by Robert Edric
‘Will you tell me what happened?’
‘There will be a full report in good time.’
‘Was a child killed?’
He paused, considering. ‘There was.’
‘A girl?’
‘A girl.’ He rose and went to the window, standing with his back to me. ‘If it is any consolation to you, I believe Frere was as much a victim of circumstance as he was a protagonist, not wholly willing, shall I say, in his involvement. Please, I can tell you no more at present. Arrangements are still being made. My report, though completed, has yet to be submitted to the authorities.’
‘In London?’
‘In Stanleyville. Please, save your breath and your strength. You all knew what would happen. Be grateful that this awful responsibility fell to another man and not to any of you.’
‘He’ll hang,’ I said, the words little more than mouthed.
‘It is almost certain that he will be sentenced to death, yes.’
‘For who he is and what he represents, rather than for the crime itself.’
‘Neither you nor I can possibly say that.’
‘No, but only because we continue to deceive ourselves.’
He returned to sit beside me. ‘The humpback wanted to bring a gree-gree man to shake his stick at you. Naturally, we refused him. He holds you in high regard. Would you deny him his birthright?’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning he may one day become a court official, a lawyer, a judge even.’
I stopped myself from laughing at this.
‘See?’ Nash said. ‘He brought the gree-gree man and Fletcher kicked them out. The man was an albino, blackened with walnut juice and anointed with powder of cloves. You could smell him a mile away. He was in the room before Fletcher knew what was happening.’ He breathed deeply.
‘You could have let him perform,’ I said. ‘For the boy’s sake if not my own.’
‘But that would have implied belief, Mr Frasier, and whatever else we may be prepared to relinquish here…’
‘Is the boy still in the Station?’
‘He comes and goes.’
‘And when will Frere go?’ I said.
‘Ten days. A steamer is on its way.’
I was about to ask him how long ago this had been arranged when, without warning, the door opened and a man appeared in the doorway. It was the albino witch doctor. He was washed clean of all his colouring and did nothing other than stand in the doorway and consider me. Neither Nash nor I spoke to the man. He began to chant in a low murmur, and from the pouch at his waist he took out a small carved figure. He came to the bed and laid this beside me. It was of the crudest kind, and with no indication, other than a piece of cloth tied around it, of what it was intended to represent. I could only assume that the doll was me. He looked at us both with his half-closed eyes and then he went. Nash closed the door behind him. I took the doll and pushed it beneath my pillow.
‘Which of my charts did you take?’ I asked him when he came back to me.
‘Those I imagine you might have had some difficulty accounting for under the terms of your employment. No-one will see them.’ Another of his deals with Frere in which I faded to nothing.
I struggled for a direction in which I might now turn.
‘And you?’ I said eventually.
‘Me?’
‘Will you return to Stanleyville with Frere?’
‘Unfortunately, yes. Believe me, he is no trophy. It had been my original intention to continue upriver, perhaps even to cross to the east. However, all that is now beyond me. Two days ago, news reached us of a revolt at Kayasa. The Station Manager and his clerk were killed over a dispute concerning wages paid in cloth instead of the promised food. There has been considerable unrest elsewhere, too. Gathering Stations are being threatened all along the river, and though no-one has yet suggested as much, I suspect all these supposedly isolated incidents are being orchestrated for the purpose of creating that unrest.’
‘Orchestrated by whom?’
He shrugged.
‘Hammad?’ I said.
He smiled. ‘Would it surprise you to learn that Klein is with him now? You’d be surprised how much respectability the construction of a mission or a chapel might stamp upon a host of other, considerably less worthy enterprises.’
‘He left me lying there,’ I said.
‘So you say.’
‘My word against his.’
‘There were no other witnesses.’ He had seen the two women.
‘No.’
He rose, ready to leave.
‘What did Frere say about her?’
‘Who?’
‘My sister. Caroline.’
He paused before speaking. ‘He said that he loved her, that he had never loved anyone before her, and that the hardest part of what he now had to endure was the knowledge that he had brought shame on her, that he had disgraced himself and that she would now feel only disgust and contempt for him as long as she lived.’
‘She loved him, too,’ I said.
‘Hence his conviction. He tried occasionally to pretend otherwise – that she did not love him as he loved her – but he could not.’
‘She would have forgiven him,’ I said.
‘Forgive me, but you are as little convinced of that as he was. Perhaps when you are in full possession of the facts…’
‘He asked me to communicate nothing to her until all this was over. I see now that what he really meant was that I was to wait until he was dead.’
‘Knowing him as I now do, I imagine that was his meaning,’ he said.
And thus we retreated from the blood and flesh of the matter into the cold and sterile language of its understanding.
He went again to the doorway. He seemed reluctant to leave me, and I saw how long those remaining ten days were now likely to be, for him as well as for Frere. He no longer had any purpose among us and wished to detach himself from us, not to endure what we had yet to endure, not to be drawn into the wasteland of that longer waiting, into that emptiness of the future in which we were all now condemned to wander like blind men in unfamiliar places.
He neither turned nor spoke to me as he left.
