by Giles Foden
He put it to Sterkx when he came in to look at his dressing, which was soaked and stained with an ominous discharge.
“Doctor, first of all I wish to thank you for saving the life of my son. For this I am eternally in your debt.”
Bending over him, Sterkx shrugged. “It was the right thing to do. Too many people are being killed in this unnecessary business.”
“I have a proposal for you,” said Muhle.
“Oh yes?”
“I want you to help me escape from the camp. All I ask is that you provide me with some food and water.”
Sterkx squatted down and pulled the new bandage tight round Muhle’s thigh. The Zulu gasped.
“I assume you are joking,” said the Boer. “You can hardly move, your leg is badly infected. In any case, it would be a treasonous act on my part. I could get myself shot.”
“What I am offering you,” explained Muhle, “is the chance to send a message to your wife. I have to get into Ladysmith to find my family, and once I am inside I will do my best to help her.”
In the gloom of the hut, the doctor’s eyes lit up. “You think you could?” But as soon as he had spoken the words, his enthusiasm dimmed. “It would be madness. I do not think you could get there.”
“I have to,” said Muhle. “I will just rot away to death if I lie here. Please, you must help me. I will not forget my promise.”
Sterkx straightened up. “I will think about it.”
“You are a good man,” said Muhle, as the doctor made his way to the door.
“All I said was that I would think about it.”
A silhouette in the light, the outline of his hat and beard clearly defined, Sterkx looked back at the injured African, let out an explosive sigh, then ducked out of the doorway.
Twenty-Five
Does agreement to an assignation amount to submission? This—although she wouldn’t have put it like that, not exactly—was a question that concerned Bella greatly during the following day. In the morning, Tom stopped by the entrance of the Royal and asked if she would walk out with him that evening, once he had come off duty.
Shaded from the sunlight, she had stood without moving on the stoep, and then said, in neutral tones, “Very well.”
He’d flashed her a grateful smile. “Five o’clock then?”
“Yes,” she had said, and glanced down, avoiding his eyes.
She knew, she thought, that she liked him, and realized also, from his tone and from his eager looks, that she was admired in her turn. But all day she worried at the notion of it, and was filled with a mixture of apprehension and desire by the thought that he might make some advance. What should she do if he did? Jane had already succumbed to Herbert Foster’s overtures and, one night after the bar had closed, and Father was out on the hills with his telescopes, had fallen into an embrace with him in the scullery.
So it was a sweet, satisfying anticipation, mixed with worry, that filled Bella’s heart when Trooper Barnes called for her late that afternoon. He looked very smart in his khaki uniform, his belt and shoulder strap polished a deep chestnut, his green eyes twinkling, and his dark hair well combed.
“Where would you like to go?” he asked, as they stepped out into the main street.
“I don’t know,” she answered, and in that moment saw exactly how it would be. Where was there to go in Ladysmith, after all?
“Well, it’s you that lives here.”
Bella thought this reply a little uncouth, and said nothing.
“How about the orchard?” Tom asked, taking her arm.
“All right then,” she said, conscious of what people would think at the sight of her on a soldier’s arm. She imagined Mrs Frinton pursing her lips.
They manoeuvred their way up the main street, between carts and limbers and the ever-present coolies, sitting on their heels by the kerb.
“That was Rashid, Foster’s shell carrier,” Tom said, as they passed one. “He’s a good little fellow. Brave as a terrier.”
Bella looked back at the man, thinking of Jane and her gunner. Clad in nothing but a loincloth, the Indian was using his hand to spoon rice into his mouth from a tin billy. He was utterly concentrated on the task, and had seemed not to notice them.
“I wonder how they feel,” she said.
“Who?”
“Them, and the kaffirs. About being boxed in like this, I mean.”
“No different from us, I should say.”
“But it’s nothing to do with them. They’re just innocent bystanders.”
“Sitters,” said Tom, and chuckled. “Well, they are subjects of the Empire, love.”
She flinched at him using the word. He hadn’t earned the right.
“Some of them are here under contract,” Tom continued.
