Authors: Wilbur Smith
‘Of course the Matabele have an absolutely free run of
the territory outside the laagers at Bulawayo and Gwelo and
Belingwe. They do as they please, though strangely enough they do
not seem to have closed the road to the southern drifts. If you
can reach Kimberley in time to join the relief column that
Spreckley is taking through, you should be in Bulawayo by the end
of the month – and Mr Rhodes and I will not be long in
joining you.
‘Spreckley will be taking through only essential
supplies, and a few hundred men to stiffen the defence of
Bulawayo until the imperial troops can get there. As you probably
know, Major-General Sir Frederick Carrington has been chosen to
command, and Mr Rhodes and I will be going up with his staff. I
have no doubt we will bring the rebels to book very
swiftly.’
Jordan kept up a monologue during the entire meal, to cover
the embarrassment caused by the stares and the whispers of the
other diners, who were deliciously scandalized by the presence of
one of Jameson’s freebooters in their midst. Zouga ignored
the stir he was creating, and addressed himself to the meal and
the conversation with Jordan until a young journalist from the
Cape Times
, clutching his shorthand pad, approached the
table.
‘I wonder if you would care to comment on the leniency
of the sentences passed by the Lord Chief Justice.’
Only then did Zouga raise his head, and his expression was
bleak.
‘In the years ahead they will give medals and
knighthoods to men who achieve exactly the same task that we
attempted,’ he said quietly. ‘Now will you be kind
enough to let us finish our lunch in peace.’
At the railway station Jordan fussed over making certain that
Zouga’s trunk was in the goods van and that he had a
forward-facing seat in the last carriage. Then they faced each
other awkwardly, as the guard blew his warning whistle.
‘Mr Rhodes asked me to enquire whether you would still
be good enough to act as his agent at Bulawayo?’
‘Tell Mr Rhodes that I am honoured by his continued
confidence.’
They shook hands and Zouga climbed into the coach.
‘If you see Ralph—’
‘Yes?’ Zouga asked.
‘Never mind.’ Jordan shook his head. ‘I hope
you have a safe journey, Papa.’
Leaning from the carriage-window as the train pulled out from
the platform, Zouga studied the receding figure of his youngest
son. He was a fine-looking young fellow, Zouga decided, tall and
athletic, his grey three-piece suit in fashion, yet also in
perfect understated taste – and yet there was something
incongruous about him, an air of the lost waif, an aura of
uncertainty and deep-rooted unhappiness.
‘Damned nonsense,’ Zouga told himself, and drew
his head in and pulled up the window by its leather strap.
The locomotive built up speed across the Cape flats for its
assault on the rampart of mountains that guarded the African
continental shield.
J
ordan
Ballantyne cantered up the driveway towards the great white
house, that crouched amongst its oaks and stone-pines on the
lower slopes of the flat-topped mountain. He was pursued by a
feeling of guilt. It was many years since he had neglected his
duties for an entire day. Even a year ago it would have been
unthinkable for him to do so. Every day, Sunday and public
holidays notwithstanding, Mr Rhodes needed him close at hand.
The subtle change in their relationship was something that
increased his feelings of guilt and introduced a darker more
corrosive emotion. It had not been entirely necessary for him to
spend the whole day with his father, from when the mailship
worked her way into Table Bay, with the furious red dawn and the
south-easter raging about her, until the northern express pulled
out from under the glassed dome of Cape Town station. He could
have slipped away and been back at his desk within a few hours,
but he had tried to force a refusal out of Mr Rhodes, an
acknowledgement of his own indispensability.
‘Take a few days if you like, Jordan – Arnold will
be able to handle anything that might come up.’ Mr Rhodes
had barely glanced up from the London papers.
‘There is that new draft of Clause 27 of your
will—’ Jordan had tried to provoke him, and instead
received the reply he most dreaded.
‘Oh, give that to Arnold. It’s time he understood
about the scholarships. Anyway, it will give him a chance to use
that newfangled Remington machine of his.’
Mr Rhodes’ childlike pleasure in having his
correspondence printed out swiftly and neatly on the caligraph
was another source of disquiet to Jordan. Jordan had not yet
mastered the caligraph’s noisy keyboard, chiefly because
Arnold’s jealousy monopolized the machine. Jordan had
ordered his own model shipped out to him, but it had to come from
New York and it would be months yet before he could expect it to
arrive.
