Keepers of the House

by JH Fletcher

  Andrew Grant was fit to be tied. He wanted to challenge Hernus Klopper to a duel, and to hell with the law. ‘I’ll not have anyone talk about my daughter like that, by God,’ he said.

  ‘Leave him to me,’ Christiaan said. ‘I’ve known him all his life. I’ll handle him.’

  And did.

  He invited Klopper and his wife to dinner. After the meal, when the men were alone, they talked.

  ‘This marriage … There has been talk of a child. If it were true I would have Deneys out of this house today, only son or not. And Andrew Grant would kill his daughter. But it is not true. It is a lie, made up by those who should know better.’

  Klopper smiled. ‘If you say so.’

  Christiaan’s eyes raked him. ‘I do say so.’

  ‘You know your own family better than I do. You say there’s no truth in the rumours, that’s fine by me.’

  ‘I’m glad. Because I’ve invited you here to tell you something. I shall track down whoever started the rumour.’ Christiaan’s blue eyes, hard as steel, watched his guest. ‘When I have found him, I shall speak to him, as a warning. In friendship. After that, anyone spreading such lies I will kill.’

  He waited for an answer. A light sweat beaded Klopper’s forehead. He forced a laugh. ‘No need for such talk, surely?’

  Christiaan smiled grimly and echoed his guest’s earlier words. ‘If you say so.’ He stubbed out his cigar. ‘There will be a wedding. You may be sure of that. You are of course invited.’

  A fat lot Deneys cared, either way. He was nineteen years old, Elizabeth was seventeen and they were marrying for love. To hell with the lot of them.

  Things had to take their course. No slipping away for an evening’s stroll by the river. Any woman who did that would have been up in front of the dominee double-quick; any man would have been in danger of a bullet from the girl’s father, never mind who his own father happened to be.

  There was conversation between the families and eventually Deneys was permitted to get on his horse and ride three hours to the Grants’ farm. That was not the end of the frustration but rather the beginning of it. For one hour he was permitted to sit on the Grants’ stoep with Elizabeth, her mother always in attendance, and exchange polite conversation. Elizabeth still wore her hat so the famous hair remained hidden, and he was not allowed to touch her in any way. Then it was back on his horse and three hours home again, the whole thing to be repeated a week later.

  After a few visits like that, Deneys was fit to burn up the whole farm with Elizabeth’s mother still inside it. He could not abide anybody standing in the way of what he wanted to do and what he wanted at that minute was to marry Elizabeth Grant and to hell with all the nonsense.

  Elizabeth felt the same but it did not matter what either of them thought. They had to wait because, if they didn’t, they would have to leave the valley and neither of them wanted that.

  Six months later, when even Mrs Klopper had stopped hinting about a child, Deneys Wolmarans and Elizabeth Grant were married at Oudekraal.

  The wedding was held at Nagmaal because that was the only day they could get the people together and the dominee to come out from Stellenbosch.

  The whole valley was invited. After the ceremony the bride and groom stood up on the hay wain they used for weddings, clean and shining and its wheel spokes painted. Flowers aplenty and a black horse for good luck, its coat brushed until the sunlight ran golden all over it, with flowers, too, in its bridle. The wain did a stately circuit of the Nagmaalvlakte while everyone cheered and fired off their guns. Powder only, of course, because bullets were precious.

  Afterwards Deneys remembered only one thing, of being scared out of his wits that the wheels would hit a bump and throw them both out on their heads.

  Elizabeth’s memories were different. She remembered her husband standing beside her, laughing and waving, his arm around her at last, the sunlight bright on his face and his blue eyes shining. She looked up at him, the veil off her face and blowing in the wind. He had a little scratch under the corner of his jaw where he had nicked himself shaving. She remembered that particularly.

  She thought how strange it was to remember so small a thing among so many more important matters, but that was how it was.