“Indenture,” Bella said. “It’s not the same. Indeed, it’s only a small degree away from slavery.”
Tom rubbed her on the back. “You’re a smart puss, aren’t you?”
They had reached the fringes of the orchard. “Come on, race you to the trees!” he said, and set off at a sprint.
Silly, she thought, then gathered up her skirts and ran after him. The light was different under the foliage, not just greener but dappled with all sorts of colours.
“Come on,” shouted Tom, ahead of her.
She ran on. It became difficult. Fronds of leaf brushed her face, trunks suddenly appeared where she had thought there were none, and the ground was uneven; not to speak of the branches that lay around, waiting like traps to trip her. She didn’t stumble, however, but ran on, and was soon with him in a more open place, where the grass grew long and the evening sunlight was beginning to fall. It was beautiful and, as she caught her breath, Bella almost forgot that she was shut up in Ladysmith, with its ugliness of mud and dust and cow dung and shellfire—forgot too her companion’s silliness, his clumsy bravado and casual Empire spirit. She had never been very close to men before, not alone, but she had seen how they were. Watched them while working at the bar, her sober eyes searching their drunken ones, watched how they held themselves, walked, sat down. Listened to what they said. Learned how even the tenderest moment, the sweetest thing, was always in danger of being buried in brag and bluster.
Her heart was beating hard. Tom had unbuttoned his tunic and the top of his shirt and was lying on the grass. She could see the dark hairs of his chest poking out. The warm evening sun was casting long shadows, and all around was a murmurous hush, a fierce calm. She felt an expectant sensation kindling in her stomach, a curious feeling at once tense and relaxed. You don’t have to do anything, she told herself as she knelt down beside him. But she wanted to know. She wanted to know what he, what any of them, looked like underneath the army clothes, what he felt like, smelled like. She was older than her sister, after all. So she was businesslike, brisk even, and acted as if she knew what she was doing when she leant across from her kneeling position and kissed him. He responded keenly, too keenly, opening his mouth. She pushed him back on the ground, her hand full on his chest. The breath went out of him and he gave a little gasp. She leant over again and kissed him softly, to the side of his mouth. She felt his eyelids flutter against her forehead. Then he sat up, and swung her round in the crook of his arm; so that, in one movement, she was almost beneath him. She felt his mouth on hers, working at it, softly at first and then harder. It was like nothing she had ever experienced before. The nearest thing she could think of was eating oranges and yet, as she looked above, what she could see were pears. Pears! Great green bundles of them, hanging in the sky.
She closed her eyes, and as he—kneeling between her petticoated legs now—unbuttoned her blouse, said to herself, to her own mind, oranges, pears, oranges, pears…and then giggled out loud in embarrassment at her ludicrous train of thought, as if there had been someone listening inside her head.
“What?” said the voice above her, crossly. Tom must have thought she was laughing at him.
“Nothing,” she said, and reached out a
nd grasped his hovering wrist.
He pushed her hand down. She felt the grass imprint upon the back of it and then he was kissing her again, more gently this time, so gently she could feel his pulse upon her lips. His hand moved down—allowing hers to spring up limply, like a cat’s paw, behind her head—and his palm began to rub her breast in a slow, circular movement. She didn’t want it to become too rhythmic, too geometric. She liked the vagueness of it, the casual way of it, and she liked the way the weight of his body was upon her, the hardness of him on her chest, even where his metal buttons dug into her.
She shifted under him a little, and then he moved further over her, so that his thigh fell between hers. As they kissed, he pushed against her a little with his thigh, and she felt herself pressing back accordingly. Then he stopped kissing her, and put his head in his free hand, looking at her from the side while his other hand touched her face and her hair and lips—questioningly, like a schoolboy with a pet. She turned to look at him.
His expression appeared terribly serious at first and then, as she stared frankly back at him—so close—he looked ashamed.
“You look a bit bashful, Trooper Barnes,” she said coolly, and smiled.
“That’s strange,” he said.
“Why?”
“I’ve got a horse called Bashful.”
“That’s a funny name for a horse,” she said.
“Maybe.”
