Solitaire

by Masterton, Graham

  ‘You going back to the mine, Mr Blitzboss?’ asked Michael.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Barney. ‘Give the horses a drink, but don’t unharness them yet.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Barney tried to restrain himself from running as he walked through the open front doors of the house and across the hallway. As he reached the library door, Horace came out of the door to the servants’ quarters, and frantically waved. ‘Mr Two-Leg! Mr Two-Leg!’

  ‘What is it, Horace?’

  ‘They all gone, Mr Two-Leg. I’m sorry, sir. I told them they should wait. But they said, not to worry, old chap. They said maybe you could catch up with them later. Maybe not.’

  ‘Gone? Who’s gone?’

  ‘Mr Hunt, sir; and Mr One-Leg; and the missis; and the amah.’

  Barney gripped Horace’s sleeve for a moment. ‘Wait there,’ he told him, and pushed open the library door. He crossed quickly to the safe, and tugged at the handle. The heavy door opened on its thick oily hinges to reveal what Barney already knew. The Natalia Star was gone. In its place was propped a letter, addressed to ‘Barney Blitz’ and marked ‘Private’ in Sara’s schoolgirl handwriting; all loops and curlicues and self-indulgent whorls.

  With unsteady hands, Barney took the letter out of the safe and opened it. On a single sheet of fresh notepaper, printed with the letterhead ‘Vogel, Vlei, Kimberley, Cape Colony’, Sara had written ‘Vincit Qui Patitur, Love Sara.’

  Horace was still waiting by the door, nervously scuffing his feet on the marble. Barney called to him, ‘What time did they leave? Early?’

  ‘Just about one hour after you went to the mine, sir. They took the landau, sir, and six horses – four in harness, two running behind. They said they were going to Klipdrift for a day or two, to show Mr Hunt the diggings. I asked them if I should tell you where they were, sir; and they said certainly. “Certainly, old chap,” they said, sir. “Off to Klipdrift to show Mr Hunt the diggings.” ’

  ‘Is that all? They didn’t say anything else?’

  ‘No, sir, Mr Two-Leg. But they were in high spirits, sir.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Barney. ‘I expect they probably were.’

  He felt shocked, and cold, even though the library windows were all closed to keep the flies out, and the air was stifling. He stood where he was for a moment, by the open safe, with Sara’s note in his hand, and then he walked around his desk, opened the top left-hand drawer, and took out the Shopkeeper’s revolver with which he had almost shot Joel once before. Lord God, he should have done. Then he would never have married Sara, and he would have been rid of Joel for ever. He released the catch on the revolver’s chamber so that it fell open, took out his single box of cartridges, and loaded up with five rounds. He doubted if he was actually going to shoot any of them. He could not imagine killing Hunt, or Nareez or even Joel; and he certainly could not think of shooting Sara. But the simple action of loading the gun made him feel that he was doing something positive to get his diamond back.

  ‘Horace,’ he said, beckoning. Horace came over to the desk and stood to attention. ‘I want you to pack me a saddlebag. Pack it as quick as you can. I want a couple of clean shirts, shaving tackle, socks, underwear. Roll me up a pair of blankets, too. And tell Kitty to pack me another saddlebag with bread, and biltong, and beans.’

  ‘I understand, Mr Two-Leg.’

  ‘I’m going to be away for at least a day,’ said Barney, ‘maybe two. Make sure you lock the house properly at night. Don’t allow any trespassers in nor kopje-wallopers, nor tinkers. You got that? If anybody wants to knows where I am, tell them I had to go to Oranjerivier, in a hurry. All right?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Right. Then get a move on. They’re only five or six hours ahead, and none of them know the roads really well. I should catch them at Modderivier.’

  ‘Mr Two-Leg? I thought they were going to Klipdrift, sir? Different way.’

  Barney shook his head. ‘There’s only one way those four are headed, and that’s directly to Capetown. Tell Michael to saddle up Jupiter, if they haven’t already taken him. I want to get going as soon as I can.’

  In half an hour, the chestnut horse was saddled and ready, and Barney had changed into a khaki veld-jacket, riding-breeches, and wide-brimmed hat. Michael, who was holding the horse’s bridle, said, ‘You want me to come with you, Mr Blitzboss?’

