by Robert Edric
We were put up at the residence of a man called Henrici, Chief Quartermaster – Cornelius’s counterpart – and it was not until late in the evening that I discovered that he was also to be the acting judge in the following day’s proceedings.
Alone with Cornelius, I asked him by what authority the man played the role, but he dismissed my remark by asking me how else I imagined these things were done. There was no doubt that the accused man was guilty, having confessed to both his crimes.
Henrici had speculated on the punishment he might deliver, but here too there was little doubt. Cornelius told me to say nothing during the trial. The accused man had also been suspected of stealing from us during the time he was in our employ, but nothing had been done to expose or punish him. I saw then how inextricably all these events and their participants were connected.
The criminal showed no remorse and stood before the court wearing only a pair of blue trousers, his feet and hands tied. He frequently shouted out to interrupt the proceedings, and each time this happened he was struck by the guards on either side of him. One of these men was Proctor, though I did not know him at the time.
A junior quartermaster acted in the man’s defence, but this amounted to little more than a recital of his record of employment, doubtlessly compiled the previous day, and being little more than a list of the months during which the man had not been accused of any crime. He was an unreliable and unpopular worker, who stood accused of beating a fellow porter in order to steal a small case of wire rods and polished tortoiseshell. The other man had died of his wounds ten days after the attack, and four days after that the thief had been arrested while attempting to sell what he had stolen.
The court proceedings were perfunctory. At one point, Henrici called for Proctor not to beat the prisoner so harshly, saying that the beatings and the man’s attempts at evasion were holding everything up. There was a small space in the building reserved for the public, and this consisted mostly of traders keen on an hour’s entertainment while they waited for their customers. There were no seats, and these men came and went.
The man’s wife and four children had been allowed into the court at the start of the proceedings, but had then been removed following the woman’s constant wailing. She had thrown a fetish at her husband, expecting him to catch it and protect himself with it, but instead the man had simply stared at it where it fell at his feet and had then ground it into the dirt. Henrici watched this and then called for the thing to be removed, saying it dishonoured the integrity of the court. He consulted frequently with the men sitting alongside him, but I imagine that little of any legal consequence was discussed by them.
The guilty man’s crimes were frequently repeated. Whatever else happened, there was to be no doubt whatsoever that he was deserving of the punishment about to be handed down to him. Cornelius had warned me the previous evening that there was only one possible consequence of a murder charge being proven and that the man would be hanged. This, he said, would take place immediately following the trial. This was not a place for reconsideration or appeals. I asked him if he thought this was fair – I had not known then how inadequate and compromising the man’s defence was to prove – and, suppressing his laughter, he told me I might want to raise the point with Henrici over breakfast.
The following morning, taking his duties seriously, Henrici left for the courthouse before I woke.
The trial lasted two hours, half of which consisted of private deliberations.
Cornelius gave his evidence. He smoked one of his cigars, constantly acknowledging the men he recognized in the crowd. He was asked to tell the court what he knew of the accused man, but everything he said only confirmed what the court already knew. He spoke to those of us in our reserved seats as though we were the members of a jury, and it occurred to me only then that this, unofficially, was what we were.
The accused man was condemned to death by hanging for the murder of his fellow porter. One of the other judges rose at this announcement and asked if there were any relatives of the murdered man present. No-one answered him, disappointing him and causing him to sit back down, his own small role in the proceedings over.
‘He would have offered them a part in it,’ Cornelius said to me, making no attempt to lower his voice. ‘In the name of fairness and retribution.’
There was then a further delay as Henrici announced that he and his judges would now consider the crime of theft.
I asked Cornelius if this was simply another example of the protocol of the occasion being seen to be observed.
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘They’ll probably want to flog him unconscious before reviving him to hang him.’
I thought at first that he was making a cruel joke at the condemned man’s expense, but a moment later Henrici announced that the man would receive three hundred lashes before he was hanged. He rose from his seat and read from a ledger. Upon finishing, he handed the book to each of the others for their signatures.
Even allowing for the fact that the man had confessed to both crimes and must have known what awaited him, it was evident to most present that the trial was a charade, concerned with a great deal more than the matter of theft or murder.
At this point, Cornelius rose and asked Henrici if the flogging might not be reduced. Henrici shook his head. The ink had already dried on the paper.
I asked Cornelius why he had made the appeal on the man’s behalf.
‘Because they’ll beat him unconscious more than once and we’ll all be kept waiting while he’s brought round. There will have to be a doctor present and he will have to certify that the man is fit enough to go on being lashed. After which, he will have to certify him sufficiently recovered to be hanged.’
I asked him how many of these trials he had attended, and rather than answer me, he began to one by one slowly extend the fingers of both hands.
I looked past him to Fletcher. We had all expected to be back at the Station by mid-afternoon.
We ate lunch with Henrici. His manner was grave, as befitted his new responsibilities. He said it shocked and surprised him to see how these people continued to behave towards each other, how little value they put on life itself. But his tone was more one of excited disgust than genuine, humanitarian disappointment in his fellow man. He drank glass after glass of wine with his food.
