Echoes from the Past (The Brigandshaw Chronicles Book 1)

by Peter Rimmer

  "You have been with the white man?"

  "For many years after the Zulus killed my family."

  "And now you have come home. Good. We are going to kill the white men and women before the soldiers return. It is said so by the witch. The kingdom of Monomotapa will come again and we will walk as men without fear in our own land, masters again of our destiny. The witch has spoken to the ancestors and they give us the word of God. We must kill the white people." Carefully, not to lose his balance and with the gun set aside on the rock he put down his hand and helped Tatenda from the water.

  The witch was satisfied with her work when Tatenda still terrified by his ordeal was brought into the village that backed away from the labyrinth of caves, a sanctuary known to the Kalanga priests for centuries. The witch was head priest and she knew she was the most powerful member of the tribe, smelling out anyone for death by clubbing if they disagreed with the instructions she fed to the people through the paramount chief. Each tribe that made up the Shona speaking people was ruled by a paramount chief and each chief was controlled by the powers of the witch-priests. And for the first time in centuries their words were being challenged by the white men and their God of love and forgiveness. The witch had travelled for nine days to attend a secret meeting. The word had reached the witch-priests that the white man's army was moving to the south for battle with the Boers. The Matabele and Shona people became of one mind. Together they would destroy the white man and drive them back across the Limpopo River. The witch-priests at their meeting agreed to unleash a war of liberation.

  The witch watched Tatenda while she stroked the leopard's head. She was old and wrinkled, her breasts hanging in long black leather pouches to her navel. No one sat near her out of fear and the self-knowledge of her power was intoxicating. She had been a girl of three when she was taken for training by the witch before her. For forty-seven years there had been no other contact with the people except through her power of fear and the magic she had learned from her predecessor. Sometimes she laughed at the stupidity of people but the sound was silent in her throat. Sometimes she threw the laugh high into a tree at night, the cackling shattering the peace of the people and sending fear deep into their genitals. Whenever the chief questioned her words of suggestion she used her power of magic, the tricks of her trade the other old crone had taught her before she died from the poison the witch had slowly fed into her food. The witch knew that power, absolute power was the most intoxicating experience of human life and she was not going to have it usurped by these white people who did not belong in her country.

  The man they called Gumbo after a Matabele assegai shattered his hip when he was twelve and left for dead, limped towards Tatenda who was standing alone next to the chief's hut where he had been taken. Tatenda watched the man approach. The gun, bag and cartridges had gone from Gumbo's possession and the limping man was smiling like someone who had just done a favour.

  "The women given you food?" asked Gumbo.

  "No. I have not eaten."

  "You will. There is food since the white people stopped the Matabele stealing our food."

  "Then why do you want to kill them?"

  "You have heard?"

  "Everyone talks about a war of liberation. You chase out the white man and the Matabele will raid your cattle again."

  "They are our friends. The chief says they are our friends. An enemy of my enemy is my friend."

  "The Matabele need you after Jameson defeated Lobengula and chased him out of Bulawayo. The Matabele impis came to the walls of Fort Victoria and slaughtered our people in front of the eyes of the white man. Jameson made up an army and rode against the Matabele."

  "And he rides again to chase the Boers out of Johannesburg to give the gold to Rhodes."

  "If you succeed you will live in fear of the Matabele. War is the only business. There are many Englishmen with powerful guns. I have seen them. You chase away a few and more will return. There is plenty of land for everyone. I have walked for days through the bush and you were the first black man I saw. White men a few on horses going south."

  "When the chief gives the word we attack the farms and mines of the white men and when they come out of the forts we will kill the men and then go to the forts to kill their women and children. They will have great fear of us. They will not come back."

  "You are well informed." The knowledge of Doctor Jameson and Johannesburg had impressed Tatenda.

  "I am the chief's son and they call me Gumbo. What is your name?"

  "Tatenda."

  "Gumbo. The man who limps. That is me."

  "Gumbo. Be careful. Tell your father. I have lived with these white people for many years. They will never go away."

  "Then why did you leave them?"

  "To find my own people."

