To Chase the Storm: The Frontier Series 4

by Peter Watt

  ‘My name is Saul Rosenblum,’ he finally said to break the silence as they walked. ‘I’m with the Queensland Mounted Infantry.’

  ‘You are an Australian,’ she replied. ‘I should hate you for being in this war which is not yours. Why are you here?’

  ‘I’m here because . . .’ he fumbled with his words. Why was he here? While he knew he was not really in South Africa for the same patriotic reasons his comrades espoused, he had never really questioned his motives for enlisting until this strange young woman had pinned him down with her blunt question. He took a deep breath and continued. ‘I’m here because you needed my help a while ago. That’s why.’

  Her laughter took him by surprise. It was light and spontaneous. She stopped in the street and turned to the tall soldier from across the Indian Ocean.

  ‘That is not why you are really here. But I like your answer.’

  There was a merriment in her eyes he had not seen up until now. And it was as if something had passed between them.

  ‘My name is Karen Isaacs, Mr Rosenblum. And, as you can see, we may share a common heritage.’ She hesitated and frowned. ‘You are an Australian Jew?’

  ‘Sort of,’ Saul responded uncertainly. ‘My father was a Jew but my mother a gentile. Me, well, I don’t exactly believe in all the stuff. But my father started to believe again, right before he died last year.’

  ‘I am sorry, Mr Rosenblum,’ she said as the merriment faded from her eyes and she touched his arm lightly.

  ‘He had a good innings,’ Saul replied.

  ‘What does a good innings mean?’ she asked, looking puzzled at the expression.

  ‘Like in cricket. Scored a few runs before he was bowled out.’

  ‘Oh, I understand now. But I was not saying I was sorry for your father dying. I was saying I was sorry that you did not follow the faith of our fathers.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you don’t get much time to think about religion when yer wrestling with some old scrub cow where I come from.’

  ‘You are a man who works with cattle,’ she said with interest as they began to walk again. ‘Do you have many cattle?’

  ‘Not anymore. We lost the property about the time the old man died. Guess the real reason I joined up was for a job that paid four and sixpence a day and all the biscuits you can eat . . . when we can get them.’

  They came to a little house with a wide verandah and dirty white-washed walls. A low wire fence overgrown by desiccated, long grass surrounded the house and red dust filled the spaces between what had once been a nicely laid out garden trimmed with stones. Karen stopped in the space where a gate should have been and turned to Saul. He was desperately attempting to stave off the imminent separation. He wanted to get to know this young woman but did not give himself much of a chance in a town where fifty thousand other soldiers would probably be wanting to do the same.

  ‘You didn’t tell me why that Boer was going to give you a hiding,’ he finally said, hoping the explanation might delay her just a little longer.

  ‘I will tell you when you come to have supper with Mrs Ramsay and myself tonight,’ she said, eyes twinkling. ‘Five o’clock we dine. Is that convenient to you?’

  ‘My oath! Sorry, Miss Isaacs, I meant that will be fine.’

  ‘Good,’ Karen said as she turned her back and walked away from him, her slim hips swinging under the cotton dress.

  Saul watched her disappear into the house and turned to walk back into the town. As he did he found his thoughts remained focused on the eyes and enigmatic smile of the woman he had just met. There was something about her that haunted him in a pleasant way. But he was soon lost in the crowd of khaki soldiers roaming the African town.

  THIRTEEN

  April had come and was almost gone by the time the rains came to the tent city that had sprung up around Bloemfontein. The dusty soil turned to a quagmire of mud, making life miserable for man and beast.

  Private Saul Rosenblum was more fortunate than his comrades who sat around in their clammy tents cursing the weather and praying for a chance to be back in the saddle hunting down the Boer commandos. He had a warm and cosy house to slip away to whenever he was granted leave – and sometimes when he was not. The gentle love that had blossomed between him and the mysterious girl grew stronger with each day in their lives.

