by Peter Rimmer
“I’ll do it myself.”
“Unwise, I would say. And please don’t hit the young man. I have no wish to defend you in a nasty case of assault.”
The wedding in Cape Town was a black affair. While Jeremiah Shank was receiving his pieces of silver at the offices of Colonial Shipping, Tinus Oosthuizen took Alison Ford to be his lawfully wedded wife. Two strangers they had found at the Mount Nelson Hotel signed the marriage certificate and left soon afterwards. Alison’s dress, run up quickly in the Malay quarter by a seamstress, billowed from the bodice down to hide her pregnancy from the dominie and was the colour of dark sand. Tinus wore a suit for the first time in his life, a well-barbered Tinus with a clipped beard and well-cut hair that hung to his shoulders. The tailor said he had never made a larger suit. Tatenda, forlorn and frightened by so large a building, sat at the back. Emily was at the police station.
Outside the Dutch Reformed Church at the top of Strand Street, the clock tower stared up at Signal Hill and to the right, far out and down the hill, a squall lashed across Table Bay tearing at the anchored ships. A pair of black-backed gulls had drifted up from the bay and cried their lonely cry, cutting and dropping, lifting in the wind. A weak and wintry sunlight crept towards the door of the church as Tinus thanked the dominie in the Taal and helped his wife into the hired coach. The dominie watched them sadly.
Tatenda was already on the coach. As soon as the pair of horses began the cobbled road down the hill, following the strangers in their own coach back to the hotel, the squall hit the face of the clock in the tower and the big hands quivered in the grasp of the wind. The dominie had closed the door of his church and gone about his business. Despite the howling wind, the long arm clunked to half-past eleven in the morning and the gulls, wings pinned back in mocking authority over the squall, veered down and away from the clanging sound of man. It was the only sound of wedding bells.
The wind was howling outside the small high window with the thick bars and Seb felt more dejected than at any other time in his life. He was sick to the very pit of his stomach and the terrible hurt drained through all his feelings.
They had ridden the wagons to Johannesburg, the mining camp in Paul Kruger’s Transvaal Republic, to load the ivory on the train and travel with the great tusks to Cape Town. Leaving the two locked railway wagons with the ivory in the Cape Town goods siding they had hired a cab to drive them to the Mount Nelson Hotel. Harry was tired and irritable, Emily and Alison were pregnant. Most of what they wanted was a good meal and a good night’s sleep, and they would worry about the ivory in the morning. There was nothing to suggest the closed wagons held anything more than machinery going north to the gold mines. Not even the stationmaster was told the contents, and the wagons stood alone and uninteresting.
Harry was asleep in his dirty clothes and they left him on the bed with Tatenda fast asleep, as they thought, on the couch. So much had happened to Tatenda in three years, he had given up wondering about the turn in his life. He missed his family and sometimes, when he was alone and the others were asleep, he cried, forgetting he was fourteen years old and ready for circumcision. The grown-ups took their baths and when they left to go down to dinner, he felt so lonely he cried and Harry asked him in Shona what was the matter as the lamp burnt softly in the room to keep away the dark. The boy was not asleep as all of them had thought.
“Are you hungry?” asked Harry, saying he was, and then they did go to sleep. When they woke, Tinus had brought them a wicker basket full of cold chicken and freshly baked rolls, and Tatenda did not feel so lonely.
The next day Tinus and Seb had gone off to Colonial Shipping to make arrangements for the ivory only to be told Captain Doyle had left the company and the man in the office was not in a position to say any more. A man with a crooked face who looked familiar had turned away from them as they made their enquiries, leading them to believe Colonial Shipping was no longer interested in ivory. Seb felt the first twinge of alarm as he always did when people behaved out of context: ivory was the best trade to come out of Africa. In the middle of his conversation with the man who had not invited them into his office but stood at the counter, Seb felt a strong hand on his elbow. Tinus cut the conversation, and they were out through the door and back in the cab.