  "Precisely. People live with their own. They feel comfortable. We also do not wish to live with these white people who treat us as slaves."

  "It is better to be a slave of the white man than dead or hiding in the mountains like a rock rabbit, frightened of the birds. I have come to tell you to come out of the caves. The white men will protect you. There is a life of joy again for us."

  "Do not say that. The witch is watching. You will have to fight with us."

  "I will not."

  "Then she will kill you. You have heard the voice of Kalanga's leopard and the priests are instruments of the leopard." Thinking of the leopard Tatenda shivered in fear and the witch watching smiled to herself. 'Fear is the best controller of man' she told herself and for good measure threw a cackle at the msasa tree above Tatenda's head.

  One hundred and thirty miles away to the south clouds had built up all day. The heat and humidity was oppressive. For the third time that day Emily snapped at Harry and sent him crying out of the house which sent four-year-old Madge into a tantrum and stretched Emily's nerves to breaking point. All the men were out in the lands and Gregory Shaw's fancy wife had not come back from Salisbury in three weeks. Despite Gregory's bragging the lady was not pregnant and Emily doubted she would come back to the farm. Romantic farming in faraway Africa from the comfort of the Savoy Grill in London was very different to the reality of a house built from raw timber which the termites ate with relish, sending fine clouds of chewed wood from the rafters dusting every cup of tea and making Alison Oosthuizen sneeze until she was ready to burst. Even after three years on the tract of land they were grandly calling Elephant Walk she longed for the solitude and calm of Hastings Court and cursed the day she ever heard of Africa. She loved Sebastian with all her heart but hated Africa with every fibre of her body. She was never free of bites whether tick or mosquito, bats hung from the roof lattices that held up the open thatch and twice she had found a dead snake in what they emphatically called the bathroom consisting of a tin tub that needed water lugged from the Mazoe River. Even the joy of living with her father could not dispel the nightmares and if she ate wild boar again or venison she would scream down what was left of their house. Even the buck ate the few flowers she had been able to grow in the patches of open land between the msasa trees and Tatenda running off without a word to anyone had been the last straw as the only other person who could speak Shona to what they referred to as house servants, which even Alison thought was a bit of a laugh, was Harry and he was more than sparing with his workload. But above everything it was hot, hot, HOT. Giving full vent to her feelings Emily Brigandshaw screamed out loud and felt a little better. The noise shut her daughter off in mid-cry and brought Harry back into the house with an expression on his face that under better circumstances Emily would have registered as compassion.

  Doing what every Englishwoman had done for a hundred years she went into the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea from the permanently hot kettle that sat on top of the wood stove making the kitchen as hot as the oven even in winter. And to cap her misery that the tea only slightly calmed her down she was pregnant. Her only consolation was that nothing could possibly get worse.

  Taking
her second cup of tea into the garden they had created by cutting away the undergrowth between the trees for fifty yards around the cluster of three thatched houses, each of two rondavels joined by a corridor that housed the euphemistic bathroom and the kitchen, as well as a passage from the bedroom rondavel to the one they called the lounge, Emily found the wooden bench made by Tinus Oosthuizen and tried to think on the bright side of life. The door was open to a separate rondavel that gave Sir Henry Manderville his bedroom and she hoped nothing creepy crawly had got inside. It was the regular routine to check the inside of their beds for bugs and reptiles before climbing in between the sheets below the billowing white mosquito nets that hung from the termite chewed rafters. Then she smiled to herself and somehow felt better. Both her children had sidled up quietly and she told herself not to scream again, Harry and Madge were just as hot and Harry missed Tatenda. With the cup of tea set down beside her she let too small sweaty hands slide into hers. In the last of their houses she could hear Alison talking to Barend in Afrikaans and for a brief moment she heard the new baby cry. An ox bellowed somewhere far beyond the trees where the men were ploughing the land they had finally stripped of trees and tree stumps. Then the good thoughts rushed through her mind sitting with her children knowing the men were fighting for survival. The memory of the vindictive Captain, of her divorced husband Arthur, the marriage annulled for lack of consummation, the bitter cold and bitter loneliness of Hastings Court came back in violent memory and when Harry next to her said it would all be better when the rains broke she began to silently cry with joy.

