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Authors: Marjorie Eccles

Tags: #Mystery, #Historical

Shadows & Lies (21 page)

BOOK: Shadows & Lies
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So why was I hesitating, now that he'd asked me to marry him?
“Don't tell me – there's someone else – in England.” I could feel him holding his breath.
“No one.”
Sometimes, when the heat danced over at the boulder-strewn kopje at the west end of the town it reminded me of the stony road up to The Pack Horse, when Willie Dyson and I had taken that last walk, in that lovely spring evening. I heard his voice again, singing softly,
‘When the fields are white with daisies …I'll return
.' I think I had known, even then, that I never would.
“I'm very relieved to hear that. As for me – well, there'll never be anyone else for me, Hannah. I'm a dull sort of chap, the sort who offers his heart only once,” Hugh said, with that half-mocking, self-deprecating smile of his that I found so attractive. “But I dare say I can understand your reluctance to say yes immediately. Big decision, I appreciate, to make your home in a strange country, and I know what you feel about Mafeking. Africa isn't all like this, though – you haven't seen much of it yet. But if it's social life you want,” – he hesitated – “we could live in Jo'burg or Cape Town – or even make our home in England if you wished.”
“What about your career?”
“What of it?” he asked quickly, after a slight pause. “These troubles won't go on for ever. And anyway, there are other ways of making a life.”
His offer to marry me would bring me more than I had ever dreamed of. His share of his father's business had left him with enough money to do exactly as he wished. He could give me wealth, social position and a life of leisure, the opportunity to see the world. Love? Yes, I could be sure of that, too, no one would be more steadfast than Hugh. But it was another matter to ask him to renounce his true vocation. It was second nature to him: he had taken to the rigour and discipline of life in the border police like a duck to water. I knew that he also enjoyed the status of having his foot firmly planted on the ladder of authority, which he was confident of ascending, rung by rung. He had a natural air of command, and all the honourable attitudes of a true guardian of the peace.
How could I take that away from him?
We were married immediately, and very quietly, before he went away again. I wore the peacock silk dress I'd made over from Mrs Crowther's old one and, apart from Lyddie and Lyall, the only other guests were the Whiteleys and Major Thomas Douglas, Hugh's best friend in the regiment, and his mousy little wife. We moved into a small house of our own on the edge of the town, where I had a dovecote built, and in the garden I planted jasmine and yellow acacia for their dizzying perfume, and a jacaranda for its purple flowers and its shade. We settled into a life which was circumscribed by the times Hugh was away on duty and the few times he was at home. As a young bride, it was only natural that I should miss him when he was away, that there should be long periods of
ennui
in between, which I tried to combat by immersing myself in the social activity connected with the military, in friendship with other wives. I did a little teaching, and read a great deal – I could now afford to order and buy all the books I might ever want. I still had Lyddie.
And when Hugh came home, we were happy, although it surprised me how much time he still liked to spend with his fellow officers in the officers' mess at the Police Barracks, talking over their exploits until late at night. When he stayed at home he often repeated them to me. For the most part, I listened with interest, for I longed to be part of every aspect of his life, but occasionally, when I'd heard the story for the second, or perhaps the third time, I confess I had to stifle a yawn.
 
