The Brigandshaw Chronicles Box Set

by Peter Rimmer

  She had been in Africa seven months and taken the train from Cape Town to Kimberley the day after the Indian Queen docked in Cape Town harbour. She had first met Tinus Oosthuizen and the black boy Tatenda on the train. In Kimberley, they had purchased two ox wagons, sixteen oxen, supplies for a year and, without a pause, headed out into the bush and out of reach of reprisal. As the weeks turned into months, they made their way into the interior, calling first at Gu-Bulawayo to ask the king of the Matabele for permission to hunt, and Harry became the child of his parents. By the end of the third month on the trail, Tinus had taught her how to fire a shotgun without bruising her shoulder and she was as brown as a berry, the soft brown hair had been bleached by the sun and her body was taut from the constant exercise. For weeks on end their party was alone in the bush, the men hunting for the old bull elephants among the great herds, the tusks cut from the dead animals and left on the ground overnight for the ants to clean before loading on top of the wagons.

  By the end of September, when Henry Manderville and Gregory Shaw were camped one hundred and twenty-three miles to the southeast, the clouds had built up and Alison heard the first rumblings of thunder. It was then too that Tatenda returned to camp with the news Tinus Oosthuizen had searched for even before Sebastian had joined the hunt. The local tribesmen had seen the spore of the great bull elephant, the elephant tusks so big he was forced to rest them on the ground when his old body made him stop for rest.

  Tinus had listened to Tatenda’s story of the rogue bull elephant, far from its herd. It had ripped through the storage silos, tearing down the rickety bush timber legs that held up the covered platforms from the ground to keep the rats and mice away from the maize. The cobs were scattered among the bent, brown stalks of the old maize stands, cobs trampled in the dust and three of the pole and dagga huts were squashed in its rage. One small girl had been trampled to death, and half the food that would feed the people until the rains grew the next crop had been eaten or destroyed.

  “Did he rest his tusks on the ground?”

  “The people ran away, baas. Not look. Very frightened. The marks of feet in dust bigger than I see.”

  “Where did the elephant go?”

  “To big river,” said Tatenda, pointing down into the valley.

  Sebastian argued the heat and mosquitoes in the valley were too dangerous for the women and children once the rains broke.

  “Then I will hunt alone,” said Tinus. “I have seen him once, from a distance. He is old now and needs my help. You see, Sebastian, a man is brave when he is alone but he can never be brave for his family. To die is to die but to be left alone when you have found your family is worse than death. Our own deaths we don’t know about. It is the death of others we feel. Make a camp up here and I will come back from the valley when I have killed him. When the rains break, some of the herds will migrate this way and you can have your picking. Make the best of it. This will be our last hunt.”

  “Why?”

  “Rhodes. He wants everything. The minerals, the land and the elephants. We Boers know you British. With you British, there are always rules and all of them stop a man from being free to do what he wants.”

  “Then next time we hunt north of the Zambezi.”

  “Rhodes will go north of the river until he fills the vacuum between the Belgians to the far north and the Portuguese to the east and west.”

  “Are the mosquitoes any bigger down there?” Emily asked later. “Won’t there be some comfort from the cool water of the river? How am I going to explain to Alison that the apple of her eye is off alone chasing an elephant bigger than a house? Now if we all go down together we can have a nice time and come back all together with the trophy that would excite the whole wide world. Hunting elephant is better in pairs, you have both said a dozen times. Are we women so weak we can’t get a little hot and bothered every now and again? I think the best thing is to start our journey down there first thing in the morning before all this evening thunder turns to rain. If we hurry, I am sure we can reach the river and build ourselves little grass huts before the rains break. Now, won’t that be nice? Little grass huts on the bank of a very nice river. I’m going to tell Harry. He’ll be very excited.”

