more worthy than his brother and uncle.”

“Aye, Mr. Mornay, this is my friend.”

“Odd, you would have a friend like this one.” Mornay jabbed his cheroot in Rogan's direction.

Rogan, surprised by what could be construed an affront, merely watched Mornay, who then offered a suave smile—perhaps the most that could be gotten out of the man.

“Derwent, your friend is a bold and brash young man. But I like him.”

Derwent cleared his throat and looked from one to the other. “I'm glad you see it so, Mr. Mornay, because Mr. Rogan's been a true friend to me since we were boys in England. His father is Sir Lyle, the squire of Rookswood. It was Rogan here who taught me to ride and shoot. Long he's been planning this expedition, and he'll do it too. Just you wait and see.”

Then Derwent surprised Rogan by standing and saying calmly but pointedly, “He'll do it with or without you, sir. And I'm going with him. And he'll do better with the gold than either Sir Julien or Mr. Rhodes. So that's how I see it.”

Rogan felt a prick to his conscience. Derwent's guileless ways and loyalty occasionally contrasted with his own tendency toward ruthlessness. He glanced at Mornay to see how he'd taken the little speech.

Mornay looked neither impressed nor offended.

“What do you know about my uncle's expedition back in the seventies?” Rogan asked mildly.

“I was seventeen, and I knew the Hottentot, Sam, who first told Monsieur Henry of the glitter of gold near the Zambezi. I sat and listened by the hour to their plans, their route, their excitement to find a great treasure of gold. I wanted to go with them. Had I gone”—he gestured dramatically—“I, too, should be dead. I doubt I would have survived the Shona attack. Only one man made it out. Your Monsieur Henry. Why?… Luck was with him, monsieur.”

Rogan looked at him skeptically.

Mornay lifted a silver brow. He shrugged. “The only thing that saved me, monsieur, was an unflattering sickness that laid me low. I wept after the expedition party moved out.” He waved his glass of warm beer. “Luck, she was with me, too.”

“More likely, the good Lord was showing you kindness, Giles,” Derwent said cheerfully.

Mornay looked across the porch at him, unsmiling. “Perhaps, yes. And sent you along later to preach at me these many long months.”

Derwent laughed, and Mornay looked at Rogan. “I can bring you to the Zambezi. How much will you pay for my services, monsieur?”

“Name your price,” Rogan stated boldly, confident, hiding his immense satisfaction that what he had come looking for was almost his.

“Fifty thousand pounds. Up front. It is, as you say, a very dangerous trek.” Mornay drew on his cheroot calmly, watching him, a sparkle dancing in his black eyes.

Rogan emptied his glass of warm beer, looking down at him over the rim.
Is he out of his mind? Fifty thousand pounds! Up front? The arrogant goat!

Rogan tried to look calm. He knew he could not get money from Julien without forming the partnership Julien wanted. And the last thing he would do was play into his uncle's greedy hand. Not that Rogan was without funds. As an inheritor, he had plenty of shares in the diamond mines at Kimberly, but access before his thirtieth birthday was another matter. Again, Julien held the purse strings, and he held them tightly. Parnell faced the same predicament regarding his inheritance. Rogan would one day have Rookswood, his father's estate at Grimston Way. But that awaited the time of Sir Lyle's passing, and Rogan wished not to dwell on it.

Except for his yearly allotment—of which he had already spent a good portion on a loan for Evy's schooling and her music school—he hadn't anything even close to fifty thousand pounds. Yes, he could understand Henry better now, and how he must have felt returning to England after being foiled by his stepbrother from finishing his expedition.

Rogan was angry that this imperious old bushman would want to lay down such an impediment.

Well, he'd call his bluff straightaway. Rogan set the glass down firmly on the table, looked Giles squarely in the eyes, and said, “No guide is worth that much. Not even your father, Bertrand Mornay.”

Mornay's eyes widened slightly, and he removed the cheroot from his mouth.

Rogan sensed Derwent moving uneasily in his chair, as though he guessed Rogan's temper was igniting like a dry grass fire.

Derwent stood quickly, catching up his floppy hat and jamming it on his head.

“Say, you'll surely need to sleep on this, Mr. Rogan. Like you said when we were boys, most decisions can wait till morning.” He looked at Mornay, nodding his head as he did so. “Don't you think so too, Mr. Mornay?”

Mornay stood, not looking at Derwent but at Rogan. Mornay looked like a brown wolf with amused black eyes.

“Then we can meet again in three days, Monsieur Rogan.”

Rogan looked at him, feeling his jaw set like a rock.

“Best we be getting back,” Derwent said again. “Alice will have that supper ready for us.”

Mornay shouted to the Bantu in their dialect, and they came bringing the horses.