  Then came the food: the beef and lamb, the wildebeest, the impala, the sausages and hams, chickens and ducks, the bobotie and denningvleis, melkterts as big as wagon wheels, mountains of fruit and vegetables and thick slices of bread baked in the ovens behind the house. And the drink … Beer, cordials for the children and barrels of wine, red and white. Brandy, too, so that by the time it was over the servants were giggling and useless and half the guests were walking sideways as they made their way back to their wagons.

  All the time people were smiling at the married couple, winking and thinking the hot thoughts that people think at weddings. It would have been as far from Elizabeth as the moon to discuss such things with a living soul but she was untroubled by what was to come that night. She was a country woman. Like everyone she knew, she lived her life to the rhythms of birth and harvest and death. She had grown up with the beasts and knew how such things were. She was above the beasts because, like all humans, she had been touched by the forefinger of God, but did not believe, as some townspeople did, that babies were brought in paper bags. Such nonsense.

  Afterwards, in the big bedroom of Oudekraal, there was quietness and a touching of hands, eyes bright in the candle flame, and stillness together and a lifting down of the heavy, wheat-coloured hair.

  Two weeks after the wedding, Doctor Leander Starr Jameson led a scallywag bunch of raiders into the Transvaal.

  The English always said that the Anglo-Boer war was fought about gold and maybe, for them, it was. Certainly it was the discovery of the main reef on White Waters Ridge, die Witwatersrand, that made the leaders of the British Empire decide to steal the independent Boer republics. For the Boers the fight was about freedom and justice.

  Freedom and justice. Words that meant a lot or little, depending on who was saying them. To the English, freedom meant being able to mine the gold, control the country, control the continent. To the Boers, freedom meant being left alone to run their own lives in the way that suited them best, which meant basically to go on living as they were, to change nothing, to shut out the outside world.

  Freedom and justice were words like love. They meant anything people wanted, but were a clarion call to the young. If anyone had asked Deneys to go and fight for the South African Republic he would have asked why. If he’d been told it was to keep the gold mines away from the English he would have laughed outright. But when he heard the words freedom and justice, it was a different story. And of course he believed, as did a lot of young men who had never seen war, that there was glamour attaching to it too.

  Freedom and justice and glamour made a brew so potent that even the mildest of youths would have had problem resisting it. Deneys did not try very hard. He loved his wife very dearly but it was not enough. He had a wife, a place in the world, a big farm that one of these days would be his and that his father needed him to help run. The quarrels of the up-country Boers were not his quarrels. President Kruger meant less than nothing to him. Yet the bugle sounded in his ear and Freedom and Justice and Glamour did the rest.

  Christiaan did not want him to go. Worse, he forbade him to go, which was a mistake, given Deneys’s nature. Elizabeth did not want him to go. What sensible woman would? There was no sense at all in his going.

  Nevertheless when the Anglo-Boer war began on 12 October, 1899, off to fight Deneys Wolmarans went.

  EIGHT

  In August 1901, after two years of fighting, Kommandant Lammers sent Deneys and a few others of his commando east to find out what was going on in that part of the country.

  Things were certainly going very badly in their area. Many burghers had surrendered or simply given up and gone home. Even some of the generals had put up their hands. One of them, General Cronje, had formed the Natio
nal Scouts to fight on the English side.

  Now the English soldiers were burning the farms, destroying the crops, driving off the livestock. Perhaps things would be better in the east.

  At first Lammers had not wanted Deneys to go at all but he had pleaded for permission. His sister and her two children — Stoffel, now aged five, and Amalie, a year younger — were on the farm outside Lydenburg. Her husband was fighting with Louis Botha and the English had been reported in the area. Deneys wanted to make sure they were still all right. Anneliese was a lovely girl, tall and dark-haired, two years older than himself, but she was also light-hearted, a little careless. He wasn’t sure she’d be able to handle the war with her husband away.

  Eventually Lammers agreed.

  They rode in a big circle around Pretoria, where the English army was now strongly established. There were few other towns but, such as they were, they avoided them too. The enemy was master of the towns and roads, so they kept to the open country.

