by John Wilcox
The Colonel, it seemed, had served with General Wolseley in the Ashanti campaign of ’73, had received a spear wound there and had gained promotion in the field. The longer the meal progressed and her companion talked, the more Alice found herself warming to him. Beneath the studied elegance and the air of a veteran mountebank lay an obviously experienced and competent soldier and, it seemed, a man of courage. More importantly to Alice, he began speaking with commitment about the problems that lay behind the projected invasion.
Chelmsford, it seemed, had asked for but been refused reinforcements from England and had been told that he had to make do with what he had. The General was confident that his two battalions of experienced infantry, the 24th Regiment, plus an artillery battery, would provide the necessary hard core for the invasion force. But he was woefully short of cavalry and of transport in a country that demanded both. Civilian volunteers of a great variety of backgrounds had therefore been pressed into service and Durnford had been allowed to recruit friendly natives to make up the invading columns. The army would prevail, of course, but it was nothing like the finely honed force that the staff would have preferred.
As Alice listened, she pushed aside her wine glass. She had a good head for alcohol and was not afraid of becoming tipsy, but she was desperately trying to fix in her mind the facts and figures that Covington so freely laid before her. It would not do to take notes but here were the bones of the article she must send to London and she could not afford to let them escape. She concentrated hard, locked into the Colonel’s pale blue eyes as he spoke and found it no hardship to do so.
‘Enough of this war talk,’ said the tall man eventually. He rose. ‘Now I suppose some of this may turn up in the Morning Post but I don’t see any harm in letting the public know what sort of mess the Horse Guards have put us in. In fact,’ his eyes twinkled as he looked down at her, ‘I don’t give a damn. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed talking to you. Let’s have a cognac and sit somewhere more comfortable.’
He grabbed a bottle and balloon glasses from the table and strode to the divan, where he indicated for her to sit beside him. Alice rose slowly to her feet. She was conscious that a slow, burning sensation of excitement was growing within her and that the time had come to make a decision. She moved to the divan and accepted the glass. The cognac was delicious.
She half smiled at him over the top of her glass. ‘What comes now, Colonel - the seduction?’
The ends of the moustaches rose a fraction. ‘You must excuse my language, Miss Griffith, but I damned well hope so. I haven’t been seduced for ages.’
‘You should know, Colonel, that I am a virgin.’
‘Flattered, ma’am. Deeply flattered. A great honour indeed.’
She lifted her glass to him and then one foot. ‘Very well. But pray do help me to get these off. I refuse to be deflowered whilst wearing riding boots.’
Alice awoke in her tent the next morning feeling that her head had been left out in the midday sun. Despite the pounding, however, there was a feeling of elation, a combination of both sexual and intellectual satisfaction. She luxuriated in it for a moment, stretching out on her camp bed and loosening her hair in a sensual movement so that it spread across the pillow. Her eyes stared at the canvas close above her but she heard nothing of the distant bustle of camp life. She was no longer a virgin! How delicious! How magnificent! How . . . how . . . emancipating! Good riddance to that girlish, awkward and overrated state. How her life had changed within the last six months. Here she was, living in a completely male-dominated world and making her way in it more than competently. So far she had made few mistakes and now, to top it all, she was a woman who had given and taken full sexual satisfaction.
Alice smiled and stretched her hands above her head and lay in the cot for one further, indulgent moment. Then, with a frown at her throbbing head, she reached across to her valise for a pencil and her notebook and began scribbling on to the lined pages as much as she could remember of what Covington (her lover, she smiled at the thought) had told her the previous night: the search for limbers, the pressing of a thousand civilian horsemen into a cavalry screen, the agonies about whether the black levies could be trusted. Slowly she sketched a factual story of an invasion force being created from bits and pieces around the hard centre of veteran colonial fighters. For once, her mind did not intrude with reminders about the injustice of their cause. In her notebook she painted a picture of the camp itself, with its colour, confusion and hustle, gradually moving towards order and determination. For the first time, she felt she had captured the smell and taste of Zululand and the tang of the danger it presented. By midday she had finished and she lay back with a sigh and closed her eyes again. The task of writing it clearly in cablese and of dispatching it safely back to Durban for onward transmission to London could wait until tomorrow.
