1999 - Ladysmith

by Giles Foden

  The Major held up a broken looking-glass. The roundel was only a quarter intact, and most of the remaining glass was missing, but Bella was shocked to recognize it as one of the very type that she herself had bought from Torres.

  “Can you explain this?” demanded the Major. Torres, Bella saw, was trembling.

  “Why are you doing this?” he said. “I have been a good citizen since I came to Ladysmith. I have no quarrel with the British. I just wanted to carry on with my business, and then the Boers hit it with a bomb. It is they who are my enemy. They have destroyed me!”

  “What of this looking-glass?” barked Major Mott. “Is it yours?”

  “It is certainly similar to ones in my stock,” said Torres, in trembling tones. “But I have sold many of them, or did, when I still had a business from which to sell them. I cannot be held responsible for what happens to them after they leave my shop.”

  “You should be advised that the punishment for treason is death by firing squad. Can you tell the Board where you were on the afternoon of Friday last?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose I was in the caves at the Klip, as usual.”

  “Can you provide a witness to that effect?”

  “I don’t know!” said Torres, who was becoming even more agitated. “I suppose so. I can’t remember. Go and ask some people there.”

  “We have made enquiries,” the Major countered. “None of the people in your tunnel are willing to say for certain that you were there on that afternoon.”

  “Of course not,” said Torres. “There are hundreds of people there. I may have been sleeping inside the tunnel, anyway, or giving someone a tattoo, or anything.”

  There was silence for a minute or so, as Major Mott made some notes on a pad, the ends of his sealion moustache drooping down before his bowed head.

  Then he looked up.

  “Is Trooper Barnes present?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Tom, smartly.

  “Could you please verify the prisoner’s bootprint? If you would oblige, Mr Torres.”

  Tom went behind Torres and, bending down, grasped his ankle.

  “This is lunacy,” exclaimed Torres, as the trooper picked up his foot and inspected the sole of his boot.

  The barber, made unsteady, was forced to put out an arm to keep his balance. If the situation had not been so tense, Bella would have found it comical. She could not think what the scene reminded her of, and then realized that it was reminiscent of someone checking a horse’s hoof for stones or lesions—an extremely common sight in the horse-swelled town.

  “It’s not the same, sir,” said Tom. “Not at all.”

  Major Mott addressed himself to Torres. “In the Board’s opinion, you are suspected of treason, and will be remanded until such time as your guilt or innocence can be proved. If you are found guilty, you will be executed, as military law dictates. We will of course be searching among your belongings in the tunnels, taking care to verify your remaining footwear.”

  Bella watched as Torres rubbed his face with his hands, as though he had just seen rather than heard something he couldn’t believe.

  “Mister Mayor,” he whispered. “Will you please stop this foolishness?”

  “I’m sorry, Antonio,” said Farquhar. “The order about Portuguese nationals has come down from General White, and is to be applied without exception. It has been issued to preserve the safety of the town. The matter of the looking glass will have to be investigated further,” he told Torres ominously. And then relented slightly. “But I am sure you will be released when it is all over.”

  “If you are innocent,” added Major Mott, sternly.

  “But I have no quarrel with any of you,” said Torres. “Mr Kiernan, tell them!”

  Bella saw her father look down at the green baize.

  “Take him away,” said Major Mott. “Next!”

  To her disbelief, Bella saw Tom and the other soldier move towards Torres, each taking one of his arms. She was so shocked by the picture—having come here simply expecting to have a talk with her father—that she was quite unable to move. Tom, giving her a wink, moved past with Torres, who on seeing her passed an accusing look in her direction. He must think I am a part of it, Bella realized, and the thought broke her inaction. She stood up and cried out, interrupting Major Mott, who was reading out the details of the charge against the next prisoner.

  “Wait!”

  The room fell silent.

  “Bella!” said her father. “You should not be here. And you must not interfere.”

