A Flower for the Queen: A Historical Novel

by Caroline Vermalle

  “Good evening, Doctor Thunberg. I hope we haven’t interrupted your nap?” Schelling said with more than an edge of malice.

  “As an amateur botanist, Mr Schelling, I find the study of the sexual reproductive system is best effected by taking one’s time, lying down and committing one’s self wholly to the task.” He paused and smiled before continuing. “Of course, if I were as busy as your good self, I might only be able to spare a moment or two, but then, what would be the pleasure in that?”

  Schelling’s smile was erased from his face as Thunberg continued “Take this Mesembryanthemum cordifolium. Incredible, really. The locals call it the Rose of Jericho. It can last months, years even, lying in the desert, keeping itself closed off from the elements and the world, its secrets safe and sound within. But with just the right kind of persuasion, with just one drop of water …” He dipped his finger into Willmer’s teacup and let fall a drop of liquid onto the star-shaped husk. It unfurled almost immediately to reveal bright yellow seeds at its centre, giving the fruit the appearance of a small sun. “… It can be opened up, revealing all that is within.”

  With a wink to Masson, Thunberg dropped the now open fruit into Willmer’s teacup and sauntered off towards the house without another word. Willmer made as if to follow after him, but Schelling held him back.

  “So, Mr Masson,” Schelling asked, trying to shift attention away from Thunberg’s performance and changing the subject. “Tell me, do you have any idea where you are likely to find this flower of yours?”

  “I have been told to look near Muyssenberg on the shores of False Bay,” Masson replied.

  Willmer and Schelling exchanged looks, and then Willmer snorted derisively. “Good luck, then. Foreigners aren’t allowed anywhere near there.”

  “Why is that?” Masson asked, curious. This was the second time that his intention to go to False Bay had elicited an unexpected reaction.

  “Mr Willmer is right,” Schelling said in a slightly hushed tone. “There is indeed an edict prohibiting foreigners from travelling too close to the shore of False Bay. But if you’re with me, you’re not a foreigner. You’ll find that’s generally how things work here.” Schelling took another sip of tea as he allowed the information to sink in.

  But Masson was not so sure. “Mr Schelling, I am exceedingly grateful for the friendship you’re bestowing upon me, but I don’t want to inconvenience you. I am rather pressed for time and I had expected to travel alone.”

  Schelling laughed. “You still have a lot to learn about Africa, Mr Masson. Haste is not a concept that has much meaning here, and a man alone, well, he simply won’t survive. But I understand your wish not to keep His Majesty waiting, and so I am more than willing to place my not inconsiderable expertise at your disposal. Surely you would not deny me the opportunity to contribute to the pleasure of our King?”

  Once again, Schelling placed an offer before Masson that he could not refuse. If False Bay was out of bounds, then getting consent from the authorities would either be impossible or costly and would serve only to slow him down. Here was Schelling offering everything he needed on a silver platter. Perhaps he really could be home in time for Christmas.

  He nodded his agreement, and Schelling beamed. He turned his gaze once again to Thunberg, who was now deep in conversation with the Governor. “It’s arranged,” he said, not taking his eyes off the scene on the veranda. “Mr Willmer and I will pick you up tomorrow morning at sunrise and chaperone you to False Bay so that you may find this flower of yours.”

  With the star-shaped fruit bobbing on the surface of his unfinished tea, Masson saw that Willmer was also staring at Thunberg.

  Schelling smiled before asking with more than a trace of mischief, “Some more tea, Mr Willmer?”

  CHAPTER 18

  As Masson stood on the veranda of the undertaker’s house, he found his gaze returning, as it always seemed to, to the mountain that towered above the town.

  The light here was unbelievably bright compared to what he was used to at home, and he was sure that even at this distance, he could discern the individual leaves and yellow and orange blooms of the numerous species of aloes or the bright red blood flowers, all of which clung to the sandstone cliffs. It was as if someone had lifted scales from his eyes and the world somehow had a clearer, sharper focus.

  He had seen no further sign of Forster, but a messenger had delivered the promised report with a note from Cook thanking Masson and wishing him a productive stay in the Cape.

  Rather than leaving the report in his room, he secreted it alongside Banks’s sketch in a pocket at the back of the journal that Constance had given him as a going-away present. With the documents well hidden, he then packed the journal into a tote, along with the rest of his collecting equipment, for the journey to False Bay.

  At the sound of approaching hooves, Masson came out of his room to find Willmer arriving on horseback, leading a second horse that was saddled but had no rider. The Dutchman stopped and raised his hat to bid Masson good morning.

  Masson returned the gesture and then looked up and down the street, but he could see no sign of Schelling. He picked up the tote and approached Willmer, squinting as he looked up at the rider silhouetted against the bright blue sky.

  “Will Mr Schelling be joining us later?” he asked.

  “Mr Schelling had some last-minute affairs to attend to, so he asked me to accompany you and act as your guide instead, if that is agreeable to you?”

  Seeing Masson hesitate, Willmer pressed on. “It’s about half a day’s ride and it’s going to be very warm today, so we should get moving.”

