The Brigandshaw Chronicles Box Set

by Peter Rimmer

  Many of the small diggers found their capital running out before they found the diamonds. Like a man playing poker for big stakes, Jeremiah forgot his land in Rhodesia. Casting his carefully cultivated accent, he plunged into the big hole and made friends with the sweating diggers. First, he lent them money to keep them going, saying he had won the cash at cards. Then he waited. On the same day six months after he arrived on the train from Cape Town he called up the loans on thirty-four claims. With half his capital still intact he was able to employ a gang of blacks to dig down far enough into the blue rock to find the diamonds. Nine months later he was rich. He left the first digger who had fallen into his loan trap as manager and rode the mail coach for Salisbury. Behind, he left three thugs to watch the manager. The thugs received ten per cent of diamond sales, as did the manager. Like cat and mouse, they found it better not to steal. And to add to the mix Jeremiah had appointed one of the local policemen as a spy.

  The estate of twenty thousand acres seventeen miles south of Salisbury was his main interest, as a man who wished to be a gentleman needed land. By the time he found himself entertaining the very sensuous Mrs Shaw in the exclusive dining room of Meikles Hotel, with the punkahs high overhead doing their best to stir the air, the first truly beautiful home in Rhodesia had been built on the north bank of the Hunyani River and Jeremiah’s great estate was fenced and three thousand head of cattle roamed the bush inside the perimeter. Looking at the woman across the perfectly starched double damask tablecloth he was not sure whether he wanted to bed the woman as a whore or take her as a wife. There was no doubt in his mind that the accent emanating from Mrs Shaw was the genuine article, born and bred for generations, something all his elocution lessons had never been able to give. Idly as he watched her over his glass of Cape red wine, he wondered how much it would cost to buy out Shaw. Jack Slater was easy. The man had a conscience and once he was acting administrator he would have to give up the delectable Mrs Shaw. Jeremiah agreed with Cecil Rhodes, every man had his price.

  Halfway through the meal and three glasses of red wine to the better, the lady began to tell him what he wanted to hear, though it puzzled him why Elephant Walk was so short of money. If he hadn’t stolen the two wagonloads of ivory, what had happened to the money, unless it had gone down the same bottomless pit of Captain Doyle and his dream of a fleet of ships? Jeremiah felt a proprietary interest in Sebastian Brigandshaw as the boy had been the source of his wealth. He knew the crew of the Indian Queen had left Colonial Shipping to start a new line, and he suspected the capital had come from Tinus Oosthuizen and young Sebastian Brigandshaw. It never failed to amuse him how easily a fool and his money or a fool and his diamond claims were separated. The story of Shaw losing his inheritance, which he heard after the fourth glass of wine, really tickled his fancy. Likely the last of the ivory money had gone down the same rat-hole, Captain mighty Doyle… With a bit of luck, the ship had sunk with the whole damn crew. Jeremiah always found satisfaction in other people’s adversity.

  The lady was on a roll. Even Shaw’s inability to fuck his wife came up politely in the conversation. Jeremiah, at the end of the supper, prided himself on the fact the lady had no idea he knew more about his shipmates than the shipmates knew about themselves. He ordered a balloon glass of Rémy Martin brandy and a cigar, and sat back in his chair, replete with food and conversation. It was such a nice feeling to be superior to everyone and the maître d’ had been particularly obsequious, wringing his hands in compliance at every opportunity.

  If there was a thing a woman or man liked doing best it was talking about themselves and Fran Shaw was no exception. By the time her coffee and liqueur arrived, a delicious glass of Benedictine, she was well on her way to being drunk and failed to pick up the gleam of interest in her supper companion’s eyes when she mentioned anyone from Elephant Walk. She thought the interest was in her, and even managed to delicately slip in her problem with Gregory so the man would not feel constrained when he made the pass she was sure was coming.

