Solitaire

by Masterton, Graham

  ‘It’s gone to the Boers? The diamond’s gone to the Boers?’

  ‘I suspect so,’ Barney told him.

  ‘Pitiful God, I can’t believe what you’re telling me,’ said Harold. ‘You know what’s going to happen if the Boers lay their hands on it? Either they’ll hold it to ransom, and ask for their independence back. Or else they’ll sell it to the Russians and buy themselves enough rifles and enough ammunition to push the British out of the diamond fields and back to the Orange River.’

  Barney shrugged. ‘I know that, Harold. Although I still don’t know for sure that it was the Boers. There isn’t any firm evidence one way or the other. But it seems to me to be the most likely thing that’s happened. The Boers would have more to gain than anybody else by stealing it, and more to lose if it were cut and sold abroad.’

  ‘How did they …?’ asked Edward, nodding towards the safe.

  ‘I’m afraid to say that Sara gave them the key,’ said Barney. ‘She’s gone with them, along with Joel, and Sara’s amah.’

  ‘Motley sort of a crew,’ remarked Edward.

  ‘Motley or not, they’ve got the Natalia Star, and I don’t know where they’ve gone.’

  Harold said, ‘I think I’m going to have to trouble you for a glass of water.’

  Barney rang the bell for Horace, while Harold loosened his tie and sat in the armchair mopping his forehead and gasping.

  ‘So, you called it the Natalia Star,’ smiled Edward. ‘Is that one of the reasons why Sara was so keen to help them?’

  Barney looked down, and re-arranged some of the pens and pencils on his desk. ‘Let’s just say that our marriage hadn’t been running particularly smoothly. But I was still shocked when I found out what she’d done.’

  ‘When did this happen?’ asked Harold.

  ‘Yesterday morning, while I was working at the mine. I didn’t find out that my key had been stolen until early afternoon; and then I made a complete fool of myself and chased them along the Hopetown road, thinking they’d made a run for the Cape. There wasn’t any sign of them.’

  ‘From what you’ve said about this Simon de Koker, it’s far more likely that they’ve headed for the Transvaal,’ said Edward.

  Horace came in, and Barney asked for a glass of water for Harold and a cup of strong coffee for himself. Edward said that he would ‘make do’ with the whiskey decanter on the library table.

  When Horace had gone, Harold said slowly, ‘The most important thing of all is to prevent the bastards from cutting it. Once it’s cut, you’ll have no chance of proving that it’s yours. In the rough, we can identify it. I’ve got photographs of it from all sides; and drawings; and a plaster-cast.’

  ‘They won’t have any great difficulty getting it cut, though, will they?’ said Barney. ‘There must be a dozen good cutters in Amsterdam who would do it for them, no questions asked.’

  ‘Well, you’re right,’ sighed Harold. ‘But it could take anything up to eighteen months to cut a stone as big as yours – the Natalia Star, if that’s what you’ve really decided to call it. And until they’ve bruted off all the rough surfaces, we’ve still got a remote chance of proving that it’s yours.’

  ‘That’s if it actually goes to Amsterdam; and that’s if we can find it once it’s there. They could just as easily sell it in the rough to the Russian court; or the Austrians; or send it over to America.’

  Harold drank his water, and then patted his mouth with his handkerchief. ‘The only way we’re going to find out where it’s gone is if I put out feelers in the trade. One thing’s for sure: they won’t take it to a second-rate cutter. They’re going to have to go to the best, and that narrows their options considerably. There are only three cutters I can think of who could do it justice – Josef Van Steenwijk, who works for Coster’s, in Amsterdam; Levi Baumgold, at Annen’s, also in Amsterdam; and Itzik Yussel, who’s the head cutter at Roosendaal’s in Antwerp.’

  Barney leaned back in his chair and sipped disconsolately at his coffee. ‘They might keep the diamond for years before they send it out for cutting. They might sell it as a rough, and not bother to have it cut at all.’

  ‘Well,’ said Harold, ‘there’s always a chance of that … in which case, you’ll never see the diamond again. But I’m crediting anyone who has the nerve to steal the continent’s biggest diamond from out under the nose of its owner with the intelligence to make as much money out of it as they can. As a rough, it’s too easily identifiable, and too difficult to sell and re-sell. Remember that Thomas Pitt did with the Regent … he sent it straight to London to be cut, so that nobody else could claim it was theirs. For my money, that diamond is going to be smuggled to Amsterdam or Antwerp within the month.’

