Wilbur Smith - B3 The Angels Weep

by B3 The Angels Weep(Lit)

  "When are your twin sisters arriving?" He ignored her protest.

  "They sent a runner ahead, they should be here before nightfall.

  Ralph, give me that flannel immediately!" "We will see how steely Mr. Rhodes" nerves really are-" "Ralph I can do that myself, thank you kindly, give me the flannel!" "And we will also see how sharp Harry Mellow's reflexes are-" "Ralph, are you crazy? We are in the bath!"

  "We will take care of both of them with one stroke." "Ralph, you can'd You can't not in the bath!" "We will have Jordan out of your kitchen, Harry Mellow overseer of the Harkness Mine and Mr. Rhodes on his way to Bulawayo an hour after those two arrive "Ralph, darling, do stop talking. I can't concentrate on two things at once," Cathy murmured.

  The tableau at the trestle-table in the dining tent seemed unaltered since Ralph had last seen it, rather like one of the productions at Madame Tussaud's Waxworks. Mr. Rhodes even wore the same clothing as he dominated the tent with his expansive charisma.

  Only the bit players seated in the position of petitioners facing the long table had changed. These were a motley bunch of out-of-luck prospectors, concession-seekers, and impecunious promoters of ambitious ventures, who had been attracted by Mr. Rhodes" reputation and millions like jackal and hyena to the lion's kill.

  It was the mode in Matabeleland to display one's individuality by adopting eccentric headgear, and the selection which faced Mr. Rhodes across the table included a Scottish bonnet with an eagle feather pinned to the brim by a yellow cairngorm, a tall brushed beaver girl with a green St. Patrick's ribbon, and a magnificent embroidered Mexican sombrero, the owner of which was relating a meandering tale of woe which Mr. Rhodes cut short. He did not enjoy listening as much as he did talking.

  "So then, you've had enough of Africa, have you? But you haven't the passage money? "he asked brusquely.

  "That's it exactly, Mr. Rhodes, you see my old mother-" "Jordan, give the fellow a chi tty to see him home, and charge it to me personally." He waved away the man's thanks, and looked up as Ralph came into the tent.

  "Harry tells me your trip was a great success. He panned your crushings from the Harkness reef at thirty ounces a ton, that's thirty times richer than the best ban ket reef of the Witwatersrand. I think we should open a bottle of champagne. Jordan, don't we have a few bottles of the Pommery'87 left?" "At least I'm not providing the champagne as well as the whisky," Ralph thought cynically, as he lifted his glass to the toast. "The Harkness Mine." He joined the dutiful chorus and the moment he had drunk he turned on Dr. Leander Starr Jameson.

  "What is this about the mining laws?" he demanded. "Harry tells me you are adopting the American mining code." "Do you have any objection?" Jameson flushed, and his sandy moustache bristled.

  "That code was drawn up by lawyers to keep themselves in fat fees in perpetuity. The new Witwatersrand laws are simpler and a million times more workable. By God, isn't it enough that your Company royalty will rob us of fifty per cent of our profits?" As Ralph said it, it dawned upon him that the American mining code would be a smoke-screen behind which the artful Rhodes could manoeuvre at will.

  "Remember, young Ballantyne," Jameson stroked his moustache, and blinked piously. "Remember who the country belongs to. Remember who paid the costs of the occupation of Mashonaland and who financed the Matabele war." "Government by a commercial company." Despite himself, Ralph felt his anger rising again and he clenched his hands on the table in front of him. "A company that owns the police force and the courts. And if I have a dispute with your Company, who will decide it surely not the BSA Company's own magistrate?" "There are precedents."

  Mr. Rhodes" tone was reasonable and placatory, but his eyes were not.

  "The British East India Company-"And Ralph's reply crackled. "The British government eventually had to take India away from those pirates Clive, Hastings and that ilk, for corruption and oppression of the natives. The sepoy rising was the logical outcome of their administration." "Mr. Ballantyne." Mr. Rhodes" voice always went shrill when he was excited or angry. "I am going to ask you to withdraw those remarks, they are historically inaccurate, and by implication insulting." "I withdraw, unreservedly." Ralph was angry with himself now, he was usually much too cool-headed to allow himself to be provoked. There was no possible profit to be gained from a head-on collision with Cecil John Rhodes. His smile was easy and friendly as he went on. "I am sure we will have no need of the services of a Company magistrate." Mr. Rhodes answered his smile with the same ease, but there was a steely blue flicker in his eyes as he raised his glass.

