The Angels Weep (35 page)

‘You have become a hard man, my son,’ Juba
whispered, with terrible shadows of regret in her eyes and an
ache in her voice.

Bazo turned away from her, and stepped back onto the path.
Ralph Ballantyne saw him and waved his hat above his head.

‘Bazo,’ he laughed, as he rode up. ‘Will I
ever learn never to doubt you? You bring me more than the two
hundred you promised.’

R
alph
Ballantyne crossed the southern boundary of King’s Lynn,
but it was another two hours’ riding before he made out the
milky grey loom of the homestead kopjes on the horizon.

The veld through which he rode was silent now, and almost
empty. It chilled Ralph so that his expression was gloomy and his
thoughts dark. Where several months ago his father’s herds
of plump multicoloured cattle had grazed, the new grass was
springing up again dense and green and untrodden, as though to
veil the white bones with which the earth was strewn so
thickly.

Only Ralph’s warning had saved Zouga Ballantyne from
complete financial disaster. He had managed to sell off some
small portion of his herds to Gwaai Cattle Ranches, a BSA Company
subsidiary, before the rinderpest struck King’s Lynn, but
he had lost the rest of his cattle, and their bones gleamed like
strings of pearls amongst the new green grass.

Ahead of Ralph amongst the mimosa trees was one of his
father’s cattle-posts, and Ralph stood in the saddle and
shaded his eyes, puzzled by the haze of pink dust which hung over
the old stockade. The dust had been raised by hooves and there
was the sharp crack of a trek whip, a sound that had not been
heard in Matabeleland for many months.

Even at a distance, he recognized the figures silhouetted upon
the railing of the stockade like a pair of scraggly old
crows.

‘Jan Cheroot!’ he called as he rode up.
‘Isazi! What are you two old rogues playing at?’

They grinned at him delightedly, and scrambled down to greet
him.

‘Good Lord!’ Ralph’s astonishment was
unfeigned as he realized what the animals in the stockade were.
The curtains of thick dust had hidden them until this minute.
‘Is this how you spend your time when I am away, Isazi?
Whose idea is this?’

‘Bakela, your father’s.’ Isazi’s
expression instantly became melancholy. ‘And it is a stupid
idea.’

The flat sleek animals were striped in vivid black and white,
their manes stiff as the bristles in a chimney-sweep’s
broom.

‘Zebras, by God!’ Ralph shook his head. ‘How
did you round them up?’

‘We used up a dozen good horses chasing them,’ Jan
Cheroot explained, his leathery yellow features wrinkled with
disapproval.

‘Your father hopes to replace the trek oxen with these
dumb donkeys. They are as wild and unreasonable as a Venda
virgin. They bite and kick until you get them in the traces and
then they lie down and refuse to pull.’ Isazi spat with
disgust.

It was manifest folly to try to bridge in a few short months
the vast gap between wild animal and domesticated beast of
burden. It had taken millennia of selection and breeding to
develop the doughty courage, the willing heart and strong back of
the draught bullock. It was a measure of the settlers’
desperate need for transport that Zouga should even make the
attempt.

‘Isazi.’ Ralph shook his head. ‘When you
have finished this boy’s game, I have man’s work for
you at the railhead camp.’

‘I will be ready to go with you when you return,’
Isazi promised enthusiastically. ‘I am sick to the stomach
with striped donkeys.’

Ralph turned to Jan Cheroot. ‘I want to talk to you, old
friend.’ When they were well beyond the stockade, he asked
the little Hottentot, ‘Did you put your mark on a Company
paper saying that we had pegged the Harkness claims in
darkness?’

‘I would never let you down,’ Jan Cheroot declared
proudly. ‘General St John explained to me, and I put my
mark on the paper to save the claims for you and the
major.’ He saw Ralph’s expression, and demanded
anxiously, ‘I did the right thing?’

Ralph leaned out of the saddle and clasped the bony old
shoulder. ‘You have been a good and loyal friend to me all
my life.’

‘From the day you were born,’ Jan Cheroot
declared. ‘When your mama died, I fed you, and held you on
my knee.’

Ralph opened his saddlebag, and the old Hottentot’s eyes
gleamed when he saw the bottle of Cape brandy.

‘Give a dram to Isazi,’ Ralph told him, but Jan
Cheroot clasped the bottle to his bosom as though it were a
firstborn son.

‘I wouldn’t waste good brandy on a black
savage,’ he declared indignantly, and Ralph laughed and
rode on towards the homestead of King’s Lynn.