  "Mummy's just being silly." said Harry to his sister. To her mild surprise and for the first time that day Madge failed to ask 'why'. "Come; it's time for your books young man. Go and bring them out here."

  "Can I listen, mummy?" asked Madge.

  "Only if you don't say a word. Not even one 'why'." The tinkling laughter of the children running back into the house for the books broke her dark spell and even the floating fly she flicked from her tea failed to break her newfound mood of confidence. Harry was right. Everything would be better when the rains broke.

  By the time the sun went down blood reddening the sky high into the cumulus, the four men were exhausted. They had been in the lands before the sun was fully risen, with breakfast and lunch brought to them where they worked with the six black labourers who had come looking for work and lasted more than a week. Half the blacks coming out of the bush for work found the white man's idea of working from sun-up to sun-down unacceptable and went back into the bush to find a place by a river where they could build a hut, find a wife and put her out to till the ground round the anthills. There was food in the river and food in the bush and a hut to sleep in away from the wild animals which was all they needed: working six days a week in the sun was no work for a man. When they left, most of them tried to steal something for their trouble and after three years, building the houses, trying to plant a crop, trying to keep the cattle alive and away from tsetse and tick, even Tinus Oosthuizen admitted to himself that this part of Africa was tougher than anything he had found before. With a wry smile he now knew why the country that looked so green was so underpopulated, even without taking the Matabele raiding parties into account. The only thing that thrived in that part of Africa was the game and the game brought the tsetse fly and the ticks.

  The small labour force went off to find their huts by the river and the white men trudged back with the three oxen that had been pulling the ploughs through the ground that was hard as iron, every weight they could think of balanced on top of the two furrow plough to push the discs down into the grass tangled soil. They had managed to finish one acre of badly ploughed land all day. When they reached the houses, they were relieved to see Alison had organised the herding of their thirty head of cattle into the kraal away from the night predators that hunted from the thick bush. The ritual each day was the same. Everyone headed for Tinus Oosthuizen's house and the long veranda along the riverside of the house, stretching the length of the corridor that linked his two rondavels. In a tall mukwa tree hung three heavy canvas bags that caught the wind. The water seeping through the tightly woven canvas evaporated with the brushing of the wind and cooled the spring water in the bags and in the bags were bottles of quinine, tonic water they believed counteracted the bite of the mosquito and malaria. Even the Afrikaner, Tinus, enjoyed the Englishman's way of drinking gin. After three or four stiff ones the daily slab of venison was easier to chew.

  Gregory Shaw was not certain if he preferred his wife away in Salisbury. The twenty-one -year old flirt he had met in London had no resemblance to the twenty-four-year old who had found nothing to her pleasure other than being the centre of attention and making everyone around her miserable. Maybe the idea he had given her of a mansion on a great estate had been a little farfetched and his descriptions of life in Africa more vivid than truthful. Maybe he had constantly compared Francesca to Sing. But whichever one way you looked at it the woman was a bitch. There was no fool like an old fool he told himself when it was too late. Taking the large gin and tonic with grateful hands from Sebastian Brigandshaw he took a good long swig and sighed with pleasure: there were some things that never changed.

  "Now that tastes good," he said and they all laughed: Gregory Shaw said the same exact thing every night just as the sun fired arrows of light at the blood-red clouds that mirrored themselves a few hundred yards down in front of them in the surface of the Mazoe River. Within five minutes it was pitch dark and the only light came from the hissing kerosene lamp on the table. From outside they heard the first roar of the lion and the horses, out in the kraal with the cattle, whinnied with fright.

  Sir Henry Manderville had never been happier in his life. He enjoyed the physical work and the challenge of doing something for himself: inheriting title and wealth removed the incentive a man needed to do more than go through a pre-arranged life in the same house with the same routine. The daughter he loved as dearly as his late wife was three yards from his chair, his grandson and granddaughter were trying hard not to go to sleep on the couch he had helped to make with his own hands, his son-in-law was holding his pregnant daughter's hand and the moths and diverse insects were being kept away by the tightly meshed wire screen. Outside the frogs and crickets screeched louder than the London Symphony Orchestra and the cattle lowing in the kraal had calmed the horses. The world of The Captain, of money and power, was as far away as the moon. The people he loved were safe in front of him and the gin and tonic tasted better than any gin and tonic he had drunk in his ancestral home.