  The house in England outside Godalming had been in the family for centuries though the land they owned had shrunk to five acres and the firm of Holland and Cotton, solicitors, had been the source of family income since her grandfather had come down from Oxford with a Law degree and not very much else. But he was a gentleman and a gentleman’s word was his bond and the local gentry felt safe with him as they did with her father, and there was still the old house to prove where they came from. Many of the clients were related to the Cottons as the pool of gentry in the county over the centuries had been small. The firm made the family a comfortable and respectable living. There were two boys and Francesca in the family, the name coming from her parents’ three-week honeymoon in Tuscany. The boys were older, which was fun, but by the time Fran was sixteen she had met every one of their boring friends and the thought of marrying one of them and burying herself in the country for life was appalling. The one good pursuit that went with her background was playing the piano. Using the female charm she found so powerful she persuaded her doting father to send her to the Royal College of Music in London. She was a very good pianist, there was no doubt about that, but her real reason for going had been to get out of Godalming for good so she could start to do some living. They found her a respectable house to lodge in near the college and off she went, knowing her real future lay in her power over men, not in the way she played a Beethoven sonata. After Godalming, London was so exciting. She played the piano with such joy, she was soon the most popular girl in her class. Even the teacher thought she had a future. The only thing she missed from Godalming was the dogs, four highly strung Red Setters.

  Her first love affair was with a flautist who wasn’t very good at playing the flute but had the sensual looks of Lord Byron and long soft curly hair the colour of ripe corn. He was nineteen and the only man she was to love for the rest of her life. They talked about beautiful things, beautiful music, beautiful poems, beautiful flowers, and most often of all they talked about the beauty they saw in each other. Unfortunately, the flautist had a short attention span and after three months he went on his beautiful way. She saw neither hide nor hair of him again.

  Making sure she chose the weak carefully, she pursued and crushed a long list of young men. Any that might have been suitable and looked likely to propose marriage were quickly warned of her reputation by her so-called friends. One of her friends was heard to say in a rare erotic moment that Fran Cotton was growing mushrooms on her bed sheets and all but one of her friends had no idea what she was talking about. ‘Damp sheets, darling, damp sheets.’ Then the unimaginative laughed nervously. By the time Gregory Shaw came along, a rich man of the world who would take her out of England and away from her reputation, she was looking for a husband. She had graduated from the Royal College and occasionally played the piano at soirées in expensive houses where the hostess was more interested in her playing than her reputation. It made her independent and avoided the problem of her going back to Godalming.

  A yellow sunlight woke her in the morning and for a split moment, she had no idea where she was. She was hungover which was not unusual, drink having drowned her sorrows many times before. She was relieved to find there was no one else in the strange room, and then she remembered where she was and the evening with the dapper man with the crooked nose came back to her. To save her life, she could not remember his name. She pulled the cord for the maid, dropping a flap on the kitchen board one story down below that sent a servant up with a tray of tea to room twenty-four.

  The tea soothed her parched throat while she contemplated the next move in her life. She could either go back to England and be ostracised by polite society, or go back to Elephant Walk and her husband. There was Jack Slater, but intuition said he was a spent force. She thought of work, but no one needed a pianist in a frontier town… They wanted a piano player who showed off more than her chest and who could sing. Against an audience that wanted lustful vaudeville in a town starved of women, Mozart h
ad very little chance. Very often in life, Fran had found it necessary to take the best she could find out of many evils. With her horse fresh in the hotel stable, it would take three hours to drive to the farm. Maybe this time he would be pleased to see her. One never knew.

  When she drove the horse and buggy away from the hotel, there was no sign of the man whose name she could not remember. It was cool in the morning and surprisingly the breakfast had settled her young stomach.

  She began to sing as the horse trotted along. The servant from Elephant Walk, the one thing they all insisted went with her on her jaunts into Salisbury, sat silently. He was always more surly at the end of their stays in the town, and as the man could not speak English and Fran could not speak Shona, there was nothing she could say to break his mood. It made the men on Elephant Walk think they had done the right thing by giving her protection, and this made her laugh. If a lion wanted to eat them, Fran rather thought there was nothing either of them could do. It really was a very strange life for a girl from Godalming, she told herself, as a herd of buck scattered into the trees. Far over on the horizon over the tops of the msasa trees, the cumulus was beginning to build.

