The Angels Weep (38 page)

‘Come back to me as soon as you can.’

‘I will, just as soon as I can.’ The engine-driver
pulled down the brass throttle-handle and the huff of steam
drowned Ralph’s next words.

‘What? What did you say?’ Cathy trotted heavily
beside the locomotive as it began to trundle down the steel
tracks.

‘Don’t lose the letter,’ he repeated.

‘I won’t,’ she promised, and then the effort
of keeping level with the rolling locomotive became too much. She
came up short, and waved with the white lace handkerchief until
the curve in the southbound tracks carried the train out of sight
beyond the heel of a kopje, and the last mournful sob of its
steam whistle died on the air. Then she turned back to where
Isazi waited with the trap. Jonathan wrested his hand from hers
and raced ahead to scramble up onto the seat.

‘Can I drive them, Isazi?’ he pleaded, and Cathy
felt a prick of anger at the fickleness of boyhood – one
moment tearful and bereft, the next shrieking with the prospect
of handling the reins.

As she settled onto the buttoned leather rear seat of the
trap, she slipped her hand into the pocket of her apron to check
that the sealed envelope that Ralph had left with her was still
safe. She drew it out and read the tantalizing instruction he had
written upon the face: ‘Open only when you receive my
telegraph.’

She was about to return it to her pocket; then she bit her
lip, fighting the temptation, and at last ran her fingernail
under the flap, splitting it open and drew out the folded
sheet.

Cathy read the instruction twice and suddenly she was deadly
afraid.

‘Oh my mad darling, what are you going to do?’ she
whispered, and Jonathan urged the horses into a trot back along
the track towards the camp.

T
he workshops
of the Simmer and Jack gold mine stood below the steel headgear
on the crest of the ridge. The town of Johannesburg sprawled away
in the low valley, and over the further rounded hills. The
workshop was roofed and walled with corrugated iron, and the
concrete floor was stained with black puddles of spilled engine
oil. It was oven-hot under the iron, and beyond the big double
sliding doors at the end of the shed the sunlight of early summer
was blinding.

‘Close the doors,’ Ralph Ballantyne ordered, and
two of the small group went to struggle with the heavy wood and
iron structures, grunting and sweating with unaccustomed physical
effort. With the doors closed, it was gloomy as a Gothic
cathedral, and the white beams of sunlight through chinks in the
iron walls were filled with swirling dust motes.

Down the centre of the floor stood a row of fifty yellow
drums. Stencilled on each lid in black paint were the words:
‘Heavy Duty Engine Oil. 44 gals.’

Ralph slipped off his beige linen jacket, pulled down the knot
of his necktie and rolled up his shirtsleeves. He selected a
two-pound hammer and a cold chisel from the nearest workbench and
started to hack open the lid of the nearest drum. The four other
men crowded closer to watch. The hammer strokes echoed hollowly
about the long shed. The yellow paint flew off in tiny flakes
beneath the chisel, and the raw metal was bright as newly minted
shillings.

At last Ralph prised open the half-severed lid, and bent it
back. The surface of the oil glimmered glutinous and coal-black
in the poor light; Ralph thrust his right arm into it as far as
the elbow, and drew out a long oilskin-wrapped bundle dripping
with the thick oil. He carried it to the workbench, and slit the
binding with the chisel, and there were exclamations of
satisfaction as he stripped away the covering.

‘The very latest Lee Metford bolt-action rifles firing
the new smokeless cordite load. There is no other rifle in the
world to match it.’

They passed the weapon from hand to hand, and when it reached
Percy Fitzpatrick, he rattled the bolt, opening and closing it
rapidly.

‘How many?’

‘Ten to a drum,’ Ralph answered. ‘Fifty
drums.’

‘And the rest of them?’ demanded Frank Rhodes. He
was as unlike his younger brother as Ralph was to Jordan. A tall
lean man with deepset eyes and high cheekbones, his greying hair
receding from a deep bony forehead.

‘I can bring through a shipment every week for the next
five weeks,’ Ralph told him, wiping his greasy hands on a
ball of cotton waste.

‘Can you do it quicker than that?’

‘Can you clean and distribute them quicker than
that?’ Ralph countered, and without waiting for a reply,
turned to John Hays Hammond, the brilliant American mining
engineer whom he trusted more than Mr Rhodes’ effete
brother.

