Keepers of the House

by JH Fletcher

  ‘Not for those who still wage war.’

  ‘No one in the valley is doing that.’

  Hardcastle cracked his crop down on the surface of the table. ‘Are you saying it was an accident? A man, his wife and two children all burned to death? We know how you Boers hate the National Scouts. If anyone in this valley killed the Hennings because of politics … or for revenge …’ Casually he said, ‘I was sorry to hear that Mrs van der Merwe’s two children died at Koffiekraal.’ He stood, tapping his crop against the side of his boot. ‘I shall question her later. And the other members of your household. In the meantime, I shall pursue my enquiries in the valley.’

  And was gone. Strutting.

  ‘Not many years ago, I’d have seen him off at the end of my gun,’ Christiaan said. ‘If he thinks he’s going to question your mother —’

  ‘He will question whoever he likes.’

  Christiaan looked his son up and down. ‘That damned war did something to you.’

  ‘They call it realism. We can’t stop them. If we try, they’ll send troops. And the Hennings are dead, after all.’

  ‘I will not believe your sister had anything to do with that.’

  ‘She did it all right. I’ve spoken to Riordan. They did it together.’

  Christiaan shook his head, shaken into an appalled silence. His own daughter … But practical considerations had to come first.

  ‘This Riordan … Will he keep his mouth shut?’

  ‘He will. It’s his neck, too. But I’m not sure about that woman of his.’ He told his father how he had tried to frighten Miriam into holding her tongue.

  ‘Hardcastle will frighten her, too,’ Christiaan said.

  ‘I know. And there’s another thing …’

  Until he had met the Inspector, it had not occurred to him that the authorities wanted not a culprit but a victim. If it were expedient to blame Deneys or his sister or Dominic Riordan for the murders, they would do it. Hang them, if they felt like it, as a reminder of who was running the country. Proof was unimportant; proof could be fabricated.

  He told Christiaan his fears.

  ‘They would never do it.’

  ‘A man like Hardcastle?’

  Again Christiaan shook his head. In his world they had sorted out their own problems. The five convicts they had hanged because they would not waste bullets on murderers … But those days were gone. He turned troubled eyes to his son.

  ‘What do we do?’

  ‘Hardcastle knows I had nothing to do with it. Anneliese and Riordan are a different story.’

  ‘Who cares about Riordan? They can hang him, for all I care. We had no trouble until he came here.’

  ‘And have him say it was all our idea?’ Deneys shook his head. ‘That won’t do. We shall have to get them both away.’

  THIRTEEN

  To go and yet to stay. A mystery.

  Everyone knew that Inspector Hardcastle and his men were sneaking about, poking their noses here, asking questions there. It was only a matter of time before they picked up some word or other, but Anneliese cared no longer.

  By morning they would be gone. Yet only in part.

  All along she had been telling herself how she hated the valley, felt only contempt for those who’d had things too easy in their lives. Yet, in truth, she knew she would never leave it.

  Deneys would be coming for them soon, when it was dark. ‘I can’t promise I can get you away,’ he had warned them.

  He would; she could feel it. She didn’t know how he had managed to arrange things so quickly but, somehow or other, it was done. Doors had been opened, eyes closed with money. To Cape Town first, then on board a steamer that would carry them to a place in Australia called, she had been told, Fremantle.

  An English name. Even now she wondered whether she was right to go, to banish herself to this far country of which she had neither knowledge nor feeling. And Dominic … What was he to her? A lover from whom she made a battlefield. The battle was over; now that she had no need for him, she had discovered it was impossible to be rid of him.

  Deneys had explained to her why he had to go, too; if he stayed, he might pin blame on the rest of the family.

  Anneliese had been horrified. ‘But that means I shall be stuck with him forever.’

  Deneys’s face had been grim. ‘You should have thought of that.’

  ‘Cut his throat, he won’t say anything.’ But she knew that gentle Deneys would sacrifice her long before he would do such a thing.

  ‘No choice,’ he told her.

