Beatrice sits down. She cannot hear these words. She tells herself he’s lying; he must be. How could he know where Kamogelo is? But then he kept the secret he learned from Pastor Gustav for a long time, until he had solid evidence to be sure of what he thought had really happened. She cannot risk anything.
‘What do you want?’ she says.
‘I want nothing. I’m just telling you what I know, nothing more.’ Thomas Milner smiles again. ‘I must go to check on poor Reverend Williamson. He gets weaker every day that passes, the poor man. I fear he’ll not last much longer. I must take him my special tea. Brought all the way from England.’
Thomas Milner is smiling throughout. Beatrice can hear the bars of her prison locked in place permanently.
He is right about Reverend Williamson. Two days later he’s dead. A week later, Mrs Williamson bids the Milners a tearful goodbye. She cries especially over baby Elizabeth, whom she has helped to care for and has fallen in love with.
Thomas Milner takes over as head of the mission. It’s better, but it’s not what he came here for – to preach to the Europeans of Cape Town and the few Khoi they allow in. He must go north and convert the heathens. That’s his calling.
It will be four years before he gets his chance to leave Cape Town and go north, a chance which he grabs with both hands.
By then Beatrice is nearly dead from her captivity. She can’t run for fear Thomas really does know where Kamogelo is. She’ll not risk that. She fears now that she’ll never get free of him. Prison is no place for a Towenaar. But she too smells the slight scent of hope from the north. When they get into their ox wagon, despite everything that says otherwise, Beatrice is sure her freedom is out there – somewhere – waiting for her.
Chapter Fourteen
It rains the day Thomas Milner arrives in Ntsweng and the people think that means he’s different from the other missionaries. Although missionaries have their uses, it’s a known fact that they cause droughts. If this one is bringing rain, maybe he’s to be another kind. Nthebolang only hopes he’ll be the right kind, the kind that makes things easier for them, not harder.
She sees the ox wagon arriving just as she returns from fetching water at the river, the clay pot balanced carefully on her head. What they’ve been waiting for has finally happened; she’s scared and excited in equal measure. So much rests on this missionary. She hides behind a tree to watch him arrive, wanting to get a good feel for what sort of person he is before he sees her. Wanting to see if he is going to be their saviour or their destroyer.
They’d been expecting him; she knows his name: Thomas Milner. She watches this Thomas Milner climb down from the wagon seat when they reach the mission house. He’s young, younger than the last missionary by quite a bit. Even from a distance Nthebolang can see that his eyes are too big, especially given his weak chin. It’s a face not easily defined as ugly or handsome, mean or kind. It’s a malleable face, situational in its countenance. Not a face you should count on. Not a face that gives away much.
Thomas Milner reaches up to help down a young woman and a child. Nthebolang suspects the woman must be his wife, though she looks too young for such things, not much older than Nthebolang herself. The child is a girl; Nthebolang thinks she might be four or five. The child resembles the husband, with the same heart-shaped face, large eyes, and long, straight blonde hair, but on her it appears soft and vulnerable, honest and inviting, the opposite to her father. The mother of the child is obviously the outsider in this group.
Nthebolang likes the look of the wife, though – nothing like the fat Mrs Johnson. Mrs Johnson, though big and burly, was scared of nearly everything – the people, and especially Nthebolang. She accused her of always sneaking up on her and giving her a fright. Dr Johnson, who was not a doctor of any important sort, eventually made Nthebolang wear a tiny bell tied to a string which he attached to her wrist, warning her never to remove it or she’d be punished. The bell was meant to warn Mrs Johnson that she was approaching so as not to frighten her heart out of her chest, something Mrs Johnson complained her heart was always on the verge of doing.
After they left the mission, Nthebolang climbed up to the hills surrounding the village and threw the bell down the other side. She was not a goat. She regretted agreeing to wear it in the first place. She’d hated its sound and the slight weight of it on her wrist. It reminded her constantly of her subservient position and that angered her. She’d only done it for her mother anyway. If it hadn’t been for her mother, she would have ripped the bell off and thrown it in Dr Johnson’s mournful face that first time he’d tied it on her.
