The Angels Weep (46 page)

‘All right, you black bastards, let’s burn some
powder.’

One corner of the stone wall had collapsed where the unbaked
Kimberley brick had not been able to withstand the heat. The
opening was jagged, it would break the silhouette of his head and
the rear wall would prevent back lighting. Carefully he peered
out over the bloody ground. They were well concealed, probably in
the bush above the mine shaft.

Then with a start of surprise he realized that the mouth of
the adit shaft had been barricaded, it was blocked with baulks of
timber and what looked like sacks of maize.

They were in the mineshaft – but that didn’t make
sense, he puzzled. Yet it was confirmed immediately. There was a
vague shadowy movement beyond the barricade in the throat of the
shaft, and another bullet sang off the lip of the wall under
Ralph’s nose, blinding him with brick dust.

He ducked down, and wiped his swimming eyes. Then he filled
his lungs and bellowed.

‘Harry! Harry Mellow!’

There was silence, even the vultures and the jackals quieted
by the shocking burst of gunfire.

‘Harry – it’s me, Ralph.’

There was a faint answering shout, and Ralph jumped up,
vaulted over the broken wall and ran towards the shaft. Harry
Mellow was racing towards him, jumping over the piles of dead
Matabele, a wide grin on his face. They met halfway, and embraced
with the violence of relief, wordlessly pounding each
other’s backs, and then before he could speak, Ralph looked
over the big American’s shoulder.

Other figures had emerged from behind the rude barricade.
Vicky dressed in men’s breeches and shirt, with a rifle in
her hand and coppery hair tangled around her shoulders. At her
side Isazi, the diminutive Zulu driver, and another even smaller
figure ran ahead of them both. The child ran with both arms
pumping, and face screwed up.

Ralph caught him up and hugged him to his chest, pressing his
haggard unshaven cheek against the boy’s velvet skin.

‘Jonathan,’ he croaked, and then his voice failed.
The feel of the child’s warm little body, and the milky
puppy smell of his sweat was almost too painful to be borne.

‘Daddy.’ Jon-Jon pulled back his head, and his
face was pale and stricken.

‘I couldn’t look after Mummy. She wouldn’t
let me.’

‘That’s all right, Jon-Jon,’ Ralph
whispered. ‘You did your best—’

And then he was crying. The terrible dry hacking sobs of a man
driven to the far frontiers of his love.

T
hough he hated
to let the child out of his arms for a moment, Ralph sent
Jonathan to help Isazi feed the horses at the entrance to the
shaft. Then he drew Vicky and Harry Mellow aside and in the gloom
of the tunnel where they could not see his face, he told them
simply:

‘Cathy is dead.’

‘How?’ Harry broke the stunned silence. ‘How
did she die?’

‘Badly,’ Ralph told them. ‘Very badly. I
don’t want to say any more.’

Harry held Vicky while she wept and when her first sharp grief
was over, Ralph went on, ‘We can’t stay here. We have
a choice, the railhead or Bulawayo.’

‘Bulawayo may be burned and sacked by now,’ Harry
pointed out.

‘And there may be an impi between here and the
railhead,’ said Ralph. ‘But if Vicky wants to try and
reach the railhead, we can send her and Jon-Jon south on the
first train that gets through.’

‘Then?’ Harry asked. ‘What then?’

‘Then I am riding to Bulawayo. If they are still alive,
then they’ll want fighting men to stay that way.’

‘Vicky?’ Harry hugged his wife.

‘My mother and my family are at Bulawayo. This is the
land of my birth – I’m not running away.’ She
wiped the wetness off her cheeks with her thumbs.
‘I’m coming with you to Bulawayo.’

Ralph nodded. He would have been surprised if she had agreed
to go south.

‘We will ride as soon as we have eaten.’

They took the wagon road northwards and it was a dismal route.
The derelict wagons abandoned during the rinderpest were as
regular as milestones. The wagon canvas was already rotted to
tatters, the cargoes looted, and scattered on the grass,
shattered cases and broken boxes and rusting tins. In the traces
of some of the wagons the mummified remains of the oxen lay where
they had fallen, heads twisted back in the convulsions that had
killed them.