  Masson looked up again and saw clouds starting to build on the horizon. Willmer followed his gaze and shook his head with a wry smile. “Don’t let that bit of cloud fool you, Mr Masson. The mountain can play a few tricks, and Mr Schelling wouldn’t forgive me if you ended up in the Company’s Hospital with heat stroke — you’d probably come out with something much worse!”

  Masson pulled himself onto the horse easily enough as Willmer passed him the reins. The other man explained with a grin, “Now remember, Mr Masson, this is a Cape horse, so it only understands Dutch.”

  “I don’t speak Dutch,” Masson replied, his brow creasing into a concerned frown.

  “Luck is on your side, then,” Willmer replied. “‘Stop’ is the same in both languages!” He chuckled as he gave his horse a kick and moved off at a gentle trot, with Masson following close behind.

  As the two riders approached the edge of town, they came to a dense hedge of trees, with long, thick branches covered in white flowers. “Brabejum stellatifolium,” Masson exclaimed. “I’ve never seen ones as large as this. But why have so many been planted? I thought the nuts were poisonous.”

  “They are. Jan van Riebeeck, the founder of Cape Town, planted this hedge over a hundred years ago to keep the Hottentots out when he first settled the colony.”

  “Hottentots?” asked Masson.

  “Natives, Mr Masson. The one thing we are blessed with in this part of the world,” Willmer said drily, “is a bounteous abundance of natives. We’ve almost managed to beat them from our front door, but the Governor in his infinite wisdom has decreed that we may not enslave a single one of them.”

  “But in town …” Masson said, confused at the memory of the shoeless figures he had seen traipsing behind the litters and wagons, dressed in animal hides, beads and primitive accoutrements.

  “Apart from the slaves captured from Portuguese slavers or brought from the Company’s far eastern colonies, they are free men, Mr Masson, all of them.” A sly grin crept over his face as he added, “Although you could say that their love of hemp or tobacco does almost as good a job as shackles. It’s not slavery as I know it, but one must adapt. Don’t you agree?”

  “Are you not afraid that they might rebel?” Masson asked.

  “Do you know what they call us?” Willmer asked. He answered his own question when Masson shook his head. “Umlungu. It means
the white scum that is left by a wave after it washes up on the shore. We are not even umuntu or ‘men’ in their eyes, but fortunately there are almost as many different tribes here as there are nations in Europe: Khoikhoi, Khoisan or Xhosa, and just like us they are too busy sparring amongst themselves to take notice of a few flecks of foam washed up on the beach. Not yet, anyway, and until that time comes, they are all just a bunch of Hottentots.”

  “So the hedge, does it work, does it keep them at bay?” Masson asked.

  Willmer just laughed. “I can see that you are an idealist. I, however, am just a practical man who believes in practical solutions, and all I will say is that we have made some progress since Mr van Riebeeck’s time.”

  As he finished speaking, Willmer gestured towards a number of metal cages that hung from the stoutest branches of one of the largest trees. Within the cages were the decomposing remains of human cadavers. Willmer smiled as he saw the shock on Masson’s face.

  “You see, Mr Masson, here in the Cape we believe in simple justice. If a slave rebels against his master or if a free man raises his hand against his employer, he is dealt with in a way that reminds everyone else exactly where they belong and what they are here for.”

  “And what are we here for, exactly, Mr Willmer?” asked Masson, trying not to retch as the stink of the corpses infiltrated his nostrils.

  “To bring civilisation, of course, Mr Masson.” Willmer smiled and shook his head at the look of incredulity that had taken over Masson’s face. “So that nice, gentile men and women can make their homes, plant their gardens and grow their flowers without fear of being murdered in their beds.”

  After a short while, the track passed through the hedge and was blocked by a gate. Two men climbed down from the back of an uncovered cart where it appeared they had been dozing and did their best to stand to attention.

  “Burgher sentries. Don’t let their looks deceive you; they could shoot the eye out of a sparrow at fifty paces.” Willmer dismounted and walked up to them, greeting them in Dutch and laughing heartily before slapping one of them on the shoulder. While gesturing at Masson, Willmer pulled a sealskin pouch from his belt and offered it to the men, who took it gratefully.

  After more laughing and backslapping, Willmer came back to his horse. “Everything is fine. There have been reports of a band of marauding Hottentots, but we should be all right.”

  The two men continued on the track, which skirted east and then north around the base of Table Mountain. The vegetation as a whole was unlike anything Masson had seen before. Whilst he recognised many plants individually, to see them all together was a thrilling experience.

  They rode on, and once again their noses were assailed by the pungent smell of rotting flesh. Masson looked around, searching for more of the metal cages which he expected to be the source of the smell. He found none, but when his eyes settled on something in the brush a few yards off, he stopped his horse and without a word, jumped out of the saddle.

  “What is it, Mr Masson? Is it the flower?” asked Willmer.

  Masson did not reply as he pulled his father’s folding knife from his pocket and stepped purposefully towards a bush beside the track. But before he had gone even two paces, Masson heard the double click of a flint being pulled back into its fully cocked position, followed by Willmer’s calm but certain voice: “Turtle blood.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Masson closed his eyes as the shot sounded and waited for the sensation of the lead ball tearing through his body to reach his brain.