  “No,” she said. “This is wrong. Father, Mayor Farquhar, I know Mr Torres. He is a good man, you don’t need to lock him up. This is pure cruelty. I myself have bought such a glass from him.”

  “Be silent!” bellowed her father.

  Cowed, Bella sat down again. The Major looked at Kiernan, who shook his head, as if disowning her. Then Mott gestured at Tom and the other soldier that they should carry on. Torres began to struggle in their grip, and a chair was knocked over as they left the room. Bella sat for a second, shaking, and then got up and rushed out after them. She caught up with them at the bottom of the steps outside, where two other soldiers were tying a cord round Torres’s hands, which had been pulled behind him. The barber’s back was to her, and Tom stood near by, leaning on his rifle.

  “Tom! Wait, this isn’t right.”

  “Army business, love. Best leave us to it.” His voice seemed different, his whole manner altered—he was not like he was before. He turned to go.

  “Stop,” she said, tugging at his arm. “I’m telling you. You must help me.”

  His face softened a little. “I can’t, Bella. It’s orders.”

  “What the bloody hell?” said one of the other soldiers, disbelieving. “We better move on, Tom. You’ll be put on report if anyone sees this.”

  “He’s right,” said Tom, embarrassed. “We’ve got to go.”

  Bella grabbed at his belt, and he took her by the wrist and removed her hand.

  “Don’t,” she cried. “You’re hurting me.”

  “Do not touch her,” said an accented voice. Torres had turned round, and was watching the encounter. One of the other soldiers looked at him and, curling his lip, hefted his rifle and jabbed the butt into the barber’s kidneys. Torres fell to the ground. Bella ran over, pushed past the soldiers and knelt by his side.

  His dark eyes, filled with pain, looked up at her.

  “It is all right. You must go. You will get into trouble.”

  She looked down at him, as he lay there awkwardly with his hands bound behind his back, and discovered tears welling up in her own eyes. It was all so horrible, so cruel and unfair. Just plain wrong. Before she could say anything else, the two soldiers had lifted Torres up and began to drag him away.

  “I’m sorry,” Tom said, giving her an uncertain look, half crestfallen, half irritated.

  Kneeling there on the ground, Bella looked back at him and loathed herself. She could not believe that she had let herself be touched by a man who could disregard her wishes so directly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. Then he hitched up his rifle on to his shoulder and followed his companions and their prisoner. Standing up, Bella walked back over to the Town Hall, sat down on the steps with her arms clasped around her knees, and began to cry. It was all too much—Jane, the hotel, and now this.

  From above her came a harsh voice. “What the hell did you think you were playing at?”

  With solemn, tear-filled eyes, she looked back over her shoulder and saw her father standing on one of the higher steps. He walked down and stood in front of her, breathing heavily.

  “What on earth possessed you? I thought I told you to stay in the caves, in any case.”

  Bella said nothing, just looked at the dusty ground at his feet.

  “Why did you do it? For what reason? I can’t understand it. Surely you don’t care about that haircutting buffoon?”

  “Father, please don’t talk like that,” sh
e mumbled.

  “Have you fallen in love with him? With a damn barber? Is that it?”

  “No,” she said, sulkily. “It’s wrong, that’s all—what you did. You know that he is no threat to anybody. He might end up being executed.”

  “It’s military law, Bella. We must accept it until things get back to normal.”

  “What is normal?” she answered angrily. “It’s never going to be any good in this town. It never was going to be.”

  “Bella,” he said, in a heavy voice. “Stop acting so wilful. Go back to the Klip and look to yourself. Forget about Torres.”

  “And you?” she said, with a note of sarcasm.

  “Why are you defying me? I have been a good father to you. God knows it has not been easy. I don’t understand. You’ve been a good girl up till now. Why are you behaving like this, at a time when your sister is in hospital and our home is destroyed? Do you not think I have enough to worry about?”

  “I had to speak up for him.”