“That was the man, with his back to us, who tipped off Jack Slater outside Salisbury. With Doyle out of the company that manager was acting on your father’s orders. Best we leave the ivory and get out of Cape Town and you go back to Rhodesia.”
“Tinus, I’ll go back with Em and Harry. You stay and marry Alison and sell the ivory somewhere else.”
“And Emily’s baby?”
“Then I’ll go alone.” When they reached the gate that led out of the docks it was closed and shortly after, the police arrived and Seb was arrested. Three days later Tinus and Alison had been married and Captain Doyle had sailed into Cape Town harbour with his new ship and the old crew of the Indian Queen.
Seb woke to his twenty-first birthday in cell number four of the central police station and he was cold and miserable and very much afraid. Being accused of a capital offence, he had been told, had prevented them from giving him bail, and he was to wait in cell number four with two blankets until a Royal Navy ship was able to take him back to England. There he would stand trial for the kidnapping of his brother’s wife and son and there was nothing the colonial authorities in Cape Town could do but hold him in the cell.
The Prime Minister of the Cape, Cecil John Rhodes or the governor of the Cape Colony, had no interest in the case as the offence had taken place in England and that was the law and there was nothing anyone could do about it. It was clear to Seb that the idea of a man kidnapping his brother’s wife and son left him beyond the pale. Emily had sworn on oath she had gone of her own accord, leaving her husband, and that her son was not her husband’s but his brother’s. She was now considered a slut who had committed adultery and broken her wedding vows, and none of this changed the fact they were sending Seb back to England. Privately, the man who ran the police cells, whose wife, he knew, slept with other men behind his back, thought Emily was as profane as the prisoner and if he had had his way, the slut would have been shipped back to England for a trial of her own, though under what statute he could not think. One of his Muslim friends said they stoned people in countries faithful to the law of Allah and that was what he would do to her. From that point, all communication had been cut between Emily and Seb and their nightmare took a turn for the worse.
In his cell, alone, early in the morning, the day after the wedding, Seb asked himself what he had done wrong other than to love a girl all the years he could remember. How could a father hate his son so much, a brother hate his brother, to bring him home in shackles when they both knew he was right and they were wrong? What could they want of him so badly that took away what was rightly his? For money? For Hastings Court? Pride and vanity? And what had his mother done to stop what she could see? If he was so wrong to be beneath the hanging tree then how much worse were all of them?
Through force of will and with daylight full through the small window above his head, he stopped feeling sorry for himself. He was right, and they were wrong, and right he told himself blindly, even foolishly, would prevail.
The doorbell rattled imperiously for the third time and Arthur Brigandshaw knew he was trapped. For a week he had thought of suicide and found he lacked the courage. And now they had come for his house. He had nothing. There would be no food or shelter. They were going to throw him out on the street and his father was ready to laugh in his face. No one would give him a job. They would laugh, his friends, and walk away, comfortable in the trappings of their own money. The fourth ring sent him cringing to the back room, the small storeroom of the Baker Street house. He was quite alone. The last of his women had gone when the money stopped flowing. They had never wanted Arthur Brigandshaw, only his money. Huddled on the floor, the linoleum smooth, uninterested in his plight, he waited for the sound of brea
king wood as they crashed down the door of the house he no longer owned. He would be thirty-four years old in a month’s time, and he was penniless, and the fear of poverty ripped at his stomach. For the rest of his life he would live as a tramp, despised by everyone. The bell rattled again and Arthur was sick on the linoleum floor.
A voice from outside the house called his name ‘Arthur’ and Arthur wiped the stains of the sick from his mouth. Who would call his Christian name if they came sent by the bank? Maybe the shares had rocketed up as quickly as they had fallen down and he was still the man about town? Getting up off his bottom he avoided the puddle of sick and straightened his coat. Again, the man outside called his name and Arthur walked out of the small room to the top of the stairs.
