There was something about Stanley King that flustered Meggie’s usual calm. In all of her seventeen years not once had she been aware of boys as anything other than brothers – usually because they were able to do things a girl couldn’t or, more correctly, shouldn’t. She and her father had always been close – quite normal with a youngest child, Meggie told herself, especially a daughter. Dallas often said that her confident no-nonsense character reminded him of Lorna. Why then should a total stranger who was twice her age – she knew he was thirty-six, if only just, from the chart at the foot of his bed – disturb her so? Dallas had said that the man was reserved. Did that mean shy or was it because he didn’t talk much about himself? Nothing wrong with that, she thought. Her father seldom spoke about his past.
The afternoon was hot and humid. Stan King dozed, his pyjama jacket unbuttoned and open to the waist, exposing the crisp white bandages wrapped tight around his chest. The single sheet was rumpled and Meggie felt compelled to straighten it. She had no idea what made her bend down and kiss the stitched scar where his left nipple had once been. The sleeping giant didn’t stir.
FIFTEEN
It was three in the morning when a loud banging at the door woke Torben and Gerda. No servants slept in the house so Torben went downstairs. Gerda could hear him having a heated exchange with whoever stood outside. Strange male voices raised in authoritative demand mingled with her husband’s infuriated responses. The irate confrontation struck terror into her heart. At just over six months pregnant, Gerda was already ungainly and clumsy. Clutching a gown too small to close completely around her, she came partway down the staircase and in a trembling voice called out, ‘Who is it, dearest?’
‘Military, ’Torben barked. ‘They say we have to go with them.’ He turned back to the two men standing beyond the open front door. ‘Why now? Surely tomorrow will do?’
‘Sorry, sir. We have our orders – ’
‘And who might they be from, pray tell me?’
‘Our commanding officer, sir. That’s the way it works. You’re not the only ones to be woken.’
‘Indeed. And that’s supposed to make me feel better? It’s a bloody disgrace, if you ask me. An invasion of personal privacy. What’s to be gained by dragging honest people from their beds at this hour?’
‘We will give you and your good lady half an hour to dress, Mister Petersen.’ Torben had retained his real mother’s surname.
‘Damned decent of you.’ He slammed the door, debated whether or not to have a drink, decided against it, turned and took the stairs two at a time.
Gerda waited on the landing. ‘Oh, Torben. What do they want? Have they come to take me away? I’m frightened.’ Gerda’s fear found its way through her fingers as she clutched his arm. Torben could both hear and feel his wife’s panic. It angered him that two impersonal soldiers could invade their home in the middle of the night and disturb his wife to such an extent.
‘Shh, my precious one. I won’t allow any harm to befall you. I’ll be right by your side.’
‘What if they hurt the baby? What if ...’
‘Don’t fret yourself, darling. It’s not the fault of these men, ’he tried to reassure her. ‘They were quite courteous. They don’t like being up at this time any more than we do. We’ll be fine.’
And they were. Along with about twenty others, Torben and Gerda were individually interrogated and sent home. The questions they were asked sought to establish and clarify any connection with Boer families, be they in komando units or not. The focus of attention was on brothers, fathers, uncles and male cousins, names and other details being meticulously jotted down. Gerda felt uncomfortable answering some of the queries, believing she was betraying her own volk. In truth, she, Torben and her parents had often discussed the coming of this time and all were well prepared. Their answers tallied to the satisfaction of the interrogators and by mid morning they found themselves being taken home.
Despite the hour, Torben poured himself a whisky. Gerda settled for a glass of cordial. ‘Let’s hope that’s the end of it, ’ he said, his relief obvious.
‘I still can’t see why they wanted to question us, ’ Gerda persisted. ‘Could it have something to do with Mark?’ Her older brother had recently been released from prison where he had been since the sjambok killing of his supposed best friend. As he was drunk when it happened, the courts had decided his crime was not premeditated and waived the death penalty. Family pressure and a good lawyer had secured him an early release. The police hadn’t been happy, though there was little more they could do. ‘They’ve been watching his house, you know, ’she went on. ‘Waiting for him to put a foot wrong.’
