Yesterday's Promise

by Linda Lee Chaikin

  When I went to produce this letter from Honoria to show Lady Brewster the thoughts of her other niece, the letter was missing. Did Julien find it and destroy it? He was there in the estate at Pietermaritzburg. Lady Brewster now believes I have the B.D. She is backing Julien in refusing me a shilling of my rightful inheritance. Curse the day old Ebenezer Bley made every family member’s inheritance contingent on the agreement of Julien and Lady Brewster. It will become even worse when Lady Brewster passes on and Julien becomes the sole arbitrator.

  10 November

  Storms. Will we even make it home alive to beloved England?

  The infant cries constantly. Thank Providence she’s with the nursemaid and not with me!

  January 1880

  Home in England, Rookswood

  I’ve delivered the baby to the London Missionary Society before arriving at Rookswood. I have requested they make arrangements with Junia Varley’s sister, Grace Havering, to take her. All seems to be going well in that regard, but it is wise the baby’s whereabouts remain a secret from those in Capetown. I’ve told this to Vicar Edmund Havering. I have given some white diamonds secretly to the good vicar to raise the baby well.

  3 August

  Old Ebenezer Bley still had his wits about him when on his deathbed he gave his son, Julien, controlling interest over the family inheritance. The security of the diamond investments motivates all of Julien’s ruthless decisions. Family members are of little consequence to Julien Bley. Be cautious of him. When Julien perceives the diamond company is at risk, he can be as deadly as a provoked cobra. Julien sees himself a guardian angel over all, but angel of greed fits his patriarchal charade far better.

  I remember the way his one good eye looked at me on a particular morning I entered his office at Cape House last year. How he told me I would receive no assistance for the gold expedition to the Zambezi. On that instance the Black Diamond was sitting on his desk. It glittered under the light of his lamp! As big as a hen’s egg!

  We got into a discussion about a loan for my next expedition, and that led to bitter disagreement. “It was Sir George Chantry, my father and Lyle’s, who found the Black Diamond back in 1868,” I told Julien. “Lyle and I both want what belongs to us,” but Julien scoffed. “Everyone suddenly claims to have found the Black Diamond. I have witnesses who swear by the law that I found it, and the Kimberly mine as well.”

  He does have authority behind him, he and some others in De Beers Consolidated, including Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes, by all accounts, controls Kimberly. When I told Julien I discovered gold and needed some of my own money to stake an expedition to the Zambezi region, he mocked me. Henry’s Folly, he called my gold claim. One day he will be striving to gain control of Henry’s Folly. When I insisted on a loan, he actually drew a pistol on me and ordered me out of Cape House and out of his life.

  31 October 1884

  I’m remembering an incident about Julien that lately has been troubling me. I walked into his library office at Cape House in 1875, and I caught him unprepared. He sat at his desk with that black patch over one eye, his face fixated upon a set of sixteen bones, called hakata, sitting there in front of him. I recognized them at once. I’ve had experience with the dark superstitions of the nganga, or witch doctor, on my various treks deep into Mata beleland and Mashonaland. I don’t know where Julien got the hakata bones. But a nganga uses the hakata for different things, including “sniffing out” an evil spell, an omen, a necromancer, or a caster of spells.

  I saw Julien, that stalwart Englishman who attends the Anglican Church, paying heed to those bones. They’re made of wood, from the mutarara tree, the tree that keeps evil spirits away. It’s often planted over graves for that purpose. All this may seem mere mumbo jumbo, but witchcraft abounds. To this day I do not know what Julien was doing with the hakata. Katie once told me that Julien was studying about the Umlimo, a god of the Ndebele, who they believe lives in the Matopos Mountain Range by the Bulawayo region. There is a spirit guide who lives in the caves who reportedly speaks dark sayings for this god. I still ask myself why Julien would be studying about the Umlimo, and about bone casting for divination.

  Of this I am certain. When it comes to diamonds and gold, I’d trust him no more than a banded cobra.

  Rogan looked up from the yellowing sheets. The ship’s groaning timbers gave voice to mental images of Sir Julien Bley engaged in divination. The idea seemed ludicrous from what Rogan knew of him. Odd…was it so? Sir Julien Bley involved with African witchcraft? Old practical Julien would have been the last person he’d ever suspect of dabbling in superstition. Was there power in such nonsense? Rogan tried to think back to his growing-up years in the church under Vicar Edmund Havering. He couldn’t recall the vicar ever discussing anything diabolical.