  Edward Nork had helped himself to a generous glassful of whiskey, and he noisily stoppered the decanter before coming back across the room and standing by Barney’s desk, his spectacles propped up on his forehead, his shaggy eyebrows tangled in thought.

  ‘What you’re going to have to do is send copies of Harold’s drawings to all the major diamond-merchants, explaining that the diamond is stolen. That won’t stop anybody really unscrupulous, but it might frighten some of the more respectable houses off. Cheers!’

  He swallowed whiskey, and then coughed until he was grey in the face.

  ‘All right,’ said Barney. ‘If that’s the best we can do, let’s do it. I can tell you something though: I would rather have lost that diamond down a hole in the ground than lose it to those people.’

  ‘I know,’ Harold told him, understandingly. ‘But that’s the way it is with diamonds. They bring out all of your most possessive and jealous feelings, no matter how much you try to resist them. They make you slightly mad. And why not? Carat for carat, they’re worth more than almost anything you can think of. Nearly twice as much as emeralds. A hundred times more than gold.’

  ‘They’re not worth anything at all if you’ve lost them,’ put in Edward, with an exaggeratedly rueful face, and hiccupped.

  Barney’s guesses about Hunt and Simon de Koker had been mostly accurate, although Hunt had actually resigned from the colonial service only two months ago, the day after de Koker had approached him in an hotel restaurant on Adderley Street and suggested that he might care to help him lay his hands on the Natalia Star. De Koker had not particularly wanted to involve Hunt in a secret Boer mission, but he had needed someone who could get himself admitted to Vogel Vlei without arousing suspicion. He had also been worried that Barney might already have heard that he was working as an agent for the Boers, and might have him arrested by the British as soon as he turned up on the doorstep.

  Hunt, for his part, had been more than eager for a little excitement, and a little peril, and the chance to play the starring rôle in a domestic and criminal double-cross. Once inside Vogel Vlei, he had been delighted by Barney’s dogmatic insistence that the stone was not for sale at any price – particularly since he had only £36 0s 2d in his Capetown bank account, which fell somewhat short of ‘a million-four’. But he had particularly relished Sara, bored and irritated and bourgeois, and he had tried to exploit her frustrations for all he was worth by telling her how beautiful she was, and yet how neglected she was, an English rose flowering unseen and unappreciated in this dry and dusty tailing of the Empire. Joel had been easy to recruit: his resentment of Barney was so intense that in Hunt’s words ‘it could have burned holes in the carpet’.

  After they had stolen the stone, though, they had not headed for the Transvaal, as Barney and Harold had supposed, and they had never intended to. De Koker’s instructions from Swartplaas, the farm on the Witwatersrand that the Boers were using as a resistance headquarters, were to take the diamond out of the country as quickly as possible, from the port of Lourenço Marques, where a Dutch steamship would be waiting in the third week of March. Their journey to the coast would be difficult and possibly dangerous, but de Koker had arranged for a small escort of Boer volunteers to meet them at Wesselstroom and guide them through
the Drakensberg pass to New Scotland, as far as Lake Chrissie, where they would turn eastwards again and follow the course of the Impellus River into Portuguese territory, and then down to the sea.

  To begin with, to put Barney off the trail, they had headed northwards out of Kimberley on the track that would have taken them up along the valley of the Vaal towards Klerksdorp, and right into the heart of the Transvaal. But after a few miles they had turned directly eastwards across open country; and spent their first night camping by a smoky fire on the open veld, not far from the settlement of Boshof. When morning came, they had started off early, and made for Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State. It took them two days to get there, travelling as rapidly as they could; but when they arrived there they rested for another two days, so that Sara could bathe and buy herself two or three new dresses to travel in, and Joel could stock up on the medication he needed, Dover’s powder and boric ointment. Simon de Koker exchanged their elegant but impractical landau for a horse-drawn waggon, which he stocked with beef and ham and smoked cheese, and eight kegs of water.