  For the first time, Fran had no real idea what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

  The man on the bench seat next to Fran was convinced the war of liberation would be over in a week if everyone acted at the same time, Matabele and Shona. The stupid white men at Elephant Walk did not even know the difference between a Matabele, a Zulu from the south, and the scum that made up the scattered tribes of the Shona. His impis had been picking over them quite satisfactorily until Rhodes stole the land from his King Lobengula and Jameson rode into Gu-Bulawayo with armed mounted men and machine guns. There was nothing then they had been able to do but retreat to the north and await their time for revenge.

  The man they called The Crocodile for his ability to snap with deadly effect when others thought he was asleep, had commanded the impi that killed Alan Wilson and his Shangani patrol in 1893 and knew the taste of victory. Enough of his warriors would always destroy some whites as, like Wilson, their guns eventually ran out of ammunition.

  Infiltrating Elephant Walk had been so simple he had wanted to laugh. He was the induna of the Matabele, general to Lobengula, King of the Matabele. They had thought him a useless savage and given him a job digging up trees for a few beans, salt and meat from game that belonged to Lobengula: Lobengula, who now lay dead in his cave wrapped in the skin of a great black ox, buried with all the dignity that was rightful to the son of Mzilikazi, induna and general to the great Shaka, King of the Zulu. Silently Zwide recited the praise song to Shaka, followed by the song to Mzilikazi, followed by the longest one of all and spoken first by Zwide at the burial cave, the praise song to his own king, Lobengula. At the time the furrows on his face were deep with concentration. Then he thought of the gold and ivory, the boxes of rifles buried with the king, and smiled. The Matabele would rise greater than ever before.

  The luck of being chosen to ride with the whore into Salisbury had only been what was due to him after the great trek from the mopane forest south of the Smoke that Thunders, which the whites were calling Victoria Falls. The journey had been dangerous but profitable. Now he knew that Jameson had left for the south and the country was theirs for the picking. Even the indignity of being a servant to a woman had been worth this knowledge.

  All he now had to do was convince the stupid Shona to act in unison by making all their bickering tribes work together. He, like Mzilikazi, a descendant of Zwide the great chief of the Zulu, would lead the Matabele back to their glory. And once he had chased away the whites, he would see about the Shona. They would be his subjects as they had been the subject of Mzilikazi and Lobengula, praise their names.

  He would slip away when he reached the farm. Quietly he wondered what the woman next to him would say if she knew he understood English, a task of learning placed on him by his king and learnt from the white hunters that buzzed around the king’s kraal like blowflies on a kill. And the great white hunter Tinus Oosthuizen had not even recognised him away from his headdress of crane feathers and the skin of a great leopard he had killed with his own hands. Now dressed in dirty shorts and a shirt discarded by a miner for one week’s pay, he was not surprised. Anyway, the whites said all blacks looked the same. They really were very stupid.

  It took a trained soldier to realise quickly the stockade being built around the garden and houses was more than a fence to keep out wild animals. The trees they had stumped out to plant crops were being strategically placed between two sunken posts, tree trunk layered upon tree trunk, the sets of sunken posts conveniently cut at the width of a fully grown msasa tree with the stump and canopy chopped off. The uneven nature of the trees left spaces for gun barrels. Against the far side of the tree fence, Tinus was stacking thorn bush but leaving sight holes at convenient intervals. Gregory Shaw had waited for his opportunity to talk to Tinus alone, away from the women and children.

  “What’s going on, Tinus?”

  “I forgot you were a soldier. I can’t really say. Instinct. The way the blacks look at me. We Boers have been in Africa a long time and never once was it easy. The man looking after Fran in Fort Salisbury is a Zulu. What’s a Zulu doing in rags looking for work? And he won’t look me straight in the eye. The Zulus have quite different features to the Shona.”

  “I can’t tell one from another.”

