‘I don’t think so, Sir.’
At that moment, Klein Steyn broke and ran. He had seen a lot in this war, but somehow this was the most unbearable of all. He had liked the Dutchman and had thought he was doing what Gideon would want too when he offered to save Esther Calitz from possible execution, but then the Dutchman turned out to be the one he should’ve watched out for. If this was how the world was, he wanted nothing to do with it. He ran as if from a rabid dog.
‘Get that man!’ Bryce sent two of the Australians after the boy at a gallop.
Esther turned and slipped back into the tent. She couldn’t breathe. Her diaphragm had turned to stone, a slab of blue slate wedged between her ribs. The weight of it threatened to pull her to her knees. How could this be? Did she go and fall in love with an enemy soldier, a spy? Was everything he had told her a lie? The most shocking part of it all was that she could no longer trust the divine compass of her emotions. Her intuition had lied to her and without that all certainty had become impossible. She dressed furiously. A layer of reason, thin as a soap bubble, kept her going through the motions. She had to be practical, do the next appropriate thing, get through the next few minutes or hours with as much self-respect as possible. She could succumb to the emotional turmoil later.
It would’ve been better never to have met him. If it weren’t for that, not only would she be spared this, but all those Boers outside would still be free to fight. Despite her best intentions, so many of the lives she had touched were now worse off than before. Jacob had lost his entire commando. Gideon had lost her respect, but maybe that didn’t bother him so much. She didn’t even want to think about what she herself had lost. She needed to find one positive to hold onto. Maybe Mr Matzdorff had got away; he might be in the arms of his beloved wife at this very moment. Would things be strange and strained between them after such a long time apart? Probably. Still, she envied them.
Outside, Gideon spoke loudly. ‘You men, put down your weapons here, in the clearing. Not just rifles, but any pistols or revolvers. You may get them back, but let’s just make sure nobody gets nervous and start shooting. Field Cornet Liebenberg, you first.’
The man laid his weapon down, looking Gideon in the eye as he did so. ‘We trusted you.’
Others followed. A few were still looking around, trying to gauge their chances of escape.
‘Please, don’t even think of taking on these soldiers. I know you all believe you’re better than them man for man, and perhaps you are, but this is not a man-for-man situation. There are many of them for every one of you. It would be suicide to try to get away.’
The two riders brought Steyn back. The boy was fighting them all the time, trying to wriggle and claw and kick despite the ropes that held his arms at his sides. When they got close enough, Steyn spat at Gideon, crying now. ‘You’re worth nothing! Nothing! You’ll never get her now!’
Gideon wiped the spittle off his shirt. He felt sorry for the boy, more than he could say. ‘See that nothing happens to him.’
Bryce dismounted and walked to Gideon’s side. ‘I don’t see De Wet here. Shall we go to the tent, you and I?’
Gideon dropped his head. ‘Yes, Major.’
The Australian lieutenant had taken over the surrender proceedings.
Gideon walked half a step ahead of Bryce. Esther wasn’t to be seen. He stopped outside the tent. ‘Can we come in?’
The flap opened and Esther stepped out, now dressed in riding breeches, a blouse and boots, the outfit she had meant to use on commando. ‘Here I am.’
Bryce looked past her into the tent. ‘We were expecting the general.’
‘What general?’ Esther was surprised. ‘Gideon …?’
In the Sudan, Bryce had once been stabbed with a home-made dagger. The feeling he had now was remarkably similar. His voice was perfectly calm. ‘Yes, Gideon, what general?’
Gideon had dreaded this moment, but it could not be helped. ‘De Wet is at a farm called Tierfontein, up towards Harrismith.’
‘Then what are we doing all the way over here?’
‘We are capturing these men, and this woman.’
Bryce spoke softly. ‘You had me bring all these hundreds of men out here for this? … It’s not nothing, but it’s hardly going to change the course of the war.’
‘I’m sorry, Sir. I had to save their lives and this was the only way I could think of.’