  Sebastian Brigandshaw was so tired it was an effort to drink his second gin and tonic and when he went to bed he knew he would not sleep and his mind would think round in circles. He was twenty-five-years old and of the men on the veranda he was the youngest by many years. His father-in-law was happy to work all day and think no further than what he was doing, knowing someone would give him food and drink for his labour. Gregory Shaw talked about a mansion but never how the money was to be made and if he did have all the money he said he had in England why hadn't he brought a team of builders from Fort Salisbury and built his house as far away as possible and kept his destructive man-eating wife away from a happily married man.

  Tinus did what every Afrikaner family did that he had come across and bred children letting Africa take care of their future. Practically he was brilliant but when it came to the mathematics of their financial survival he left it to his young friend.

  By the time the rains came in five to six weeks, Sebastian calculated they would have thirty tilled acres to plant, to feed three and a half families and have enough over to expand. Even if every black man out of the bush wished to work forever it would be no good as there was no food or money to give them. Over and over again his mind calculated how they were going to survive on thirty acres. He must have tensed again as Emily squeezed his hand that bought him back to Fran and whether he should tell Gregory what his wife was up to. Sebastian had no pre
vious experience of women but his primal instinct told him Fran Shaw was trouble, trouble for him, trouble for Em, trouble for everyone. She was bored and a bored woman with too much sex appeal in the middle of the bush with four men was not something any of them would know how to handle. He just hoped her affair in Fort Salisbury with Jack Slater lasted, the same Jack Slater Jeremiah Shank had wanted to arrest him for abduction back in '91. The kerosene lamp spluttered on the carcass of a moth that had crept in under the door. Maybe four stiff gins instead of three would let him sleep. Looking at his children fast asleep on the couch he was doubly envious. Nothing, he told himself for the umpteenth time came easily in life.

  Their whole world had shrunk to the light of the kerosene lamp. On the fly screen a giant shadow of a moth was dying in agony and outside it was pitch-black. Alison, in light on one side of her face handed them plates of cold meat and salad, the lettuce and tomatoes from the wire cage built by Henry Manderville to keep out the buck and wild pigs. They had stopped talking while they ate and all the children were fast asleep on mattresses around their feet. The distant days of being an English servant were so far away she found it difficult to think of herself as the same person. Tinus was the kindest, sweetest person on the earth and all she had ever wanted to do in life was look after her own children. Harry had been a darling but he was not Barend or Tinka. When she finished her food she put down the plate on the low table and looked again at her sleeping children, the flow of love so strong she could feel it leaving her body.

  Tinus Oosthuizen chewed the end of his pipe he had forgotten to light and his mind was far back in the past, the past of his people trying to cut a life for themselves in Africa. For a while he had thought of telling Sebastian but decided the man had enough worries chewing in his mind to add one that was far more serious than anything they had faced. The ivory hunter turned farmer and husband knew the signs better than anyone else in the room. They were vulnerable. The administrator of Rhodesia, Dr Jameson had taken the police force out of the country to help the Uitlanders, the foreigners in Johannesburg, overthrow the Boer republic of Paul Kruger and put the vast gold reef back in the British Empire. Rhodesia, five years after occupation was undefended and the settlers like themselves were scattered on farms and small mines in pockets of twos and threes. He had caught the look of the black men asking for work: the gleam of avarice, the knowing smirk of contempt. With a story to keep the wild animals away from the houses he planned a way to turn the buildings into a stockade. Content with the solution to his problem he lit a match on the side of his rough leather boot and brought the flame to the bowl of his pipe sending clouds of sweet smelling tobacco up into the flare of the lamp. Over the light of the match he smiled at his wife, the blue eyes showing gently through the flame.