Then at intervals they came upon death and destruction that
was fresher and more poignant. One of the Zeederbergs’
express coaches in the middle of the track, with the mules
speared to death and, festooned from the branches of a
thorn-tree, the disembowelled bodies of the driver and his
passengers.

At the drift of the Inyati river the blackened walls of the
trading-post was all that were left standing. Here there was a
macabre twist to the usual mutilation of the dead. The naked
bodies of the Greek shopkeeper’s wife and her three
daughters had been laid in a neat row in the front yard with the
shafts of the knobkerries thrust up into their private parts. The
shopkeeper himself had been beheaded, and his trunk thrown onto
the fire. His head, fixed on an assegai, leered at them in the
centre of the road. Ralph covered Jon-Jon’s face with his
coat, and held him close as they rode past.

Ralph sent Isazi ahead to scout the drift and he found it
defended. Ralph closed up the little party and they took it at a
gallop, catching the dozen or so Matebele
amadoda
by
surprise, shooting four of them down as they ran to their
weapons, and thundering up the far bank together in the dust and
gunsmoke. They were not followed, though Ralph, hoping they might
be, turned back and lay in ambush beside the road.

Ralph held Jonathan in his lap during the night, starting
awake every few minutes from nightmares in which Cathy screamed
and pleaded for mercy. In the dawn he found that without
realizing it, he had taken the mole-skin headband from his jacket
and held it balled in his fist. He put it back in his pocket and
buttoned the flap, as though it was something rare and
precious.

They rode on northwards all that day, past the little one-man
gold mines and the homesteads where men and their families had
begun to carve a life out of the wilderness. Some of them had
been taken completely by surprise. They were still clad in the
remnants of their night-clothes. One little boy even clutched his
teddy bear while his dead mother reached out to him with fingers
that did not quite touch his sodden curls.

Others had sold their lives dearly, and the dead Matabele were
flung like woodchips from a sawmill in a wide circle around the
burned-out homesteads. Once they found dead
amadoda
but no
white bodies. There were tracks of horses and a vehicle heading
out northwards.

‘The Andersons. They got away,’ Ralph said.
‘Please God, they are in Bulawayo by now.’

Vicky wanted to take the old wagon road, past Khami Mission,
but Ralph would not do so.

‘If they are there, it’s too late. You’ve
seen enough. If they got away, we’ll find them in
Bulawayo.’

So they rode into the town of Bulawayo in the early morning of
the third day. The barricades opened to let them pass into the
huge central laager in the town square, and the townspeople
thronged around the horses, shouting questions.

‘Are the soldiers coming?’

‘When are the soldiers coming?’

‘Did you see my brother? He was at the Antelope
Mine—’

‘Have you any news?’

When she saw Robyn waving to her from the top of one of the
wagons in the market square, Vicky wept again for the first time
since leaving the Harkness Mine. Elizabeth jumped down from the
wagon and pushed her way through the crowd to Ralph’s
horse.

‘Cathy?’ she asked.

Ralph shook his head and saw his own sorrow reflected in her
clear dark honey-coloured eyes. Elizabeth reached up and lifted
Jon-Jon down from the front of the saddle.

‘I’ll look after him, Ralph,’ she said
softly.

T
he family was
installed in a corner of the central laager. Under Robyn’s
and Louise’s direction, the single wagon had been turned
into a crowded but adequate home.

On the first day of the rising, Louise and Jan Cheroot, the
little Hottentot, had brought the wagon in from King’s
Lynn. One of the survivors from the Matabele attack at Victoria
Mine had galloped past the homestead, shouting a barely coherent
warning as he went by.

Louise and Jan Cheroot, already alerted by the desertion of
the Matabele labourers and servants, had taken time to pack the
wagon with a load of essentials, tinned food and blankets and
ammunition, and they had driven into Bulawayo, Jan Cheroot
handling the traces, and Louise sitting on top of the load with a
rifle in her hands. Twice they had seen small war parties of
Matabele at a distance, but a few warning shots had kept them
there, and they reached the town amongst the very first
refugees.

Thus the family did not have to rely on the charity of the
townsfolk, like so many others who had arrived in Bulawayo with
only a lathered horse and an empty rifle.