She looked around. It was nearly dark now. The shadows on the grass looked like leopard spots, and it was hard to tell whether it was dapples of light she was looking at now or patches of night.
“What if someone sees us? They could easily…”
Before she could finish, her words were swallowed up by his mouth coming down on hers again. It was a kind of peck except that his lips opened in the instant and gave hers a fillip, before pattering over her cheeks and her eyelids and the tip of her nose. She shivered a little, and then felt his hand go inside her blouse, tracing the edge of her corset with a finger. Another button was undone, and another, and then he began to stroke her breasts through the fabric, stroke them with that same half-directed, half-careless intensity. Was this what it was always like? Did they always pretend that it was all somehow happening by accident?
The question went out of her head as she felt him try to unhook her stays. She turned to help him, and then felt herself swell as the tightness went away, and suddenly she didn’t care whether anyone saw them. Now he was pulling up her knees, his fingers scooping the soft flesh behind, above the tops of her calf-high boots. Her outer skirt fell down about her waist, and then his hands were beneath her petticoat, raising it like two white alps in the fleeing light. He flung it up—she felt the blow of it on her wet mouth—and then his mouth, his tongue, was probing at her through her underwear. She gave a little sob at the shock of it, feeling every lineament of the cloth’s weave. It was almost painful in being so particular, but she didn’t want it to stop all the same, especially in the moments when—and they were unpredictable, save that he was learning, gauging the tightness of it from her reaction—he touched her in such a way…She closed her eyes and willed it to go on for ever, to go on till morning came down through the tops of the trees, moving stealthily between the leaves. She was a leaf herself now, waving, hoping to fall…
Bella felt hands either side of her, tugging at her underwear.
“You mustn’t,” she said, tensing.
Full of regret, she sat up, her legs apart with him kneeling between them. To keep her balance, she was forced to throw her arms around his neck. This pulled her down on to him, and then he slumped to one side, breathing heavily. She could feel him pressing against her through his breeches. Determined to distract him, yet still half-full of exploring zeal, she snaked down a hand. Tom moaned, and rolled over on to his back. She rubbed against the straining tip of him, using the palm of her hand as he had done upon her breast.
“Like this,” he whispered, shaking his head, and at first she didn’t understand that it was an instruction, not an expression of pleasure.
He reached down and moved her hand aside, and with a quick movement undid his belt and the top button of his breeches. Almost reluctantly, Bella pushed her hand into the gap—felt the fleshy top of him, warm underneath her palm, astonishingly warm, and softly textured. That vel-vetiness of skin was more striking to her than the prodding, hard way the thing pushed up against her hand. Tom put his own hand on top of hers and moved it up and down, and then undid some more buttons, until he sprung free.
Long Tom!
She smiled at her own thought, and in the consciousness of it gripped him more firmly. Moving her hand up and down the stock of him, she could feel a long, arcing vein under her fingers. Or was it a muscle? Every now and then it twitched a little. She noticed quickly that Tom moved about and made small, breathy noises at the beginning and end of each movement of her hand. The fascination was in the pure mechanism of it; she felt like an engineer, one surprised by some chance discovery in the field of iron bridge building, or steam. She was even more surprised when Tom released a sharper breath than all the previous ones, kicked out his legs, and a small, wet frog landed on her bare arm.
Twenty-Six
“Frogs!”
Herbert Foster swore as the Boer shell buried itself in the earth breastwork beneath his emplacement on Junction Hill, making the whole thing shake. The redoubt was more like a conning tower than a sandbag epaulement, they had built it so tall—shoulder-high and six foot thick, with the Armstrong sticking out at forty-five degrees and the Maxim trained point blank. But Long Tom was getting the better of the exchange…
“Bloody Frogs! Bloody Huns! Bloody Irish! If they weren’t all fighting with them, then we might have a chance.”
No one was listening, and even if they had been they could not have heard him over the noise of battery and counter-battery fire. But he was not really addressing his remarks to anyone in particular, just expressing his frustration at the good aim of the gunners of the Staats Artillerie.
