The Brigandshaw Chronicles Box Set

by Peter Rimmer

  “Perry, my boy,” he said. His father had always called him ‘Perry, my boy’. Never plain ‘Perry’. “We all fall in lust when we are young. That is primal nature calling. Probably way back then, when land and money had not come into the equation, we procreated with whoever came along, fighting for the survival of our species. I don’t even think man and woman are meant to be monogamous. In the beginning, there was no need to take a lifetime partner to protect our property and our children. Everything and everyone belonged to everybody. I rather think the tribes in darkest Africa and Borneo are the same today. Most likely they have a short sweet life, the fittest surviving the weak by killing them. Mr Darwin has some interesting theories which if they get out all over the place will change the way we think of ourselves, even the way we are told on pain of fiery hell the way we were created. Fact is, I rather agree with his logic that comes back to you, my son, and our ancestors. We have been on this land for a long time but to survive we have had to be the best, the strongest, the richest. We have to dominate as the empire dominates or we will be knocked off our perch. Do you really think I married your mother for love, though you might think so after eleven children? There was a girl in my day, I forget her name deliberately. Like your girl, she was poor. No dowry. Probably after me for my potential money and title as much as anything, though we both swore to each other money had nothing to do with it. My father took away my horse. Told the stable boys on pain of dismissal not to saddle me a horse. They locked the stables at night. He took away all my money and anything else I could turn into money. He knew I would not steal what was not mine and there he was right. We all so hate being told we are wrong. I had met your mother a few times socially. We had not even glanced at each other. And then it was arranged. You see, Perry, my boy, your mother had the right breeding and half a million pounds. So they married us. The other girl married into her own class. I heard she was happy. And I ask you, my son, is this a happy house? Don’t you love your mother? Doesn’t your mother love you? Are we not a close family in harmony with each other and our surroundings?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Then do as you’re told. If we have to have this discussion again I will not be so pleasant. With wealth comes responsibility. You will have a great weight on your shoulders when I die. Mary’s not a bad girl. You have the same background, the two of you. In the end, you will find that more conducive to harmony than primal lust. You will be able to trust each other. The families will be marrying each other. If she were to seduce you in the bushes, how many others might she seduce, and then where would you be?”

  “How do you know?”

  “I have my spies.”

  And all the logic in the world had been to no avail. He was in love, not in lust. He was incapable of other thought. The arguments with his father grew violent. The happy family began to disintegrate and they told him it was all his fault. Then the girl had gone and in this temper and frustration, he had run away. Put his back to them. And still, in his dreams, she came to him and made him cry. They were sweet moments in his life.

  Peregrine rather thought to himself, as he looked back on his lonely life, that we want what we can’t have, and curse a moment when we have what we want and it is taken away from us. He knew, in his heart, if the affair had been allowed to follow its natural path it would have petered out like the others. His love, his lust, his passion would have waned. He would have satiated himself. But all the daylight logic churning in his mind had never stopped the night-time dreams. Somewhere, back then, there had been perfection in his life. The cold hard reality he had faced since then was, to him, an indictment on life itself. Without that sweet, brief perfection in his mind, he rather thought he would not survive. She never changed. Never grew old. Was always perfect in his thoughts.

  The journey through his life had gone on and on, place to place, people to people, country after country and little had stuck in his memory. He had soon found a way to make a living, a transient living but mostly it had worked. When he wished to be, he could be the most charming man in the room. Educated, well spoken. Good at talking. Good at listening. And he had a courtesy title, Lord Peregrine Kenrick, which he used sparingly, only letting out the surprising news when he had found himself a mark. And they had never been difficult to find throughout his wandering, especially in America, when hostesses would have killed to lay their hands on a young handsome genuine English lord. In many ways, it had all been too easy. Like the lady he wanted in his dreams, they always wanted what they could never have. No matter how much money they had, no one would ever call an American the Right Honourable, the Earl of Pembridgemoor. They had fought a war of independence to make sure it never happened, that they were all a happy, egalitarian commonality. But if by chance their daughter married an English earl… It was all rather pointless, Peregrine had thought. But then, so was the variety of certain men and women. And he had to have a living, and in a roundabout way, he was selling them a product, their ability to refer to their good friend Lord Peregrine Kenrick for the rest of their natural lives. He was a celebrity in America, and celebrities cost money, ‘that’s Lord Peregrine, you know’. The fact that Lord Peregrine was a bum never entered their heads.