  “Look. Someone has been passing information about targets in the town to the Boers. I am not saying it is Torres, but as a Portuguese, he is bound to fall under suspicion as a traitor and a spy. There is nothing I can do about it.”

  “You could have spoken up for him.”

  “Why should I have done so? I don’t like the man, and unless I had some particular reason, the army would have taken no notice of me. I don’t understand why you are making such a fuss. Can you not settle for the fact that it has happened and go back to the caves and wait for the siege to end?”

  “He was kind to me,” Bella said, meekly.

  “Don’t be so stupid.”

  Scrawny, sallow, tense, a bundle of nerves crouched there on the steps, Bella Kiernan looked up at her father and found that even she was surprised by the force of feeling in her. All the dissatisfactions of her existence, the knowledge that her life—in that town, in that era—was set to be one of narrow, miserable renunciation, welled up in her. All her daughterly feelings—of respect, of love, and of fear too—evaporated in that moment. She felt a space—wide and empty as the veld, full of possibilities, but hollow also—open up inside her.

  She spat the words out. “I hate you.”

  Thirty-Five

  Back in the tunnels the night after her outburst, Bella was both wretched and resentful. On the one hand, she felt both sadness and fear on account of her hateful words; on the other, she was filled with righteous indignation at the treatment of Mr Torres. Confusion, too, was compounded with her clearer thoughts and feelings: why did she feel this anger at—this contempt for, even—their subjugation to military law? Probably the generals, and Father, were right; if the town was to continue its defence, such measures had to be taken. Perhaps Torres was a spy, after all?—but even as she asked the question in her mind, she knew it could not be true. What they had done was wrong, and she felt an unaccountable urge to right it. The question was not so much one of morality as of her own self-determination, and this troubled her. When she had spoken those words to her father, she had for the first time in her life felt she was being her true self. It was a disturbing feeling, one that she was scarcely able to recognize for what it was…

  The images of the day played through her mind. Father had actually raised his hand as if to strike her. Then, letting it fall, he had simply turned on his heel and walked away from her. She had gone back inside the Town Hall and collected the abandoned suitcase of food, then walked disconsolately back to the Klip.

  Now, unable to sleep and trying to put these awful pictures away, she was sitting in the opening of the tunnel. Everyone else was in their cave, and the embers of the supper fire glowed in front of her. Other fires, Boer fires, shone on the hills here and there, indistinctly. It was a murky night. The moon was covered over, the hills shrouded. Now and then, clusters of stars showed through the cloud, as it moved its ragged chariots across the night sky. The stars made her think of her father; perhaps even now he was focusing his telescope upon them from the window of the Star Room, or walking out among the sentries with his haversack on his back. She shivered. He could be shot!

  From time to time, as if to confirm her anxiety, came the boom of a gun or the sudden effulgence of a flare. Then the entire landscape was transformed, taking on a hellish cast. It made her think of sin, and as she looked up into the stars she thought of all the dead people who had gone heavenwards, and all the thousands more that this war was sending there.

  It was Mrs Frinton, whose devotion was of a dissenting stamp, who had put her in this frame of mind. Earlier in the evening, she had discovered Bella weeping in her cave.

  “What is troubling you, my dear?” she had asked.

  “I have a difficulty in finding the right course of action,” Bella had replied, not wanting to reveal to the widow the details of her discomfort.

  In the lamplight, Mrs Frinton’s creased, careworn face had been full of kindness, but also a sort of excitement. “Whatever the quality of your difficulty, the Lord will show you the way. You are of the Roman faith, I take it, being Irish?”

  “Yes,” Bella had said, although the family rarely went to church.

  “Well, I suppose that as long as you believe, virtue will come to you—and then you will be happy, knowing that your path is the right one. I cannot describe that happiness. It is unspeakable. I have been with the Lord for over half a century and, as the Good Book says, my cup overflows.”