Later, the proceedings resumed and the condemned man was unceremoniously tied to a crude frame erected in the space outside the court. A larger crowd gathered.
Proctor and two of his men carried out the beating, one man counting aloud each time the cane connected with the man’s back.
Mercifully, the flogged man screamed only at the first thirty or so lashes, and after that he seemed anaesthetized by his pain. Blood sprayed the ground in a wide circle around him. I even imagined I felt the finest flecks of it on my own forehead twenty yards from where he was whipped.
After sixty lashes, he fell unconscious, and Proctor and his men revived him by pouring water over him. The man groaned – sufficient for the doctor to signal to Proctor to continue – and the flogging resumed. Men and women in the crowd called out continually and I saw that wagers were being made on how much more the beaten man might endure.
He passed out four more times before the first hundred lashes were administered. After this he was revived, allowed to rest for a few minutes, swilled with clean water, and his flayed back pointlessly sprayed with sulphur powder. The doctor moved closer to oversee this, standing with a cloth pressed firmly to his nose and mouth. The man’s injuries did not concern him, merely his capacity to endure having more inflicted upon him.
The flogging resumed, and this time the man passed out almost immediately. It was by then three in the afternoon and the sun was at its hottest. A cloud of flies hung over the beaten man. The men with the canes paused and Henrici went to them. After a brief conference, Henrici announced to the crowd that nothing would be served by further reviving the man and that the flogging would continue even though he was
unconscious. The men with the canes worked less energetically at this, and the man counting the lashes lowered his voice until he was almost silent. An air of shameful expediency now hung over the proceedings.
In this manner, the punishment was soon over and Henrici finally called a halt to the proceedings.
The man was again doused, and when, after fifteen minutes, he showed signs of responding to the water thrown over his near-skinless back, he was released from his frame and carried to the tree where he was to be hanged. All that was required now, apparently, was that he was able to stand upright, unaided, for a full minute before his punishment was completed.
Henrici stood in front of him, his pocket-watch in his hand, counting. The condemned man stood upright for only a few seconds before swaying and falling. He was helped back to his feet, but fell again soon afterwards. This happened several more times, until Henrici finally called for a chair to be taken to the man. The man sat on it, crying out when his back was pushed against its slats. After conferring with the doctor, Henrici announced that to insist on the man standing and repeatedly falling was beyond him and that this requirement need not now be fulfilled if the other judges were in agreement. They were.
After this, the condemned man was given a drink of water, and a rope was thrown over the branch of the tree above him and its noose placed round his neck. He seemed barely to notice what was happening to him. A minister approached him and read aloud from a Bible. Then, even as the reading continued, the man was helped up onto the chair and held steady at his waist.
The minister turned from the man to the crowd, still reading, and walked slowly away from him. The slack was taken in from above the man and the rope secured to a hook in the trunk of the tree. Henrici and the other judges stood shoulder to shoulder facing the man on his chair.
A signal was given to Proctor and the chair was kicked away. The man dropped, jerked, appeared to kick out two or three times, and then hung limp, dead, his feet inches from the ground.
The crowd fell silent for a few seconds, and then, one by one, began to cheer and applaud. Henrici motioned for the doctor, who in turn called for Proctor to unfasten the rope. Proctor did this and the hanged man fell into a sitting position beside the fallen chair, his legs splayed. The doctor touched a finger to his forehead and the body fell backwards. The crowd pushed forwards for a closer look at the corpse.
I rose and was caught in the movement, having to fight to extricate myself and push a way through to where Cornelius and Fletcher awaited me. They were determined to leave as soon as possible.
The river, I remember, was low and there was great demand for the small boats now that the proceedings were over. Cornelius insisted on seeking out Henrici and thanking him for his hospitality.
‘Thank him for the show, too,’ Fletcher told him.
Cornelius left us and I went with Fletcher to find a boat.
As we returned, I looked out over the brown, sluggish water to see our own Station in its entirety. I saw how whitely our distant buildings shone in the fierce sun, saw smoke rising through the trees in unbroken columns into the windless air. I remember then, in that brief moment of calm after all that I had just witnessed and hoped never to see again, asking Fletcher if we ever held our own trials, and him telling me that we didn’t, that we no longer possessed the authority. I remember the relief I felt at hearing this, and at leaving the far shore and all that had just happened there behind me, my thoughts then distracted by the flock of birds which rose screaming all around us at our intrusion.
20
Nash spent the next three days preparing his living quarters and unpacking his loads. Cornelius found a recently vacated room for him. Nash went everywhere in the Station, explored the river, our immediate hinterland, visited the quarry, inspected the garrison and our wharves, and throughout all of this he spoke only to our workers, avoiding all mention of Frere, and discouraging all our own approaches to him.
He came to me on the fourth morning without any prior warning. I had only just risen and was washing. It was not yet six, and the cool of the night could still be felt. The smoke of rekindled cooking fires again covered the ground in a low mist.