  Barney said, ‘No thanks. What I’m going to say and do to those four people when I catch up with them, I’m going to do on my own, with no witnesses. Besides, I’ll ride faster by myself.’

  ‘God take care of you, Mr Blitzboss.’

  Barney clicked to his horse, and it trotted down the driveway between the trees to the road. His black servants stood watching Barney go; and they walked across the hot gravel back to the house, saying nothing. It did not occur to them that there was nobody in this huge classical mansion now except them, that there was nobody to call ‘boss’. Horace solemnly closed the front doors behind them, and locked them.

  He rode south-west across the scrubby veld, and the wind plucked the dust from every step that Jupiter took, and blew it westward. The sun was beginning to sink now, and the landscape was taking on a grainy, inflated appearance, like a coke furnace seen through a muslin curtain. In the distance, on the western horizon, pale gazelles fled through the camelthorn trees, ghosts of their own forthcoming extinction.

  They would have needed supplies, he thought. They could not have considered crossing three hundred miles of veld and desert in a horse-drawn landau, two women and a cripple and a pint-sized city-dweller like Hunt, not without water and food and not without a guide. Of course, Hunt had probably brought a guide with him when he came up from Capetown, and there were plenty of shiftless Afrikaners around Kimberley who would have been willing to take them across the Great Karoo for a few pound notes and a drink. But a guide meant one extra person for the horses to pull, and wheels that were going to get bogged down when they forded rivers, or whenever they crossed tracts of soft sand.

  There were too many of them, and they were too inexperienced; and if they believed that Barney had swallowed their story and ridden across to Klipdrift to catch up with them, they may not even be hurrying. If he did not overtake them at Modderivier, about twenty miles to the south-west, then he would certainly stop them before they got to Belmont. He thought about what he would say and do when he confronted them, and even rehearsed it all in his head. He knew that Sara would give him the most difficulty. By stealing the Natalia Star from him she had virtually declared herself divorced.

  And what made it worse for her, although she was unaware of it, was the fact that she had taken the stone that Barney had named after the woman he felt he really loved.

  Just before darkness, when the sun had dipped below the distant mountains, but the sky was still suffused with a pale bluish half-light, Barney reached a small farm settlement, no more than a whitewashed house with a corrugated-iron roof, and a cluster of barns and huts and straw-strewn kraals. He dismounted, and led Jupiter to the drinking-trough by the fence. There were mosquitoes in the air, and the last light in the sky was reflected in broken ripples in the trough as Jupiter lapped up his water.

  Across the farmyard, a door opened, and Barney saw the orange glow of lamplight. A voice called, ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘I stopped to water my horse,’ Barney called back. ‘I’m on my way to Modderivier.’

  ‘Do you want a drink yourself?’ The voice was distinctly Afrikaans.

  ‘Thanks. I’ll just tie up the horse and I’ll be right over.’

  Inside the farmhouse, at a plain wooden supper-table, sat a family of ten – a sun-wrinkled Boer farmer, his sturdy wife, and a collection of eight girls and boys, all blond-haired, and all alike as skittles, with angular cheekbones and snubbed-up noses. The wife took a blue Delft plate down from the high yellow-wood dresser, and ladled out Barney a generous helping of game stew, with floury potatoes. The farmer himself brought out a bottl
e of johannisboombeer brandy, and filled up a small thick-rimmed glass with it.

  ‘This is very generous of you,’ said Barney. ‘I was expecting to have to eat my supper on horseback.’

  ‘Bad for the guts, man,’ said the farmer. ‘My old father always used to say that you could do anything standing up except eat.’ He reached across the table to shake Barney’s hand. ‘My name’s Marais Brink, by the way, and this is my wife Elsa, and these are all the little Brinks. Well, not so little these days. Barend, my eldest, is twenty next month. Marietjie is three.’

  ‘I’m looking for four, maybe five people,’ Barney said, tearing off a piece of bread. ‘They were headed this way in a four-in-hand, with two spare horses running behind.’

  Marais Brink forked a large chunk of meat into his mouth, and Barney had to wait patiently for an answer while he thoroughly chewed it, and took a sip of brandy, and then cleared his throat.