This wife looks different. She’s not as white as other whites she’s seen. The wife has light brown skin and long, curly dark hair, windblown now as she climbs down from the wagon, torn from the bun it was meant to be tied into. That hair did not want to be controlled; Nthebolang can see that. She’s small, shorter than Nthebolang. Once down from the wagon, she immediately starts walking around the outside of the house, peering in the windows, checking the garden at the back, looking into the shed, peering out over the back fence. The little girl, meanwhile, stands with the father, clutching his hand, both of them watching with their too-big eyes, watching the woman investigate the new place, letting her be the pioneer they send forth to check if all is safe while they wait, huddled, for the verdict.
After some time, the man says, in an impatient voice, ‘Come, let’s take the things out of the back.’ The young woman reluctantly stops her investigations and goes to him.
They struggle to remove three trunks from the back of the wagon. They’re heavy; that’s apparent by the way the wife drops one side. It falls in an awkward way, twisting her husband’s hand. To Nthebolang’s surprise, this seemingly cowardly man snaps, ‘Can you never take care with things?’
‘Sorry,’ the wife says, looking away from him so that the word doesn’t count as it should.
Likely the man doesn’t know why she looks away, but Nthebolang does. It’s a ‘sorry’ that’s nearly a slap in the face for a person who reads it right. He doesn’t – she can see that. A sorry that is forced and not felt. Nthebolang knows this because it’s the sorry she employed nearly all the time with the Johnsons. It’s a meaningless sorry meant to placate others. This makes her look at the wife again even more carefully. Something is going on here.
The husband’s brow glistens with sweat and a piece of his long yellow hair sticks awkwardly to the side of his face as they remove the trunks from the wagon and set them on the dusty ground. Three trunks don’t amount to much, though, Nthebolang thinks. They’re lucky the Johnsons left nearly everything in their rush to be gone or they would be in some trouble. Nthebolang knows that white people need a lot of things.
From her hiding place, she watches her mother appear from the servant’s hut behind the mission house. Her mother dips her knees ever so slightly in what people think the whites believe shows respect. She offers her right hand, the forearm held by the left in the way the Bakwena show respect. She’s trying her best to show compliance and cover respect from every conceivable angle, trying to ingratiate herself with the ones who will decide their fate. It has to be done; still, it annoys Nthebolang. The fact that it always has to be done is a source of much shame for her. She hates to put herself under anyone and hates having to watch her mother do it too. Their compromised position as near-beggars requires it.
‘Good afternoon, sir,’ her mother says. ‘I am Mary.’ She’s not. Her name is Kopang, but for the missionaries she is Mary.
‘Hello, Mary,’ the tall, thin, easily angered missionary says, clearly happy to have a familiar name for his tongue to wrap around. Happy to have a person able to speak English. Even from a distance, Nthebolang can see the relief. She can see him melting into Mary. The hook is set. Now to reel him in.
‘I was the helper for the great Dr Johnson. He left me behind living in the servant’s hut in the hope I could be of service to you on your arrival,’ her mother continues.<
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Her mother has the key to the mission house, something she guards fiercely. Nthebolang watches her unlock the door to the house. She leads the wife and the girl inside, likely promising them a cup of tea in a minute. She quickly comes back out of the house and takes up the trunk handle opposite Thomas Milner and lifts it effortlessly to carry it inside. Thomas Milner tries his best to equal her.
She smiles and he smiles back. Nthebolang knows that smile. Thomas Milner and Nthebolang’s mother have just made a pact. He might not have known it, but she does, and so does Nthebolang. They will continue living at the mission house. Everything has been settled.