  The widow had brought a collection of devotional texts down to the riverside. Mention of the Psalms spurred her, and she insisted on fetching a tome for the troubled girl.

  “It’s by a papist saint,” she had said, on re-emerging. “But it’s still one of my favourite books, and I think you might like it too.”

  Once the old woman had kissed her goodnight and retired to her own tiny chamber, Bella read a little of the book by candlelight. There was one passage which affected her powerfully, where the author described a vision that had come to her: “A most beautiful crystal globe, made in the shape of a castle, and containing seven mansions, in the seventh and innermost of which was the King of Glory, in the greatest splendour, illuminating and beautifying them all. The nearer one got to the centre, the stronger was the light; outside the palace limits everything was foul, dark and infested with toads, vipers and other venomous creatures.”

  The sentiments seemed very pertinent: a part of Bella identified strongly with the author’s suggestion that solace was something to be found inside one’s own heart. But another part of her, the more practical side, found the text quite unhelpful. What was she to do? She stared into the embers. Should she go and apologize to her father? Should she go and visit Torres in the Dopper Church? How did all this leave things between her and Tom Barnes? Unable to answer any of these questions, she retired to her pallet, and dreamed of a condition in which all of them could be resolved.

  In the morning she decided that she would, at any rate, visit Torres, and in due course set out determinedly to do so. It was a relief to get out of the warren and even though several shells fell along the way, she felt better for the walk.

  This feeling disappeared when she reached the Dopper Church, however. The wire fence which the soldiers had erected around it gave it a most peculiar look—Bella didn’t think there must be a church in the world like it—and if the wire alone made the picture peculiar, the faces behind it made it horrible. There were even children in there, no less spectral than their mothers, and all of then looked mournfully out between the strands of steel. She looked for Torres among those trapped, furtive faces, but could not see him. Eventually she approached the gate, where a little wooden shack had been built for the sentries.

  She looked in at its open doorway, half expecting to find Tom there. He was not, but his friend with the whiskers—the one she had met at the camp—he was inside, sitting on a chair, smoking his pipe and reading a Ladysmith Lyre. His rifle was propped against the wall next to him. There was something about its smooth brown l
ines, and the smoky metal of bolt and muzzle, that drew the young girl’s eye.

  “Hallo again,” the man said, on looking up and seeing Bella. “If you are searching for Tom, I am afraid you have come at the wrong time. He only does nights here.”

  “I actually wanted to speak with one of the prisoners.”

  The trooper put down his Lyre. “Oh yes? I’ll have to get permission from an officer if you want to come inside, and there isn’t one here right now.”

  “Couldn’t you just fetch the prisoner for me? It’s Mr Torres.”

  “That Portuguese fellow? Tom told me about the business outside the Town Hall.”

  “Please,” Bella said. “I’d be so grateful if you could just fetch Mr Torres for me.”

  “All right, love,” the bewhiskered man said, with a grin. “I’ll go and have a look for him. But you’ll have to wait here.” He picked up his rifle and, unlocking the gate with a key from a bunch on his belt, went through into the exercise area in front of the church. Bella watched him climb the steps and go in by the big wooden doors. A minute or so later he emerged with Torres. The barber looked strained and, coming up to the wire, gripped it with his hands. Bella looked through at him.

  “I have come to apologize for my father’s involvement in all this,” she announced.

  Torres took a deep breath, and gave a stoical smile.

  “It’s not your fault. You were just trying to help, I could see that.”

  “There must be something we can do,” said Bella. She reached up and clasped his fingers, with the wire between them. Torres gave a dry laugh, but he did not remove his hand.

  “I cannot see how. Unless you mean to bring guns and spring me out.”

  Bella looked into his dark eyes, scanning the aquiline face with its generous, full-lipped mouth and pointed beard. She felt a nervous fluttering in her breast, a mixture of frustration at his imprisonment and an almost maternal feeling of wanting to take him in her arms. She shook her head.