  I’ll have a look into this myself. Derwent might know a few things. Does the Bible speak about it? Just what was Julien trying to do when Henry walked in on him?

  Rogan drew his brows together. Along with his blood uncle’s warnings, his own suspicions grew stronger. Henry had his faults, but he had never been ruthless in the hardened way Julien was.

  Julien’s presence at Rookswood made Rogan wary, even as a boy. After Henry’s will was read and his bequest of the map known to the family, Julien would come from Capetown and seek him out alone to “have a small chat.” By the time Rogan turned twelve, he didn’t trust Julien. He would sense being “watched” from the shadows of the mansion, or in the garden. Julien would come to Rookswood each year to visit “the dear family,” something he had never made much of before the reading of Uncle Henry’s will. More than clever for his age, Rogan began to turn the tables on Sir Julien. He would follow him at night to the third floor and watch him enter Henry’s old rooms to search time and again.

  Was Henry killed for the Black Diamond, or the map? Was it Uncle Julien who murdered Henry? With his powerful influence, Julien could have easily arranged things at Grimston Way to cover over anything that might point to him.

  Rogan reached for the other item on his desk, perhaps the more important, the map. The ship pitched again, and Rogan held a column to steady himself. He squinted for perhaps the hundredth time at the emblem of a bird—or birds. He’d long pondered the meaning of the symbols Henry had drawn on the map. Could it represent a falcon, a hawk, or some fowl peculiar to that area? Perhaps he was making too much of it. In all the meticulous research he’d done in London since locating the map, he had yet to find anything significant about a bird in the region north of the Limpopo River. Henry had also drawn a lion and a baobab tree.

  Perhaps the trek itself would shed light on any obscure meanings contained in the wildlife symbols. Was it possible that Henry had nothing more in mind than adding a touch of artistic flair to the painting? If so, its application here would merely have detracted from his usual clarity.

  Rogan’s thoughts roamed to his grandfather, Sir George, who died at sea on a return voyage from the Cape in 1869. Rogan knew him only by his grandiose portrait displayed above the stairwell in the Great Hall at Rookswood with the rest of the Chantry squires.

  Soon after discovering the map, Rogan had asked about his grandfather. One day he found his father busy writing a history of Rookswood. He looked up from his books with typical impatience, brows twisted as though hooked together over the bridge of his aristocratic nose.

  “My father found the Kimberly Diamond? Balderdash! What is this, Rogan, more of Henry’s Folly? I wish that will of his had never mentioned leaving you a map.”

  Rogan held his questions and, after that meeting, never again went to his father on the subject. Had he tried to justify himself, showing the map or diary pages, the news would soon have reached Julien in Cape House. Rogan had long been rankled by the way he saw his father submit to his stepbrother. All through the years he had grown up at Rookswood, he had longed to see his father confront Julien head-on. But whenever opportunity arose, his father, Lyle, always backed down, insisting, “Conflict is foolish,” and wo
uld withdraw to another room to lose himself in his private interests.

  Rogan replaced the map and diary pages into a leather envelope he wore on his person to guarantee safety, then glanced at his pocket watch. It was close to midnight. Tomorrow the ship would be entering the Cape harbor. That is, if the storm did not delay them. Sir Lyle or Aunt Elosia would have wired Cape House that he was aboard the HMS King George. Would Julien be waiting? More than likely he would be riled that Rogan had not completed a full year in the family diamond business in London. Rogan knew his uncle would assume he had found the work too tame and, longing for action, had grown restless.

  To occupy time alone in the cabin, he picked up a pencil and turned his attention to his personal journal. He had begun writing down what he knew of Henry’s death when he’d departed London. Then, as ideas accumulated, he grew interested in trying to make more sense of his mysterious death.

  Rogan scowled. He looked at the last entry he’d made the night before, dated the first week of July. He mused over his own words as he reread them.

  Henry Chantry was not the manner of man to snuff out his own life. He was not prone to any emotional disheartenment that might provoke such an act. He would be the first to scoff at such a notion if he could have attended his own inquest. He was too bold to leave his burdens behind for others to carry.