Now Jordan reined in the big glossy bay at the steps to Groote
Schuur’s back stoep, and as he dismounted, he tossed the
reins to the groom, and hurried into the house. He took the
backstairs to the second floor, and went directly to his own
room, unbuttoning his shirt and pulling the tails from his
breeches as he kicked the door closed behind him.
He poured water from the Delft jug into the basin and splashed
it onto his face. Then he dried on a fluffy white towel, tossed
it aside and picked up the silver-handled brushes and ran them
over his crisp golden curls. He was about to turn away from the
mirror and find a fresh shirt when he stopped, and stared
thoughtfully at his own image.
Slowly he leaned closer to the glass and touched his face with
his fingertips. There were crows’ feet at the outer corners
of his eyes; he stretched the skin between his fingers but the
lines persisted. He turned his head slightly, the light from the
tall window showed up the pouches beneath his eyes.
‘You only see them at that angle,’ he thought, and
then flattened his hair back from the peak of his forehead with
the palm of his hand. There was the pearly gleam of his scalp
through the thinning strands, and quickly he fluffed his hair up
again.
He wanted to turn away, but the mirror had a dreadful
fascination. He smiled: it was a grimace that lifted his upper
lip. His left canine tooth was darker, definitely a darker grey
than it had been a month before when the dentist had drilled out
the nerve, and suddenly Jordan was overwhelmed by a cold
penetrating despair.
‘In less than two weeks’ time I will be thirty
years old – oh God, I’m getting old, so old and ugly.
How can anyone still like me?’
He bore down hard on the sob that threatened to choke him, and
turned away from the cruel glass.
In his office there was a note in the centre of the tooled
morocco leather top of his desk, weighted down with the silver
ink well.
‘See me as soon as possible. C. J. R.’
It was in that familiar spiky scrawl, and Jordan felt a leap
of his spirits. He picked up his shorthand pad, and knocked on
the communicating door.
‘Come!’ the high-pitched voice commanded, and
Jordan went through.
‘Good evening, Mr Rhodes, you wanted to see
me?’
Mr Rhodes did not reply at once, but went on making
corrections to the typed sheet in front of him, crossing out a
word and scrawling a substitute above it, changing a comma to a
semi-colon, and while he worked, Jordan studied his face.
The deterioration was shocking. He was almost totally grey
now, and the pouches below his eyes were a deep purple colour.
His jowl had thickened and hung in a dewlap under his jawbone.
His eyes were red-rimmed and their Messianic blue was blurred and
diluted. All this in the six months or so since Jameson’s
disastrous raid, and Jordan’s thoughts jumped back to that
day that the news had come. Jordan had brought it to him in this
same library.
There had been three telegrams. One from Jameson himself was
addressed to Mr Rhodes’ Cape Town office, not to the
mansion at Groote Schuur, and so it had lain all weekend in the
letterbox of the deserted building. It began, ‘As I do not
hear from you to the contrary—’
The second telegram was from the magistrate at Mafeking, Mr
Boyes. It read in part, ‘Colonel Grey has ridden with
police detachments to reinforce Dr Jameson—’
The last telegram was from the commissioner of police at
Kimberley. ‘I deem it my duty to inform you that Dr
Jameson, at the head of a body of armed men, has crossed the
Transvaal border—’
Mr Rhodes had read the telegrams, meticulously arranging them
on the top of his desk before him as he finished each.
‘I thought I had stopped him,’ he had kept
muttering as he read. ‘I thought he understood that he must
wait.’
By the time he had finished reading, he had been pale as
candlewax and the flesh seemed to have sagged from the bones of
his face like unrisen dough.
‘Poor old Jameson,’ he had whispered at last.
‘Twenty years we have been friends and now he goes and
destroys me.’ Mr Rhodes had leaned his elbows on the desk
and placed his face in his hands. He had sat like that for many
minutes and then said clearly: ‘Well, Jordan, now I will
see who my true friends are.’