  ‘There’s been nobody like that past this way, man. Not today. It was today they were supposed to come by?’

  ‘This morning, maybe eleven or twelve o’clock. They would have been hard to miss.’

  ‘I’ll ask my foreman, but I was out in the yard myself all morning, repairing a plough. I wouldn’t have missed a rig like that.’

  ‘This is just about the only way they can come, isn’t it, right past the front of your farm?’

  ‘Well, that’s right,’ nodded Marais Brink. ‘They can’t come around the back of the farm, not in a carriage, because of the ditches. And they can’t go far beyond the track in the other direction, because it’s all trees, and stones, and after that there’s the river. Everything comes past the front here, man. I don’t miss a thing.’

  Elsa Brink offered Barney another spoonful of stew, but he raised his hand and said, ‘Thanks, really. But no thanks. I don’t have much of an appetite. Not while I’m still chasing after those people.’

  ‘They took something from you?’ asked Elsa Brink, clapping the lid back on the stewpot.

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Well, times are difficult, man,’ said Marais Brink. ‘There’s been more thievery than I can ever remember. There was a time when you could leave your horses out at night; but not these days. I had a mule taken about a month ago. As if life isn’t difficult enough already.’

  Barney stared at him. Then the farmer’s words at last sank in, and he blinked, and nodded. ‘You’re right. It’s very difficult.’

  After supper, the Brinks invited him to stay; and he sat preoccupied on a riempie chair by the fire, drinking johannisboombeer brandy, while the children sang songs, and the eldest boy Barend played the fiddle. He thought of the tenement on Clinton Street, and of Leib Ginzberg practising his mazel tov dances upstairs. He thought of Leah and Moishe, and the thumping of wooden buckets outside the Brink farmhouse sounded so much like the thumping of bolts of cloth on the cutting tables at Blitz, Tailors, that Barney had to make himself sit up straight, and remind himself where he was. Thousands of miles away from the Lower East Side, in the middle of the night, in a small Boer farmhouse in Africa, with everything lost. His wife, his brother, the woman he loved; and the largest diamond ever discovered on the whole sub-continent.

  There was something else, too. Tonight was Shabbes eve. He turned to Marais Brink, and said, ‘Would you mind if I recited something? We call it the Kiddush. It’s a kind of a prayer for the sabbath.’

  ‘You’re Jewish?’ asked Elsa Brink.

  Barney nodded. ‘A Jew from America, a long way from home.’

  ‘It’s not unusual for a Jew, is it, to be a long way from home?’ asked Marais Brink. ‘You go ahead and say your prayers. We both have the same God.’

  Later, as Barney lay sleepless in a hard wooden cot in one of the outhouses, with the waning moon watching him sadly through the uncurtained window, he repeated the words that he had spoken, the words that began the Kiddush, and he tried to take comfort from them. ‘Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested …’

  But Barney found that rest was impossible. The moon sank behind a bank of early-morning clouds, and the sky began to lighten again, and on the other side of the farmyard a cockerel began to crow. He climbed off the cot, and went to the window, unshaven and exhausted.

  If they had not gone to Capetown, where had they gone? Not to Klipdrift, surely; there was nothing for them there, and no escape to the coast. Not east, to the Orange Free State, or across the mountains to Natal. What would be the point of that? No point at all, unless Sara thought her father could help them to escape from South Africa with the diamond or sell it on the IDB black market. But they wouldn’t be able to sell it for anything like a million pounds on the black market, not a diamond as huge and as distinctive as the Natalia Star; and Hunt’s consortium of British businessmen, if they had ever actually existed, had apparently only been interested in putting up a million-four if they could be sure that the gem was going to be presented to Her Majesty as the Victoria Star.

  So where had Hunt and Joel and Sara gone with the stone, and why? There were plenty of unscrupulous merchants and collectors who would pay anything up to £300,000 for it, credentials or not. But it would only take Harold Feinberg a month or two to alert the newspapers and the diamond trade all over the world that the Natalia Stone had gone missing, and anybody who wanted to resell it would either have to choose their client with great care, or else cut the stone up into twenty or thirty anonymous and far smaller diamonds, to be marketed separately. Either way, Sara and Joel would receive only a fraction of the money they might have been able to ask if they had been able to sell the diamond legitimately.