“Just coming,” he shouted, turning into the bathroom to wash his face.
From suicidal fear to desperate hope, Arthur trod the red staircase down to the front door of his house, fixed a smile of confidence on his face and opened the door.
“May I come in?” said Henry Manderville.
“My man was out when you rang.”
“Bollocks. You’re bankrupt, Arthur. The Charter shares went down another shilling this morning.”
“Then why are you here, esteemed father-in-law?” said Arthur sarcastically. “Last I heard you were sunning yourself in Italy on our money. You haven’t by any chance seen my wife?”
“I know where she is and who she is with.” Henry pushed past Arthur and walked into the morning room.
“So you’re part of the kidnapping,” shouted Arthur, slamming his front door shut and following his father-in-law into the morning room.
“My first instinct is to knock your block off but then you would be of no use to me. You know better than me there was no such thing as a kidnapping and that young Harry is Seb’s child, not yours. In the first place, we were both wrong agreeing to an arranged marriage. Sometimes they work, quite often in fact, and the flights of young love wither with familiarity. But to charge your own brother with a capital offence and have him arrested! That’s murder.”
“He kidnapped my son.”
“She ran away with their son! Sebastian became a man and claimed what was his.”
“The law is on my side.”
“Yes, it is, which is why I am prepared to repay your overdraft with the bank in exchange for you withdrawing your complaint… You didn’t consummate your marriage, did you, Arthur?”
“She wouldn’t let me.”
“Good, then the marriage can be dissolved. By the twisted luck of fate, you are going to be able to go back to your life of debauchery.”
“I want the whole two hundred thousand,” said Arthur thinking on his feet, the light of dawn flashing in his eyes.
“Yes, I rather thought you would and frankly I don’t care. You can keep both Hastings Court and your money, but you can’t have my daughter or my grandson.”
Arthur began to laugh, quietly at first and then hysterically.
“Do you agree?” asked Henry.
“Of course. You sure you can give me the money?”
“My solicitor is certain, and he drew up the agreement.”
“Father will spit blood.”
“He may even come to his senses. After all, Sebastian is also his son.”
“My father is as hard as nails. All he wants to do is come up in the world and he doesn’t care how we do it.”
Puzzled by the break into north country dialect, Henry gave Arthur the address and time to meet in the solicitor’s office.
“You won’t be late?” he said.
“Not this time.”
Outside the closed front door, Henry Manderville shuddered as if someone had walked over his grave.
Part 3 – The First Chimurenga
1
September 1895
For some months before his nineteenth birthday (the date given to him by Emily to celebrate), Tatenda had been yearning for his own people. Without a word to anyone, he left in the night and began his journey north from the farm on the banks of the Mazoe River. He headed north guided by the four stars of the Southern Cross, dissecting the pointer stars through the bar made by joining the two bright stars that never left the proximity of the cross. Careful that south was always kept at his back he began the long walk back to his people, the Kalanga, one of the smallest tribes that made up the Shona-speaking people.
Four years before, they had left Cape Town the day after Sebastian was freed from jail and taken the train to Kimberley. When Sebastian drove the lead ox wagon over the Limpopo River at the new crossing east of Tuli, and stated loudly that he would never leave the country the white men were calling Rhodesia, Tatenda felt the first shiver of fear for his people. These white people who had saved his life had come to stay and stay as masters, never as equals. And when, six months after they first arrived in Salisbury the man who said he was Emily’s father joined them, Tatenda knew the days of freedom for the tribes of the Shona were over. The father they called Sir Henry had brought a friend from England, and the friend had brought a new wife, and this man they called Gregory Shaw told everyone he was going to have ten children and a farm so big that not one of his neighbours would see his chimney smoke.