  "To a deep mine and a deeper relationship," he said, and only one other person in the tent recognized it as a challenge.

  Jordan moved restlessly in his camp chair at the back of the tent.

  He knew these two men so well, loved both so dearly. Ralph his brother had been with him through all that lonely and tempestuous childhood, his protector and his comfort in the bad times and his joyous friend through the good.

  Looking at his brother now, and comparing Ralph to himself, it seemed impossible that two brothers could be so different. Where Jordan was blond and slim and graceful, Ralph was dark and muscled and powerful, where Jordan was gentle and self-effacing, Ralph was hard and bold and as hawk, fierce as his Matabele praise-name implied. Instinctively Jordan looked from him to the big burly figure facing him across the camp table.

  Here Jordan's feelings went beyond love itself to a kind of religious fervour. He did not really see the physical changes that a few short years had wrought in this godhead of his existence. the thickening of Mr. Rhodes" already bulky body, the bloating and coarsening of features already mottled with cyanosis caused by the labouring of the damaged heart, the reddish-blond curls receding swiftly now and slashed with grey at the temples. The way a loving woman places little store on the appearance of the man she has chosen as her own, so Jordan saw far beyond the marks of suffering and sickness and the racing years. He saw to the steely core of the man, the ultimate source of his immense power and brooding presence.

  Jordan wanted to cry out to his beloved brother, to run to him and physically restrain him from the folly of turning this giant of a soul into an enemy. He had seen other men do just that, and be ruthlessly crushed.

  Then with a sickening slide in the pit of his stomach, he knew which side he would cast his lot if that dreaded confrontation ever forced a choice upon him. He was Mr. Rhodes" man, beyond brotherly ties and family loyalties, to the very end of life itself, he was Mr. Rhodes" man.

  He sought desperately for some plausible excuse to break the tension between the two most-important persons in his life, but relief came, from beyond the stockade, in the delighted cries of the servants, the hysterical barking of the camp dogs, the crunch of cartwheels and the excited shrieks of more than one woman. Jordan was the only one watching Ralph's face, so he caught the sly and smug expression as his brother rose.

  "It seems we have more visitors," Ralph said, and the twins came into the inner stockade. Victoria came first, as Ralph had expected that she would. She came on long shapely legs, outlined beneath the whirl and boil of her thin cotton skirts, barefoot in defiance of all ladylike pretensions, carrying her shoes in one hand, and Jonathan riding on her hip. The child was squeaking like a wart hog piglet that has lost the teat.

  "Vicky! Vicky, did you bring me anything?" "A kiss on the cheek and a slap on the behind." Vicky laughed, and hugged him. Her laughter was loud and gay and unaffected, her mouth was a little too large, but her lips were velvety as rose petals and sweetly shaped, her teeth were large and square and white as bone-china porcelain, and as she laughed her tongue, furry pink as that of a cat, curled between them. Her eyes were green and wide-spaced, her skin was that lustrous silky English perfection that neither sun nor massive doses of anti-malarial quinine could mar. She would have been striking, even without the dense tresses of copper-blonde hair, ruffled by the wind, and wild as the sea, that tumbled about her face and shoulders.

  She
riveted the attention of every man there, even Mr. Rhodes, but it was to Ralph she ran, holding his son on her hip still, and she threw her free arm around his neck. She was so tall that she had only to stand on her toes to reach his lips. The kiss was not long held, but her lips were soft and wet, the pressure of her breasts through her cotton blouse was springy and elastic and warm against his chest, and her thighs against his sent a shock up his spine, so that Ralph broke the embrace, and for an instanter green eyes mocked him, dared him to something that she did not fully understand, revelling in this heady sense of power over all mankind that she had not yet tested to its limits.

  Then she tossed Jonathan to Ralph and whirled away to run barefoot down the tent and launched herself into Jordan's arms.