  Open and terrible it was. For two days they rode through a nightmare landscape of blackened ruins and trampled fields, desolate and totally deserted.

  ‘Jesus, will you look at that?’ Dominic Riordan’s pale eyes were shocked in his sunburned face. ‘So they’ve been doing it here, too.’

  Dominic Riordan was someone out of the ordinary among the Boers. He was not Dutch at all but Irish and had come to the war from Australia. Others had come from that country, but nearly all to fight for the English. For that reason people had been suspicious of Riordan at first but soon it had become obvious that there was nothing to be feared from him on that score. Whatever the reason, his skinny body held such hatred for England and the English that its ferocity scorched everyone who had anything to do with him, and every incident throughout the long and bitter campaign had only made things worse.

  ‘God and his holy angels! Not a blade of grass in sight!’

  They reined in their horses at the top of a low rise. Eyes shaded beneath the brims of their Terai hats, they stared into the distance. The stench of ashes filled their nostrils. As far as they could see, ruin, here and there the broken shells of buildings presiding over a wilderness of burnt fields.

  No crops, no animals, no people. The devastated land extended in silence to a distant horizon. Here and there the wind stirred spirals of ash that rose half-heartedly into the air and subsided again, as though even the wind had been destroyed by the passing soldiers. Nothing else moved.

  Deneys swore softly, turned to the others. ‘I would never have believed it …’ He dug out his battered Bible. ‘We should pray.’

  Something he would never have thought to do in the old days, but war changes all things and Deneys was changed.

  ‘Pray that they shall all be destroyed.’ Dominic Riordan again. ‘Pray that the Lord shall scatter his enemies. I’ll join you in that. Let’s be having no talk of forgiveness, mind.’

  Deneys looked at him and at the broken countryside, the ashes stirring in the wind. He was his own man and would read what he wished. He opened the Book, turning the pages until he reached what he wanted. He raised his voice above the keening of the wind.

  ‘“They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint.”’ He turned the page. ‘“How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that publisheth peace —”’

  Dominic jerked as though the words had stabbed him to the heart.

  ‘Didn’t I just say let’s not be talking of peace?’

  Startled, Deneys’s horse danced a little. ‘All of us should pray for peace,’ he said.

  Dominic’s face was flushed with rage. He stabbed a furious hand at the devastated landscape. ‘With that in front of you? Well, Dominic Riordan’s having no part of any talk of peace, I can tell you that.’

  Deneys sat taller in his saddle. ‘Do not pick and choose which part of the Book you wish to hear. It is all the word of God. All!’

  ‘From which I suppose a man may choose what he wishes to read‚’ Dominic said. ‘What about the bit that says they have sown the wind and shall reap the whirlwind?’ He stood in his saddle and raised his clenched fist in the air. ‘“Let God arise and let his enemies be scattered.” Read that.’

  Deneys felt for him with all his heart but would not give way. Softly, without looking at the Bible that lay still open in his hand, he quoted, ‘“Break forth into joy, ye waste places, for the Lord shall redeem Jerusalem.”’

  Dominic’s face was wet with tears. He rubbed his cheek with the back of his hand and turned away. The ugly flush had gone from his face; that at least. He stared across the devastated land.

  ‘Redeem Jerusalem?’ he repeated softly. ‘We shall never see it.’

  They moved eastwards past torched farmhouses and empty, trampled fields. No crops; no animals; no people.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ Kaspar Pieterse wondered.

  That was indeed a question and with no one to answer it. With every mile Deneys felt more and more frightened for his sister and her children but, two days later, at long last, they came out of the burnt land.

  There were many small hills with valleys running between them and the trees were filled with a wonder of birds. Streams ran everywhere and the countryside was lush and green. After what they had seen it was like paradise and Deneys’s heart lifted. Perhaps Anneliese and the children would be safe after all.