  He was wrong. There was always a choice. Even now, she could go or she could stay. Stay and be hanged, admittedly, but still a choice. She watched through the window, seeing not the gathering darkness but the slow unfolding of the years.

  Darkness like a cloak, the lamps in the house turning yellow, the air with a sting of ice. Steam rising from the men and horses gathered before the stoep. Her father reading from the Book. The sharp clatter of hooves as the men spur away. One thing out of so many.

  Another: The slow, tender, stiff-boned courting of the farmer from far away. The wedding. The coming together of the flesh in apprehension, pain, finally in wonderment. The act of departure, eager for the future, yet sad for what would be left behind. The sadness showing itself, despite her efforts. Her mother saying, ‘A woman’s destiny …’ She, who had expected never to be alone again in her life, lonely and apprehensive because of it, wondering why.

  The huge, dusty veld stretching like a golden shield beneath a sky of sapphire, the cold mountain streams where they outspanned their wagon. Besides which, for the first time, she thought she might come to love her husband after all.

  Children’s faces.

  Death and more death, hatred providing a bitter focus to a life that had ceased to be a life at all.

  Now this.

  ‘We are going to Australia.’ Anneliese said it aloud, tasting the words. They meant nothing. What had Australia to do with her? At first she had refused to consider it. It was Dominic who had talked her round.

  ‘We shall be safe there. Australia’s a good country. I’ve parents, a sister, Dana. You’ll like her. We’ll be able to make something of our lives. Something for us and for the future. Together we shall conquer the world, you’ll see.’

  ‘Under an English king?’

  ‘Sure, and why not? If you come with me, if we stay together …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We’ll raise our children to spit in the king of England’s eye.’

  Children in Australia. And she had thought Lydenburg far. Yet still he had not found the words to turn the key.

  ‘Is that why you want us to go? To save our necks?’

  ‘We’d be fools not to. But that’s not the only reason. Put all this behind us, we’ll be able to forget the fear and hatred. Get on with our lives together.’

  ‘Is that what you want? For us to be together?’

  ‘If you do.’

  Did she?

  This man whom she hardly knew, whom she seemed to have known forever. In him she saw everything she had lost in her own life. Things that only now, in the moment of losing them, she realised she had had.

  The opportunity for freedom. Without fear, as Dominic had said. Without hatred. Could there be such a place on earth?

  Dominic had made her realise that freedom was not only possible but desirable, if one could bear the responsibility and the pain of freedom.

  She remembered hearing how an escaped prisoner had climbed high into the mountains until at last he had come to a precipice. The dogs were close behind him and he had launched himself into the air as though to fly to freedom. At the time she had thought how foolish he was. Now she understood that he had succeeded, that he had found freedom by doing it.

  They would hurl themselves into the yielding air. In hope of freedom. Together.

  So be it. The key turned. The lock creaked open.

  Deneys came, with horses, after dark.

 
‘There’s no need for you to be bothering yourself on our account …’ Dominic blustering, putting muscles in his voice to show the world how much of a man he was.

  Deneys wasted no time arguing. ‘If I don’t come with you, you’ll never get away.’

  And that was that.

  There was no knowing whether Hardcastle and his men would be on the lookout, even at nine-thirty at night, so all three of them held their breath until they had followed the winding road up to the pass and the valley was lost behind them. Ahead lay the world and emptiness. Anneliese felt very small, very lonely, but had come to accept there was no other choice open to them. She would not have undone what she had done, would have done it again a hundred times over to assuage the ache of sorrow and anger that still weighed her down, far heavier than the loss of home, kin and the life she might have had.

  The valley gone, they increased pace. The rhythm of the hooves beat its knuckles against the darkness. Deneys rode with his legs long in the stirrups. Dominic was no horseman but out of necessity became a jockey, riding hunch-shouldered in the saddle, lurching up and down, elegant as a bucket of rubbish in a dray, yet clinging on somehow, cursing in monotonous undertone until Deneys told him to shut it.