Torben knew that Mark hadn’t taken kindly to what he saw as ‘the bloody English and their red tape’, but he’d buckled down and behaved, much to the relief of his father and mother. The army did try to bluff him into becoming a spy. He saw through their threats and refused, leaving the British administration no choice but to respect his wishes. They did, however, warn him to keep well away from any more trouble. Mark had every intention of doing just that. His one experience of prison had been enough to last a lifetime.
Gerda’s frightened eyes reminded Torben of a mesmerised rabbit, aware of danger yet too terrified to do anything about it. The incident only served to make him more protective. No-one would hurt her. No-one would take this woman from him. He’d make damned certain of that.
As it happened, military intelligence had not been worried about Gerda at all. It was Torben in whom they were interested or, more specifically, his arms-dealing business. Despite having family ties with the enemy, the man was good at what he did and had helped the army out on more than one occasion – a fact first demonstrated when he had been able to replace ten breech-loading 15pounders lost to the Boers at Colenso. For that reason they had decided to let him be, at least for the time being. Rattling the man’s cage was just to let him know they were watching. Torben Petersen could be useful again.
Dallas and Duncan finally found the Fairfax Scouts. As Buller had said, they were now reporting back to Major-General John French who, thanks to Cecil Rhodes’s nonstop demands for action, had been ordered by Lord Roberts to relieve Kimberley.
‘Roberts has forty thousand men, a hundred guns and five thousand cavalry about to cross the border but is refusing any assistance for Buller. He’s determined to take Bloemfontein and believes Steyn will pull some of his Free State komandos out of Natal to help defend it.’
‘Makes sense, ’ Dallas commented as he and Fairy discussed what had been going on in his absence.
‘I agree. So you can see why Kimberley remains a thorn in his side. Last week the Boers brought up one of their Long Toms. It’s done more damage in a matter of days than anything since the siege started. Rhodes expects worse is to come and has thrown open both De Beers’s diamond mines to shelter women and children.’
‘So you think French will try to break through this week?’
‘Sooner the better. Before he gets caught up in Kitchener’s supposedly simplified transport system. It’s causing chaos, Dallas. Right now there are four thousand African drivers with Lord knows how many wagons, oxen and mules milling around in utter confusion near Ramdam.’
Delays were inevitable, and not helped by the fact that Lord Roberts had been forced to abandon two hundred wagons – containing almost a third of his food and supplies for the advance on Bloemfontein – after Christiaan de Wet found them outspanned north of the Riet River at Waterval Drift and succeeded in stampeding their peacefully grazing trek oxen – nearly three thousand of them.
It was not until Thursday the fifteenth that a way to Kimberley appeared to be open. The scouts had reported Boer activity on two ridges near Abon Dam and French decided on an all-out cavalry charge to smash his way past the last hurdle. Dallas watched as five thousand mounted men thundered across the parched veld and disappeared into a choking blanket of dust. He knew that most of the mounts had only been in the country for a matte
r of weeks and were not yet acclimatised to the stifling heat of Africa, the terrain or their riders. They were being pushed too hard. It was madness. He was not wrong. After only a few miles, hundreds of irreplaceable horses were either killed or so badly crippled as to be of no further use. Britain’s only mobile force in the whole of South Africa had been devastated by one act of thoughtless folly.
After four months of siege, Kimberley was finally relieved. To those who had waited so long Cecil Rhodes became their hero. Dallas had not forgotten that the next day, 16 February, was his fiftieth birthday. Not being able to be with Lorna, Kimberley seemed as good a place as any to pass such an unwanted milestone in his life. He resolved to tell nobody, hoping that Duncan would become too caught up in more important celebrations to remember such an insignificant family event. As it transpired, that was exactly what happened.