One morning about a year later, I bumped towards the Catholic school on my bicycle, which I did nearly every day now. Six nuns of the Order of the Sisters of Mercy, volunteers from their mother convent at Strabane in Northern Ireland, had come to Mafeking to establish a convent here. Being so few in number, they were glad of any help in their work of teaching and nursing. I wasn't a Roman Catholic, but then, neither were most of the pupils they had gathered for their little school. Nor was I qualified to teach. Still, I could show the girls how to sew, and help the younger ones with their sums and reading, and this was what
I did.
There was a dewy clarity to the air, a soft mist lay just above the ground after the rain which had drummed on the iron roof most of the night, and the ground smelled of slaked earth and new growth. Rain, bringing in its wake sweet new grass, was always welcome in this arid region, but although my umbrella was strapped across my handlebars, I hoped there wouldn't be another deluge while I was on my way to the school.
The parish priest was already at work on clearing the ground for the new convent, raising his pick-axe and bringing it down with a mighty thwack, striking sparks from the stony earth. His shirt stuck to his back as he levered up a rock, wary of uncovering nests of coiled snakes in the process as very often happened, none of which he would kill, however. A muscular man of tremendous enthusiasm, Father Ogle had rolled up his sleeves, proving he could heave up boulders and wield a spade or a crowbar with the best of them, setting a magnificent example to others, and early as it was this morning, around him milled a whole crowd of people anxious to help: other men were also digging, children were picking up stones and filling baskets with excavated earth, and Mr Harris from the general stores was supplying free lemonade.
Naturally, the nuns wanted their convent to be finished as soon as possible, but I feared they might be showing more optimism than was justified. The town had made a free gift of the site for the convent, which indeed they could well afford to do, for it was an unpromising piece of scrubland to put it at its best, which before anything else needed to have stubborn old thorn trees chopped down and their stumps grubbed out. The mudbrick walls would be rising as soon as the rock-hard ground could be levelled and boulders removed – not for nothing did the native name for the town,
Mafikeng,
mean ‘the place of stones'. But the convent was altogether a far more ambitious project than any yet undertaken in Mafeking, destined to be the best yet, the only two-storeyed building in the town, in fact, and because of this, the builders were proceeding with extreme caution, not to mention slowness, however much Father Ogle bullied and cajoled. But this had dismayed the nuns not one whit.
“Will you look at how well it's coming on? It seems God has answered our prayers and our home will be finished sooner than we had dared to hope,” said my friend, Sister Mary Columba, with her ever cheerful smile, joining me as I walked along to the school. She was a young, fresh faced and very pretty novice, totally unlike my admittedly vague notion of what a nun should be and, I think, a little unlike her own. She had a quick and puckish sense of humour; her face, rosily glowing with heat under the restricting coif, always bore a smile. Her voice was as soft as the rain falling from the skies of her native Donegal, though it was not so much what she said, as her silences, which fell upon her with disconcerting suddenness, whenever she remembered Mother Superior's caution that talking too much was an indulgence. But laughter and humour were never far away from her twinkling eyes.
She was happy at the prospect of the convent walls going up soon, with the gentle confidence that all would be well if their trust was put in God, and who could question her faith?
Indeed, I hoped for all their sakes that their faith would be rewarded.
In the event, it was opened early in the following year. Considering the difficulties, in record time.
 
The time I spent at the convent was something of a lifesaver for me, and not only because it filled in time that would otherwise have hung heavy on my hands. I had come to love those quiet, religious women who followed their own form of practical Christianity by teaching, nursing the sick and providing help wherever they could see it was needed to the people of Mafeking. I could not embrace their Catholic faith, but I believe I'd learned from them a composure I didn't have before, and to swallow my growing disappointment that life as the wife of a serving officer wasn't all it was cracked up to be. I'd learned the ability to hold my tongue, too, when I couldn't agree with the ingrained, stiff-necked and rigid code of discipline demanded of men like Hugh. I assisted in teaching the girls in the school and generally helped out as much as I could, often acting as a liaison between the nuns and the traders in the town. It was tiring work, especially in the hot season, but if the nuns could rise at three in the morning for
prayer, work for a full day and then spend their evenings in contemplation and more prayer, I felt humbled enough to carry on.
 