‘Have you decided on the final plan of action?’ he
asked. ‘Mr Rhodes will want to know when I return to
Kimberley.’

‘We will seize the Pretoria fort and the arsenal as our
first objective,’ Hays Hammond told him, and they fell into
a detailed discussion with Ralph scribbling notes on the back of
a cigarette packet. When at last Ralph nodded and stuffed the
packet into his back pocket, Frank Rhodes demanded:

‘What is the news from Bulawayo?’

‘Jameson has his men, over six hundred of them. They are
mounted and armed. He will be ready to move southwards to Pitsani
on the last day of the month, that’s his latest
report.’ Ralph shrugged on his jacket again. ‘It will
be wiser if we are not seen together.’

He returned to shake hands with each of them, but when he
reached Colonel Frank Rhodes, he could not resist the temptation
to add, ‘It would also be wiser, Colonel, if you could
limit your telegraph messages to essentials only. The code you
are using, the daily references to this fictitious gold-mine
flotation of yours is enough to attract the attention of even the
most dimwitted of the Transvaal police agents, and we know for
certain that there is one in the Johannesburg telegraph
office.’

‘Sir, we have indulged in no unnecessary traffic,’
Frank Rhodes replied stiffly.

‘Then how do you rate your latest effort? “
Are
the six hundred northern shareholders in a position to take up
their debentures
?” Ralph mimicked his prim old maidish
diction, then nodded farewell and went out to where his horse was
tethered, and rode down the road to Fordsberg Dip and the
city.

E
lizabeth rose
at a glance from her mother, and began to gather up the soup
bowls.

‘You haven’t finished, Bobby,’ she told her
young brother.

‘I’m not hungry, Lizzie,’ the child
protested. ‘It tastes funny.’

‘You always have an excuse not to eat, Master
Robert,’ Elizabeth scolded him. ‘No wonder you are so
skinny, you’ll never grow up strong and tall like your
papa.’

‘That’s enough, Elizabeth,’ Robyn spoke
sharply. ‘Leave the boy, if he’s not hungry. You know
he isn’t well.’

Elizabeth glanced at her mother, then dutifully stacked
Robert’s bowl with the others. None of the girls had ever
been allowed to leave food, not even when they were giddy with
malaria, but she had learned not to protest the unfairness of
Robyn’s indulgence of her only son. With the kerosene
lantern in her other hand, Elizabeth went out of the back door
and crossed to the thatched kitchen hut.

‘It is time she had a husband.’ Juba shook her
head mournfully. ‘She needs a man in her bed and a baby to
her breast to make her smile.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense, Juba,’ snapped Robyn.
‘There will be time for that later. She is doing important
work here, I could not let her go. She is as good as a trained
doctor.’

‘The young men come out from Bulawayo one after the
other, and she sends them all away,’ Juba went on, ignoring
Robyn’s injunction.

‘She’s a sensible, serious girl,’ Robyn
agreed.

‘She is a sad girl, with a secret.’

‘Oh Juba, not every woman wants to spend her life as
some man’s chattel,’ Robyn scoffed.

‘Do you remember when she was a girl?’ Juba went
on unperturbed. ‘How bright she was, how she shone with
joy, how she sparkled like a drop of morning dew.’

‘She has grown up.’

‘I thought it was the tall young rock-finder, the man
from across the sea who took Vicky away.’ Juba shook her
head. ‘It was not him. She laughed at Vicky’s
wedding, and it was not the laughter of a girl who has lost her
love. It is something else,’ Juba decided portentously,
‘or somebody else.’

Robyn was about to protest further, but she was interrupted by
the sound of excited voices in the darkness outside the door, and
she stood up quickly.

‘What is it?’ she called. ‘What is happening
out there, Elizabeth?’ and the flame of the lantern came
bobbing back across the yard, lighting Elizabeth’s flying
feet but leaving her face in darkness.

‘Mama! Mama! Come quickly!’ Her voice rang with
excitement. Elizabeth burst in through the door.

‘Control yourself, girl.’ Robyn shook her
shoulder, and Elizabeth took a deep breath.

‘Old Moses has come up from the village – he says
that there are soldiers, hundreds of soldiers riding past the
church.’