The deformed boy had spent the night outside my door, and it was upon hearing him being addressed by Nash that I was alerted to the man’s presence. I had spent a largely sleepless night, frequently waking in a sweat, as though I were at the start of a small fever. I had seen the boy the previous evening and had asked him what he wanted, but, as at our previous encounter, he had refused to answer me. I felt almost as though he were there to keep guard over me while I slept. It was he who had woken me with a bowl of heated water on the stand beside my bed.
I heard Nash tell him to leave, which he did. A long silence followed before Nash finally knocked and called in to me.
He had recovered well from the rigours of his journey. He was cleanly shaved, and wore a jacket buttoned to the collar.
‘I have disturbed you,’ he said. ‘I can return later.’
I told him to come in while I finished washing. I wore only my trousers and boots. The water in which I doused myself ran over my chest and back. I felt him considering me as I rubbed myself dry.
‘I was always told that this was the best part of the day to do business,’ he said.
I sensed his urgency to please, to reconcile himself to us following his spurning of our society.
I offered him tea and he accepted.
‘I wished to talk to you about Nicholas Frere,’ he said.
I was surprised and encouraged by the remark, and then made wary by it.
‘You and he seem to have formed a close attachment,’ he said. ‘You are friends.’ He looked around my room as he spoke, his gaze coming to rest on the much-amended map I had pinned to the wall where he sat.
‘We were interviewed and employed together,’ I said. ‘I knew nothing of him before that. But, yes, I would call him my friend.’
‘Should this map not be secured in your office?’ he said. He leaned closer to the confused scribble of names and markings.
‘There is nothing of any commercial interest on it,’ I said.
‘In your opinion. No matter. Frere.’
‘We came out here together,’ I said. ‘On the Alpha.’
‘Ah, the Alpha. Sold a month ago. Along with the Corisco. Crews paid off. The Belgians wanted her. She was of less and less use to the Company. Sold or broken up, she didn’t have long left. And her crew were Company men. They’ll find work elsewhere.’ He spoke as though expecting me to be impressed by his knowledge.
‘Work with the Belgians, perhaps,’ I said. ‘They’ve closed their fist on everything else.’
‘Perhaps. Can we return to Frere? It is my intention to speak to all the Company officers before I interview the man himself. He may have said something to one or other of you that is of some significance in the case.’
Something he may not now repeat to you, you mean, I thought.
‘He holds himself wholly responsible for whatever happened,’ I said, raising my voice.
‘Please. There is no doubt as to the guilt he pleads. I was talking to Abbot, who—’
‘Who presumably told you to visit me.’
‘I would have come anyway. But, yes, he did tell me you and Frere were close, and that there were other, shall we say, family attachments to be considered.’
‘He had no—’
‘I visited your quarry yesterday. What a great pity. The place should have ceased operating months ago, years perhaps. I told Abbot as much. It is a waste of his talents, a complete waste.’
‘Talents?’
‘Abbot is a highly regarded employee. Surely you understand that?’
‘He tells us often enough. Or highly regarded because he sends secret reports on everything and everyone here?’
‘Secret? They are merely confidential reports. And they are a part of his contractual obligations to us, to the Company. Why do you insist on seeing intrigue and s
ubterfuge where none exists, Mr Frasier?’ My title was clearly marked on the Company file he had no doubt already committed to memory.
‘And so will the quarry finally close?’ I asked him.
‘Oh, undoubtedly. In fact, I imagine there will be a great many changes in the coming months.’
‘And Abbot?’
‘Mr Abbot might better serve us were his talents to be deployed elsewhere. Even you must realize that this whole enterprise is not what it once was.’ He paused. ‘Or even what the Company expected it might become as a concessionary concern.’ He spoke as though these disappointments were his own.
‘And the rest of us?’
‘Why do you ask? You presumably read your contract before you signed it. You seem concerned. Please, there is no need. You are just as valued as Mr Abbot. I promise you, your capabilities and loyalty – ’ he glanced again at the map ‘ – will not be wasted. Perhaps a job on the coast might better suit your own capabilities.’
I understood only too clearly what I was being told, why Frere’s name had been mentioned once and never since.
‘Is the Company withdrawing completely, has the concession finally been lost?’
‘You surely cannot expect me to speculate on matters of such commercial sensitivity, Mr Frasier.’ His gaze remained on the map as he spoke, and he smiled broadly before turning back to me.
‘And Cornelius and Fletcher?’ I said.
‘Mr Fletcher has always been something of a renegade. He would be the first to admit it. His contract expires in seven months. Did you know that?’
I shook my head.
‘Then rest assured, he surely did.’
‘And Cornelius?’
‘Another loyal and long-serving servant. Perhaps he has had enough of this place. Perhaps he would not wish to stay were his present circumstances to change. He is a man somewhat set in his ways.’
‘And the best quartermaster the Station has ever known.’
‘Perhaps, perhaps not, but is he a man prepared to move with the times? This is the modern age, Mr Frasier; can you honestly say that he lives within it? I imagine he is owed a not inconsiderable pension.’