  There were always buyers for diamonds of dubious background, but the stones had to be sold and re-sold before they acquired a new respectability. After he had killed the slave who had taken the Regent diamond from the Parteal mine, the British sea-captain who had promised to give him passage out of India had later sold the stone to the Indian diamond merchant Jaurchund for only £1000. Jaurchund had been obliged to put it around discreetly that he had ‘exceptionally large diamonds for sale’; and when he was approached by Thomas Pitt, the grandfather of William Pitt and the governor of Fort St George, close to Madras, Jaurchund had been easily beaten down from his asking price of £80,000 to less than £20,000. Pitt sent the Regent to England to be cut into a flawless 140½-carat brilliant, and sold it in 1717 to the Regent of France, the Duke of Orleans, for £135,000; but that did not help the slave, or the sea-captain, or Jaurchund, and Hunt and Sara and Joel were in the same position as the sea-captain.

  But however little they were paid for it, and however alert the merchants were, the Natalia Star could still be lost to Barney for ever. As Hunt had reminded him, a large diamond has its own destiny; and unless Barney could very quickly intervene in the destiny of the Natalia Star, it would be out of his reach – cut, sold, mounted, and locked away in some private collection on the other side of the world. Barney thought about the stories he had told the newspapers about the Natalia Star being one of a kind, a once-in-a-lifetime discovery, and the ironic part about it is was that he had been right. It was. He might acquire the whole of the Kimberley mine, and excavate it as deep as it was possible to dig, and never find another diamond as huge as or perfect again.

  He felt as if his wife and his brother had taken not only his diamond but his reason for staying in Africa, his reason for battling against Rhodes, his reason for trying to rediscover his religion, and his God. The Natalia Star may have embodied absolute truth, but it seemed to Barney as if absolute truth could too easily be slipped into a thief’s pocket, and carried off.

  In the morning, he breakfasted with the Brink family at six o’clock, and left them a five-pound note tucked into the blue milk jug on their dresser. Then he rode slowly back to Kimberley, and to Vogel Vlei, where his servants were awaiting his return with domestic patience. Somebody else was awaiting his return
, too; and with a game-rifle.

  It was Alf Loubser, the sheep-farmer from Beaufort West, looking as fierce as he possibly could. He had drawn his eighteen-ox waggon up outside the front doors of Vogel Vlei in a wide curve of horns and yokes and reins and idly-flopping tails, and he was sitting in the driving-seat with his long-barelled gun resting across his knees. Beside him, in a gingham dress and a poke bonnet, her hands demurely clasped in her lap, was Louise, his daughter, the girl who had taken Barney’s virginity all those years ago on that warm starry night on the Koup.

  Barney climbed down from Jupiter wearily, and walked across to the ox-waggon leading the horse on a loose rein. ‘It’s Alf Loubser, isn’t it?’ he asked, taking off his hat and shielding his eyes from the sun with his hand. ‘And that’s Louise. My, you’ve grown, haven’t you, Louise?’

  ‘She’s not as grown now as she was after you visited our farm,’ commented Alf Loubser, harshly.

  Barney stopped where he was, and squinted up at Loubser awkwardly. The sun was right behind Loubser’s head, shining through the canvas top of the waggon, and it blotted out the taut, narrow-eyed expression on the fanner’s face.

  ‘I’m not sure what you’re saying,’ said Barney.

  ‘You’re not? I’ll suppose you’re going to deny it, are you?’

  ‘If I knew what I was supposed to be denying, then maybe I would. Listen, why don’t I ask my boys to feed and water your beasts, and then you can come inside and talk this all over in a civilised way, whatever, it is. Did you come all the way from Beaufort?’

  ‘Leg by leg. I have cousins in Hopetown, I was visiting them, too.’

  ‘Well, come along inside. You look like you could use some refreshment, and I know that I could. Let me help you down, Louise.’

  Alf Loubser reared up the muzzle of his rifle. ‘She doesn’t need any of your help, man. Leave her alone.’

  ‘I was only trying to be friendly.’

  ‘Well, we don’t need friendship like yours. Friendship like yours, we can do without.’