  Six thousand miles away at Hastings Court, Mathilda Brigandshaw, mother of Sebastian, was in one of her ‘states’. Her husband, The Captain, had built up a cold rage and none of her timid words of protest had had any effect. After seven months of constant badgering, the case against her youngest son had been heard in the Bow Street Magistrates’ Court and Sebastian was now a criminal, wanted anywhere in the empire for abducting his brother’s wife and kidnapping his brother’s son. When found, the penalty was death and there would be nothing the family could do to change the court’s decision. After the months of fruitless search, her husband had seen fit to use the courts to bring down his rage on his own son for frustrating his ambition. Mathilda was well aware The Captain did not give a jot about Emily. All he wanted was Harry, the future master of Hastings Court, his grandson dressed up as a Manderville.

  When she had first met The Captain, he was a common seaman sailing out of the Port of Liverpool for sixteen shillings a month, coming back a year later after each voyage with less than five pounds in his pocket.

  In those early young days they called her Tilda, and many said she was the prettiest girl in Chester, some even went as far as the whole of the Wirral of Cheshire, but all of them said she could have done ten times better than the roving seaman who told strange tales and talked of great wealth that had no reflection in his seaman’s clothes. They called him a big mouth but within three voyages he came back to Liverpool as coxswain of the ship, appointed halfway through the voyage when the original coxswain died of yellow fever. It was at the end of that voyage they were married. She had been dominated by her father and was now dominated by her husband. She was to have his children, look after his small house and behave herself while he took the steps to move them out of poverty. Never once had she looked at another man during the long months alone for fear of reprisal. He had learnt the word ‘gainsay’ at an early age. As the years went by, she forgot who she was and did as he told her, and the big mouth proved his worth and the small house grew to a mansion. The one thing she had never understood was the loyalty of his crews, but then she had never been to sea and seen the bond of men in danger and the need for leadership to survive.

  She had tried to help Emily when they came to Hastings Court after the wedding but had failed. The young extrovert who had cantered over the county with Sebastian had withdrawn into her shell, and even when the boy was born Emily had left most of the bringing up to the nurse, brooding alone in her room or walking for hours in the woods. The light had gone out of her eyes. Mathilda never once heard her laugh and Harry had reached out for affection from Alison Ford. Emily’s father had left for Italy the day after the wedding in the old church. Some letters came for Emily but after the first, they were left on the silver tray in the hall unopened. First, she put it down to Arthur spending his weeks and more often his weekends in London, but even before Harry was born she recognised a cold indifference. They were pawns in two other people’s game of chess, strangers in a marriage of their fathers’ convenience. The only person Mathilda could see who was happy with the arrangement was her husband. He was the squire, the real master of Hastings Court, and his heir, young Harry, was the apple of his eye because young Harry was going to be recognised by the county as a gentleman.

  “Five hundred pounds,” he was raging again. “I’ll offer anyone five hundred pounds who finds that boy and brings him back to his ancestral home. Good God, woman, there have been Mandervilles on this estate since the time of the Conqueror. That brat can’t take that away.”

  “If they find Harry they will find Sebastian,” she said miserably.

  “And bring him to justice.”

  “Hang him, Captain! You’re talking about our youngest son!”

  “He kidnapped my grandson, for Go
d’s sake. And his mother.”

  “I rather think she went willingly. They were inseparable since childhood.”

  “She consented to marry Arthur.”

  “Maybe. She loved her father. Did what he said. Have you ever looked at the calendar?”

  “What do you mean?” snapped The Captain as he stopped pacing the front terrace. The sun was throwing the shadows of the old trees from far away. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I think our grandson was born a little too early to have anything to do with Arthur. Anyway, she’s not his type. He likes sluts.”

  “What do you mean, sluts?”

  “Whores. The woman he keeps in that house in London. I think that Sebastian kidnapped his own son and that will make a difference in a court of law. Leave well alone.”

  “What about my grandson?”

  “He’ll be living his life without your help and maybe his mother is smiling again.”

  “Five hundred pounds’ll bring ’em back. Brass, that’s what people understand. Someone must know where they are and this time I have the law on my side. Five hundred pounds is a lot of money. Five hundred pounds will find them.”