  Saul had learned that she was born in Holland and that her father was a gemstone buyer for De Beers diamond company. Her mother had died of malaria while they were in Portuguese territory en route to Rhodesia three years earlier and one of her brothers was killed riding with the Boer commandos earlier that year. Her other brother was presumably still living, his whereabouts unknown with a commando operating in the Transvaal. Her father, as he knew, resided in Pretoria, awaiting his daughter’s return.

  Karen told Saul how the Boers had accused her of collaboration with the English on the day he had rescued her from a public thrashing with the stinging sjambok. She said it was really because she was a Jew and also because she resided with an English widow, Annabelle Ramsay, whose husband had been killed in a mine accident at Kimberley two years before the war broke out in South Africa.

  The Boers had focused their brand of anti-Semitism on the gold barons of South Africa, accusing them of being the real architects of the war. But the anti-Semitic feelings of the Boers were not restricted to them alone. Many protesting the war in England cited the universal Jewish conspiracy as the cause of war.

  Mrs Ramsay was an old friend of the Isaac family from when Karen had lived in London for a time as a young girl to perfect her English. Saul’s visits to the house and the walks he and Karen took together on the veldt soon led them both to the young Dutch girl’s bed. She was sometimes unsure why the tall Queenslander had appealed to her above all other men she had known. Was it his gentle innocence despite his tough exterior? Or was it his slow smile and self-deprecatory sense of humour? In the old double bed with its brass metal bedhead, under the tin roof of Mrs Ramsay’s cottage they would lie entwined and listen to the lullaby of the steady April rain. Together they found a universe that, however transient, transcended the inevitable moment when Lord Roberts had swelled his army sufficiently to march on the Boer capital of Pretoria.

  Some nights Saul trembled in his sleep and screamed himself awake when the nightmares came, the ground thumping under him as the Boer artillery shredded men and horses with hot, flailing shrapnel. Arms, legs and entrails piled in steaming heaps as he struggled against the drowning tide of blood. On such nights Karen would press him against her tiny breasts and rock him with soothing words. At those times she would think of her dead brother whose body lay in an unmarked grave and wonder if the man she soothed in her arms might have killed him. But her guilt helped no-one. This was their universe and nothing else mattered when they were together.

  Sister Greeves of the New South Wales Army Medical Corps held up a methylated lamp for the two rain-drenched colonial scouts who carried their comrade between them in the blanket they had used as a stretcher. With rifles slung across their backs, they struggled to get him into the makeshift hospital and onto the floor. In the converted former Boer military barracks enteric fever cases had taken most of the available beds.

  ‘Doctor,’ she called to the surgeon on duty. ‘We have a man who has been shot in the upper body.’

  The doctor hurried to join the nursing sister as she knelt by the big man and expertly stripped away the wounded man’s blood-stained shirt to reveal a tiny hole to the right upper pectoral muscle. She knew from experience that the wound was caused by a high velocity Mauser round. She held the lantern close so that the army surgeon could make a diagnosis of the man’s condition. He was conscious but refused to allow his obvious pain to show. His teeth were gritted to stop himself screaming out when the surgeon probed as gently as possible the entry wound with sterilised forceps.

  ‘He looks too old to be riding around the veldt,’ the doctor muttered angrily.

  ‘’E’s only half the age of so
me of the Boers we’ve come across,’ one of the tough-looking colonial scouts snarled. ‘And I’ve seen some of them Boers no older than twelve shootin’ at us from the rocks.’

  The doctor glanced up into the face of the man who had made the statement. He was an Australian, as were many of the colonial soldiers in the local units raised to fight the Boer. Most had once worked the mines before the war, crossing the Indian Ocean from their own land to seek employment in South Africa when the recession of the ’90s hit Australia. The doctor nodded. The independent scouts were not men who necessarily were awed by rank, nor was it wise to argue a point with them.

  He scanned the rest of the wounded man’s body and marvelled at the scars, obviously inflicted over many years and most probably by war. He was not young, perhaps close to sixty, and yet his body was as hard and muscular as that of a man half his age. Even in his wounded condition his face remained ruggedly handsome, despite the black leather patch over his left eye.