The major looked at the girl, whose gaze was focused on Gideon like a welder’s arc. So that’s how it was. Bryce recognised one more feature to fill in on the map of the human heart if he were ever to draw such a thing. Despite the devastating disappointment, he could hardly suppress a smile. This turn of events would have bad implications for him, no doubt, but it did surprise him. He loved that the world could still do that to him, present him with the occasional desert flower. As always, he found refuge from the immediate by taking a longer view. This mess most definitely would make life worse for him, but at the same time it was things like this that made life worthwhile.
His voice was calm when he spoke. ‘Next time, Lancaster, make sure you love something appropriate, by which I mean something you already have. Otherwise you’ll ruin your life.’
Bryce turned on his heel and walked away – troubled, delighted, alive. Perhaps the Australian officer needed a hand. The man had someone writing down the names and particulars of each prisoner. Other men were sent to toss through the Boers’ belongings to make sure there were no hidden weapons.
When the British officer was gone, Esther went back into the tent. The flap closed and she tied the strings that held it in place.
‘Esther.’
‘Go away.’
Gideon stood right up against the canvas, whispering urgently. ‘Esther, I had to do it. It was the only way to save you. If I didn’t, Eksteen would have killed you.’
She didn’t answer.
‘Please talk to me.’
‘Just go away. I’m done talking to you and I refuse to listen.’
‘Esther …’
He stood there and watched his own shadow take shape against the tent. He could rip the tent from the ground or cut a slit in it, but none of that would get him closer to her. The separation between them was not one of canvas.
When the soldiers were satisfied that they had all the firearms, they fired a signal shot and their comrades started to appear from all sides. The Boers stood around open mouthed, some gathering their things together, some having a hard time just collecting their thoughts.
Lieutenant Farrell found Bryce standing some way off, looking at proceedings but clearly lost in his own world. ‘Which one is De Wet? I don’t see him.’
‘There is no De Wet.’
‘There must be a De Wet!’
‘There is one, but he’s not here.’
‘Did he get away?’
‘He was never here.’
‘I don’t understand … So your spy made a mistake?’
‘No … Lancaster knew exactly what he was doing. He wanted us to come capture a girl.’ Bryce enjoyed seeing the confusion on his young sidekick’s face.
Farrell frowned, puffed his cheeks and blew a long breath into the morning air. ‘I could never understand this sort of thing.’
‘People don’t stop being people just because there’s a war on, you know.’
‘Doesn’t the idiot realise that he’s ruining you?’
‘It wasn’t just him … I’ve ruined myself, which is terrible, but still better than being ruined by you … Good day.’ He walked off into the veldt.
The Boers were told to saddle up and were herded into a small group with their horses. Gideon had wandered around to the side, not part of one group or the other, nor of the pairing that was most important to him.
Gideon saw the major approaching, carrying his cap in his hand. Bryce looked purposeful, but somehow less military than before. There was a complicity in the way he looked at Gideon. ‘It’s beautiful country.’
I
t was, no denying it. It was Eden, if you could only get rid of the people, maybe just keep one man and one woman, a family, no social problems or politics.
‘I’ve come to like it.’
‘And you like the girl too.’
‘More than anything.’ The first rays of sunlight highlighted the tops of the hills around them. ‘I’m sorry this didn’t turn out as you expected.’
‘Not for you either, by the looks of it.’
‘She’s safe, that’s what counts. She’ll come around when she thinks about it. She just needs time.’ Gideon picked a grass stem and rubbed the seed pods between his hands. It made his palms red. ‘I’m sorry to have caused you such trouble.’
Bryce shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about me … Coping with failure is the foundation of an orderly life – that’s what my Uncle Vernon always said. Everyone thinks it’s success, but no. The thing about success is not that you achieve it, but that there is something you consider worth striving for. As long as you have that, you’re fine.’
‘I have that now, Sir.’
‘I will always have it. I guess I’m lucky that way.’ Bryce smiled. Low expectations are a man’s best friend. Have small ambitions and don’t ask too many questions.
‘You’re not angry then?’
‘No.’ Bryce put his arm around the young New Zealander’s shoulders. ‘And now, my boy, we’d better get ready for what comes next.’