  "Darling Jordan, oh, how we have missed you!" She forced him into a prancing jig around the stockade, shaking out her shining hair and carolling joyously.

  Ralph glanced at Mr. Rhodes, and when he saw his expression of shock and unease, he grinned and released Jonathan, letting him race across to cling to Vicky's skirt and add his shrill voice to the uproar, then he turned to greet the second twin.

  Elizabeth was as tall as Vicky, but darker. Her hair was polished mahogany, shot through with sparks of burgundy and her skin was sun-kindly, gilded to the colour of a tiger's eyes. She was slim as a dancer, with a narrow waist and shoulders supporting a long heron neck, and her breasts were smaller than Vicky's, yet elegantly pointed, and though her voice was soft and her laughter a throaty purr, yet there was a mischievous quirk to her lips, a jaunty tilt to her head and a measured sexual candour and awareness to the gaze of her wild honey eyes.

  She and Cathy were arm in arm, but now she slipped out of her elder sister's embrace and presented herself to Ralph. "My favourite brother-in-law," she murmured, and looking into her eyes Ralph was reminded that though her voice was softer, and her manner seemingly more restrained than that of her twin, yet Elizabeth was always the instigator and prime mover in any mischief that the pair conjured up.

  This close, her true beauty was apparent, less flamboyant than Vicky's perhaps, but the balance of her features and the depths beyond those golden-brown eyes were more disturbing.

  She kissed Ralph, and the contact was as brief but even less sisterly than had been the elder twin's embrace, and as she drew back from it, she slanted her eyes with a pretence of innocence, that was more deadly than any brazening. Ralph broke the electric contact, and looked to Cathy, making a comical moue of resignation, and hoping that she still believed his studied avoidance of the twins was because he found them boisterous and childish.

  Flushed and panting, Vicky released Jordan, placed her hands on her hips and asked Ralph, "Ralph, are you not going to present us to the company?" "Mr. Rhodes, may I present my sisters-in-law," said Ralph with relish.

  "Oh, the famous Mr. Rhodes," Vicky gushed theatrically, but there were little green sparks in her eyes. "It is such an honour to meet the conqueror of the Matabele nation, because, you see, King Lobengula was a personal friend of our family." "Please excuse my sister, Mr. Rhodes." Elizabeth curtsied, and her expression was demure. "She intends no discourtesy, but our parents were the first missionaries to the Matabele, and our father sacrificed his life trying to help Lobengula while your troops were pursuing him to his death. My mother-" "Young lady, I am fully aware who your mother is," Mr. Rhodes forestalled her sharply.

  "Oh good," Vicky chimed sweetly. "Then you will appreciate the gift that she asked me to present to you." Vicky reached into the deep pocket of her long skirt and brought out a thin volume. It was bound in cardboard, not morocco leather, and the quality of the yellow paper was coarse and matt. She laid it on the trestle-table in front of Mr. Rhodes, and when he saw the title his heavy jaw clamped closed. Even Ralph quailed slightly. He had counted on the twins providing an unsettling influence, but he had not expected them to be so instantly explosive.

  The book was entitled Trooper Hackett of Matabeleland, by Robyn Ballantyne, for the twins" mother wrote and published under her maiden name. There was probably not a man in the stockade who had not already read the slim volume, or at least heard of its contents, and if Vicky had thrown a live mamba on the table, their consternation could not have been more intense.

  The contents of the book were so dangerous that three reputable London publishers had rejected it, and finally Robyn St. John had published it privately and created an immediate sensation. In six months it had sold almost two hundred thousand copies, and had been treated to extensive reviews in almost every influential newspaper both at home in England and abroad in the colonies.

  The frontispiece of the book set the tone for the text that followed. It was a murky photograph that depicted a dozen white men in BSA Company uniform standing under the spreading branches of a tall wild teak tree and looking up at the corpses of four semi-naked Matabele hanging by their necks from the topmost branches. There was no caption to the photograph, and the faces of the white men were too indistinct to be recognizable.