  ‘This man should not be riding with you,’ the sister exclaimed indignantly. She was unafraid of any living being except the matron of the hospital and the tough scouts did not frighten her in the slightest. ‘How could the army let him enlist at his age – and with only one eye?’

  ‘This old man, Sister, is none other than Captain Michael Duffy,’ one of the scouts growled defensively, ‘the best lion hunter in Africa, next to Selous that is, and a man who has seen more wars in his time than you’ve had breakfasts. Them scars he got stretch back as far as the Maori Wars before you were even born. Not to mention the American Civil War, fighting the red Injuns, fighting Mexicans. And the rest just scars he got being mauled by lions. Kind of fitting he got another scar fightin’ in this war.’

  ‘We have a Major Duffy here in Bloemfontein, attached to Lord Roberts’ staff,’ the doctor said as he traced the route that the cupronickel projectile had taken along his patient’s ribs under the skin. High velocity bullets rarely took a straight path when they hit a target. They had a habit of being easily deflected and following the least line of resistance, which in this case was under Michael’s arm and down his ribs to lodge just under the skin at the lower end of his ribcage. ‘Wouldn’t be a relation, would he?’

  ‘My son,’ Michael winced as the doctor pressed on the outline of the bullet beneath the skin. ‘But he’ll be an orphan if you don’t get the bloody bullet out soon.’

  ‘You’re lucky, Captain Duffy. The wound is clean and the bullet should come out with very little trouble. You seem to have a tough hide for someone your age. I’ll have one of the orderlies fetch Major Duffy and tell him you are here.’

  ‘Thanks, Doc,’ Michael replied with a broad smile. ‘Think he will be somewhat surprised to find he still has a father . . . or maybe not.’

  ‘How did this happen?’ the surgeon asked as he stood to prepare himself for the operation. ‘I thought there wasn’t much action out there for the moment.’

  ‘We were reconnoitring well up the railway track when we stumbled into an ambush. Seems they didn’t know I was too old to fight anymore.’

  The doctor grinned at the Australian’s quiet jibe. He was a tough bastard, he thought and wondered if the son was anything like his father.

  Patrick stared at the rain-drenched hospital orderly in stunned silence, wondering if he had been sent as some elaborate joke by the Queenslanders in an attempt to break the monotony of their camp existence.

  ‘Captain Michael Duffy?’ Patrick repeated.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the orderly confirmed. ‘A big man with a black leather eye patch. He also says he is your father.’

  Patrick quickly threw a groundsheet over his shoulders and followed the orderly through the tent city on the outskirts of the town. He was drenched when he arrived at the hospital in the early hours of the morning. As Sister Greeves eyed the tall major, Patrick knew she was making some comparison with the man who said he was Michael Duffy. From the expression on her stern but pretty face he knew he had passed her assessment. She held a lamp to lead the way between the rows of sleeping patients, some moaning in their restless fight with fever, others moaning in pain from their wounds.

  By the time Major Patrick Duffy arrived at the hospital the surgeon had removed the bullet from his patient. The big Irishman had scorned the use of an anaesthetic for such a trivial operation, and did not scream out when the scalpel peeled open the flesh over his ribs to release the projectile. ‘Send it to Count Manfred von Fellmann in Prussia,’ Michael had grinned weakly as the doctor held up the bullet. ‘Let the bastard know I’m still alive and his German bullets can’t kill me.’

  Sister Greeves led Patrick to a bed at the end of the ward where the shadows of the lamp fell on a profile he had last seen fifteen years ago, crouching beside an ox wagon, with a Winchester rifle, waiting for the Boer commando to launch its night assault on them. Patrick stood beside his father’s bed staring down at him.

  Although Michael was in great pain he grimaced at his son. ‘Hello, Patrick,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Or should I call you sir, as you seem to outrank me.’

  Patrick pulled a face and shook his head. He had only one question after fifteen years of presuming his father was dead.

  ‘How?’