  As far as I know, my uncle was not a religious man, but he did respect the church. I do not believe he would look upon the doorway of death as an escape, if he were unsure what lay ahead for such a man as he. Taking his life would be too easy for my uncle. He had fought wildly and bitterly to stay alive when under attack by Shona tribesmen on his last expedition near the Zambezi. He had lost his guide, Bertrand Mornay, and a bushman called Sam in a wild scramble to survive. No, Uncle Henry would not have committed suicide.

  Then what happened that night?

  Members of every branch of the family were all reported to be in London at a family wedding the night of his death. But I have ridden the late train from London to Grimston Way enough times to know that any one of them might have done the same, taking the short trip to Rookswood and then returning without being missed.

  Henry had been working at the estate in his upstairs rooms. The murderer must have known this and gone up to the third floor. But who?… Julien, Anthony Brewster, Lady Camilla? Yes, even my own father Lyle or my maiden aunt, Lady Elosia? Any one of them might have come to meet with Henry about the Black Diamond or the map on that fatal night.

  If I hadn’t been so young, I might have been awake to hear footsteps inching their way up the stairs, across the second floor hall, and the steps up to the third floor… I might have heard the pistol go off. If only…

  Rogan tapped his chin and sighed. He snapped the journal closed and placed it inside his leather satchel. Outside, the wind increased. Restless and eager to disembark, he stood up just as the ship pitched violently, and losing his balance, he struck his head on the protruding cabin bulkhead. Leaning on one knee while propped against the wall, he narrowed his eyes and gritted his teeth. One thing I am glad of. I won’t ever need to be a sea captain!

  He crawled to his bunk and tied himself in for the rough night.

  He thought of Evy Varley…those amber eyes with green flecks, and wavy, tawny hair… Where was she now? What was she doing? He imagined her playing her piano. Was she also remembering him?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Capetown

  Even though Rogan was out at sea, the distant sight of Table Mountain, appearing to rise above the watery horizon, with white clouds draping its flat top, roused his imagination. Later that afternoon he was standing on the ship’s deck with his back to the stiff landward breeze as they neared Table Bay and Capetown, when an old sailor he’d spoken to on the voyage came up beside him and gestured to the mountain range.

  “Stirred many a sailor’s hopes, that mountain. Been a cheery beacon for ships comin’ out of some of the worst storms a man ever did see.

  “Table Mountain, she’s called. Them’s her two companions, Devil’s Peak and Lion’s Head. That there mountain range ’tween ’tis the backbone for the Cape peninsula. Only thing is, I’da called her Angel’s Peak. That there devil gets too much publicity.”

  Rogan held to the ship’s rail and squinted across the water to Table Bay. “Sir Francis Drake described it as ‘the fairest cape we saw in the whole circumference of the earth.’”

  “Did he, now? Well, aye, so she is. Mighty fair. The Almighty knew what He were doin’ aright,” the old sailor agreed. “He made Table Top flat so as it gathers all that moisture. Then that purt cloud just comes rollin’ over the edge nice ‘n’ neat as a lady’s crocheted dining cloth.”

  “What makes the cloud drape across the mountain slope and stop halfway down where it does?”

  The old crewman scratched his locks. “Well, sir, I wouldn’t be knowin’, but today ’tis truly earning its name, ‘Tablecloth.’”

  Rogan studied the tablecloth cloud through his binoculars. The way the cloud rolled over its northern edge and stopped—draped just so far down the slope—reminded him of a waterfall wrapped in mist. “It looks to me as though the wind is colliding head-on with the mountains on the peninsula, getting forced up the steep slopes. That would drop the temperature and start condensation, apparently just where the thick cloud edge appears.”

  “Aye, suppose you be aright. Wind screams throughout the year ‘round the Cape o’ Good Hope. Seldom’s the day when there be none. Been in many a bad storm and ocean swell comin’ round that tip of southern Africa. Storm t’other night was small turnips compared to the ones I seen. Been sailin’ since I were a cabin boy, only a young’un of nine years.” He studied Rogan. “You be goin’ to the diamond mines at Kimberly, I suppose?”

  “For a short visit. I’ve family there.”

  “Most folks go to Kimberly and stay.”