The reference to the French was based on little more than the fact that some of the Boer guns were made by a French company (thus supplementing the Kaiser’s Krupps), and the imprecation upon the Irish was a consequence of the discovery that the Boers, like the British, had their own Irish brigade—‘full of paddywacks with a grievance’ as Foster put it—whose second-in-command was a renegade nationalist politician called MacBride. News of the existence of this brigade had already caused some tension in the ranks, being the cause of a brawl between a man of the Leicesters and a sergeant of the Dublin Fusiliers, who resented his loyalty to the Crown being called into question. The man got a double beating, first from the sergeant, and then from the provosts, on account his having struck a superior.
But there were larger quarrels, ones in which such discriminations counted for naught. The big guns on Umbulwana and Pepworth Hill had kept up their racket all week, making no distinction between famous or ordinary human beings, or for that matter between human beings and animals. Lord Dufferin, Dr Jameson (of ‘Jameson Raid’ notoriety) and Colonel Frank Rhodes (brother of Cecil) were disturbed by a shell while sitting for a photograph. Another mule of Rashid, carrier to Gunner Foster, had been disembowelled at the naval gunpit, and now he had to carry the shells himself.
It was not all one way, not by any means. Foster’s Armstrong was roaring like a bullock today. It searched the country for Dutch blood, as if in revenge for the ill-fated mule.
“A Boer name on every round,” Foster would say, and spit, as Rashid staggered over with the heavy shell in his arms.
This utterance would be made from a low shelf beneath the parapet, upon which Foster would sit down between firings to smoke his cigar. Rashid, even without his beast of burden, was so quick with the shells that he hardly had time for more than a couple of puffs before he had to be up taking the shells in and supervising the firing. The consequence of this was—albeit hard to distinguish amid the mazy hell of a gun p
osition in action—a pretty little counterpoint of bluish smoke: the big puff of the Armstrong, the little one of Foster’s cigar.
Apart from technical details to do with aim and elevation, the question of where the shells were actually going was hardly entertained. Whenever he tried to think about the other side, an awful blankness descended upon Foster.
They were just—the enemy. It could not be otherwise, for to extend any particularity towards them made the job impossible. Humanity lived on this side of the gun, began and ended within the confines of Ladysmith—and, like others, he was quite happy to exclude the Africans and Indians from that compass.
Not everyone thought like this. In the quiet of the night, that sturdy freethinker, Nevinson of the Daily Chronicle, thought about the black families he had seen on the way up here, as the rumour of war swept across the country. Thought, too, about the Dutch women and children being rounded up and brought in by British soldiers from farms close to Ladysmith. Most had escaped under the protection of their menfolk, but perhaps twenty or thirty of these fatherless families had been locked up in the Dopper Church, along with those long-standing Afrikaner inhabitants of Ladysmith who had not gone out to join the rebel armies, and the new ‘shady characters’. Even in many of the Dutch cases—such as that of one Heer De Vries, a long-beard of ancient years—it was clear that such people could pose no threat to the security of Ladysmith, but the order had been given by General White and that was that.
Behind their wire fence, the prisoners made a pitiful sight when they came out to exercise each day. There were now, reflected Nevinson, so many enclosures and fortifications in and around the town, from the Klip earthworks and the sangars of the outer defences to the merest piling up of sandbags around a cottage window, that seen from above (as he supposed the men in the observation balloons saw it), it must have appeared a near-impregnable series of plots and snares. But although Ladysmith now had something of the Great Wall of China about it, there were many gaps, and the fortifications were far from impenetrable. On balance, it was fear of bristling bayonets that prevented the Boers from simply storming the place, rather than the crudely built demi-lunes, hornworks and ravelins of the town’s hastily erected defences. All that traditional siege-craft and geometrical deviousness became irrelevant when the shells came whistling over: that demanded fortification of a different type—getting as low as possible in a cushioned hole, walling yourself in on top as well as at the sides. And everyone, all the town and garrison, was doing it, covering themselves in layer after layer of earth and stone, hoping that the layers underneath, those of skin and flesh and skeleton, would stay unharmed.