  Dawn saw them out of the mountains and halfway across the flats. They rested for a while under an isolated exclamation of thorn trees. The sun came up and all of a sudden there were shadows, miles long, pointing their dark fingers in the direction they had to go.

  They rode on in rising heat, the only living things in a vastness where the air shimmered and mirages, copper-tinted, stalked the middle distance. Behind them the sun climbed higher, overtook them and began its western slant. They reached the outskirts of the city at dusk. Lights pricked out of purple haze as they entered a long street set with buildings. Deneys led them to a house where they were admitted without argument or delay.

  A young woman, silent, with eyes that avoided them, served a meal. Anneliese could not eat. Her heart was devastated, as though the fire that had devoured the Hennings had raged there too, leaving nothing but ashes and a terrible, brooding stillness. She was so tired she could have wept but sat silently, the food grown cold before her, her chin challenging the future. At her side, Dominic golloped everything that was put before him.

  Eventually it was time. For the first time the woman spoke.

  ‘Be careful,’ she warned Deneys. ‘They have patrols everywhere, particularly near the docks.’

  They went out, muffled to the eyes against the nip wind, but her heavy cloak could not warm Anneliese against the cold of imminent departure. She saw the glint of water, silver-shod beneath a rising moon, and almost hoped they would be stopped while there was still time. To make an end of things beneath the shadow of the mountain, vast and silent against a rime of stars, representing all she had known and that now was fleeing from her forever. If they were captured it would be the end of them, no doubt, but at least it would be here, in her own land which at that moment was vastly preferable to the unknown country that awaited her beyond an infinity of salt miles.

  She wondered how she would be able to bear the fact of going but rode on, caught in the inexorable rhythms of departure that now had taken over her life.

  They reached the wharf without trouble. It lay, silent and deserted, before them. There were vessels tied up here and there, hawsers taut as bars in the faint lamplight. The shapes of warehouses were dark along the water’s edge. She could hear the slop of waves against the piers.

  The ship they wanted was a hundred yards away, its gangway down. The Star of Erin. No doubt Dominic would regard that as a good omen. Lanterns gleamed.

  ‘We’ll leave the horses here.’

  ‘Thank God for that.’ Dominic’s voice breathed in the darkness.

  Their footsteps echoed from the buildings as they walked along the quay. A hundred men could be hiding in the shadows and they would never see them. Anneliese could smell her own sweat, taste fear like copper in her throat.

  Deneys stayed with them, walking tall at her side. At one time she had been willing to hate him, calling him traitor because he had been against what they had done, had been blind to her need for violence to still the clamour of her lost children. Yet he had proved himself a good man, despite all. He was getting rid of them to save his own neck, no doubt, but perhaps not for that reason alone.

  They reached the gangway. The ship’s engine rumbled softly amid a hint of steam and coal. A shadowy figure advanced from the shadow of the bridge, if bridge it were. Anneliese’s heart bounced sickeningly.

  ‘Mr Wolmarans?’

  Deneys said, ‘Yes?’

  Both of them whispering, with good reason, while Anneliese and Dominic watched. Eventually the man turned to them. ‘Go aboard, please.’

  Dominic scurried up the gangway, wasting no time. Anneliese went to follow — the last time I shall feel Africa beneath my feet, she thought — when Deneys stopped her, his hand on her arm.

  She looked at him, saw his anguished expression.

  ‘For God’s sake, why?’ His words like bubbles burst painfully in the darkness. ‘How could you do such a thing?’

  ‘You know why! Because he was a Scout.’

  ‘Not Henning. Riordan.’

  What could she say? It had been an act of rebellion, a determination to strike out against her past. She had embraced her unknown future in the body of the Irishman. Whom she did not love, who was equally unknown to her.

  It was too hard to explain. Kinder that Deneys should believe she had done it for love. That he might learn to forgive, in time. The other … Never.

  She said, ‘Because I wanted to.’