By now the Boers were aware of Lord Roberts’s intention to take Bloemfontein. With British troops now well to the north of his entrenched position at Magersfontein, Piet Cronje – ‘The Fox’, as he was known – deserted the trenches which had held Lord Methuen at bay for over two months and, during the night of 15 February, simply slipped away, taking his force of five thousand to help defend the Free State capital. Having to move fast, he was forced to abandon over seventy fully loaded supply wagons. The scouts found him heading east along the Modder, and French quickly closed in with what was left of his cavalry. Nobody expected The Fox to stop and dig in but that was what he did, north of the river at Paardeberg.
Thirty miles to the south, Christiaan de Wet heard of Cronje’s predicament and undertook a desperate overnight dash to support the main Boer force, now faced with fifteen thousand troops under the command of Lord Kitchener, who, in a message to Lord Roberts, confidently predicted being in the enemy laager early the following morning. It was not to be. In a matter of hours, nearly thirteen hundred British officers and men were killed, wounded or captured and de Wet, against all odds, held a strategically vital kopje south of the river, offering Cronje a way out. All that night and into the following day deWet’s guns fired on the British positions.
Some did take the unexpected opportunity to escape. Most stayed. Cronje’s remaining wagons and horses had been decimated by Kitchener’s artillery though fewer than one hundred of his men were killed, with two hundred and fifty wounded. His request for an armistice to bury the dead was rejected by Lord Roberts, who arrived on the nineteenth, fearful that any further delay could cost him his main objective – Bloemfontein. Scouts had already reported the anticipated reinforcements moving in from Natal.
Further to the south, at Colesberg, recently arrived colonial troops – Australians, in the main– faced a superior force under ‘The Lion of the West’, General ‘Koos’ de la Rey. This posed a direct threat to Lord Roberts’s line of supply. Sir Alfred Milner, Governor of the Cape Colony, was also showing concern about fresh outbreaks of rebel activity close to Cape Town.
After three days spent trying unsuccessfully to dislodge de Wet from his high ground, Roberts was on the verge of giving up. Fortunately, fate intervened. For no obvious reason, the Boers abandoned their positions and rode away.
Still Cronje held out. On the twenty-third heavy rain flooded his dug-in defences, a swollen Modder River carrying away the rotting, maggot-ridden corpses of both men and horses.
At 0600 hours on Tuesday 27 February, a white flag announced the surrender of General Piet Cronje and over four thousand Transvaal and Free State burghers– among them fifty women. Ironically, Lord Roberts’s first significant victory of the war fell on the anniversary of Majuba Day when, nineteen years earlier, Paul Kruger defeated the British in a battle that gave the Transvaal Boers their independence.
Taking of the Thukela Heights and Ladysmith stumbled towards success though it had been a long and bloody time coming. Each new confrontation added to the toll of those wounded or killed. Winston Chuchill’s younger brother, Jack, had been hit during his one and only contact with the enemy. Shot in the leg, he became the first patient of his mother’s hospital ship, Maine, when it arrived in Durban harbour.
Places like Horse Shoe, Wynne’s and Hart’s hills were heard of for the first time as Buller’s fourth attempt to relieve the siege of Ladysmith gathered momentum. The press were describing it as the biggest ever military undertaking in the southern hemisphere. On 19 February, Boer forces had deserted Colenso and retreated north of the Thukela, leaving the rail bridge a twisted mass of collapsed steel and sleepers, only its stone supports still standing.
Since the battle of Spion Kop just over a month earlier and Buller’s subsequent repulse at Vaal Krantz, Ellie and Lindsay had never been so busy. Their field hospital was now at Colenso, even closer to the front line. Lindsay had recovered from his bout of dysentery and, with Ellie, was working up to eighteen hours a day, sometimes snatching no more than half an hour’s rest between cutting off some soldier’s beyond-repair limb, attending to horrific shrapnel wounds or patching up those too far gone to save. Fatigue invariably brought mistakes and some died as a result. Nobody pointed the finger of blame. Many more were saved. Officers and men alike knew how hard the medics had to work.