I waited in the hope that the gree-gree man might return, but he never came.
25
I went outside for the first time two days later. I had imagined myself sufficiently recovered and strong enough to resume my part in the slow life of the place, but even the simple act of crossing the compound exhausted me, forcing me to pause every few steps, and then to rest on an empty case before reaching the water’s edge.
I was surprised to see all our wharves and jetties empty, with not even a single small boat tied up there. The river had fallen during my illness, and I had anticipated a back-log of traffic, but other than a pair of fishing boats unloading their meagre catch directly onto the bank, there was nothing.
Other men and women congregated in the shallows and beside the path leading to the quarry. I recognized the dismissed workers among them. They watched me sitting on the case, just as they had watched my painful journey from my room, but no-one approached me.
A canoe left the main channel of the fallen river and came to where I sat. I shielded my eyes and recognized the old boatman and the boy. The boy leaped out and splashed in his usual ungainly fashion towards me. He asked me how I was feeling. The old man looked up at us, but made no attempt to join us.
The boy told me that Hammad had been visiting all the nearby villages and settlements, nailing up posters and calling for everyone to come and read them. He took a piece of folded paper from his pocket and gave it to me. The writing was in no language I understood. The boy took it back and translated for me. A new nation was being born, a nation governed by its own people. A census was being taken and land was being surveyed. Everyone was exhorted to rejoice in these coming changes and to participate in them. That was all. I asked him if Hammad’s name appeared anywhere on the announcement, but it did not
.
He and the old man intended leaving, he said. He wanted to go to the coast and live in one of the new cities there. They were towns calling themselves cities. I asked him what the old man would do. Live somewhere on the river until he died, he said. He pushed the announcement back into his pocket and took out several coins. He insisted that I took these and I asked him why. They were the coins I had thrown into the canoe the last time I had crossed the river. The old man had refused to retrieve them and they had laid untouched in the water there until I was spotted. I told him I felt ashamed at what I’d done.
I asked him if he’d seen or heard anything of the unrest along the river. At first he was unwilling to answer me, hoping to avoid the question by shrugging his deformed shoulders, but when I insisted, he said that many of the villages along the Lomami had recently been abandoned for no good reason, and that only the previous day smoke had been seen pouring into the sky above the trees surrounding the Kirasi mission.
As we spoke there was a commotion among the fishermen and women. I looked down and saw several of the men pointing into the water a short distance away. I thought at first that a crocodile or hippopotamus had been spotted, but when I looked more closely I saw that it was a corpse in the water that had attracted their attention. Then a further shout went up, and following that, another. There was more than one corpse – five or six, all floating together, all travelling in the same slow current. From where I sat, these were nothing more than indistinct shapes rising and falling at the surface of the water. I considered it unlikely that so many bodies would have been carried so closely together, and that a mistake had been made in their identification.
The old man in his canoe remained apart from the fishermen, watching as the body which had been spotted first was retrieved by a man throwing a rope from the shore.
I followed all this as closely as I could. My vision was beginning to blur, and I depended on the boy to tell me what was happening. He told me that the first body had been secured and was being pulled ashore, and that the others – he was certain there were five more – were following it.
This first corpse was laid out and a rope was found tied to its ankle – the rope to which the remaining bodies were attached. One of these was missing both its arms, another both its legs from the knees down.
Slaves, the boy said.
I made some facetious remark about the new nation and its people, but he remained oblivious to whatever connection I hoped to suggest. The women washed the bodies and started their wailing.
A short while later, attracted by all the noise, Cornelius arrived. He was surprised to find me out of my bed. He told the boy to leave us, and he went without speaking, first to look more closely at the laid-out corpses, and then back to the canoe and the old man.
I told Cornelius about the proclamation. He said they had also appeared in the Station and nailed to the trees along all our trails. I told him Nash had been to see me, but he knew that, too, having contrived to leave the man alone with me. He told me he had just come from the garrison, where he had gone in the hope of seeing Frere, but that Frere had refused to see him.
‘What did you expect?’ I asked him. We had forsaken Frere in unequal measure, but however we might now prefer to see it, we had forsaken him all the same.
He watched the men and the women and the corpses in the mud without speaking.
Afterwards he helped me back to my room, turning away from me at the door as I made my way inside.
26
The next morning, Cornelius came to me as I washed myself. He took off my dressings and replaced them. The sores on my joints had still not healed, and it was impossible to avoid the stink of the bandages. He suggested that I went no further than my veranda, and that if there was anyone I wished to see, then he would send them to me.
The only person I truly wanted to see was Frere, but I knew that the journey to the garrison was beyond me. I asked Cornelius to tell Nash I would like to see him.
Later, I watched Bone walk out of the trees carrying his rifle and with an animal slung over his shoulder. He saw me and came to me. The creature over his shoulder was a small deer, already gutted and missing its feet and head, the pearly joints of its bones protruding from the skin.
‘Shot it,’ he said, holding up his rifle.
‘Are you going to cook it?’
‘Sell it. They’re buying anything they can.’