  Like with any job, he grew tired of the constant need to keep on his toes to stop the lie being understood by his benefactors. To give them their money’s worth. He hoped it was the way of people to create a façade that gave them the most from life. And society and business, because of all the falsity, were riddled with the fear of being found out.

  After thirty years of drifting and ignoring letters from his family as they followed his career in the American social papers, he had come to Africa. He had never married one of the daughters, as none of them compared to the lady in his dreams. And then he had disappeared from sight. And in Africa he called himself Peregrine the Ninth just in case: it was his own private joke.

  There were moments when his lack of family responsibility involuntarily turned his stomach. Someone, one of his youngest brothers, would be running the estate. Maybe they had proclaimed him dead. Maybe he was not the ninth Earl of Pembridgemoor. But whichever way he looked at it all, it was too late now, in the swamps of Africa, six years after reading about his father’s death. He would be a ghost from the past, a past best left to get on with itself. Even friendly ghosts were rarely welcome, he argued. He had a letter for them in the wagon should there be someone around to give it to when he was dying. And then again someone might find the wagon and his corpse. And then again he would just turn to dust and sink into the soil of Africa, Clary and Jeff, his donkeys, himself, and an abandoned wagon.

  He was hungry. Reminiscing in his mind always made him hungry. A nice piece of dried venison was exactly what he fancied for his breakfast. Getting up with surprising ease for a man of seventy, he walked across to his wagon in the beautiful yellow light of early sunrise. A heron rose above the reeds, long-legged from the river, and somewhere deep in the swamps an African fish eagle called its lonely cry.

  “My, it’s grand to be alive,” he said to the donkeys as he passed.

  On the big island across the thirty feet of clear river water, Barend Oosthuizen was preparing the morning shoot for his German clients, among them Lieutenant von Stratten of the Imperial German Army, the man who had met Barend on the Skeleton Coast and been gone in the morning without saying goodbye. The smell of coffee, that surprisingly would shortly find its way into the nostrils of the ninth Earl of Pembridgemoor causing him concern about his mind, was strong. There were ten of them camped on the island, four white men and six black men, the blacks having carried the guns and equipment for so many miles in the heat. The bearers were huddled together ten yards away from the white men’s camp, and to Barend’s trained eye they were more excited than they should be, talking in a language Barend suspected was spoken by less than ten thousand people in the world. Barend had been unable to draw from them their tribe name or the name of their language. One of them, the leader, who had
worked in the mines in Johannesburg, spoke enough Afrikaans to take and relay orders to the rest of them. Barend had found him at the small trading post at Maun where the swamps began and the stray tourists looked for guides to take them hunting in the great Okavango Delta. The surprise had been meeting von Stratten again, which had been little surprise to the German. Having put up his shingle as a white hunter, the word had spread quicker than Barend could ever have imagined. From Portuguese West Africa to Portuguese East Africa, through all the British colonies of Central Africa, wherever the business of hunting animals was done for the white man’s pleasure, many of the white hunters and their trackers heard that Tinus Oosthuizen’s son had become a hunter like his father. At night around the campfires, there was little to talk about but shooting elephant or lion and retelling the legends of the old white hunters, blown out of all proportion by so much repetition over so many years.

  Unlike Peregrine, who had walked his donkeys along the old hunters’ paths and through the drifts that sank his big iron wheels underwater, flooding the bottom of the wagon and drowning some of the bugs, the Germans’ party, having hired Barend in Maun, had driven as far into the delta as possible, before leaving the big army trucks with their drivers to be fetched on the way back.