Over the next few days, Alice maintained a low profile within the camp. She rode down to Rorke’s Drift to see the little mission station, which was being converted into a temporary hospital and border post, and then further to the Buffalo River to gaze across its muddy waters into Zululand. The river was swollen and looked unpropitious for the crossing of the central column, which Chelmsford proposed to command himself. But engineers had already erected stanchions from which cables would be extended across the drift to take pontoons. Each day detachments of the column were moving down to the mission station to set up camp in preparation for the crossing.
Two days after her dinner with Covington she returned to her tent - she was now alone, her servant having been dispatched to Durban with her copy - to find, tucked discreetly within the opening flap, a small silver-plated hip flask. Tentatively, she sipped the contents. It was the delicious cognac she had tasted on the chaise-longue. Attached was a small sealed envelope containing a message scrawled in masculine, strongly sloped handwriting:
Difficult to send flowers out here. Thought you might care to accept this instead. More practical, anyway. If you would like to taste a little more, you have only to say . . .
RC
RC? Alice realised that she had no idea of the Christian name of the man who had removed her innocence. Robert? Robin? Randolph? Rodney? Rupert? Most likely Randolph. Yes, Randolph. It sat well on him. She felt no sense of shame or disappointment as she recalled the seduction. Covington had been gentle, considerate and then grandly passionate. She was glad she had acquiesced, glad that she had lost her maidenhood; glad that it was over and out of the way for ever. And also glad that it had happened with some style, with a man of some experience and authority. Now, Simon . . .
Ah, Simon! She blushed to think of how little she had thought of him since the Colonel’s dinner, despite the shock of hearing of his alleged disgrace. Somehow, however, she could not accept the story. Simon, with his awkward honesty and natural diffidence, could never be a bounder. But could he be a coward? No. Anyway, it was most unlikely that the Horse Guards would send a coward on a special mission into Zululand.
She turned her head and looked towards the east, to Cetswayo’s kingdom. Was Simon somewhere out there? She longed to look for herself.
On 6 January, Lord Chelmsford returned with his staff to Helpmakaar and Alice immediately penned him a formal request to accompany the invading force into Zululand. She could travel anywhere within Natal and attach herself to the army there but she knew it would be impossible to enter enemy territory with the central column without permission from and the support of the C-in-C. Almost by return came a polite refusal, giving no reason but enclosing a formal invitation to dine with the General and his staff and senior officers the following evening.
Later that day, a message came to her from Pietermaritzburg. It had been forwarded from Durban and it lifted her heart. The cable was from her editor and read:
Congrats on recent articles partic 1st one stop am payg into yr bnk acc cost of passage Cape stop reprt upn comg campaign best you can fm Natal stop do nt repeat nt enter Zululand ends
Alice dressed f
or dinner with the General and his staff with more care than she had lavished on Covington. Carefully uncreasing, as best she could, her only formal dress, she struggled into it and then added pearls, face powder and a little rouge. She permitted herself a flush of excitement at seeing Covington again.
The evening, however, was an anticlimax. She was placed at table in the seat of honour between Chelmsford and his Chief of Staff, an excitable little old India hand named Lamb. The General spoke little to her, although he was impeccably polite, and on her right, Colonel Lamb declined to say anything about the coming campaign and was rather boring about India. Alice did consider asking him about Simon but was doubtful if he even knew about his existence so thought better of it. Covington had held her hand a little longer than was necessary on greeting her but, with a twinkle in his eye, had allowed himself to give way to the young staff officers who clustered round her over the pre-prandial sherry. In fact, with some chagrin and realising that, as the only woman present, she was restricting the after-dinner conversation, she retired before ten p.m. and allowed a young subaltern to escort her to her tent.
