The Covenant (72 page)

When Hilary received the letter he was at low ebb, for Golan Mission was not doing well. The rows of huts were filled with Hottentots and Xhosa seeking to avoid work under the Boers, but few were sincere Christians. Not even Emma’s parents had converted, and there was a problem with Emma herself. She was nineteen now, and a true Christian, but plans of some kind had to be made for her future; the most she could hope for was marriage to some half-Christian Xhosa; more probably she would slip back into servitude at some Boer kraal.

Funds to support the mission were slow in coming from England, and one young man who had been seconded to relieve Hilary had taken one look at South Africa and scrambled back aboard his ship, preferring to trust his luck in India. Hilary kept himself insulated from such disappointments by cherishing his trivial accomplishments and sharing them with Emma: “Phambo appeared at prayers again, and I do believe he is on the way to salvation.” Three days later, when Phambo ran off to the Xhosa camp on the other side of the Great Fish, taking with him three Golan cows, Hilary did not condemn him: “Poor Phambo heard temptation and could not resist, but when he returns, Emma, as I am convinced he will, we must greet him as our brother, with or without the cows.”

Hilary refused to acknowledge the ostracism directed against him by both the Boers and the English: the former because he was an agent of the English repression; the latter because he had “behaved poorly” at Slagter’s Nek. And both sides viewed him with scorn for supporting the Kaffirs against white men. One good reason why he was able to ignore the ostracism was that he rarely participated in any public gathering. His world was his church.

But his brother’s letter suggesting that he take a wife made great sense; he was thirty-four now, worn and wasted by his exertions on a difficult frontier, and he felt the need for someone to share his spiritual burdens; if his mother, in consultation with her other sons, could
comb the Salisbury scene and locate a suitable wife, the years ahead might prove more profitable both to Jesus and to His servant Saltwood. So he wrote a careful letter, advising his mother as to the requirements for a missioner’s wife in South Africa.

He was distracted from such personal matters when Tjaart, accompanied by four Boers, galloped into the mission one morning, shouting in anxiety, “We need every man! The Kaffirs are marching on Grahamstown.”

The commando waited some fifteen minutes for Saltwood to arm himself, and Hilary spent ten of these in agonizing inner debate as to whether it was Christian for him to participate in armed combat against the Xhosa, a people he loved; but he realized that until the frontier was pacified, not even missionary work could proceed, so reluctantly he took his rifle.

“Bring your Hottentots, too!” Tjaart cried, and six of them eagerly mounted up. For the English to have used armed Hottentots against the Boers had been criminal; for the Boers to use them against the Kaffirs was prudent.

It was seventy miles from Golan Mission to the little military post at Grahamstown, and as the Boers urged their horses onward, Saltwood reflected that only Englishmen lived in the village, yet here were the Boers galloping full speed to aid them. He was aware that Tjaart despised the English, inveighing against them at every chance, but when an English outpost was threatened by Kaffirs, the Boer commandos were always ready to saddle up. It was confusing.

The twelve newcomers were given a cheering welcome at Grahamstown, where fewer than three hundred English and Hottentot soldiers, plus two cannon, awaited the Xhosa attack. Tjaart’s contingent meant that thirty civilians would aid the soldiers; he was distressed when the English commander divided his troops: “Half to the barracks southeast of town, half here with me to defend the empty town.” He sent the women and children to the safety of the barracks, except for five, who said, “We’ll fight with our husbands in the town.”

Throughout the night Hottentot scouts crept in to report the steady advance of the Xhosa horde, but Tjaart and Saltwood could not credit the numbers they recited. “Hottentots always exaggerate,” Tjaart explained. “Whites and blacks are so much bigger, they think there’s more of us.” But at dawn the defenders gaped in sickening awe as the slopes northeast of Grahamstown showed more than ten thousand warriors descending in three massed divisions. The noise
of this multitude as they began dashing toward the settlement caused fear in every heart.

The brow-scarred Xhosa prophet had predicted certain victory: “When Grahamstown falls, we have a clear run through every frontier farm from the ocean to the mountains at the north!” Behind the exulting regiments came hundreds of women with their cooking pots and gourds, for the prophet had promised them: “At sunset we shall feast as never before. Redcoats and Boers alike, destroyed.”