  Barend had noticed the excited chattering among the black men soon after he had hired six makoris with local oarsmen to take them up the reed-lined rivers that marked the swamps to look for elephant. The locals, the previous night, had made camp next to the river and their canoes, not wishing to join the hunting party. Barend was certain the blacks were not telling him something and he wanted to know what it was. With a mug of hot coffee wrapped inside the palm of his big right hand, he went down to join his employees by the river. When they saw him coming the blacks stopped talking immediately, every one of them looking sheepish. In all of their eyes, Barend saw the signs of fear, causing his hackles to rise at the hidden danger. He stood for a long time looking down at them crouched on their haunches, silent, averting their eyes. To them, he was a huge, blond, hairy, slate-green-eyed monster drinking a strange-smelling liquid, the name of which they were unable to pronounce.

  Having finished his coffee slowly, to maximise the intimidation, Barend, with the tin mug now in his left hand, walked slowly to the group, and one-handed gripped the one-time gold miner by his shirt front and jerked him to his feet. Behind, the Germans looked up to see what was happening. Barend stared into the eyes of the frightened black man for a long minute before he spoke to him in Afrikaans, a language none of the others understood.

  Barend smiled sweetly and waited, having asked his question.

  “They frightened of ghosts,” said the black man. “The people in the makoris say since you arrived at Maun the Great Elephant seen many times. They think dead father sent you the Great Elephant to kill but they say the Great Elephant kill you way it killed Baas Brigandshaw.”

  “And where is this Great Elephant?” asked Barend mockingly, inwardly surprised at the accuracy and travelling distance of the bush telegraph which had spread the death of Sebastian Brigandshaw.

  “On island, baas. It was last seen two days ago on island.”

  “Then that’s good. My clients will be pleased. We will kill the Great Elephant and my German friends will become part of the great legend. Don’t be afraid. It is only an elephant.”

  “Those men in the makoris say elephant kill all of us.”

  “But I will shoot the Great Elephant if my clients fail.”

  “But you can’t kill the Great Elephant. No one can. It is a spirit.”

  “Then if it is only a ghost it can’t kill any of us.”

  “That is not true, baas. A ghost can kill who it likes.”

  “Then why do you stay with me?”

  “We more frightened of being left alone in the swamps.”

  “But you all know the swamps.”

  “No, baas.”

  “But you said they all knew the swamps better than their mothers.”

  “I lied, baas. We were hungry. We want a job. Now we say the Great Elephant ghost kill us or the lions eat us. We think elephant kill us more quickly. We stay with you.”

  “So you’ve never been in the swamps before?”

  “No, baas. I come from Johannesburg.”

  “Why did you leave Johannesburg?”

  “That is a long story.”

  “Yes, I’m sure it is. Did you kill another man or steal his wife?” he said sarcastically.

  “Both, baas. But the man, he was going to kill me.”

  “Have any of the others been in the swamps before?”

  “No, baas. They too come from Johannesburg. They are my brothers.”

  “You have the same mothers and fathers?”

  “No, baas. We are brothers.”

  “If you knew the Great Elephant was on this island, why did you let the oarsmen bring us here?”

  “The Great Elephant is on all the islands.”

  The belly laugh, made first by tension, swelled up in Barend and burst in loud guffaws. Shaking his head he walked back to the Germans.

  “What was all that about?” asked von Stratten in English.

  “He was telling me a joke.”

  “It must have been a good one. This island is thick with bush and trees. You think we’ll see anything to shoot? My colonel wants to take home to Frankfurt a big pair of elephant tusks. And tonight, when we come back to camp with our trophy, he wants to talk to you.”

  “I can’t speak German.”

  “My colonel speaks English.”