  Michael attempted to drag himself into a sitting position. His son helped him prop himself against the wall behind the bed. ‘Got a cigarette?’ Michael asked when he was moderately comfortable.

  Patrick produced a crushed packet and found a relatively dry cigarette which he lit and passed to his father. Michael inhaled deeply before answering. ‘I was lucky. They hit me all at once and in the darkness and confusion I got hold of one of their horses. When they woke up to what had happened I was halfway down to the river. I got off the horse and took to swimming. The horse was still galloping away in the dark and the stupid bastards followed the sound of it away from me. It was as simple as that.’ He took another long drag on the cigarette. As simple as that...

  Patrick knew it had probably not been that simple but he also knew his father was not a man for elaborate explanations. ‘Why in God’s name didn’t you contact me to say you were still alive?’ he questioned in a cold voice, as if his father were an enemy to be interrogated.

  ‘You know my life, Patrick,’ the Irishman replied. ‘I’ve been a dead man ever since you were born and there was no reason why I should disturb your life. And besides, it did not seem a good idea because you were rightfully with Catherine. I’ve never felt good about what happened.’

  Patrick shook his head. In his mind the affair between Catherine and his father had long been buried. He did not blame his father for Catherine’s infatuation with him – she had been very young then. Time had brought Patrick some wisdom in the matter long past. ‘Do you know that you have a grand-daughter and two grandsons? Don’t you think that they have a right to know you, even if I didn’t seem to have that right?’

  Michael smiled at his son’s revelation. ‘Ah, but that’s a grand thing to know. Tell me about my grandchildren.’

  Patrick sighed and sat at the edge of the bed, describing the three children to his father who listened engrossed as the cigarette burned down to his fingers. As Michael questioned his son on their lives, Patrick felt an unexpected closeness to this man who was almost a stranger to him. This was only the third time he had met his father in his life. The dangerous intrigue that was Michael’s life had kept father and son apart.

  When Patrick had answered his questions about his grandchildren, Michael moved on to the rest of the family. The answers came: Daniel Duffy was now a politician of some standing, fighting the Federationists with words, in favour of the colonies forming a republic on American lines. Lady Enid was alive and well and running the Macintosh companies in his absence. Aunt Kate, Michael’s sister, was well and the wealthiest woman in the Colony of Queensland. Young Matthew had turned up in Sydney and enlisted under-age without his mother’s knowledge. In response to his urgent inquiries, Patrick had just received a telegram f
rom Arthur Thorncroft confirming the worst. Matthew was with the New South Wales Citizen Bushmen’s Rifles en route to South Africa.

  At this news of his nephew Michael growled his disapproval. Both men vowed that he would be intercepted and put on the first ship back to Australia, in irons if necessary. But they also agreed that Kate should not know of Matthew’s foolhardy adventure until her son was located.

  ‘Did you know of my mother’s death?’ Patrick finally asked.

  His father looked away. ‘I did not know,’ he answered softly. ‘When did she die?’

  His son told his father all that he knew of his mother’s peaceful death in Prussia. Michael nodded but no tears came. Instead he sighed and related a story from his own experiences.

  ‘About ten years back I was doing some hunting in Bechuanaland, mostly lions. I had an opportunity to observe the big cats and the way they lived and I learned something that makes a lot of sense to me now. Maybe it always did. I learned that the female lion was happiest with her sisters. The females would hunt and live together and the old male would just prowl around as a solitary creature. The female only needed him when she came into season. For that privilege he was prepared to put his life at risk fighting off other competitors for the females. But when that time was over, she went back to her sisters, to live out her life. I don’t think lions and people are much different.’

  Patrick could understand what his father was trying to tell him. He knew of his mother’s passionate love for her cousin Penelope and his story of the lions was his way of attempting to reassure his son that his mother had not been an evil woman.

  ‘I do know of the matter of Catherine and yourself, Patrick,’ his father continued. ‘Soldiers talk, especially about the private lives of officers, and I am truly sorry that matters turned out the way they did.’