During one particularly messy amputation, the unfortunate patient woke during the process and, not surprisingly, screamed, thrashed and cried in pain. Lindsay solved the problem with a full bottle of brandy. On that occasion Ellie had been assisting. As they cleaned up in exhausted silence, a spluttering Tilley lamp highlighted the silver blonde of her short-cropped hair. Gold-rimmed glasses failed to hide dark shadows of fatigue as she stretched her back to relieve the strain of bending over an operating table for three concentration-filled hours. At that moment, Lindsay thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
On more than one occasion he had asked her to marry him. Ellie always said no, to try again when she had qualified as a doctor. Well, now she had, and Lindsay waited only for the right moment.
She looked up to see him watching her and smiled tiredly. ‘Any more?’
‘Not right now. Come, my girl, time to get your head down.’
Lindsay led her to a curtained-off area – basically a connecting tent – next to what passed for the operating theatre. After Ellie lay down on the canvas camp bed, he gently removed her glasses and covered her with a blanket. ‘What about you?’ she whispered, exhaustion clear on her face.
‘I’ll be right over there.’ He nodded towards a second similar stretcher.
She watched him as he sat and scratched the itchy stubble of a week’s beard. Boots still on he fell backwards and gave a grateful sigh.
‘Lindsay?’ Her voice was fading.
‘Mmm?’
‘Will you marry me?’
‘Silly not to.’
‘When?’
‘Any time you like.’
‘That’s good.’ Turning her back to him, she dropped into a deep sleep, leaving Lindsay staring towards the dark tent top, a beaming smile on his swarthy face. In the silence he quietly muttered, ‘Thank you, Lord.’ Ever since meeting Ellie, Lindsay had known she was the one for him. He loved everything about this woman – her single-minded determination; the dedication to her work; the satisfaction she found in caring for others; her near fanatical obsession with understanding the human body. For him, it summed up someone who had the makings of not just a good, but a great, doctor.
As if that wasn’t enough, Lindsay had always been attracted to women with clean-cut, no-nonsense good looks. Ellie had such qualities in abundance, no matter what the occasion or how she dressed. The first time he saw her, Lindsay realised he’d found his idea of perfection. Then she spoke, and her accent – influenced by background and breeding – told him that whatever this woman had to say would be worth listening to; the subject mattered not. She aroused him in every way imaginable.
Sighing, Lindsay turned onto his side and settled into a more comfortable sleeping position. He had been just plain fortunate that she’d seen something in him
as well. It was typical of her to propose. They both knew the time had come and for Ellie that meant no more messing around. He loved her for that as well.
A commotion outside told Lindsay that sleep would have to wait. Another patient was being brought in for attention. Surely this one could be dealt with by someone else? But no. The flap was flung back and he heard his name being called. In an instant he recognised the voice. Cam!
‘Lindsay, Ellie.’
‘Shh! Your sister’s asleep. What is it?’
‘Will. He’s been shot.’
‘Shit!’ Lindsay swore softly. ‘Coming.’
Blinking in the still-illuminated operating theatre, he quickly assessed the situation. Will lay on a stretcher, displaying no sign of life. Two bearers hovered, awaiting instructions. He recognised one – Mohandas Gandhi – and nodded a quick greeting.
‘Help me get him onto the table.’
Exhaustion forgotten, Lindsay pushed Cam aside, cut away Will’s blood-soaked shirt and carefully examined the wound. A bullet had hit just above his collarbone, chipping off a clearly visible fragment before exiting slightly lower down his back. It would not have been serious unless, as was the case with Will, there had been previous damage in that area. Cameron paced up and down in agitation.
Lindsay smiled at him reassuringly. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks. He’ll be fine. A nurse can fix this up.’
‘I ... I just thought ...well ...you mean he’s not going to ...?’
‘Far from it. In shock, I’d say. Will’s no youngster. The wound needs to be cleaned and dressed, that’s all. We may have to strap his arm but first things first.’ Lindsay turned to an Indian orderly and indicated that he should take over. ‘Then see if you can find him a place in one of the ward tents.’
Footprints of Lion Page 21