The dark clouds move in from the west and, before the sun sets, the thunder starts and the rain falls in heavy sheets pounding the earth so hard that it jumps back up before finally settling back in place. Nthebolang is not afraid of lightning; unlike others, she loves it. She sits on a stool leaning against the wall of the servant’s hut, protected from the rain by the deep thatch overhang, and watches the sky flash in its wild dance. She follows the thin streams of rainwater as they make their way towards the wider ones, and those as they make their way to the gullies that will get wider and wider until they become the river. The river, as she learned from the missionary children’s books, will flow to the sea. In the sea, the rain drops will be taken back up to the clouds to rain down and start the whole thing all over.
Nthebolang wishes she could be a raindrop and take a journey such as that. She envies the rain as it sets out once again on its new adventure. She imagines herself tied to one drop, sailing to places far away from where she is, far away from Ntsweng, to a place where no one knows her, where no one knows anything about her at all.
Candles are lit in the mission house. The curtains are not yet drawn and Nthebolang can see inside clearly. Her mother is setting out plates on the functional wooden table that’s part of the mission house’s simple furniture. The missionary’s wife is in the bigger bedroom at the back of the house. Nthebolang watches her. The trunk is open and she takes a few pieces of clothing out and puts them in the wardrobe but quickly loses interest. She sits down at the dressing table, brushing her long curls. Nthebolang thinks that she might like brushing that hair. She wonders if this woman will allow it.
The small girl sits on the floor of the bedroom paging through a book, likely one of the mission children’s books. Nthebolang feels those books that have been left behind are her responsibility. The little girl didn’t look very clean when she arrived on the wagon. Nthebolang doesn’t like the idea of her books being handled by a small girl with soiled hands. She frowns as she watches her turning the pages, thinking about all the dirty smudges that will certainly be left behind. But Nthebolang can see the girl is careful turning the pages, and that’s something for such a young child. It’s good – at least the pages will not be torn by clumsy hands. Still, she wishes the wife would do something, but the wife is not interested in the child and what she’s doing.
Thomas Milner is in the sitting room. He sits at the desk in the corner and reads papers, probably those left by Dr Johnson. Papers telling him about Ntsweng, the people, about Kgosi Sechele, a powerful missionary himself. Nthebolang has long read those papers marked ‘private’. Private is not something to be respected when things written about might affect her and her mother’s future. She was happy to see that Dr Johnson’s only reference to them was to say ‘Mary is an honest capable worker’. Nothing about Nthebolang, which is better, considering the fraught relationship she had with the missionaries.
As Nthebolang watches him she feels herself warming to his odd face. It seems kind and thoughtful in this light, but then Nthebolang remembers the quick anger at the dropped trunk. Thomas Milner will not be an easy person to understand; she’ll need to be cautious around him, at least until he’s better understood.
There’s a loud crack of thunder and Nthebolang sees the missionary’s wife stand up and go to the window. She looks up at the nearly black sky, just as a blue-white flash of lightning makes the night day for an instant and, before the thunder booms again, she smiles. She’s a storm lover too. That’s a notch in her favour, Nthebolang decides. Two storm lovers will surely be able to find a way to get along.
‘At least he doesn’t drink,’ Nthebolang’s mother says as she sits down at the little table in the servant’s hut to eat their dinner. ‘That drinking was the cause of everything with the other one.’
‘Is that the wife then?’ Nthebolang asks.
‘Yes, not much of anything really. She’s called Beatrice. She says I must call her that. I think she’s from the Cape. Madam is good enough for me, though.’ She takes a long drink of her tea, which is scorching hot the way she likes it. ‘He must have taken her young. She looks barely twenty years if you ask me – only a few years older than you, I’d guess.’
‘And the girl?’
‘Elizabeth. She’s four. I don’t think they feed her right. A strong wind would blow her over the hills. Scared of everything too.’
‘So? Are they going to keep us?’
‘All sorted. I said you’d meet them tomorrow. She might want you to look after the girl. She doesn’t seem to have much interest in her.’
‘So what do you think of them then?’