‘Juba, get Bobby’s coat.’ Robyn took her
woollen shawl and her cane down from behind the door.
‘Elizabeth, give me the lantern!’

Robyn led the family down the driveway under the dark
spathodea trees, past the godowns of the hospital, towards the
church. They went in a small tight group, with Bobby bundled up
in a woollen coat riding on Juba’s fat hip, but before they
reached the church, there were many other dark figures hurrying
along in the darkness around them.

‘They are coming out of the hospital.’ Juba was
righteously indignant. ‘And tomorrow they will all be sick
again.’

‘You’ll never stop them.’ Elizabeth sighed
with resignation. ‘Curiosity killed the cat.’ And
then she exclaimed, ‘There they are! Moses was right
– just look at them!’

The starlight was bright enough to reveal the torrent of dark
horsemen pouring down the road from the neck of hills. They rode
two abreast and a length between each rank. It was too dark to
see their faces under the broad brims of their slouch hats, but a
rifle barrel stuck up like an accuser’s finger behind each
man’s shoulder, silhouetted against the frosty fields of
stars that filled the heavens. The deep dust of the track muffled
the hooves to a soft floury puffing sound, but the saddles
squeaked with the rub of dubbined leather and a curb chain
tinkled as a horse snorted softly and tossed its head.

Yet the quiet was uncanny for such a multitude. No voice
raised above a whisper, no orders to close up, not even the usual
low warning, ‘‘Ware hole!’ of massed horsemen
moving in formation across unfamiliar terrain in darkness. The
head of the column reached the fork in the road below the church,
but took the lefthand turning, the old wagon road towards the
south.

‘Who are they?’ Juba asked with a thrill of
superstitious awe in her voice. ‘They look like
ghosts.’

‘Those aren’t ghosts,’ Robyn said flatly.
‘Those are Jameson’s tin soldiers, that’s his
new Rhodesian Horse Regiment.’

‘Why are they taking the old road?’ Elizabeth,
too, spoke in a whisper, infected by Juba and by the unnatural
quiet. ‘And why are they riding in the dark?’

‘This stinks of Jameson – and his master.’
Robyn stepped forward to the edge of the road and called loudly,
lifting the lantern above her head, ‘Where are you
going?’

A low voice from the column answered her: ‘There and
back to see how far it is, missus!’ and there were a few
low chuckles, but the column flowed on past the church without a
check.

In the centre of the column were the transports, seven wagons
drawn by mules, for the rinderpest had left no draught-oxen.
After the wagons came eight two-wheeled carts with canvas covers
over the Maxim machine-guns, and then three light field guns,
relics of Jameson’s expeditionary force that had captured
Bulawayo a few short years ago. The tail of the column was again
made up of mounted men, two abreast.

It took almost twenty minutes for them all to pass the church,
and then the silence was complete, with just the taint of dust in
the air as a reminder of their going. The patients from the
hospital began to slip away from the roadside, back into the
darker shadows beneath the spathodea trees, but the little family
group stayed on silently, waiting for Robyn to move.

‘Mummy, I am cold,’ Bobby whined at last, and
Robyn roused herself.

‘I wonder what devilry they are up to now,’ she
murmured, and led them back up the hill towards the
homestead.

‘The beans will be cold by now,’ Elizabeth
complained, as she hurried back into the kitchen hut, while Robyn
and Juba climbed up the steps onto the stoep.

Juba let Bobby down from her hip, and he scampered back into
the warm lamplight of the dining-room. Juba was about to follow
him, but Robyn stopped her with a hand upon her forearm. The two
women stood together, close and secure in the love and
companionship they bore each other. They looked out across the
valley, in the direction in which the dark and silent horsemen
had disappeared.

‘How beautiful it is!’ Robyn murmured. ‘I
always think of the stars as my friends, they are so constant, so
well remembered, and tonight they are so close.’ She lifted
her hand as though to pluck them from the firmament. ‘There
is Orion, and there is the bull.’

‘And there Manatassi’s four sons,’ Juba
said, ‘the poor murdered babes.’

‘The same stars,’ Robyn hugged Juba closer to her,
‘the same stars shine upon us all, even though we know them
by different names. You call those four white stars
Manatassi’s Sons – but we call them the Cross. The
Southern Cross.’