  At sunset on the following day they reached the farm. Deneys had never seen it but had heard much; climbing the wooded slope to the house was like coming home. He could see the buildings long before they reached them. Perched on its hilltop, the house would command a view over the entire valley. No doubt that was where its name had come from. Uitkyk. In English, Lookout.

  They reached the summit and Deneys’s heart turned to water. Nothing stirred. No sign of livestock; no smoke from the chimney; no dogs barking at the strangers. Before he turned the corner of the building he knew what he would find.

  Like all the rest, Uitkyk had been burned to the ground.

  A one-armed doll, lying abandoned.

  Deneys sat his horse and stared at the ruins. Thought of the days of happiness, achievement and sorrow burned up in the flames. Of people’s lives. All gone now. Nothing but a broken doll lying in the mud.

  Dominic spurred his horse to Deneys’s side. Stared with hating eyes. ‘The Lord shall redeem Jerusalem, is it? Can you look at that and tell me you believe a word of it?’

  ‘I have to believe it,’ Deneys protested. But felt himself lost in saying it. ‘There has to be a resurrection, surely?’

  ‘I’ll give them resurrection. “I shall visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation,”’ Dominic said. ‘That’s what I believe. And, God willing, I intend to be alive to see it.’

  After dark Deneys rode into Lydenburg. There was no moon but the stars were bright and, from the top of a neighbouring hill, he looked down at the thatched buildings straggling along the solitary dirt street. A church gable gleamed white. An owl called, otherwise there was no sound. Lydenburg lay still under the stars.

  He left the horse and stole softly down the hill into the town. Not softly enough. A dog barked furiously. A door opened and a rectangle of light leapt across the dust. Deneys drew back.

  ‘Who is it?’ A man’s voice, sharp with fear. The Dutch words stabbed the night.

  Deneys walked forward, making sure his empty hands were in plain view.

  ‘What do you want?’ The voice had gone up a notch.

  ‘I am enquiring about Anneliese van der Merwe,’ Deneys said, ‘of the farm Uitkyk.’

  ‘Not here.’

  The door was closing.

  ‘I thought you might know where she was.’

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘Her brother.’

  ‘Her brother?’ The man’s expression changed. He looked quickly up and down the street. ‘In
side with you, man. Quick.’

  The house was small and open to the thatch. Dung floor, bits and pieces of furniture, a door leading presumably to another room. A few sticks burned in the hearth, a black cauldron hung from a hook. Beside the fire a woman, staring. The man locked the door. Dragging his right foot, he limped into the middle of the room. He was stockily-built, about Deneys’s age, with a bitter, brooding look about the eyes. His collarless shirt was grubby, dark hair unkempt; he looked like someone who had lost all respect for himself.

  ‘You are mad to come here.’ Wet lips gleamed in the firelight. ‘This place is alive with Tommies.’

  ‘I know about Tommies,’ Deneys said. ‘I have killed a few in my time.’

  Bravado was not his way, but the man’s fear was like a sickness in the room and it was necessary.

  ‘I came to ask about my sister, that’s all.’

  ‘The farm is burnt,’ the woman said.

  ‘I know. I have come from there.’

  ‘All the farms are burnt,’ the man told him. ‘We live dangerously in these parts.’

  Deneys looked at him. ‘Not only here. There is not one farm standing between here and Pretoria.’

  The man glared suspiciously. ‘If you are Anneliese van der Merwe’s brother, you ride with Lammers.’

  ‘Lammers is far from here. I am alone.’

  ‘We want no commandos in Lydenburg.’

  ‘I am not even armed.’ He had a pistol under his coat and a knife in his belt, but never mind.

  ‘They shoot people for sheltering Boer fighters.’

  Deneys was sick of it. ‘If you can tell me about my sister, good. Otherwise, I’ll be on my way.’

  The woman came forward from the fire. Her dark skirts brushed the floor. ‘Not until you’ve eaten.’

  ‘That won’t be necessary.’

  ‘It is necessary. My man is right,’ she said, speaking as though he were not in the room, ‘they have shot people for less. But you will not go through that door until you have eaten.’