Three days later, on instinct, Alice moved her tent to Rorke’s Drift. This time she asked no one’s permission but camped in the lee of the little hospital there and rose when she heard the reveille bugles sound early in the darkness. Dressing hurriedly and nibbling a biscuit, she crawled out into a thick fog and light rain and hurried down to the Buffalo. She was in time to observe the first companies of the 24th Regiment embark on punts and cross the river. The invasion of Zululand had begun.
Chapter 13
For Simon and Jenkins, the days that followed Dunn’s departure were the worst of their captivity. After a week, they expected every night to be woken by their rescuer, so they stood watch, turn and turn about, to ensure that they would be ready when the call came, but the system failed because even the one who was off watch stayed awake to ensure that every sound, however faint, was heard. The excitement faded after ten days and the old mantle of depression and boredom descended upon them again, except that this time it was harder to bear, because it seemed as though their hopes had been raised only to be dashed again. Each began to fear that Dunn had somehow fallen foul of the King and would never return. He had given them a calendar torn from a pocket diary and they passed a joyless Christmas together, the day exactly the same as the many that had preceded it. They were seventeen days into the New Year of 1879 before, at last, relief came.
The captives were dozing uneasily, about to slip into that final portion of the night before morning that brought them about two hours of reasonably full sleep, when both men were instantly awake. Outside the hut, by the entrance, there was a faint whispering and then, soundlessly, the curtain was drawn aside and a slight, slim figure entered quickly.
‘Nandi!’ cried Simon.
‘Blimey!’ said Jenkins.
She raised a finger to her lips and beckoned them to her. They crawled to sit by her in the dim half-light. ‘Don’t say anything, just listen,’ she whispered. ‘The invasion has begun and you are in great danger. You must leave Ulundi tonight and try and reach the main British column that is advancing westwards from Rorke’s Drift. It is difficult country, about sixty miles as the crow flies, but,’ Nandi looked pityingly at their white faces, ‘you are not crows. It would be best if you try and hide during the day and travel only by night. There is no moon tonight but it will rise tomorrow, so you must go now.
‘Here.’ She handed them identical buckskin satchels. ‘There is food and water enough for four days, if you are very eumonical . . . er . . . ecomi . . .’
‘Economical,’ prompted Simon.
‘Yes. You must eat and drink little and save it. Papa says that you must head due west and you will then strike the Buffalo, if you don’t meet with the British column before then.’ She opened a bundle she was carrying. ‘You must wear these blankets when you leave the hut, and here are scissors, razor and soap. Zulus don’t have long beards like that so you must shave them off.’ They could see now that her face was sad and that she had been crying. ‘You don’t look like Zulus,’ she went on, ‘but in the darkness I think you will pass well enough. I could not bring rifles, of course, because I could not hide them, but here is another of the handguns with some cartridges. I know you have one already.’
‘Nandi.’ Simon laid a hand on her arm to stop the earnest flow of instructions. ‘How did you get in here? There is always a guard outside.’
The girl’s teeth flashed in the gloom. ‘Ah, tonight it is Nkumo. This is why it has taken so long to come here - or, at least, one of the reasons. We had to wait until Nkumo could get this duty. He usually does what I want him to, but anyway he is grateful to Mr Jenkins because Mr Jenkins did not kill him when he could easily have done so.’ Then the smile vanished and she turned to Jenkins. ‘But he says that he has now repaid the debt and that the next time he sees you he will kill you.’
Jenkins turned an ingenuous face to Simon. ‘That’s nice of the lad, look you. You couldn’t wish for anything fairer than that, could you?’
Nandi held a finger to her lips and Simon asked her, ‘Will you come with us?’
Nandi shook her head. ‘No. I must leave before they find that you have gone and ride south, back home. Papa and Catherine and most of the children have already left for the Tugela with as many cattle as Papa could round up.’ She looked with a hint of embarrassment at the ground. ‘James was supposed to come here and help you, but after Papa had left, he refused to come.’ She looked up at Simon with her direct gaze. ‘I don’t think he likes you, so I came instead. Anyway, it was easier for me, er, because of Nkumo.’