  Now Mr. Rhodes reached out and opened the book at the gruesome illustration. "Those are four Matabele indunas who were wounded at the battle of Bembesi, and who committed suicide by hanging, rather than surrender to our forces," he growled. "They are not the victims of some atrocity as this scurrilous piece of offal implies." Mr. Rhodes closed the book with a snap, and Elizabeth exclaimed sweetly, "Oh, Mr. Rhodes, Mama will be so disappointed that you did not enjoy her little story." The book described the fictional adventures of Trooper Hackett of the BSA Company expeditionary force, and his whole-hearted participation in the slaughter of the Matabele with machine-gun fire, the pursuit and shooting down of the fleeing survivors, the burning of the kraals, the looting of Lobengula's cattle and the rape of the young Matabele girls. Then Trooper Hackett is separated from his squadron and spends the night alone on a wild kopje, and while huddled over his camp-fire a mysterious white stranger comes out of the night and joins him at the fire. Hackett remarks, "Ah, you have been in the wars, too, I see," leaning forward and inspecting the stranger's feet. "By God!

  Both of them! And right through you must have had a bad time of it!"

  And the stranger replies, "It all happened a very long time ago, then the reader is left in no doubt as to whom he is dealing with, especially when the author describes his beautiful gentle countenance and his all-seeing blue eyes. Abruptly the stranger breaks into a florid injunction to young Hackett.

  "Take a message to England. Go to that great people and demand of them. "Where is the sword that was given into your hand, that with it you might enforce justice and deal out mercy? How came you to give it up into the hands of men whose search is gold, whose thirst is wealth, to whom the souls and bodies of their fellow men are counters in a game, men who have transformed the sword of a great people into a tool to burrow for gold, as the snouts of swine for earth nuts?"" It was little wonder, Ralph smiled to himself, that Mr. Rhodes pushed the book away and wiped the hand that had touched it on the lapel of his rumpled Norfolk jacket.

  "Oh, Mr. Rhodes," murmured Vicky, angel-faced and wide-eyed. "At the least you must read the inscription that Mama dedicated to you."

  She retrieved the , discarded volume, opened the flyleaf and read aloud, "For Cecil John Rhodes, without whose endeavours this book would never have been written."" Mr. Rhodes rose from his seat with ponderous dignity. "Ralph," he said quietly. "Thank you for your hospitality. Dr. Jim and I will be getting on to Bulawayo, I think. We have spent too long here as it is." Then he looked across at Jordan.

  "The mules are well rested. Jordan, is there a moon tonight?" "There will be a good moon tonight," Jordan replied promptly, "and there are no clouds so we will have a good light for the road." "Can we be ready to leave by this evening, then?" It was a command, and Mr. Rhodes did not wait for a reply, but stalked out of the stockade towards his own tent, and the little doctor followed him stiffly. The moment they were gone, the twins burst into merry tinkling laughter and hugged each other
ecstatically.

  "Mama would have been proud of you, Victoria Isabel.-" "Well, I am not." Jordan's voice cut through their hilarity.

  He was white-faced and shaking with anger. "You are ill mannered and silly little girls." "Oh Jordan," Vicky wailed and seized his hands. "Don't be cross. We love you so." "Oh yes, we do. Both of us." Elizabeth took his other hand, but he pulled away from them.

  "You do not have any idea in those giddy little heads how dangerous a game you are playing, not only for yourselves." He strode away from them, but paused for a moment in front of Ralph. "Nor do you, Ralph." His expression softened, and he placed his hand on Ralph's shoulder. "Please be more careful for my sake, if not for your own."

  Then he followed his master from the stockade.

  Ralph pulled the gold hunter from the inner pocket of his waistcoat and made a show of inspecting it.

  "Well," he announced to the twins, "sixteen minutes to clear the camp. That must be a new record even for you two." He returned the watch to his pocket and put one arm around Cathy's shoulders. "There you are, Katie my love, there is your home again without a single stranger." "That is not quite the case," murmured a soft Kentucky accent, and Harry Mellow rose from the log he had been using as a seat and removed the slouch hat from his curly head. The twins stared at him for a startled instant, then -flashed each other a look of complete accord and a remarkable transformation came over them. Liza smoothed her skirts and Vicky pushed back the dense dangling tresses from her face and their expressions became grave and their comportment ladylike.