Jacob was up long before daybreak. You cannot hold on to what is gone, he said to himself. It’s best he got going to keep his appointment with Matzdorff at sunrise and get it over with. The goat watched him saddle up and on the spur of the moment he decided to take the animal with him, meat for later. He held out a handful of grass and the eager animal came forward to nibble at it. Jacob picked it up around the belly, one hand on the horns to keep that in check, and flipped the goat onto its side. He quickly tied the front legs together and did the same with the back two. Then he flung the goat over the back of the horse, two legs dangling down at either side. He got on behind it and held the goat by the horns with one hand and the reins in the other. So they set off.
The poor goat was being jostled and it bleated piteously for a while before falling quiet. Snot dribbled from its nostrils, streaking Jacob’s trousers. Once it ejected a stream of pellets the other end, a few catching Jacob’s shoe. Above the Drakensberg, the sky lightened.
The sound of a gunshot made Jacob pull up. It was some way off, in the direction of the commando. Then a din erupted, a string of single shots. It wasn’t a battle and it wasn’t random. He kicked the horse in the flanks. Something unusual was happening and he had to see what.
He rode into a grove of poplars, left the horse and goat there and walked on with his rifle and binoculars until he got to a spot where he could see the camp. There was dust and people were milling about, a horde of mounted Khakis and his men on foot in between. They were piling their rifles on the ground, overseen by some Khakis in slouch hats. He watched them being herded this way and that. Only one man was exempt. He trained the binoculars and recognised the Dutchman, talking to a British officer, who clasped his arms around Doncker’s shoulders. Jacob swore under his breath as he recognised the implication. The man was a damn traitor, and he had offered to take him to meet De Wet! He lifted his rifle to his shoulder, sighted along the barrel. There, that grey speck, that was Gideon Doncker. The man was walking towards the larger group. If only he was as good a shot as Von Waltsleben, he might have had a go from here, but he was as likely to hit any of the other men or, more likely, nothing but earth. He’d better wait, he told himself, patience, patience.
He watched the men mount up, and not only the men – there was Esther too. What was she still doing there? She should’ve gone back to the Lost Lamb long ago.
Finally the procession got moving, the bedraggled Boers in a huddle in the middle, their horses tied together so one couldn’t head off on his own. Their rifles were tied onto the backs of pack horses. The column moved along with scouts on all sides.
Jacob went back for his horse. The stupid goat stared at him, its rectangular pupils in the yellow irises. Even lying down it had found something to chew on, its little goatee moving from side to side. It was fate or the devil mocking him, Jacob decided. He drew his knife and leapt on the animal, stabbing, slicing and hacking through the skin, viscera and muscle, ripping ribs, severing arteries and air passages. The kicking and shuddering stopped, the animal became limp between Jacob’s knees, but he kept slashing at it until he was completely out of breath, falling over on the ground beside the bloodied mess, his legs and arms smeared with blood and green stomach fluid, even some splatters on his face. He lay there with closed eyes, catching his breath. When he opened his eyes, the goat’s glassy pupils were still staring at him. Jacob got up and staggered to his horse.
Lured by his blood-encrusted clothes, a cloud of flies followed Jacob while he shadowed the Khaki column. He stayed in touch with them until they got to the road, and then long enough to figure out where they were going. It had to be Senekal. The Dutchman Gideon Doncker was riding up front with a few officers. If Jacob could go ahead and find a place to lie in wait, he might get a good shot at the traitor. He wouldn’t be able to free the commando on his own and they were moving too fast for him to go find help somewhere else, but at least he could make sure that bastard Dutchman, if that’s what he was, got what he deserved.
He galloped up ahead and found a place in what looked like open country, but where there was a dry creek not far from the road. Here he left his horse in the gulley and crept up to a small outcrop of rocks. He could shoot, run back to his horse and be five-hundred yards or more away before coming out of the creek. Then it would be a race across the open veldt, but the enemy’s horses looked as tired as his own and it was a chance he was willing to take. Who said justice was easy?
