Keepers of the House

by JH Fletcher

  Come off, I’m dead.

  He did not come off but sensed rather than saw that the fire was raging its way through the forest on either side of him, the whole world changed to a roaring pit of heat and smoke and flame.

  He twisted in the saddle, looking back with frantic eyes. A curtain of fir blotted out the slope. Despite his speed, it was gaining on him. The very air blazed with heat.

  He came out of the forest like Captain Thunderbolt, the Noojie settlement ahead of him. Blazing.

  Somehow the fire had got there first. Dermot was cut off.

  ‘Agnes!’

  A despairing cry wrenched from lips blistered by heat. At least she would have had some notice, enough to get out in time. Nothing he could do, either way. He spun the terrified horse, seeking a way clear. Pillars of flame a hundred feet high surrounded him. There was no way out.

  There was the creek, a quarter of a mile away on the edge of the blazing township. If he could get there …

  He dug his heels into the horse’s flanks, rode frantically for the water across the advancing front of flame.

  Agnes was in the hut when old man Magilvray came running.

  ‘Bushfire!’

  He screeched the words at her, spraying spit and terror. ‘Get out while you can!’

  Was already on the move.

  Her own scream followed him. ‘Dermot’s with the cattle. What about Dermot?’

  For an instant Magilvray looked back. ‘Dermot gotta take his chance. Hang around here, you’ll burn up, too.’

  And was gone, running pell-mell while flames roared skywards above the trees beyond the creek.

  ‘Where …?’

  Too late. She was alone, watching with appalled eyes the cavalry charge of the fire. Magilvray was right. Stay here, she would burn with the house. She fled towards the only refuge, the creek’s deepwater pool a hundred yards distant.

  She made it by inches. Magilvray was there and a handful of others. Their faces were so blackened by smuts that at first she didn’t recognise the Hudsons, a woodcutter and his family. She crouched in the water as the flames roared up to the bank. She took a deep breath, dragging heat and ash as well as air into her lungs, ducked her head beneath the surface. Had a blurred impression of flames arching high across the creek, leaping the water as the wind tore the fire from its moorings and flung it fifty, a hundred, two hundred yards into the forest on the far side.

  A roar, diminishing. An endless patter of debris sifting down from a sky black with smoke and cinders. A searing heat that raised the temperature of the creek until Agnes thought they would all be boiled alive.

  On either bank twigs and branches blazed in individual conflagrations, the flames contracting at length into a core of ash and glowing embers. Ruin, as far as they could see.

  Twenty yards from the bank a tangled heap of blackened branches.

  After a night in the creek, waiting for the ground to cool enough for them to walk upon it, Magilvray, Agnes and the Hudson family emerged from the water. In the aftermath of the fire they were cold, arms wrapped about their shivering bodies as they drifted like ghosts through a landscape of ghosts. With the trees gone the sky seemed to rest upon their heads. Charred stumps patterned the slopes as far as they could see.

  They discovered that the tangled heap of branches was in fact the unidentifiable remnants of a horse and man. Twenty yards from safety.

  Agnes, responding to some unspeaking instinct, knew.

  Forest, home, man. All gone.

  Two days later, trudging alone through a forest where wisps of acrid smoke still clung to the devastated ground, Agnes set out to walk to the only sanctuary that remained.

  Somehow, wits scrambled in her head by the fire, by Dermot’s death, she found her way up a winding track into the high country. Found a horse fair at a settlement in the forest. Met a man, tall, massive-chested, with a tangled white beard and glittering eagle’s eye. Her scrambled wits remembered him, hazily. When the time came she went with him without complaint.

  Carmel has been dead for years, yet always Agnes hears her voice, the endless recitation of history and abuse with which, in her lifetime, she had bruised Agnes’ ears:

  I have seen the vision; the world will end not in fire, but water. There will be rain, months of rain, pouring from clouds that will not be emptied. The distant seas will rise and the rivers, drowning the land as in the days of the Nephilim, a great flood to drown the summits of even these high hills. Paddocks and trees will be gone, horses and farm animals and all wild beasts. Man himself will be gone.

  Thus comes the Deluge.

  The vision gives me the strength to endure the daily burdens that the Lord has laid upon me in this place, far from consolation.

  It is a harsh land; in winter the snow and wind are cruel, setting fangs of ice deep within the bones of those who must endure them. Few can. Families drift into the district, planning to make a go of it, but only a handful live out the first winter. With the spring, even they are gone. You need to be flint to survive here, I am married to a man of flint and have learned from him how to endure.

  My husband, with his bull-like body, is a man of the soil with all the passions of the soil, a voice to quell the tempest. Were it not sacrilege, I would swear that when he stands four-square upon the earth these very mountains quake beneath his weight. He holds all — land, animals, myself — in hands that from the first filled me with loathing and a queer, sick fascination that I was helpless to subdue.

  On our wedding night, they wrenched the garments from my back. I, shrinking, angry at God that He should permit me to be so abused, the anger a sin for which I have ever since made daily penance. I am not yet forgiven, must wait for that as I have had to wait for all things, all my life.