She became intense again. ‘Now, listen. Nkumo is outside but he will be killed if it looks as though he helped you. So you must cut a hole in the back of the hut so that everyone can see that you got out that way. Take off your boots and carry them under your blankets.’ The girl gestured with both hands. ‘You must walk directly down the lane between the huts that are ahead of you. Then you will come to a small paddock. Your horses are there.’
‘Thank God for that,’ said Jenkins.
‘But I don’t know where your saddles are. You must ride bareback.’
‘Oh lord,’ sighed Simon.
‘Bach, you’ll never stay on. Best to walk behind an’ ’old ’is tail, like.’
‘Oh, shut up, Jenkins.’
Nandi went on, still in her low, conspiratorial whisper. ‘The horses are hobbled and I don’t think there is a guard on them. It would be wise to mount them right away and ride out through the gate rather than lead them. The guards could take you for Basuthos, but, in any case, Zulus don’t seem to question people on horseback.’ She leaned forward now and looked at them in turn with her round eyes to give emphasis to her words. ‘But be very careful. Ulundi is full of warriors at the moment because this is the time of umKhosi, the first fruits ceremony. The army has come to the King’s kraal to be cleaned and strengthened for the year ahead. In one way, this will help you because there are many strange people in the capital now, but there are also many assegais out there.’
She put her fingers to her face in quick horror. ‘They will come after you when they find you are gone. So you have little time. If you get into trouble, just ride hard.’
Nandi rose to her feet and the two men joined her.
Jenkins took her hand in his and with aristocratic solemnity raised it to his bedraggled moustache. ‘You are a very nice and a very brave young lady, Miss Nandi. Thank you for ’elpin’ us, and take great care, now, in ridin’ back.’
Simon took the hand reluctantly relinquished by Jenkins. ‘Yes, Nandi, please be careful. We will wait here for half an hour to give you time to get well clear - just in case something goes wrong. Although,’ he added hastily, ‘of course it won’t.’
Nandi stepped very close and looked up into Simon’s face. He could see two silver streams of tears running down her cheeks. ‘Simon,’ she whispered, ‘I do not know wh
ether you have betrayed the Zulus and me by what you have told the British, but I am very sad that your army is now invading my country.’ She blinked. ‘I do not think now that I want to make a baby with you.’ Then she turned and slipped through the entrance, leaving the two soldiers standing in the semi-darkness, staring self-consciously at each other.
‘I’ll start on the ’ole, eh?’ said Jenkins. ‘You’d better get shavin’.’
After a busy half-hour, the two men wrapped the blankets around them and, shoving their boots before them, crawled awkwardly through the hole. The night outside seemed blacker than within the hut, whose contours had become so drearily familiar to them. Save for the barking of distant dogs, all was still, although they knew that they had only perhaps ninety minutes before the anthill that was Ulundi would come to life again. They had to move quickly. The lane between the huts lay before them and they stepped quietly in their bare feet between the walls. No one stirred in this tranquil suburb of the capital, and after about four minutes they came to the open paddock where, untended, their horses were grazing.
‘Thank God they’ve still got bridles,’ hissed Simon. ‘But you’ll have to help me up. I shall never get on without a stirrup.’
‘Don’t worry, bach sir. It’s all part of the service provided by a good officer’s servant, look you.’
Jenkins hacked away at the hobbles with the food knife while Simon held the bridles and spoke soothingly to the horses. Simon fancied he could see the horizon lightening to the east but it still remained a blessedly dark night, low cloud and a cloying humidity signalling the promise of rain.
‘We mustn’t put our boots on until we are out of Ulundi,’ whispered Simon. ‘They will betray us straight away if we wear them. So it will have to be barefoot as well as bareback for a while. Here, give me a hand.’