Tjaart, imbued with the spirit of the Hammer, perceived the impending attack as one more clash in a never-ending battle. There stood the enemy, here stood the men of God—and the only obligation of the latter was to chastise the former. Turning to the men near him, he said, “Anyone afraid to fight, ride off now.” And he looked directly at Saltwood, half expecting him to flee, but throughout history no Saltwood had ever deserted, and Hilary would not break that tradition. Turning to his six Hottentots, he asked, “Are you ready?” and the brown men nodded.

“Then let us pray,” and when he had done so in English, Tjaart asked if he might add words of his own, and in Dutch he prayed: “Like Abraham we face the Canaanites. Like him we place our lives in Thy hands. Great God, guide us good Christians as once again we smite these Kaffirs.”

The attack came in early afternoon, wave after wave of shrieking Xhosa roaring down the hill to hurl themselves against the soldiers in the town. Those in the barracks had to watch, helpless, as the regiments rushed at the little houses.

“We must go to help them,” Saltwood said.

“Stay!” a lieutenant ordered. “Our time will come.”

The most daring of the Xhosa got to within one hundred feet of the soldiers, but then massed gunfire raked their ranks and the two cannon wreaked devastation. Hundreds of blacks fell in the front ranks, until their commanders, seeing that the English line could not be broken, gave the order to swing onto the barracks. Here they were more successful, penetrating the small collection of buildings. This landed them in the center of the barracks square, where they were safe, since the cannon could not be brought directly against them for fear of killing fellow Englishmen and Boers. The fighting would have to be hand-to-hand.

Tjaart and Saltwood were in the midst of it, shoulders pressed. They saw two Hottentots go down, a Redcoat fall. A huge Xhosa
leaped at Saltwood, swinging his war club, but Tjaart twisted about to drop him with a pistol shot. For almost an hour the battle raged in the square, then finally the gallant Xhosa, facing gunfire they had not anticipated, had to retreat. A jubilant cry arose from the white and Hottentot fighters as the warriors fled in uncontrolled panic. Grahamstown had been saved!

In the aftermath of battle Saltwood was missing, and for a while Tjaart wondered if this missionary, who had fought so bravely, had been dragged away by the fleeing Xhosa, but as Tjaart searched a field he saw Hilary, bloody and disheveled, kneeling beside a dying Xhosa. Tears streamed down his face, and when he saw his neighbor Van Doorn approaching he looked up in bewilderment.

“Seven hundred of them dead,” he mumbled softly. “I’ve counted more than seven hundred lying here. Three of our men dead. May God forgive us for this slaughter.”

“Dominee,” Tjaart reasoned. “God wanted us to win this battle.” When the missionary muttered something incoherent, Van Doorn added, “In warfare like this, so few of us against so many of them, it’s no time to love thy enemy. Destroy him. Because where would you be now if they’d broken through? Can you see Golan burning?”

Saltwood looked up at the man who had saved his life. He tried to justify his feelings of repugnance, but he could form no words. “It’s all right, Dominee,” Tjaart said. “We taught the Kaffir bastards a lesson they’ll remember. Till next time.”

“Next time?”

Tjaart tugged at his beard. “It will never stop, Dominee. Not till one side is victor in this land.”

Saltwood had to admit, though reluctantly, that what Van Doorn was saying was true, but he did not voice this thought, for next to him the young Xhosa warrior, no more than a boy, shuddered and lay still.

When Hilary Saltwood’s letter reached Sentinels in the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral, his mother was fifty-four years old, a widow and eager to help her distant son find the proper wife. The commission was not an unusual one in rural England. Sons of distinguished families would venture to all parts of the world, serving for years as outriders of civilization in places like India, South America and Ceylon, without ever thinking of marrying local women the way Portuguese
and French colonizers did. An Englishman remembered the girl left behind, and when he was in his mid-thirties he would come home, and some gaunt woman in her early thirties, who in another society would never find a husband, would be waiting, and they would repair to the village church, two people who had been terrified of missing life, and they would be married, and flowers would be scattered, and the local curate would dry his eyes at this little miracle, and soon the pair would be off to some other remote spot.