  “Don’t you see what you’re doing?”

  “Of course I do. I want my grandson back in Hastings Court.”

  The Reverend Nathanial Brigandshaw saw the reward posted on a billboard in the docks, the youthful face of Sebastian grinning at his fate.

  “It is the enemy within us that destroys. A family, a nation is the same, Bess,” he told his wife. “We Brigandshaws are destroying ourselves as we are trying to be what we are not. Mother was a scullery maid and father a common seaman, for God’s sake. Now look at what we are trying to be. Why did I go to Arthur that morning?”

  “Because you thought it was right.”

  “We are too quick to impose our judgement. Why should I be right? The judge. The arbiter of good. Now mother tells me the boy’s more likely Seb’s. Why couldn’t I mind my own business? If he hangs, I will have helped to cast the rope. If I had not told Arthur Seb was here, it could have been any maniac running off with Emily and the child. Good God, Bess, no one knew Seb was in the country until I told them. And I do it every day. Every day I am telling people what to do because I think, me, Nat Brigandshaw, the holy reverend, that it is good for them. What do I really know about their lives except I would not like to live the same way? I tell all those poor souls what I want. What would be good for me. Why do we interfere, Bess?”

  “Because we want to help,” answered his wife.

  “But do we help?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Arthur Brigandshaw saw the reward in the Times which ruined a generous day. The last thing Arthur wanted was Emily back in Hastings Court. Paying for another man’s bastard was not on Arthur’s itinerary, and the status quo was much to his satisfaction. When the latest of his live-in housekeepers demanded he make her an honest woman, he could honestly say he would be delighted but the law would have something else to say. He told himself he would happily have his cake and eat it too. It was the kind of situation that appealed to Arthur.

  The day before, news of the Jack being raised in southern Africa had sent the shares in the British South Africa Company up twenty-two shillings; more than Arthur’s purchase price but, he was not going to sell. Soon the thousands of prospectors who were combing the countryside would strike it rich and the flow of royalties to the BSAC would send the price of their shares to the sky. Why, Arthur told himself, letting greed get the better of him, last week’s newspaper had said there was more gold in the country than in the whole of the Transvaal. Everyone knew the gold on the Witwatersrand was more than anything they found in California. If he sold his shares and paid off his debts, he calculated he would have twenty thousand and some pounds in his pocket. But if he waited for the gold to flow out of the earth, he would become a millionaire, a man richer than his father, and without the impediments of his father’s birth. Rich, free of his wife and father, unable to marry, the combination for Arthur was idyllic. He could have as many mistresses as he wanted without the slightest chance of a problem.

  Ignoring his father’s request to return to Hastings Court, Arthur took the train to Dover. Paris in the autumn was as perfect as Paris in the spring. Even with a house and twenty thousand pounds he was a rich man. The banks would not worry him. Their loans were now covered well above the hilt. Mentally he wished his young brother well. The man and small boy were out of the country. It was obvious. If only his father would let the matter rest. He was master of Hastings Court, wasn’t that enough? How much did one’s vanity require to quench its thirst?

  Alison Ford was the first to discard her corset, the stay that strapped in her stomach. The temperature in the valley had risen to a hundred and ten degrees in the shade and the rains refused to break. Each afternoon the clouds built up ominously and twice there were streaks of lightning but not one drop of rain. Four rondavels, pole and mud huts, had been built under a spreading acacia tree that rose a hundred feet above the roughly thatched roofs, the roots of the great thorn tree tapping the living waters of the Zambezi River. Across from their camp, a long island stood out in midstream, rich in tangled, green undergrowth with ilala palms stretching out of the thickets to reach for the sky. On the near shore of the island, crocodiles sunned themselves and when their blood temperature rose too high, they slid into the water and floated with the stream, nose and eyes bulging.