They had settled on the farm on the banks of the river twenty miles from Salisbury that the new government had given them. The trees had come out of the ground, ploughs had gone into the soil and as the game ran from the falling trees, the white men shot them for fun and only sometimes took the meat into Salisbury for sale. And then the first house went up and the first fences and the first white policemen in uniform visited the farm they were calling Elephant Walk. A few of the Shona people came out from hiding away from Lobengula and were given jobs on the farm. Each week they were given a ration of maize meal, a cup of salt, a bag of beans, and as much meat as they could eat along with a place away from the white man on the river to build a hut and plant some pumpkins. After generations of fear the people thought it was paradise. For most people, their freedom was worth giving away for food and shelter and protection from the stabbing spears of the Matabele, the Zulus of Shaka, who had raped and pillaged their way north to the ancient lands of Monomotapa.
Wherever possible, Tatenda had followed the game trail that took him north through the long dry grass that was often higher than his head, dotted with treacherous anthills hidden in the grass and tall msasa trees that traced their newborn leaves against the black heavens. When the moon went down, the millions of stars in the heavens were not enough to show him the way and he stopped under a tree and listened. The warm spring night whirred with the constant call of insects and frogs and far away a lion roared and made him shiver and clutch the puny protection of Harry Brigandshaw’s .410 shotgun that he had stolen before he left Elephant Walk. Over his shoulder was a full cartridge belt with everything from number six birdshot to the heavy buckshot that if he got close enough would kill a duiker or a klipspringer.
The guilt of stealing Harry’s precious gun was his only sorrow, mingled with the deep fear of loneliness and the fangs of wild animals. The late September sky was clear and layer upon layer of stars domed above his head deep into the black heavens, and he prayed to his ancestors to intercede with God to protect and take him home. Then as the lion roared nearer and was answered by another animal further to his right, he prayed there was a home that some of his people had escaped to from the Matabele terror. Not even once did he think of the new God Sebastian’s reverend brother had made him swear to follow. The lions were too close for pleasing other people and other gods and before the night was out, he was calling to his ancestors in fear, his voice thin and shaking. Only with the light of day did he stop his shivering and remember he was a man going to join his people. Gathering his wits he went on his journey, using the sun’s position to guide him north; with the night stars, he would check his position accurately the way Tinus had taught them to walk through the bush.
The new leaves on the msasa trees were russet brown and th
e red of ox-blood mingled with the pale green and yellow of limes. Birds were calling for their mates, telling them where they were in the new day of courage. A buzzard rose on the warm thermals up into the new blue sky, calling plaintively with aching sadness to the new day below. Alone he watched the bird turn and turn higher, calling with the same sad sound of melancholy that filled his heart. It was the first time in his life he had been alone and he looked back to the south whence he had come and he saw his warm bed, and breakfast on the table, and seven-year-old Harry, nearly eight, calling out to find some new excitement in a small boy’s world. He almost went back.
The years of good food and the hard training of Tinus Oosthuizen had turned the thin boy into a strong man who came as high as his teacher’s shoulders. His thick black hair was cut short to his skull and his face in the white light of morning was aquiline and spoke of some Arab slaver in his ancestry. His eyes were coal black, his lips thin for a Kalanga and his small ears almost as pointed as a lynx. The strong forehead sloped back to the short cropped hair and his head was domed at the back like a calabash. Using the hunting skill of the Boer, Tatenda worked his way through the long elephant grass and pushed the long barrel of his .410 through into the clearing and shot the small impala grazing beside the safety of its mother. The bush echoed with the shot and birds and animals scattered from the powerful sound. Quickly, Tatenda cut the half-dead animal’s throat with the knife given to him on his eighteenth birthday by Sebastian. With skill and concentration he skinned the buck, placed a haunch over the coals of his new fire, and cut the rest of the meat into strips to dry in the sun and fill the single saddlebag that thumped against his thigh as he strode the bush. In the far distant heat haze, he could see the foothills of the mountains to the north. Having eaten and filled his bag with half-dried meat he went on his journey.