  There was no shoreline to most of the island, the trees growing out over the water in tangled roots thicker than Barend’s arm. Like his father before him, Barend never believed in coincidence. When the man he had met on the Skeleton Coast appeared at Maun, Barend was sure the man had a reason other than killing wild animals. The man was too smug. Too sure of himself. A man on the brink of great things justly deserved. Barend would have turned down the client had he any nerve. Despite the shingle on the front of his small hut on the side of the only dusty road in Maun, he had not received a commission and was about to go on his endless wagon journey. He had the idea to go to Kimberley and the big diamond mine to find out if the seven stones hidden in the soft leather belt strapped around his stomach were really diamonds. Some of the hatred for the English had seeped out of his mind. All the wandering had been pointless. He was getting nowhere going around in circles. The German money, despite the prospect of an ulterior motive, would take him to Kimberley, and if the diamonds were real he would sell them on the illicit market and go home. He was not as tough as he thought he was. He had never before experienced the strange feeling that lately kept returning to his mind, a feeling that spread to a physical sickness in his stomach, and that only went away when he allowed himself to think of his mother, Madge, Katinka, and Elephant Walk. After nine years alone, Barend was finally homesick.

  Thinking it better to leave the bearers in the small clearing where they had camped for the night, Barend led the Germans down the one path between hundred-foot high trees in search of an elephant, trying to remember all the knowledge his father had taught him when he was a boy. Within two hundred yards they were swallowed by the trees, Barend consciously taking the sight of the sun so he could lead them back to camp. He would not have been the first white hunter to go into the swamps and never come out again.

  Peregrine the Ninth had been worried all morning. Smelling freshly made coffee in the swamps was a sure sign of dementia. Instead of his body giving out at seventy years of age, his heart stopping, his kidneys gracefully giving up after the years of abuse in his youth, his mind was going. He told himself in quiet despair, ‘I’m going crackers’. And when Clary looked up from chewing the grass, he knew he had spoken out loud. The possibilities he decided were twofold: if he was going crackers, he would lose himself in the bush; but if his mind went he would not know what was happening so it wouldn’t matter. Not sure there wasn’t a fal
lacy in his thinking, he had eaten his stick of dried venison, congratulating his teeth on their ability to still chew the biltong, as it was called by the Afrikaners he sometimes met on his travels, and made himself a rare pipe from his limited supply of tobacco. If he was going crackers he had better enjoy the smoke before he had no idea what he was doing. Back under the fig tree, and with the taste of tobacco deep in his lungs, he began to enjoy his morning. The idea of eating a nice large river bream appealed to him. He never ate lunch. Two meals were enough for an old man. He would find a spot between the tall reeds from where he could cast his line in the water and still keep an eye out for crocodiles. Crocodiles and snakes were still his pet aversions, even after so many years in the bush. The bugs in his bedclothes worried him not at all, they were part of life, but he always checked his bedding for snakes when he went to bed, especially in winter when they had a bad habit of climbing straight away into the warm spot when he got up in the morning and spending the rest of the day. Once one had got in with him when he was asleep which caused a ruckus in the middle of the night that had the donkeys bolting into the bush.

  With the pipe finished and propped against a root of the fig tree, his mind pleasantly thinking of fish for supper, the donkeys happy on their own grazing next to the wagon, Peregrine the Ninth fell asleep.

  The sun was vertically above them when they came out of the trees into tall grass as high as their armpits. The Germans were sweating in the heat, their guns heavy on their shoulders. Thirty yards through the elephant grass, brown at the top despite so much water underground, the river circled the mile-long island, the stretch in front of them blocked at the back and both sides by the giant trees of the forest. The open land was sprinkled with small, flat-topped trees. They could all hear a wallowing noise coming from a patch of trees next to the river. The wallowing and slosh of water went on for some time while they waited motionlessly, their guns, .37 Mausers, off their shoulders, with a bullet pushed into every breech, the safety catches pushed forward, ready for whatever it was wallowing in the water. Barend recognised the ears above the height of the trees and watched the trunk ride up and curl to spurt water on the back of the elephant hidden by the trees; its feet still in the river. Barend shivered with fear; for the first time in his life the ghost of the Great Elephant was eighty yards in front of him, and from the sound of the cascading water falling into the water, the animal was coming out of the river. First, the top of the great head and tusks appeared above the trees at treetop height. Then the elephant rested them on the earth while it took in the heads and shoulders of the five men looking at him in awe. The ears flapped once, slowly, and then again fast. The tusks came off the ground. The ears flapped with claps of thunderous sound and the trunk went up in the air, showing the red, gaping mouth.