  “You will… He’s also got a bullet wound in his right thigh. Probably a couple of years old. Jameson has taken out the police and military and it makes me nervous. Why didn’t someone tell Jameson that rushing into Johannesburg with a few armed men won’t have the Uitlanders clapping their hands and joining the revolution? Those foreigners are a mix of every European race with a lust for gold mixed in with opportunist Australians and Americans. So, Kruger won’t give them the vote. Who the hell wants the vote, anyway! They want the gold. And if I know what our esteemed administrator is doing on behalf of Mr Rhodes, you can be sure our Oom Paul Kruger, President of the Transvaal Republic, knows more about the plan to steal the Rand goldfields than I do. Which brings us back to us, which is the main point in question. Without armed soldiers patrolling the country, we are vulnerable. This is a stockade, Greg. To fight behind.”

  “I rather thought so. Do you need any help?”

  “Check my lines of fire. Look for blind spots. All this may be a waste of time, but it makes me feel less nervous.”

  The first rolling thunder of the day rumbled from the hills to the north as the horse and buggy drove through the path they had cut through the trees.

  “When it rains, that road will be impassable,” said Tinus. “I want a word with that Zulu. I want to know who put a bullet in his leg.”

  Overhead the base of the cloud was black, the heat more oppressive than the day before. Lightning flashed nearer and nearer as Gregory inspected the fifty yards of the built stockade. He should have gone to his wife whatever she had been up to in Fort Salisbury but could not face the contempt in her eyes. He had known her reputation in London, there was no getting away from that, and the bad reputation had been part of her attraction. The side of him that wanted her to stay away was swamped with relief at her return. If only she stopped laughing at him, his impotency would go away. There was nothing physically wrong with him; it was all in his head. There had been many girls before Fran in London and none of them had left wanting. To make it different, to make it more important, to show that he was different to all the other men he heard about who had hopped in and out of her bed, he had waited till after they were married and that was the disaster. He had even stayed sober, the man of the world showing his young bride the great carnal pleasures in life. And then it had happened. Nothing. A piece of rope would have done better, and then she had laughed. Peal after peal of laughter, and they had gone to sleep in twin beds without consummating their marriage. A week later the family solicitor pointed out the terms of the family trust. H
e was left with a twenty-one-year-old wife and nothing but a swathe of virgin African bush. He had told Henry about his impotence and Henry had said to wait and that was three years ago and he was still waiting. And he was forty-one years old. Looking through the last rifle hole he wondered if what he wanted was a fight. Just as the first big raindrop dolloped on the side of his cheek he heard Harry yelling at the top of his seven-year-old lungs.

  “Mummy, it’s raining! Mummy, it’s raining!” And everyone ran out of the houses. Within three minutes the heavens opened and everyone ran back inside, breathless with excitement.

  “Home just in time,” said Fran, thankful for the diversion. When she turned to give the black man an instruction where to put her case and the shopping, he was gone. She shrugged. The stable boy had taken the horse and the houseboy was told to bring the parcels in out of the rain. Then she joined in the celebration. Immediately the temperature had begun to fall. If the parcels got wet, the parcels got wet. Most important of all, it was raining. And she was inside the house without a scene.

  The rain lasted a torrential hour and was a great relief. The lamps had been lit, and the drinks poured, and Gregory had said, “That tasted good”. Everyone had noticed his wife sat on the opposite side of the room but they all carried on a polite conversation. They talked about the rain, they talked about the children. The subjects of politics and Fran, seething in each of their separate minds, they kept to themselves. They even laughed more than usual, which was a sign of the tension. Outside the wind was still blowing through the trees, but the thunder was so far away only the dogs could hear. Two of them were cowering under the dining room table, both of them short-haired ridgebacks, the lion dogs they were now calling Rhodesian ridgebacks. The light from the kerosene lamp picked out their frightened eyes and Tinus smiled. The dogs preferred to face a wounded buffalo than rolling thunder far, far away and he wondered if the fear was built into all of them from the great distant past. The two fox terriers, the danger alarm clocks of Elephant Walk, came from a different ancestry… Both were rolled out on their sides full of food and fast asleep… The problems of man at that moment were very far away.