  The hands were huge, clad with black hairs like wire; they handled me like the property I had become. I clenched my knees together, not in fear but anger. I knew it would avail me nothing but, by making him fight for what he had bought — three horses to my father, a keg of spirits of which he himself drank most, a shilling to the priest, that mewling man — I hoped to deny him his pleasure, at least.

  I failed, as I have failed in my dealings with Jack Riordan all my life. He prised apart my legs with his great knees, his weight crushed me, I lay with frozen face and body awaiting the assault. Which, when it came, split me with its ferocity, its heat. I bit my lip, denying not pain or indignity but the wave of pleasure that arose unbidden within my treacherous body.

  I would not let him see it; in my secret depths I was happy that my frigidity troubled him.

  ‘It is your duty, girl,’ he told me.

  So it is, and my duty I shall perform. Nowhere in the teachings is there any word of pleasure. By denying that to us both, I work my revenge on a life that has treated me so.

  God himself cannot deny that I have done my duty.

  Two children born in the suffering that is woman’s lot, in this kingdom of icy winds and loneliness. Both lost to me. A grandchild conceived in lust, born in pain and death, also lost. Before Dermot left, I read his future in his face: a life of sorrow; a death alone in torment and in fear.

  The Lord’s will be done.

  I have endured much.

  The African woman who beguiled my son, plunging him and all of us into the steaming vats of hell. Could she imagine I did not know what was happening in my own house?

  I smelt my husband on her, that animal stench of rut and heat that I have such reason to know. I could see from the lazy glow in her eyes how he had pleasured her. My son’s father. To abomination there is no end.

  They went and I was thankful. Routine, my saviour, returned.

  Years later, my grandson returned. I did not know him, felt nothing. With him was a young woman. This family is cursed by its appetites. They stayed only briefly. After they had gone, I returned once again to the loneliness that I had learned to welcome.

  After the devastation of the great fire, my husband went to a horse fai
r over the mountain. When he returned, he brought with him the same woman who had come here with Dermot. The fire had scattered her brains, as it did to many. I had forgotten her name, but eventually persuaded her to tell me. Agnes. She thought she was seventeen years old. She could not tell me what had happened, only that Dermot was gone. Burned up in the fire, I suppose.

  Agnes had become simple, her head filled with the flutter of birds’ wings. I have read somewhere that the simple person is closest to God, in which case the wings might have been those of angels. St Agnes was the saint of chastity, but this one’s body was not the body of a saint. Lush as grass in spring, the hollows and hills, the well to drown a man’s senses.

  She would walk half-naked about the house, the ivory glint of breast and thigh, yet demurely, completely unashamed.

  I shut my eyes to her body, the heat in my husband’s face. He was old, yet still lustful. I told myself it was another burden laid upon me by God. I would accept it with humility, I would spread myself before the Lord as Agnes spread herself before my husband. The passion of my submission drowned her cries, the triumphant bull-bellow of the man savouring his animal pleasure.

  What he did was wickedness, and the Lord smote him, bringing down the evildoer.

  He had been down the valley to sell horses. A man there saw the mob he brought in and laid claim to one of them. My husband laughed but the man ran to the constable, who had had trouble from Jack Riordan in the past.

  The troopers came after him and he got away only by riding through their line, the bullets whistling about his ears. He rode up here to safety. None of them dared follow; we could have held off an army and would, put to the test. Escape or not, he brought with him the seeds of his own destruction.

  That night he was taken by a seizure of the brain. Blood ran from his mouth and his eyes rolled up. I ran to him, as was my duty, but there was nothing I could do. By morning he was dead. I washed the body while Agnes cowered in a corner, calling to the Lord in terror. I silenced her, slapping her until she fell, crawling away from me, moaning.

  ‘Listen to me, Agnes.’

  To begin with, she would not, forcing me to chastise her again. Eventually, when she was silent, I told her what we would do.

  It took two days for the troopers to muster sufficient courage to come up here after him. I met them at the door, rifle in hand.

  Trooper Flanagan, as Irish as myself, eyed it. ‘Not thinking of using it, missus?’

  ‘If you’re come for my husband,’ I told him, ‘You’re too late.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘How should I be knowing where he is? He rode out of here two days gone and I’ve seen neither hair nor hide of him since.’

  ‘Questions needing to be asked,’ said he. ‘About horses.’

  I stared him down. ‘Ask him yourself about that.’

  ‘So I shall, missus, so I shall, you’ve Bob Flanagan’s word for that. As soon as we catch up with him.’ He smoothed his moustache with his finger, eyes prowling over my face. ‘You’ll not object if we look around?’

  ‘Look as much as you like. You’ll not be finding him here.’

  Nor did they. They found the girl in the shed but got nothing out of her; she was too frightened of me for that.

  When Flanagan came back to the house, I could see that he was intrigued by the girl’s presence. ‘Who is she?’

  ‘A poor wight we took out of pity,’ I told him. ‘She helps me about the place.’

  I could see he had his own thoughts about that. ‘When your husband comes back, tell him I want a word with him.’

  ‘I shall not. You want him, tell him so yourself.’