‘Who are?’
He motioned in the direction of the sheds and shelters out of sight along the river.
The small carcass can have weighed no more than ten or twelve pounds.
‘Is Frere still in the gaol?’ I said.
‘Been there with nobody near him since Nash finished with him.’
‘Has he asked for me?’
‘You?’
‘I mean, does he know I’ve been ill and unable to visit him?’
He shrugged. ‘I imagine so.’
‘Will you tell him for me? Tell him that but for my illness I would have been to see him.’
He held out his hand for payment. He no longer made any attempt at subterfuge. I gave him what he asked.
‘He’ll have known anyhow,’ he said. ‘Not long now until he’s gone.’
‘Seven days.’
‘If you say so. They had thirty more bodies wash up at Makura, all of them roped together like ours. What do you reckon, boat sink?’
‘I don’t know.’ I knew the figure was likely to be an exaggeration.
‘Or perhaps somebody tried to take what wasn’t rightly theirs, and these poor beggars got caught in the middle.’
‘Your compassion does you justice,’ I said.
‘Not mine. I’m just grateful they washed up further downriver.’ A detail of his men had been sent by Fletcher to bury the bodies washed up the previous day.
I smelled the blood of the small deer. Flies swarmed over the severed neck.
‘What will you get for it?’ I asked him.
He dropped the meat at his feet and prodded it with his boot. ‘Who cares?’ he said.
We were both distracted by the arrival of a small boat, from which Klein and Abbot disembarked together in close conversation.
‘Where have they been?’ I asked Bone.
He shook his head, unconcerned.
I watched as the two men came from the river towards Abbot’s office. Abbot saw me with Bone. He spoke to Klein, who also turned to look at us. The priest paused to consider me, but then resumed his journey.
I looked back to the river, hoping to see either Perpetua or Felicity, but they were not there. I had seen neither woman since the night of my collapse in the chapel. I asked Bone if he had seen them. I tried to make the remark sound casual, its answer not worth paying for, but he shook his head without even considering its worth.
Klein and Abbot continued to Abbot’s office and went inside.
Bone rose and left me. He retrieved the carcass and swung it from side to side in an attempt to rid it of its flies. The insects followed their feast like a waving scarf.
I had intended spending the remainder of the day examining my charts in the hope of discovering precisely what had been taken by Nash and what remained, but seeing Klein and Abbot together had intrigued me, and so instead of returning to my desk, I followed them to Abbot’s office.
The two men stood on either side of his desk. Mounds of his own files and ledgers all around the room indicated where another of Nash’s inventories had been carried out. A single large chart lay unrolled and weighted on the desk.
I entered without knocking, and Abbot, who had been speaking, fell silent at seeing me. He was clearly excited about something, and he looked back and forth between Klein and myself as I approached them.
‘You need a seat,’ Klein said to me. ‘You clearly remain unwell.’ He smoked a cigar and its smoke marbled the warm air of the room. ‘Abbot, get Mr Frasier a seat.’
Abbot remained where he stood.
‘A seat,’ Klein repe
ated. He stepped to one side, took hold of the ledger-filled chair beside him and tipped its contents to the floor. ‘This one. Here.’ He wiped the chair with his sleeve and offered it to me. I was unable to refuse.
‘Apparently, I’m in your debt for finding me in the chapel,’ I said to him.
‘I left you where you lay for an hour. One hour, that’s all. Did you want to be discovered with those disgusting women?’
‘What?’ Abbot said to Klein. ‘You knew he’d collapsed there and you left him?’
Klein alarmed him further by kicking a pile of ledgers away from where he stood.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said to Abbot.
‘But you almost died.’
‘Is that true?’ Klein said to me, smiling. ‘Did you almost die, Mr Frasier?’
‘He did,’ Abbot insisted, as though he believed Klein’s mocking tone suggested he did not believe me.
‘Perhaps if you had,’ Klein said to me, leaning over so that his face was close to mine, ‘perhaps if you had, then perhaps Nash might have been persuaded to change your clothes for those of our doomed Mr Frere, and your corpse could have been taken to Stanleyville in place of him. Imagine how convenient that might have been for all concerned.’
‘What?’ Abbot said, still unable to grasp the nature of the man’s hostility towards me. ‘What are you saying?’
Klein kept his eyes on me. I waved the tobacco smoke away from my face.
‘But fortunately you recovered,’ he said. ‘You burned and you recovered. Another little hero.’
‘What’s he talking about?’ Abbot said to me. He started to come round the desk towards us, but Klein held a hand to his chest and stopped him.
‘What are you doing?’ Abbot said, affronted by the gesture.
‘Doing? What do you imagine I am doing, Mr Abbot? I am merely suggesting to you that we resume our business here, that we ignore this side-show –’ he pointed to me ‘– and carry on. Did I hurt you? I’m so sorry.’
Abbot brushed at his chest.
‘I apologize. I am a man of the cloth. I meant you no harm. Here, let me.’ He too wiped a hand over Abbot’s chest. Abbot withdrew immediately and returned to the far side of the desk.