Or, as in this case, the son would write home to his parents and ask them to pursue his courtship for him, and they would visit only the daughters of families they had known for a generation, and again some older woman who might never have married would find that she was needed in some far country by a man she could only vaguely remember. This was the English pattern, and men who deviated from it by marrying local women were apt to find their lives truncated, if not ruined.

Emily Saltwood, upon reading her son’s appeal, retired to her room for two days and reflected upon the marriageable daughters of her friends, and after trying her best to judge the girls from a man’s point of view, and a missionary’s, she decided that the family she must visit was the Lambtons, who lived across the bridge within the purlieus of the cathedral.

Wishing not to share her secret mission with any servant, she elected not to use her carriage but to walk to the village, where she sought out the bricked path leading to the Lambton residence, at whose door she knocked quietly. After an interval that troubled her, because it seemed that no one was at home, she heard shuffling feet approach, and an elderly maid creaked open the door. “Mrs. Lambton is not at home,” she said. Nor was Miss Lambton there, but there was a possibility that they could be found near the cathedral grounds, for they had planned on having tea in that vicinity.

Emily said, “You know, it’s frightfully important that I see Mrs. Lambton immediately, and I think you’d better go fetch them.”

“I couldn’t leave the house, ma’am.” The maid was insistent.

“On this day you’d better.” Emily Saltwood could be just as insistent.

“Couldn’t you go and meet them at the cathedral?”

“No, I couldn’t. Because what I have to discuss is not for an open park. Now you scurry off and find your mistress, or I’ll take this umbrella to you.”

This the maid understood, and after a while she returned, leading both Mrs. Lambton and her daughter Vera. This was rather more than Emily had expected, so she said quite brusquely, “It was your mother I wished to see,” and the tall girl, twenty-nine years old and somewhat timid, dutifully vanished.

“I’ve had a curious letter from my son Hilary, in South Africa,” Emily began, and without another word being spoken, Mrs. Lambton grasped the significance of this abrupt meeting. Keeping her hands under discipline, lest they tremble, she said, “Vera and I remember Hilary well. The soldier, wasn’t he?”

“The missionary,” Emily said.

“Yes, yes.” Her hands were now trembling furiously, but she kept them hidden. She knew she’d made an unforgivable mistake, confusing the Saltwood boys, but she recovered admirably by throwing Emily on the defensive: “Didn’t you have a son who went to America?”

“Alas, we did. Never hear of him.”

“They tell me that your boy Richard’s thinking of returning to India … without the regiment.”

“He’s headstrong. He’ll be off to some remote spot.”

“Tell me, Emily, how does a mother feel when her chicks are so scattered?”

“You may soon know, because Hilary has asked me to ascertain whether Vera …” It was most difficult to say such a thing bluntly, without preparation of any kind, but it was inescapable. “He wonders if Vera would like to join him in South Africa—in the mission field, that is.”

“She’s a devout girl,” Mrs. Lambton parried. “All us Lambtons are devoted to the church.”

“I know, I know. That’s why it’s been so easy for me to approach you on so delicate a matter.”

“I don’t know how Vera …” Mrs. Lambton spoke defensively, as if her daughter were accustomed to weighing such proposals, but Emily Saltwood was not going to have any of that. Abruptly she said, “Vera’s at the age when she must make up her mind … and quickly. Hilary’s a fine lad and he needs a wife.”

“How old is he?” Mrs. Lambton asked sweetly.

“Thirty-four. The proper age for such a marriage.”

“And has he propects?”

“His older brother—Peter, that is—he’ll inherit the house, of
course. But we expect Hilary to be dean of the cathedral one of these days. When his tour ends, of course.”

“Most interesting.” Mrs. Lambton knew of three young clergymen who were being considered for that promotion. Besides, Hilary suffered an impediment which completely disqualified him, and it was important to knock down Mrs. Saltwood’s bargaining position early in the game: “Didn’t I hear that your son took orders with the Methodists, or something quite awful like that?” She beamed her benign Sunday-in-church smile.

“Merely for his ordination to do Christ’s work. He’ll scamper back into the proper fold, once he returns.” She, too, smiled. “You’ve heard, I’m sure, that before he died, the old Proprietor, who was extremely fond of Hilary, made special overtures for him at the cathedral.”