  After I’d seen Flanagan’s back, I went into the forest, to the place where we had buried my husband. I stared down at the grave. I told him, ‘The Lord has delivered you into my hand at last. Forty years I have been your prisoner. Now you are mine, as the girl is mine. I am the instrument of God. I shall rain down sulphur upon her as did the Lord in the days of Sodom. In tormenting her I shall earn forgiveness for you and for herself. In her suffering I too shall suffer and so wipe away the sins that have stained my heart also.’

  I went back to the house. The door to the shed was open but the girl was still inside, frightened of disobeying me. I had thought to drive her into the forest, to live or die as the Lord wished, but now I changed my mind. I was getting old. It was time for me to take things easy at last. Agnes would stay here and do the work that had to be done. She would eat what I chose to give her. Her looks would fade, but we would be company for each other. When the mood took me, I would lead her to my husband’s grave. There I would strip her naked, so that he could see the body that he once enjoyed and that now was mine. All this place mine at last. Even the ice and the wind would be mine.

  The two of us will stay here until I die. From me she will learn the mortification of the flesh that is the true road to salvation. When I am dead, she will weep for me, for I shall have been the rod to sustain her in the wilderness and without me she will surely perish.

  As for the police … I shall not give them the satisfaction of knowing their search is over.

  The Lord’s will be done.

  Both circles rounded at last, Anneliese agreed to go on. They left Agnes to her silence, the stillness of the wind, and travelled west.

  After several weeks on the road, they arrived at the rotting house, the yard overgrown with weeds, that became their home.

  A few years later, Archer’s father died and left him a little money. Enough to survive in poverty, to kindle the grandiose flames that were to illuminate his imagination ever afterwards. Anneliese had been seventy, but not old. Now she grew old amid the empty clatter of Archer’s dreams.

  Rëen and Archer had one child, Tamsin. In her heart, Anneliese knew that the child would be the answer to her secret hopes.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Anna had been back in Australia a week when, to her astonishment, she was invited to a reception at the South African High Commission.

  She had a million things on her desk — extraordinary how they piled up as soon as your back was turned — and her first impulse was to refuse. In the end she changed her mind, her instinct telling her that it might be important.

  It was the usual toffee affair: one or two people she knew, half a hundred more she didn’t, most of them obvious members of the diplomatic cocktail circus. She wondered why she’d come. Then the High Commissioner, a distinguished-looking Afrikaner of the old school, grey-haired, imposing moustache, buttonholed her and she knew.

  ‘I understand you have acquired an interest in a wine farm in the Cape?’

  ‘Your Excellency is well informed.’

  ‘I like to keep in touch.’

  ‘In which case you will know that all I’ve done is take over the debt. I have no interest in the property as such.’

  The Commissioner chewed his moustache along with the notion that she could control the debt but not the property. ‘The wine industry is of great importance to the new South Africa. If we are to compete successfully in world markets, our wines have to be up to international standards. Some estates are going to need a great deal of capital. More, I would say, than they will be able to raise locally.’

  Anna knew when to say nothing; she said nothing now.

  ‘Are you planning to expand Oudekraal?’

  ‘You will have to ask its owner.’

  The Commissioner played with his wine glass, smiling benignly. But watching.

  ‘There are those in the new South Africa, men of influence, who hold certain views regarding the distribution of land. They believe that justice will best be served if certain properties are re-allocated. For the benefit of the community, you understand. There has been special mention of farms that lack adequate capital resources.’

  ‘Even where they produce award-winning wines?’

  He ignored the question, pursuing his own train of thought.

  ‘At present there are two words on peo
ple’s lips. Expansion and centralisation.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Expansion means that the industry has the potential to become a major hard-currency earner for the country. Naturally, it must grow if it is to meet the demands of the overseas market.’

  ‘And centralisation?’

  ‘There are those who feel that such expansion should be monitored centrally. To ensure the effective allocation of capital resources, you understand.’

  ‘Surely a man should be free to run his property as he likes?’

  It was a principle that the Commissioner was unwilling to concede. ‘The interests of the State must always come first.’

  Anna selected an olive from a tray offered by a white-uniformed steward. She nibbled thoughtfully until he was out of earshot.

  ‘Is this discussion official?’

  A frosty smile. ‘Extremely unofficial.’

  ‘Then why are we having it?’

  ‘I understand that your ex-husband has expressed an interest in acquiring Oudekraal.’

  She smiled. ‘I never know where these rumours come from.’

  ‘I have known Pieter Wolmarans all my life,’ the Commissioner said.

  ‘In which case you also know that Pieter kicked him out.’

  ‘Then, perhaps. But my information is that Mr Harcourt is still interested in acquiring the property. That he has gone so far as to retain a land agent to assist him.’

  ‘That won’t help him if Pieter isn’t willing to sell.’

  ‘Those who support the principle of centralisation are aware that a high level of expertise is needed to run the industry successfully,’ the Commissioner told her.

  ‘There are plenty of experts in South Africa.’

  ‘Not all with the capital resources that will be needed. Besides, to the people I mentioned, a foreigner might be more acceptable politically than a South African. Mr Harcourt is well known for his involvement in the international wine industry. To those people he might seem a logical choice.’