One morning Hugh, back home after a long spell of duty, woke as I was getting ready to meet Sister Mary Columba at the convent. She had begun a routine of going down to the mission church in the native stadt, taking food and teaching the black children to read and write – and, incidentally, to be instructed in the Catholic faith. Braving the disapproval of many of the other ladies in the town, I had fallen into the habit of going with her, and while she ran the thread of her religion through everything she taught, I tried to instil some small idea that there was, out there, a wider world beyond Mafeking. The thirst for knowledge of some of these children amazed and delighted me. It was something with which I could sympathise.
I was taken aback by Hugh's disapproval when he learned where I was going. He was not against me having a useful occupation, something to fill in the time while he was away, and found nothing wrong with my teaching the girls at the convent, but when I told him what our plans were for that morning, he met my explanation with a look of frank disapproval, frowning and leaning back against the pillows, his arms folded behind his head. “I hope you're not getting any notions of treating the Kaffirs as equals, Hannah – that's just asking for trouble. You have to keep 'em under control, you know, or they'll soon have the upper hand. I thought you'd have learned that by now. Black's black and white's white, and they're not the same as us, however you look at it.”
There were differences, I had to admit. Everyone knew that though they were childlike, amiable and willing to please, the blacks were also lazy, they told lies and they were cruel to their animals; they stole, and would promise anything to get themselves out of trouble. They were incapable of keeping time. But how could they ever learn to be otherwise if they were not educated? I asked.
This was not the time to argue the point, and neither of us said any more, but the exchange curiously disturbed me. I knew Hugh always treated the natives with the same courtesy as he treated everyone else — so how could he feel this way? I worried
that he might be growing more imbued with the attitudes I encountered all too often in other officers. ‘Give them an inch and they'll take a mile' was an expression one heard all too often. But to keep the black people of this land ignorant was surely as horrible a barbarity as using them as slaves and worse, as the Boers did.
We had been married for two years, during which I had learned several things. One was that marriage was not the grand passion, or even the meeting of soulmates which the silly, romantic girl I had been had once hoped for. Another was that my husband was a man who kept his life in separate compartments. Nor was he a demonstrative man. I knew in my heart that he would go to the ends of the earth for me if necessary and that should surely have been enough, but I longed for more, for some demonstration that I, and not that life he led when he was away from me, took first place. This was hard not to believe, when I saw how alive and interested he became when he was with his brother officers and their talk was all of the sporadic rebellions across the border, and what they were prepared to do in the face of the war with the Boers which was sure to come. But this was where my life had led me, and I reminded myself that regardless of everything else, we did love each other, if not passionately, at least truly.
“What's wrong with you lately, Hannah?” he asked now.
“I'm sorry, Hugh, perhaps I'm a little out of sorts. Maybe it's the weather.”
I pretended not to see his disappointed look. There was plenty of time yet. I would not let the desire for a child dominate my life, as it did Lyddie's.
He was always kind and gentle. He rose and kissed me before I left, to show he had forgiven me.
 
As the storm clouds gathered and troops were moving into position on both sides, it became impossible to ignore the fact that war was on our doorstep. Food and other necessities of life were being stockpiled, and more and more of those who could leave Mafeking were taking the opportunity to do so, while refugees from other parts flocked in.
Lyall was worried about what would happen to his business in the event of hostilities, taking all the necessary preventive
measures he could to conserve and protect his stock. To this end, he decided he needed to make a trip to inspect one of the ostrich farms, worked by two brothers out of England, who supplied him with feathers – for which England had a seemingly insatiable demand, not only for boas and hats and aigrettes for debutantes to wear in their hair, but also for feather dusters and as decorations to stick in vases. He reckoned he could make the trip in three days. Lyddie's eyes lit up. “Oh, do let me go with you – I'm sure I shall go quite mad if I don't get away from all this endless talk of war.”
In the end he gave in, perhaps knowing how much she was in need of something to divert her thoughts from what was becoming an obsession with her and a great worry to him: her inability to have a child. I could understand how she, with all the abundant and robust good health that was part of her attraction, chafed against her inability to fulfil the quite normal function of carrying a baby to full term. On the other hand, she had been told that having another child might cost her her life. It was ironic that she had by now conceived three times, each of which had ended in failure, whereas I …I could not conceive at all.
 
Several more people joined us in the expedition, there being a general feeling there might not be another such chance for a very long time. With us was Roger Marriott, a young subaltern, and Caroline Douglas, the meek and silent wife of Hugh's friend, Major Thomas Douglas — only she was neither meek nor silent on this trip, I thought as I observed her laughing and teasing Roger. But the desert air had an exhilarating effect on all of us, as if it were charged with electricity, and we were all in gay spirits.
“Caroline Douglas? Must we, Lyall?” Lyddie had said, making a moue. “She's such a little goose.” But we couldn't find any excuse to prevent her accompanying us, and Lyddie, with her usual good nature, made her feel welcome. But she was right, I thought: Caroline was a silly, vapid young woman, whose company was always a trial, and I was quite content to leave her to Lieutenant Marriott. Thomas was to have come with us too, but, like Hugh, he could not be spared from his duties at this time. Roger, I supposed, was not of enough importance for him to be
forbidden two or three days' leave but, watching him with Caroline, I thought Lyddie hadn't shown much sense in inviting him along when she was to be there.
Like any small town, Mafeking was a place rife with gossip and rumour, petty quarrels and intrigues, and I was sure there was nothing much in the little scandal that was blowing up around Caroline and the young lieutenant, but having him accompany us on this trip was going to do nothing to lessen the gossip. Roger cut a handsome and dashing figure, and all the ladies were romantically in love with him. It was a surprise when he'd picked out Caroline for his special attentions, though it shouldn't have been; he liked a conquest. There was nothing more to it than a mild flirtation, I was sure, but Hugh took a different stance.
BOOK: Shadows & Lies
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