  “See that mountain? I’ve plans for an expedition that will bring me far beyond to the Zambezi region, to gold, perhaps emeralds, too.” Rogan looked at the old man and grinned. “You can come with me if you like. Ready to give up the sea?”

  The old sailor chuckled. “Yer pullin’ me leg, lad. Ne’r catch me beyond the land of the Dutchies. Sooner face dragons o’ the deep than giant savages with spears. Heard tell they pulls out yer heart and eats it alive. If you can get yer gold and emeralds and make it back to merry old England alive, you be deservin’ ever’ last one of ’em.”

  It was dawn the next morning when the HMS King George slid through the rippling water of the Cape into Table Bay and docked at the wharf. Impatient to be about the coming adventure, Rogan hefted his bag over his shoulder, grabbed his hat, and bolted from the cramped cabin, heading topside to the deck.

  His booted feet took the steps with the same confident ring that drove him forward toward his desired destiny.

  On the deck, he set his bag down and stood feet apart, one strong hand bracing himself against the rail. Even at dockside, the wind blew in from the sea, but now the salt air mingled with the enticing fragrance of a strange new land. His shirt, partially opened over his bronzed chest, tossed as freely as the new liberty pulsing through his veins. The adventurous wind, like a woman’s seductive fingers in his dark wavy hair, was welcoming him, drawing him, toward an uncertain future.

  Table Mountain dominated the view, with the mountain range forming a half circle around Capetown, Devil’s Peak and Lion’s Head on either side. Rogan could see Capetown spread around Lion’s Head with some red-roofed, white mansions and smaller bungalows, which clustered near the bay.

  The sky was clear as he walked down the ramp to the dock, which teemed with workers awaiting the ship’s cargo. A fiery hue touched with gold colored Devil’s Peak. Rising thirty-five hundred feet, Table Mountain was unveiled, showing off its glory, its huge mass close enough for him to see the clefts and ravines. Its long flat top stretched behind Capetown, with the blue sky above like a canopy.

  Rogan strode along the
crowded dock with his heavy bag over his shoulder, taking in everything he could see. Barrels and crates were stacked everywhere as they were hauled from ship to shore on the sweating backs of both Europeans and Africans. The Bantu workers wore short knee pants, their backs bare. One-horse taxis and private coaches jostled for space to greet the disembarking passengers.

  Rogan stopped on the wharf to survey the vehicles waiting for passengers. To his surprise, he saw Arcilla seated in an open carriage attended by two Bantu. She was smiling and waving for his attention. One of the serving boys ran over and relieved him of his baggage.

  Should he be surprised to see his sister? His father or Aunt Elosia must have wired Cape House about the ship he was on. Then Julien must know he was here. Rogan set his jaw. He wasn’t ready to meet Julien yet. He wanted to go alone to Kimberly to locate Derwent, who had written him from there. Parnell was at Kimberly too, working at the Company office.

  But he didn’t see Julien or Arcilla’s husband, Peter. She was alone, and a pretty picture she was in a lacy pink hat and white blouse with puffed sleeves. He walked toward her carriage, with the Bantu following, carrying his baggage.

  Arcilla Chantry Bartley recognized the forceful young man standing at the ship’s rail even before the unloading ramp had been secured in place. She smiled with sisterly pride over his handsome, rugged appearance. The confident line of his tanned jaw revealed a hardness of purpose she knew well from their growing-up years at Rookswood. His dark hair curled slightly, and a thin mustache had been added since she’d seen him last, perhaps grown on his voyage to give the appearance of maturity when dealing with gold rands and diamond moguls who would be dogging his steps once they knew of his plans for an expedition to find gold. It also added a certain rakish charm that fit him well. She laughed, thinking of Evy Varley. As if Evy hadn’t fallen for her brother years ago. Evy hadn’t fooled her a bit, despite all her dignified ways and pretense and all that silly talk about marrying the vicar’s boy, Derwent Brown! Arcilla sighed. But how she missed Evy! If only she were here with her now. At least the vicar’s niece was a loyal friend, someone she could trust. Darinda Bley was a thorn in her side and she spent most of her time in Kimberly helping her grandfather, Julien Bley, with the diamond business. The other married women, whose husbands worked for the Company, were even more insufferable. Two-faced and catty, all! She hadn’t a friend to confide in anywhere in Capetown.