Authors: Wilbur Smith
Flushed and panting, Vicky released Jordan, placed her hands
on her hips and asked Ralph, ‘Ralph, are you not going to
present us to the company?’
‘Mr Rhodes, may I present my sisters-in-law,’ said
Ralph with relish.
‘Oh, the famous Mr Rhodes,’ Vicky gushed
theatrically, but there were little green sparks in her eyes.
‘It is such an honour to meet the conqueror of the Matabele
nation, because, you see, King Lobengula was a personal friend of
our family.’
‘Please excuse my sister, Mr Rhodes.’ Elizabeth
curtsied, and her expression was demure. ‘She intends no
discourtesy, but our parents were the first missionaries to the
Matabele, and our father sacrificed his life trying to help
Lobengula while your troops were pursuing him to his death. My
mother—’
‘Young lady, I am fully aware who your mother is,’
Mr Rhodes forestalled her sharply.
‘Oh good,’ Vicky chimed sweetly. ‘Then you
will appreciate the gift that she asked me to present to
you.’
Vicky reached into the deep pocket of her long skirt and
brought out a thin volume. It was bound in cardboard, not morocco
leather, and the quality of the yellow paper was coarse and matt.
She laid it on the trestle-table in front of Mr Rhodes, and when
he saw the title his heavy jaw clamped closed. Even Ralph quailed
slightly. He had counted on the twins providing an unsettling
influence, but he had not expected them to be so instantly
explosive.
The book was entitled
Trooper Hackett of Matabeleland, by
Robyn Ballantyne
, for the twins’ mother wrote and
published under her maiden name. There was probably not a man in
the stockade who had not already read the slim volume, or at
least heard of its contents, and if Vicky had thrown a live mamba
on the table, their consternation could not have been more
intense.
The contents of the book were so dangerous that three
reputable London publishers had rejected it, and finally Robyn St
John had published it privately and created an immediate
sensation. In six months it had sold almost two hundred thousand
copies, and had been treated to extensive reviews in almost every
influential newspaper both at home in England and abroad in the
colonies.
The frontispiece of the book set the tone for the text that
followed. It was a murky photograph that depicted a dozen white
men in BSA Company uniform standing under the spreading branches
of a tall wild teak tree and looking up at the corpses of four
semi-naked Matabele hanging by their necks from the topmost
branches. There was no caption to the photograph, and the faces
of the white men were too indistinct to be recognizable.
Now Mr Rhodes reached out and opened the book at the gruesome
illustration. ‘Those are four Matabele indunas who were
wounded at the battle of Bembesi, and who committed suicide by
hanging, rather than surrender to our forces,’ he growled.
‘They are not the victims of some atrocity as this
scurrilous piece of offal implies.’
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.
I
n 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.