The column appeared towards midday. Jacob put a round in the chamber and propped the barrel of his rifle on a flat rock he had placed there for the purpose. He was glad in a way to finally be able to use his decorated Lee-Enfield for its proper purpose. This was justice of the poetic kind, the best there was. He watched the column through the binoculars and used that to help him pick out the target. The Dutchman’s white shirt among a group of riders in khaki made it quite easy. It didn’t matter who this Gideon Doncker character really was, Jacob thought. He was a traitor and would die. When they were about two-hundred yards away, Jacob pressed his cheek to the decorated stock of his rifle, put his sights on that patch of white, and followed it until he had a clean shot. He breathed out halfway, held it there and, with one finger curled around the trigger, slowly closed his fist. In the course of that smooth movement, a catch was released and the springloaded firing pin struck the primer on the case head, detonating the powder in the cartridge, the explosion forcing the bullet through the barrel at the speed of sound.
Gideon did not realise what had happened at first. There was a slap in his midriff, a crack in the air and then no breath. Blood drained from his head; he tipped sideways, shouts sounding up around him.
‘Over there, between the rocks!’
Hanging upside down from the saddle, falling to the ground, Gideon saw soldiers galloping off. Then he lost consciousness.
4–31 December 1901
Gideon came to his senses in the hall of Greenhill Convent in Bloemfontein, surrounded by people wrapped in white and the smell of disinfectant. His memory revealed glimpses of what had happened to him in the past week, entering the base at Senekal strapped to a makeshift stretcher dragged by a horse, trying to find Esther’s face among those of the captured Boers, waking in a moving ambulance wagon. Somewhere in all this was Major Bryce’s face peering at him.
The convent had been converted to a hospital. A Scottish nurse named Mary told him the bullet had gone straight through him, not rupturing any intestines, but chipping the top of his left hip. Initially he suffered more through blood loss than anything else, but the wound bec
ame infected and took him to death’s door. He was recovering well, she said. Barring further complications, he could be out of there in two or three weeks.
Every day he saw sheets being pulled over the faces of men in beds around him. Nurses bundled the bodies onto gurneys and took them away. The men who were recovering spent more and more time out of bed until the day they stayed away for good. New wounded took the places of the dead and the healed. As in all previous wars, the sick outnumbered the wounded, though only two to one. The sick and their germs were kept in separate wards. From time to time, a troupe of officers would come into the ward, weave their way between the tightly arrayed beds to find a particular soldier and pin a medal on him, whether he was conscious or not.
Among the locals who helped the British nurses was a well-mannered, well-presented Boer girl named Sarah Nieuwoudt – blonde hair, blue eyes, dimples in her cheeks. When she discovered Gideon could speak her language, she started paying extraordinary attention to him, but he was not interested. One day she brought him a bunch of letters that had arrived for him while he was with the Boers. Major Bryce had kept them all these months and had asked for them to be delivered to Lancaster. He sent word that he would’ve liked to have made the delivery himself, but couldn’t because he was being reassigned to the frontline, wherever that was.
Gideon read the letters in order. Most were from his mother, responses to fictitious events he had described to her in post-dated letters he had left with Major Bryce to send off from time to time, to keep up the pretence that he was working as a cartographer. Her concern over things that never actually happened made Gideon sad. The woman who had once been his entire world now knew so little about his life. This did not stop him from writing her a new letter that was just as far removed from reality as the ones that had gone before. The two letters from Imogene Ballard he barely understood – they were about a world of events and values that seemed completely alien to him.
The day came when the Boer girl Sarah helped Gideon into a wheelchair and pushed his emaciated frame down the passage. Near the front door, she stopped to talk to a colleague, treating Gideon to a view of a display cabinet that, on its bottom shelf, held a collection of bullets and metal shards taken from the bodies of men who had survived their wounds. The weapons that had killed men were not on display, presumably because it would be demoralising. Higher shelves held what seemed to be remnants of the convent’s days as a school. There was a stuffed barn owl, the skull of a horse, the skin of a snake and, floating in jars of formaldehyde, various animal organs and the severed hand of a baboon. Gideon was relieved when the girl pushed him out through the front door.
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