Mr Rhodes had not slept for five nights after that. Jordan had
lain awake in his own room down the passage and listened to the
heavy tread back and forth across the yellow-wood floor, and
then, long before the first light of dawn, Mr Rhodes would ring
for him, and they would ride together for hours upon the slopes
of Table Mountain before returning to the great white mansion to
face the latest renunciations and rejections, to watch with a
kind of helpless fascination his life and his work crumbling
inexorably into dust about them.
Then Arnold had arrived to take his place as Jordan’s
assistant. His official title was second secretary, and Jordan
had welcomed his assistance with the more mundane details of
running the complex household. He had accompanied them on their
visit to London in the aftermath of Jameson’s misadventure,
and remained firmly by Rhodes’ side on the long return
journey via the Suez Canel, Beira and Salisbury.
Now Arnold stood attentively beside Mr Rhodes’ desk,
handing him a sheet typed upon the caligraph, waiting while he
read and corrected it, and then replacing it with a fresh sheet.
With the rancid taste of envy, Jordan recognized, not for the
first time, that Arnold possessed the clean blond good looks that
Mr Rhodes so much admired. His demeanour was modest and frank,
yet when he laughed, his entire being seemed to glow with some
inner illumination. He had been up at Oriel, Mr Rhodes’ old
Oxford college, and it was more and more obvious that Mr Rhodes
took pleasure and comfort in having him near by, as he had once
taken from Jordan’s presence.
Jordan waited quietly by the door, feeling strangely out of
place in what he had come to think of as his own home, until Mr
Rhodes handed the last corrected sheet to Arnold and looked
up.
‘Ah, Jordan,’ he said. ‘I wanted to warn you
that I am advancing the date of my departure for Bulawayo. I
think my Rhodesians need me. I must go to them.’
‘I will see to it immediately,’ Jordan nodded.
‘Have you decided on a date, Mr Rhodes?’
‘Next Monday.’
‘We will take the express to Kimberley, of
course?’
‘You will not be accompanying me,’ said Mr Rhodes
flatly.
‘I do not understand, Mr Rhodes.’ Jordan made a
helpless little gesture of incomprehension.
‘I require utter loyalty and honesty in my
employees.’
‘Yes, Mr Rhodes, I know that.’ Jordan nodded, and
then slowly his expression became uncertain and disbelieving.
‘You are not suggesting that I have ever been disloyal or
dishonest—’
‘Get that file, please, Arnold,’ Mr Rhodes
ordered, and when he fetched it from the library table, he added,
‘Give it to him.’
Arnold silently came across the thick silk and wool carpet,
and offered the box-file to Jordan. As he reached for it, Jordan
was aware, for the first time ever, of something other than
openness and friendly concern in Arnold’s eyes, it was a
flash of vindictive triumph so vicious as to sting like the lash
of a riding-whip across the face. It lasted for only a blink of
time, and was gone so swiftly that it might never have been, but
it left Jordan feeling utterly vulnerable and in dreadful
danger.
He placed the folder on the table beside him, and opened the
cover. There were at least fifty sheets in the folder. Most of
them had been typed on the caligraph, and each was headed
‘Copy of original.’
There were stockbrokers’ buy and sell orders, for shares
in De Beers and Consolidated Goldfields. The quantities of shares
in the transactions were enormous, involving millions of
sterling. The broking firm was Silver & Co., of whom Jordan
had never heard, though they purported to conduct business in
Johannesburg, Kimberley and London.
Then there were copies of statements from half a dozen banks,
in the different centres where Silver & Co. had offices. A
dozen or so entries on the statements had been underlined in red
ink: ‘Transfer to Rholands – £86,321 – 7s
9d. Transfer to Rholands – £146,821 – 9s
11d.’
The name shocked him, Ralph’s company, and though he did
not understand why, it increased his sense of peril.
‘I don’t understand what this has to do with
me—’ He looked up at Mr Rhodes.
‘Your brother entered into a series of large bear
transactions in those companies most drastically affected by the
failure of Jameson’s enterprise.’
‘It would appear—’ Jordan began uncertainly,
and was interrupted by Mr Rhodes.
‘It would appear that he has made profits in excess of a
million pounds, and that he and his agents have gone to extreme
lengths to disguise and conceal these machinations.’