  Dominic and the seaman were waiting at the head of the gangway. She placed her hand on Deneys’s arm. ‘I must go …’

  He nodded. They embraced. These arms. This still-hard body. He stood back, relinquishing her to the unknown. The moment of parting had brought them close for the first time since her return to Oudekraal. He said no more but his silence said it all.

  Head high, not looking back, Anneliese picked her way up the steep gangplank. As soon as she was on board, the seaman guided them along a narrow corridor redolent of smoke and fried food. He opened a door. ‘Captain Evans’ compliments and will you please remain in the cabin until we’re at sea?’

  The door closed behind them. They were in darkness. She sensed Dominic’s presence beside her but made no attempt to speak, to touch him.

  They waited as stiff as statues for what seemed hours, the hull vibrating softly beneath their feet. A sudden increase in engine noise. Voices. A clang and crash. The cabin swayed. She sensed the vessel drawing away from the quay. She took a deep breath.

  Safe, at last.

  FOURTEEN

  Anna and Mark sat facing each other, separated not only by the spilled crumbs and stains of food but by the memories of the people they had once been and now were not.

  Anna studied him surreptitiously. His eyes were still blue but beneath them the skin was shadowed, with tired creases. His irises, once as white as porcelain, a brilliant glare in his tanned face, were now tinged with yellow, a hint of red at the corners.

  Age. She was vain enough to wonder what he saw when he looked at her. She, too, had aged. Thirteen years, after all. Thirteen action-packed years, as Mostyn’s wretched Trumpet would no doubt say. It didn’t seem like it.

  They both had crazy schedules, did not have time to sit over a lunch that had already taken a sizeable chunk of the afternoon. Yet neither of them suggested leaving. Instead ordered more coffee, dawdling deliberately, exchanging desultory talk about this and that. No dewy eyes, no hearts going pit-a-pat; neither of them was of the age or temperament for such nonsense. Yet, undeniably, things had gone well between them. They had discovered that resentment, at last, had been eroded by the years. They might see each other again, they might not; for the moment, it didn’t matter. What did matter was that today they had come to safe harbour together, a peaceful moment in liv
es that for the most part had neither. It was comforting and unexpected and, for the moment, enough.

  Anna smiled at him across the table. His strong hand lay relaxed upon the cloth.

  ‘Still play tennis?’

  ‘When I get the time.’

  Inconsequential talk, comforting because of it. Like old friends; a long-married couple, even.

  She had believed in him so much, in them both.

  He believed she had fucked that black man.

  There. She had put it into words at last. She hated that bestial word, yet it was the right one. It was a bestial act that Mark imagined, with nothing of tenderness or goodness about it. He believed she had fucked the black man. In lust.

  So resentment still lingered, after all. Yet she too had done inexcusable things in her life, remembered one such episode now.

  As far back as she could remember, Tamsin Fitzgerald had wondered what it was about people’s names that sent a signal, not only to the world but to themselves, of what they really were.

  Three years before, in Year Seven, their form teacher — Mrs Rose Teakle, could you imagine it? — had spent a whole session explaining how important names were. Not only did they tell the world what to expect from the person who had the name; they could even change that person to suit the name they’d been given. Uriah Heep would have been a different person if his name had been Bob Smith. Totally weird, coming from someone they all called Treacle behind her back.

  All the same, Tamsin thought, there might be something in it. She stood before the mirror, trying to see behind her reflection. The face behind the face.

  Tamsin Fitzgerald. Different, you could say that. A bit of a ring to it. She rounded her lips, mouthing Tamsin … Her mouth was so close to the glass that her breath bloomed upon it. Tamsin Fitzgerald …

  It was no use. She hated it, hated the signal it sent to the world of who she was. No, not hated — despised, rather. She despised herself for having such a name.

  She thought of her father, Archer Fitzgerald, boozing in the back room he called his study, talking big as always when he had a load on. All the things he was going to do. One of these days. She wondered if he believed it himself. Certainly no one else did. She couldn’t imagine how her mother put up with it, the boozing, the tears and rages, the rags and mouse droppings of his dreams.