‘They’re going to be better, I think.’ Her mother already looks relaxed after the long months of tense waiting.
Nthebolang thinks about Dr Johnson and his wife; it would take very little to be better than them. The good news is that she and her mother can stay at the mission. There’d been talk that people in the village wanted them to move from the servant’s hut while the missionary was not yet there. But where would they go? They have no house in Ntsweng.
There’d been so much uncertainty since the Johnsons left, but Thomas Milner and his family have arrived and everything is settled now. They’ll be fine staying at the mission house, as fine as they ever can be.
Chapter Fifteen
The trip from Cape Town, though long and in close quarters with Thomas Milner for months, was an enjoyable one for Beatrice. As soon as they got away from the city she felt rejuvenated. They moved through the mountains and into the open plains of the Karoo. Beatrice thought how easy it would be to escape from Thomas Milner. She would jump off the wagon and run. If he pursued her, she would stop and confront him, bringing Maangees out if needed.
She knew, though, that she would have to kill him. She couldn’t let him be free to go and harm Kamogelo.
Though Beatrice didn’t search too deeply through her feelings around killing Thomas Milner, she knew she couldn’t do it. It wasn’t that she didn’t think he deserved it. He did. He was an evil man and death would be a fitting punishment. It was only that the night she had killed John Anderson was always fresh and clear, sitting at the front of her mind. She told herself that she was brave; she told herself that some animals were best put down. But still the blood spurting from the missionary’s neck was red on her hands, as bright as that night. She hated Thomas Milner too much to stay that connected to him. He would be punished, and she would be free, but not just yet.
Still, even though she knew she could not escape, there was freedom being in the open again away from the buildings that closed in the sky and hard pavements of the city. It had taken four months to reach Ntsweng, and during that time even Thomas Milner behaved better.
‘Is that our new home?’ Elizabeth asks as they spot a collection of houses in the distance.
Beatrice looks ahead at the houses arranged in tidy circles within a ring of high hills on three sides. Thomas Milner keeps quiet as he guides the oxen along the rutted road. Elizabeth doesn’t ask again; she’s used to her parents paying her no attention.
They are given directions to the mission house at the kgotla. Thomas Milner meets the king there too.
‘He’s well known for his in-depth knowledge of the Bible,’ Thomas Milner says, climbing back into the wagon. ‘So unusual for a native.’
The mission house is lo
cated at the far end of the village. It’s unique in being on its own, not part of the circles of dwellings of which the village is made up. Later Beatrice will learn that each circle is a family ; the leader of the family lives in the compound in the middle – the kgosana, the chief of that kgotla. And the status of the family members is decided by the distance of their house from their leader’s house. The mission compound is separate from this system, an isolated place with no familiar connections.
As they near the house, Beatrice spots a girl watching them from behind a tree, a clay pot balanced on her head. Beatrice looks in her direction and her mind window opens slightly, then closes. Who is that girl? She can feel a pull to her. When she’s settled she’ll find a place of silence where she hopes she’ll find some answers.
The mission house is modest, with huts at the back, and located on a large piece of land with an outbuilding for storage to the west and an outdoor kitchen just behind that. Beatrice climbs down from the wagon when they arrive. She likes the look of this place. She investigates until Thomas Milner calls her back to the wagon.
A woman appears from the back of the house after some time. She’s tall and strong, but Beatrice believes that she’s younger than she looks. She explains to Thomas Milner that she’s the one who takes care of the mission house. She immediately takes over everything and Beatrice is happy about that. She had no intention of cooking and cleaning for Thomas Milner. Let this woman, Mary, do it – she seems keen, though not as keen as she’s making out to be. Beatrice knows the show is for Thomas Milner.
Beatrice cannot wait to be free to explore outside the village. There are wide fields to cross to reach the mountains in the distance that pull her eyes and spirit to them. They remind her of the mountains she and Kamogelo climbed to find their sanctuary. She knows they’re not the same but still she wants to see what’s on the other side.
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