  By the time the first big drops of rain splashed the dark surface of the flowing river, Alison had discarded the top stay made from strips of whalebone and elastic a quarter-inch thick, and Emily had followed suit. The temperature had risen another five degrees Fahrenheit and convention had been sacrificed to the heat. The men still wore breeches and shirts with long sleeves, the breeches held up with thick braces that Tinus used to hook his thumbs into when he was standing looking out at the great river and the herds of animals forced near the water by the six-month drought. All the waterholes away from the big river had dried up along with the watercourses. Everything, man and beast, was waiting for the rain and tempers flared as the heat pressed down. Even the girls in print frocks that came to the ground and showed the shape of their bodies underneath in the bright sunlight, were too hot to worry about the breach of decorum. English ladies of good breeding had never before lived in the valley of heat. During the day, it had become too hot to talk or complain, and even Harry sat quietly in the shade of the big acacia tree and envied the crocodiles’ cool water. Finally, Tinus had given up his search for the spoor of the Great Elephant and only shot the meat they cooked over the evening fire to the rumbling sounds of distant thunder.

  In the middle of November, the rains broke, and they laughed with joy and for the first time amid the clashes of monstrous thunder, using the excuse of her fear, Alison and Tinus became lovers, each returning to their huts before morning. Not one of them thought of the past or the future. Even Tatenda smiled at the white man’s happiness.

  Early in the morning, at the time Emily was conceiving her second child out of wedlock, the Pool of London was gripped by a black frost. Jeremiah Shank, sitting half-frozen on a discarded wooden railway sleeper, was out of money, out of a job, and out of the smallest prospect of finding one. The Certificate of Character given to him by Captain Doyle, after his discharge from the Indian Queen, was tantamount to a blacklisting from any British boat or any boat calling at a British port. The Merchant Navy had ostracised him. Jeremiah Shank was a man of small stature and sharp features, the nose slightly twisted to the left from birth. Unfortunately, he also had one eyelid that permanently drooped but these were not the features that got him into trouble. Unbeknownst to him, and quite outside his control, the combination of the bent, twisted nose and one drooping eyelid gave him the cocky look of a man sneering at the world and particularly his fellow man. Even perfect strangers found their fists involuntarily clenching when they perceived him in the line of sight. When men grew to know t
he man, they not only clenched their fists but punched him on the crooked nose. Over the years of punishment, the constantly broken nose had tilted more and more to the left. Even dogs ran away from him.

  The east wind was cutting through his short seaman’s jacket and the scarf that wrapped around his face. Beneath this paltry protection against winter weather, there was nothing left in his stomach to make a noise. At one point during the night, he had thought he was going to die. The Mission to Seamen had told him to go away as they were tired of his fights. Before the dawn and as the temperature continued to fall, he began to pray, and when the dawn showed him where he was, sitting in the lee of Colonial Shipping’s Pool of London warehouse, where he had staggered, cold and hungry in the early part of the night, he looked up at the post on the wall and the grinning youthful face of Sebastian Brigandshaw.

  “There is a God,” he croaked to himself and got up to stamp the circulation back into his feet. With the first glimmer of hope, he began to work his way round to the front of the building. Clutched in his right hand was the poster.

  Five men in winged collars sat at high lecterns in the counting room. The youngest of them was forty years old. None of them looked up. Leading off from the counting room were private offices and behind these, the warehouses stuffed full of the proceeds of empire. Chests of tea from India and Ceylon, demerara sugar from British Guiana, cloves from Zanzibar, raw wool in great bales from Australia, hogsheads of tobacco from America, the first empire, and waiting to go out, cloth from the Lancashire cotton mills, steel from Sheffield and every kind of new-fangled machine known to man. Even in the counting house, Jeremiah Shank could smell the cloves. He waited in the warmth, the coal fire acting as a blood transfusion. For more than an hour, no one took the slightest notice of him sitting on the wooden bench next to the roaring fire. Even the tearing east wind failed to penetrate the building. On the bench sat the notice, Sebastian looking at the ceiling. When he was quite warm and sure he could stand properly, he stood up, lifting his head above the sanctuary of the shipping counter, catching the eye of one of the scribes.