Here there was all the bustle and excitement that he had
expected. There were horses that Ralph did not recognize in the
paddock below the big thatched house, and amongst them the
unmistakable matched white mules of Mr Rhodes’ equipage.
The coach itself stood under the trees in the yard, its paintwork
asparkle and harness-wear carefully stacked on the racks in the
saddle-room beside the stables. Ralph felt his anger flare up
when he saw it. His hatred burned like a bellyful of cheap wine,
and he could taste the acid of it at the back of his throat. He
swallowed hard to control it as he dismounted.

Two black grooms ran to take his horse. One of them unstrapped
his blanket-roll, his saddlebags and rifle scabbard, and ran with
them up towards the big house. Ralph followed him, and he was
halfway across the lawns when Zouga Ballantyne came out onto the
wide stoep, and with a linen table-napkin shaded his eyes against
the glare. He was still chewing from the luncheon table.

‘Ralph, my boy. I didn’t expect you until
evening.’

Ralph ran up the steps and they embraced, and then Zouga took
his arm and led him down the veranda. The walls were hung with
trophies of the chase, the long twisted horns of kudu and eland,
the gleaming black scimitars of sable and roan antelope, and
guarding each side of the double doors that led into the
dining-room were the immense tusks of the great bull elephant
that Zouga Ballantyne had shot on the site of the Harkness Mine.
These heavy curved shafts of ivory were as tall as a man standing
on tiptoe could reach, and thicker than a fat lady’s
thigh.

Zouga and Ralph passed between them into the dining-room.
Under the thatch it was cool and dark after the brilliant white
glare of noon. The floor was of hand-sawn wild teak, and the roof
beams of the same material. Jan Cheroot had made the long
refectory table and the chairs with seats of leather thonging
from timber cut on the estate, but the glinting silver was from
the Ballantyne family home at King’s Lynn in England, a
tenuous link between two places of the same name and yet of such
dissimilar aspect.

Zouga’s empty chair was at the far end of the long
table, and facing it down the long board was the familiar massive
brooding figure that raised his shaggy head as Ralph came in from
the stoep.

‘Ah, Ralph, it’s good to see you.’ It amazed
Ralph that there was no rancour in either Mr Rhodes’ voice
or eyes. Could he have truly put the dispute over the Wankie
coalfields out of his mind, as though it had never happened? With
an effort, Ralph matched his own reaction to the other
man’s.

‘How are you, sir?’ Ralph actually smiled as he
gripped the broad hand with its hard prominent knuckles. The skin
was cool, like that of a reptile, the effect of the poor
circulation of the damaged heart. Ralph was pleased to release
it, and pass on down the length of the long table. He was not
certain that he could long conceal his true feelings from the
close scrutiny of those pale hypnotic eyes.

They were all there. The suave little doctor at Mr
Rhodes’ right hand, his appropriate station.

‘Young Ballantyne,’ he said coldly, offering his
hand without rising.

‘Jameson!’ Ralph nodded familiarly, knowing that
the deliberate omission of the title would rankle with him as
much as the condescending ‘young’ had annoyed
Ralph.

On Mr Rhodes’ other hand was a surprising guest. It was
the first time that Ralph had ever seen General Mungo St John at
King’s Lynn. There had once been a relationship between the
lean grizzled soldier with the dark and wicked single eye and
Louise Ballantyne, Ralph’s stepmother. That had been many
years ago, long before Ralph had left Kimberley for the
north.

Ralph had never entirely fathomed that relationship, nor
somehow the breath of scandal clouding it. But it was significant
that Louise Ballantyne was not in the room, and that there was no
place set at the table for her. If Mr Rhodes had insisted that St
John was present at this gathering, and Zouga Ballantyne had
agreed to invite him, then there was a compelling reason for it.
Mungo St John flashed that wolfish smile at Ralph as they shook
hands. Despite the family complications, Ralph had always had a
sneaking admiration for this romantically piratical figure, and
his answering smile was genuine.

The stature of the other men at the table confirmed the
importance and significance of this gathering. Ralph guessed that
the meeting was being held here to preserve the absolute secrecy
that they could not have assumed in the town of Bulawayo. He
guessed also that every guest had been personally selected and
invited by Mr Rhodes, rather than by his father.