Rogan leaned a hand against the porch post, looking hard at Mornay, trying to read him, then said, “Make it a thousand pounds, and we have an agreement. I'll leave you to think it over. Au revoir.” He turned, went down the porch steps, and strode to the black. He mounted and wheeled the horse to ride out the gate, raising a small cloud of silty dust. Derwent was quickly in the saddle.

Rogan cantered out of the yard, and when Derwent caught up a minute later, Rogan drew up under some trees by the path. He gazed back toward Mornay's bungalow.

“I don't understand it,” Derwent said. “He wasn't this way before. He didn't charge a tenth of that much when he took Baron Frederick von Kessler on safari. Why, it was almost as if he was making it hard for you on purpose.”

“He was.” Rogan's voice was cold. “He's been bought, Derwent.”

“Bought?” Derwent looked at him, brows pinched in puzzlement.

“I'll wager he's been bought by Julien. Parnell will tell me the truth this time. I'll force it from him if I have to.”

“Mr. Rogan, it's been a mighty long day, and it's been a disappointment, to be sure. You're angry, and they're all plotting against you, it seems. And this is no time to talk to your brother. I wish you'd come to the house first and sleep on all this. Mr. Parnell will be at the mine in the morning. He comes early. There's little we can do now, and all our problems will still be there staring us in the face come daylight. And I heard Peter Bartley will be there tomorrow too. What do you say? Will you come over for supper?”

Rogan knew he had to concede. Another meeting with Parnell in his present heated state would be detrimental to any plans he had for an expedition north to the Zambezi. He needed time to think about all that was happening and try to decide what Julien had in mind. He was hungry and in need of a good night's rest. He looked toward Derwent and smiled suddenly.

“You're right. I'm starving.”

Derwent laughed, and turning their mounts, they rode off side by side down the track back toward town.

The first flush of sunset in the western sky was painting the polished rock of distant, brooding hills a rosy gold. Rogan saw a large flock of birds on their way to roost for the night, their colors faded to dark profiles sweeping across the veld. For a few quiet minutes the sunset slowly rinsed the grasses from a pale eggshell green to a colorless shadow, and the new light of a white moon inched above the hills. Somewhere a hyena laughed in the darkness.

Rogan rose early the next morning, saddled his horse, and rode out to the diamond mine. European, African, even American diggers were already there, clambering about the Big Hole under the watchful eyes of guards and overseers.

Rogan stood on the edge of the giant hole, hands on hips, watching all the activity and thinking of all that had led up to this point. From childhood, the history of the first diamond discoveries was drilled into his thinking until he'd become bored with the familiar saga. Perhaps it was the reason Henry's mysterious expeditions to find gold rather than more diamonds had caught his fancy as a young boy.

Diamonds were first discovered in diggings close to the Vaal River in the Boer Republic of the Transvaal, then again, twenty miles away at Colesber, on a rocky flat-top hill the Dutch called a kopje. The kopje, which was “pudding-shaped,” later developed into what was now known as Kimberly. The kopje was now the “Big Hole.” Rogan had heard it said that it became the largest man-made hole in the world. After the diamond discoveries, the revenue of Cape Colony rose five years in a row as thousands of diggers from around the world came to Kimberly to muck the blue mud in search of wealth.

This was the very region where Sir Julien and his partner Carl van Buren were said to have found the Kimberly Black Diamond, where Carl died in a mining accident, and where Julien lost an eye. Here, too,
according to Henry's diary, was where Sir George Chantry had found the diamond—was it true? Just
who
had found the Black Diamond?

The debate between the Boers and the English over who owned the area where the diamonds were found had raged for some years until England managed to gain control. Finally, in 1872, Cape Colony was granted self-rule. What had Heyden said that night in Henry's rooms? “By all rights the diamonds of De Beers Consolidated belong to the Boer Republics.”

Heyden… Where was he? The Transvaal, still working in Paul Kruger's government, no doubt, hating Britain and hoping for war. Rogan hadn't thought too much about war recently, nor did he wish to waste time doing so. He heard a coach coming on the road. He turned, catching the wind in his face.

The fancy gilt-edged coach was pulled by four fine horses. The driver looked English, and beside him rode another man, muscled and blond. A guard?

Rogan narrowed his eyes suspiciously. The door of the coach opened. Parnell stepped out, followed by a young woman who must have been Darinda Bley. Next Sir Julien stepped out and stood, dark and forbidding, his strong features scorched a leathery brown by his hard life in South Africa. Except for the deepening white in his sideburns, he seemed not to have aged since Rogan last saw him. His black eyepatch added to his enigma, and Rogan could imagine the one good eye burning like blue fire. He was staring straight in Rogan's direction.

Arcilla had said he wouldn't arrive until next week. What happened? Julien had to have left Capetown soon after he did! Had Arcilla told Julien, after all?

Rogan armed himself for confrontation.