  Edward had been right about them: they were a motley band, and from the very beginning of their uncomfortable flight across the Orange Free State there were violent disagreements about who should sit where, and who was in charge, and most crucial of all, who the Natalia Star now belonged to. Sara, who had taken the key from Barney’s bureau, and had actually removed the stone from the safe, was quite sure that the diamond was now hers. Simon de Koker said that if the diamond was now hers, then why was he bothering to drive her all the way across southern Africa? The diamond was now the property of the true government of the Transvaal, the Boers, and it would be cut and auctioned in Amsterdam for the sole purpose of financing a Boer campaign against the British oppressors. Joel claimed that the diamond was fifty per cent his, since the mine in which it had been found was fifty per cent his. Hunt argued that the stone should be sold in the rough, as quickly as possible, and the proceeds divided four ways, with a few hundred pounds for Nareez. Nareez was suffering from heatstroke, and said nothing at all, but chewed coriander seeds, and stared at the mirages of lakes and rivers that shimmered on the horizon as if they were visions of the Ganges at Rājshāhi, on the hot days of her childhood.

  What none of them knew, as they toiled their way towards the foothills of the Drakensberg, was that Sir Bartle Frere’s invasion of Zululand had already started, and that only two hundred miles to the east of them, Lord Chelmsford was advancing towards the Zulu capital of Ulundi with three columns of regular soldiers and volunteers. On 11 January, the week before Sara and Hunt had stolen the diamond, Lord Chelmsford’s central column had forded the Buffalo River at Rorke’s Drift and on 20 January, a few miles further on, he had established a new camp in the shadow of the odd sphinx-shaped mountain known as Isandhlwana.

  On 22 January, the Wednesday after Sara and Hunt and Joel had stolen the Natalia Star, and when they were a day east from Bloemfontein, twenty thousand Zulu warriors attacked Lord Chelmsford’s camp and slaughtered nearly 1400 soldiers and Natal native recruits, leaving the sloping hillside littered with burned-out tents, looted waggons, and stiffened bodies. The six companies of the 2nd Warwickshire regiment died to the last man, and the broken ground down to the Buffalo River was splattered with the blood of grooms, cooks, waggon drivers, and bandsmen, all of whom had tried to escape when the Zulu impi broke through the front lines of soldiers. On the same day, the British mission station and hospital at Rorke’s Drift was successfully defended against 4000 Zulus by only 104 British soldiers. But Lord Chelmsford had been obliged to withdraw, and call for reinforcements, and to re-assess his previous contempt for Cetewayo’s army.

  It thundered for three solid days when Hunt and Sara and Joel crossed the Drakensberg mountains, great dark barrages of bumbling noise, with rain so harsh and torrential that it stung their faces. The horses shied and reared, and their hooves kept slipping on the wet rock. Six or seven times in every mile they managed to cover, their waggon wheels would lodge in a groove or a gully, and Simon de Koker and Hunt would have to lever the wheels free with shovel-handles, or push the waggon out with their backs. Joel, cursing and complaining, would have to be lifted out into the storm by Sara and Nareez, to lighten the load, and the three of them would be obliged to sit on a nearby boulder like drowned cats while the waggon was heaved back on to the track again.

  ‘Every now and then, one is given a severe lesson in life that one should have been content with what one had,’ Sara remarked, with a drip on the end of her nose, on the day they reached the highest point in the Drakensberg. She was sitting by the side of the road with a khaki canvas kitbag upturned on her head, her waterproof cape drawn around her shoulders, her white leather boots hopelessly muddied and stained with water. The rain was sloping across the pass in sheets of bitterly-cold spray, and the waggon had got jammed again, this time in one of the old narrow tracks that had been gouged out of the rock by the heavy ox-waggons of the Boer voortrekkers.

  ‘Content?’ asked Joel. ‘How could you ever have been content with Barney? Even this is better than sitting in that tomb of a house, trying to remember what human dignity was.’

  ‘Do you think you’ve found your dignity now?’ asked Sara, tartly.

  Joel looked down at himself. Under his wide wet bush-hat, which was drooping down on all sides, he was dressed in a muddy brown overcoat and frayed grey trousers. He had wound a blanket around his waist to keep his hips warm and the stump of his left leg dry; and inserted his right foot into a leather saddle-pouch to prevent the rain from running into his shoe.