Robyn had set up a clinic under a canvas awning beside the
wagon and had been asked by the Siege Committee to supervise the
health and sanitation of the laager. While Louise had quite
naturally taken charge of the other women in the laager, setting
up a system by which all food stocks and other essential supplies
were pooled and rationed, delegating the care of the half-dozen
orphans to foster mothers, and organizing the other activities,
from an entertainment committee, to lessons in loading ammunition
and handling firearms for those gentlewomen who did not already
have those skills.

Ralph left Vicky to break the news of Cathy’s death to
her mother, gave Jon-Jon into Elizabeth’s care and set off
across the laager to find a member of the Siege Committee.

It was after dark when Ralph got back to the wagon.
Surprisingly, there was a brittle air of festivity upon the town.
Despite the terrible bereavements that most families had
suffered, despite the threat of dark impis gathering just beyond
the walls of the laager, yet the cries of the children playing
hide-and-go-seek amongst the wagons, the merry notes of a
concertina, the laughter of women and the cheerful blaze of the
watch-fires might have been those of a picnic in happier
times.

Elizabeth had bathed both Jonathan and Robert, so they glowed
pinkly and smelled of carbolic soap, and now as they ate their
dinner at the camp table, she was telling them a story that made
their eyes big as marbles in the lamplight.

Ralph smiled his thanks at her, and summoned Harry Mellow with
an inclination of his head.

The two men sauntered off on a seemingly casual circuit of the
darkening laager. They walked with their heads close together,
while Ralph told Harry quietly, ‘The Siege Committee seem
to be doing a good job. They have held a census of the laager
already, and they reckon there are six hundred and thirty two
women and children and nine hundred and fifteen men. The defence
of the town seems to be on good footing, but nobody has yet
thought of anything but defence. They were delighted to hear that
their plight is known in Kimberley and Cape Town. I gave them the
first news that they have had from outside the territory since
the rising began – ‘ Ralph drew on his cheroot
– ‘and they seemed to think it was as good as a
couple of regiments of cavalry on their way already. We both know
that isn’t so.’

‘It will take months to get troops up here.’

‘Jameson and his officers are on their way to England
for trial, and Rhodes has been summoned to a court of
inquiry.’ Ralph shook his head. ‘And there is worse
news. The Mashona tribes have risen in concert with the
Matabele.’

‘Good God.’ Harry stopped dead and seized
Ralph’s arm. ‘The whole territory – all at the
same time? This thing has been carefully planned.’

‘There has been heavy fighting in the Mazoe valley and
in the Charter and Lomagundi districts around Fort
Salisbury.’

‘Ralph, how many have these savages murdered?’

‘Nobody knows. There are hundreds of scattered farms and
mines out there. We have to reckon on at least five hundred men,
women and children dead.’

They walked on in silence for a while. Once a sentry
challenged them, but recognized Ralph.

‘Heard you got through, Mr Ballantyne – are the
soldiers coming?’

‘Are the soldiers coming?’ Ralph muttered, when
they were past. ‘That’s what they all ask from the
Siege Committee downwards.’ They reached the far end of the
laager and Ralph spoke quietly to the guard there.

‘All right, Mr Ballantyne, but keep your eyes open.
Those murdering heathen are all over.’

Ralph and Harry passed through the gateway into the town. It
was utterly deserted. Everyone had been moved into the central
laager. The thatch and daub shanties were dark and silent, and
the two men walked down the centre of the broad dusty main street
until the buildings petered out on either hand; they stopped and
stood staring out into the scrubland.

‘Listen!’ said Ralph. A jackal yipped down near
the Umguza stream, and was answered from the shadows of the
acacia forest out in the south.

‘Jackal,’ said Harry, but Ralph shook his
head.

‘Matabele!’

‘Will they attack the town?’

Ralph did not reply immediately. He was staring out into the
veld, and he had something in his hands that he was teasing like
a string of Greek worry beads. ‘There are probably twenty
thousand fighting bucks out there. They have got us bottled up
here, and sooner or later, when they have massed their impis and
plucked up their courage, they will come. They will come long
before the soldiers can get here.’

‘What are our chances?’

Ralph wrapped the thing he held in his hand around one finger,
and Harry saw it was a strip of drab fur. ‘We have got four
Maxim guns, but there are six hundred women and children, and out
of the nine hundred men, half are not fit to hold a rifle. The
best way to defend Bulawayo is not to sit in the laager and wait
for them—’