Apart from Jameson and St John, there was Percy Fitzpatrick, a
partner of the Corner House mining group, and prominent
representative of the Witwatersrand Chamber of Mines, the organ
of the gold barons of Johannesburg. He was a lively and
personable young man with a fair complexion and ruddy hair and
moustache, whose chequered career had included bank clerk,
transport rider, citrus farmer, guide to Lord Randolph
Churchill’s Africa expedition, author and mining magnate.
Many years later Ralph would reflect on the irony of this
extraordinary man’s claim to immortality being founded on a
sentimental book about a dog called Jock.

Beyond Fitzpatrick sat the Honourable Bobbie White, who had
just visited Johannesburg at Mr Rhodes’ suggestion. He was
a handsome and pleasant young aristocrat, the type of Englishman
that Mr Rhodes preferred. He was also a staff officer and a
career solidier as his mess tunic revealed.

Next to him sat John Willoughby, second-in-command of the
original pioneer column, which had taken occupation of Fort
Salisbury and Mashonaland. He had also ridden with
Jameson’s column that had destroyed Lobengula, and his
Willoughby’s Consolidated Company owned almost one million
acres of prime pastoral land in Rhodesia, a rival to
Ralph’s Rholands Company, so their greetings were
guarded.

Then there was Doctor Rutherford Harris, the first secretary
of the British South Africa Company and a member of Mr
Rhodes’ political party in which he represented the
Kimberley constituency in the Cape Parliament. He was a taciturn
grey man with a sinister cast of eye, and Ralph mistrusted him as
one of Mr Rhodes’ slavish minions.

At the end of the table, Ralph came face to face with his
brother Jordan, and he hesitated for just a fraction of a second,
until he saw the desperate appeal in Jordan’s gentle eyes.
Then he gripped his brother’s hand briefly, but he did not
smile and his voice was cool and impersonal as he greeted him
like a mere acquaintance, and then took the place that a servant
in a white Kanza uniform and scarlet sash had hurriedly laid
beside Zouga at the head of the table.

The animated conversation that Ralph had interrupted was
resumed with Mr Rhodes orchestrating and directing it.

‘What about your trained zebras?’ he demanded of
Zouga, who shook his golden beard.

‘It was a desperate measure and doomed from the outset.
But when you consider that out of the hundred thousand head of
cattle that we had in Matabeleland before the rinderpest, only
five hundred or so have survived, any chance seemed worth
taking.’

‘They say that the Cape buffalo have been wiped out
utterly and completely by the disease,’ Doctor Jameson
suggested. ‘What do you think, Major?’

‘Their losses have been catastrophic. Two weeks ago I
rode as far north as the Pandamatenga river, where a year ago I
counted herds of over five thousand together. This time I saw not
a single living beast. Yet I cannot believe they are now extinct.
I suspect that somewhere out there are scattered survivors, the
ones that had a natural immunity, and I believe that they will
breed.’

Mr Rhodes was not a sportsman; he had once said of his own
brother Frank, ‘Yes, he’s a good fellow, he hunts and
he fishes – in other words, he is a perfect loafer,’
and this conversation about wild game bored him almost
immediately. He changed it by turning to Ralph.

‘Your railway line – what is the latest position,
Ralph?’

‘We are still almost two months ahead of our
schedule,’ Ralph told him with a touch of defiance.
‘We crossed the Matabeleland border fifteen days ago
– I expect as we sit here that the railhead has reached the
trading-post at Plumtree already.’

‘It’s as well,’ Rhodes nodded. ‘We
shall have urgent need of your line in a very short while.’
And he and Doctor Jim exchanged a conspiratorial glance.

When they had all relished Louise’s bread and butter
pudding, thick with nuts and raisins and running with wild honey,
Zouga dismissed the servants, and poured the Cognac himself,
while Jordan carried around the cigars. As they settled back in
their seats, Mr Rhodes made one of his startlingly abrupt changes
of subject and pace, and Ralph was immediately aware that the
true purpose for which he had been summoned to King’s Lynn
was about to be revealed.

‘There is not one of you who does not know that my
life’s task is to see the map of Africa painted red from
Cape Town to Cairo. To deliver this continent to our Queen as
another jewel in her crown.’ His voice that had been
irritable and carping up until now, took on a strange mesmeric
quality. ‘We men of the English-speaking Anglo-Saxon race
are the first among nations, and destiny has imposed a sacred
duty upon us – to bring the world to peace under one flag
and one great monarch. We must have Africa, all of it, to add to
our Queen’s dominions. Already my emissaries have gone
north to the land between the Zambezi and the Congo rivers to
prepare the way.’ Rhodes broke off and shook his head
angrily. ‘But all this will be of no avail if the southern
tip of the continent eludes us.’