  ‘At least I’m free,’ said Joel, although he did not sound very convinced, even of that.

  Sara took out a sopping handkerchief and wiped her face. ‘I’d give up any amount of freedom for a hot bath.’

  ‘We’ve got the diamond,’ said Joel. ‘In a month, we’ll all be well on our way to Amsterdam. Then, when it’s cut and sold, and we get our share, we’ll be rich enough to do whatever we like. By this time next year, we won’t have any worries about anything, helevai.’

  Sara stared at him for a while, the raindrops clustered on her eyelashes. ‘Do you really think I’m going to share the diamond with the Boers?’

  Joel looked back at her warily. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Exactly what I say. I didn’t take the diamond for the sake of the independence of the Transvaal, I can tell you that. I don’t care for Boers one bit. They’re crude, and they’re uneducated, and they spend all of their time smoking pipes and eating dreadful varieties of cheese. Just look at that Simon de Koker. He smells like a mule, and I shouldn’t think he’s combed that beard of his for weeks.’

  Joel picked up a pebble, and juggled it in the palm of his hand. Only a few yards away, Simon de Koker was trying to wrestle the iron rim of the waggon wheel out of the rock with a crowbar, and there was a grinding noise of metal against wet sandstone. Hunt, almost purple in the face, was trying to push the waggon forward.

  ‘He won’t let you run off with it,’ said Joel. ‘He didn’t travel all the way to Capetown and back, and then across to Lourenço Marques, just to watch you wave him goodbye.’

  ‘He may be going to Lourenço Marques, but I’m not,’ said Sara, emphatically.

  Joel tossed the pebble up, and caught it again. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked, in a bland voice.

  ‘You’ll betray me, if I tell you. You’ll probably betray me anyway.’

  ‘Why should I betray you?’ asked Joel, trying to sound surprised.

  ‘You betrayed your own brother.’

  Joel sniffed. ‘Is that what you call it?’

  ‘What do you call it?’

  ‘I call it survival, most of the time. Sometimes I call it justice.’

  Simon de Koker snapped his whip at the horses, and, ‘Yip! Yip! Yip! Come on now, pull up! Pull up, you bunch of bonebags!’

  ‘I don’t think insulting them is going to help,’ Joel called loudly, ove
r the cold clattering of the rain. Simon de Koker looked around and gave him a flat, sour stare. Joel grinned back at him, and said, ‘Don’t mind me. What do I know from horses?’

  As the team of horses strained at their harnesses, their hooves skidding and sliding and their flanks steaming with rain, Sara said quietly: ‘A million-pound diamond for one would be ideal. A million-pound diamond between two would be almost as good. But a million-pound diamond between four? It’s just not enough. Particularly when I suspect that our smelly Boer friend has no intention of giving us anything more than a token reward for our troubles. He’s a political zealot, and political zealots are usually even more untrustworthy than common criminals. So Papa said, anyway.’

  Joel kept on juggling his pebble, until at last he reached his arm back and tossed it away down the track, back towards the Orange Free State. ‘You’re going to have to think of a way of getting rid of him, then, aren’t you? And Hunt.’

  ‘Hunt won’t be at all difficult. He’s like a child. It’s de Koker that’s going to be a problem.’

  ‘What are you thinking of doing? Knocking him on the head with a bottle, and tying him up, and leaving him for the lemmergayers?’

  Sara’s lips were blue from cold. ‘We’re going to have to kill him,’ she said. ‘He knows the land far better than we do. If we don’t kill him, he’s bound to get free, and come hot in pursuit. Anyway, for all we know, he’s planning to do the same thing to us. If you were he, would you drive a whole waggon-load of cripples and women all the way to Lourenço Marques, when you could make it in half the time on your own? He’s probably waiting for nothing less than a convenient place in the mountains, so that he can cut the horses’ traces and push us all over a precipice.’

  ‘Your sense of the melodramatic is over-developed, to say the least,’ said Joel. ‘And less of the “cripples”, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘If you weren’t a cripple you could deal with him yourself,’ Sara retorted. ‘As it is, it’ll have to be me.’