  But when nothing happened, he opened his eyes to see Willmer grimacing through a cloud of gunsmoke. The smell of cordite and sulphur mixed with that of scorched flesh left Masson puzzled as to why he felt no pain.

  Willmer dismounted and walked past Masson before reaching down into the brush and picking up the headless carcass of a snake about the length of Masson’s arm.

  “Turtle blood,” Willmer said again.

  “Sorry?” Masson asked, not quite understanding.

  “If one of these buggers gets to you,” the Dutchman said, “then all the turtle blood in the world won’t save you from a very slow and painful death. Now, my rifle on the other hand …” He smiled and shrugged. “You really should be more careful, Mr Masson. Mr Schelling was very keen that you get to False Bay in one piece, but perhaps you have found your flower already?”

  Masson looked down and saw that he was still holding his knife.

  “Oh, yes. I mean, no — it’s not the flower. It’s something else, something I’ve not seen before.”

  Masson turned and walked a few tentative steps into the bush, as if expecting to find more deadly creatures at every step. A rosette of fleshy leaves sprouted from a rock, supporting an enormous flower around which a number of flies were buzzing.

  “What’s this one called?” Willmer asked Masson, wrinkling his nose in disgust.

  “I don’t know,” Masson replied. “At least, it hasn’t been named yet. But it looks like a starfish that has climbed out of the sea, don’t you think?”

  “Ja, and it smells like it, too. Well, what are you going to call it?”

  “Who, me? Oh, no. I’m not qualified to name it,” said Masson as he carefully cut the flower from the leaves. “I can only classify it according to Linnaeus’s principles. I’ll have to send the sketches and a sample back to the gardens at Kew, and either Mr Aiton will name it or he’ll send it on to Doctor Linnaeus in Sweden.”

  “You mean it has to go all the way back to Europe just so that someone who has never even been here can tell us what to call it?”

  Masson shrugged and smiled as he collected his sample. He folded the knife and put it back in his pocket. “That’s science.”

  “Well, just so long as you keep science downwind!” Willmer barked as he spurred on his horse.

  Masson climbed back onto his horse and followed at a short distance until they came to a track that wound around the mountain and then headed south towards False Bay.

  The budding clouds Masson had seen building in the morning had failed to mature, burned off by the midday sun that beat down on them as they passed by the patchwork of farms and vineyards of Constantia. On the slopes that stretched out from the base of the mountain, the thatch-roofed farmhouses with their elaborate white gables looked down majestically as armies of slave labourers worked the land, attaching young vines to wooden pegs and forming them into straight lines or clipping off and replacing any that had not flourished.

  The riders paused for lunch under an enormous milkwood tree and whilst the horses were let free to graze, the men ate from the supplies that Willmer pulled from his saddlebags. They dined on apples, cured meat and rock-hard biscuits which they washed down with a sweet, rust-coloured tea that Willmer brewed from the leaves of a local bush that grew on the slopes of the mountain.

  After finishing his tea, Willmer settled himself against the trunk of the tree for a small siesta. Whilst Masson was keen to keep going, the Dutchman had explained that it was only fools and slaves that went about their work under the heat of the midday sun.

  As his guide dozed, Masson opened his journal and re-read the words that Constance had written on the first page: Mr Masson’s Botanical Travels in the Fair Cape. He proceeded to cover the first few pages with drawings of what he imagined the Queen’s flower might look like. Each drawing was annotated with questions that highlighted parts of the flower that were missing or unclear in Banks’s original sketch.

  As Willmer snored, he took from the hiding place in the rear sleeve of the journal Banks’ drawing of the flower and Cook’s report. He couldn’t help but notice that both the Queen’s flower and the one he had found were all sharp angles and vibrant colours — beautiful and yet somehow fierce at the same time — and he wondered if this collision of beauty and strength was an essential mixture that ensured survival in such a hostile environment.

  After catching his breath at the stench, he set the flower he had discovered on the ground and was abo
ut to begin drawing it when Willmer roused himself.

  They set off and as they passed from the western flank of the mountain to its eastern side, the natural vegetation was transformed from woody slopes into fynbosch or “slender forest”: a wild and varied heathland that comprised many small flowering shrubs and bushes with grasses in between.

  After a while, they began their descent to the coastal plain that rimmed False Bay, and the heathland in turn gave way to golden dunes covered by a carpet of varying tones of green dusted over by a dazzling array of small, multi-coloured flowers that stretched all the way along the bay in either direction.

  “Isn’t that something? I bet you don’t get anything like that in England, eh?” Willmer exclaimed as they stopped and looked out at the panorama of vibrant colours that had erupted in front of them.

  “No, we don’t,” Masson said, climbing down to get a closer look at what he felt sure was the treasure trove that Banks had promised.

  But his enthusiasm evaporated on the burning rock of disappointment as he realised that, as he had noticed earlier, whilst the context was spellbinding in its scale and magnificence, there were very few individual plant species that he did not recognise. There was nothing new here.