by Wilbur Smith
‘Tell Mr Rhodes that I am honoured by his continued confidence.’
They shook hands and Zouga climbed into the coach.
‘If you see Ralph—’
‘Yes?’ Zouga asked.
‘Never mind.’ Jordan shook his head. ‘I hope you have a safe journey, Papa.’
Leaning from the carriage-window as the train pulled out from the platform, Zouga studied the receding figure of his youngest son. He was a fine-looking young fellow, Zouga decided, tall and athletic, his grey three-piece suit in fashion, yet also in perfect understated taste – and yet there was something incongruous about him, an air of the lost waif, an aura of uncertainty and deep-rooted unhappiness.
‘Damned nonsense,’ Zouga told himself, and drew his head in and pulled up the window by its leather strap.
The locomotive built up speed across the Cape flats for its assault on the rampart of mountains that guarded the African continental shield.
Jordan Ballantyne cantered up the driveway towards the great white house, that crouched amongst its oaks and stone-pines on the lower slopes of the flat-topped mountain. He was pursued by a feeling of guilt. It was many years since he had neglected his duties for an entire day. Even a year ago it would have been unthinkable for him to do so. Every day, Sunday and public holidays notwithstanding, Mr Rhodes needed him close at hand.
The subtle change in their relationship was something that increased his feelings of guilt and introduced a darker more corrosive emotion. It had not been entirely necessary for him to spend the whole day with his father, from when the mailship worked her way into Table Bay, with the furious red dawn and the south-easter raging about her, until the northern express pulled out from under the glassed dome of Cape Town station. He could have slipped away and been back at his desk within a few hours, but he had tried to force a refusal out of Mr Rhodes, an acknowledgement of his own indispensability.
‘Take a few days if you like, Jordan – Arnold will be able to handle anything that might come up.’ Mr Rhodes had barely glanced up from the London papers.
‘There is that new draft of Clause 27 of your will—’ Jordan had tried to provoke him, and instead received the reply he most dreaded.
‘Oh, give that to Arnold. It’s time he understood about the scholarships. Anyway, it will give him a chance to use that newfangled Remington machine of his.’
Mr Rhodes’ childlike pleasure in having his correspondence printed out swiftly and neatly on the caligraph was another source of disquiet to Jordan. Jordan had not yet mastered the caligraph’s noisy keyboard, chiefly because Arnold’s jealousy monopolized the machine. Jordan had ordered his own model shipped out to him, but it had to come from New York and it would be months yet before he could expect it to arrive.
Now Jordan reined in the big glossy bay at the steps to Groote Schuur’s back stoep, and as he dismounted, he tossed the reins to the groom, and hurried into the house. He took the backstairs to the second floor, and went directly to his own room, unbuttoning his shirt and pulling the tails from his breeches as he kicked the door closed behind him.
He poured water from the Delft jug into the basin and splashed it onto his face. Then he dried on a fluffy white towel, tossed it aside and picked up the silver-handled brushes and ran them over his crisp golden curls. He was about to turn away from the mirror and find a fresh shirt when he stopped, and stared thoughtfully at his own image.
Slowly he leaned closer to the glass and touched his face with his fingertips. There were crows’ feet at the outer corners of his eyes; he stretched the skin between his fingers but the lines persisted. He turned his head slightly, the light from the tall window showed up the pouches beneath his eyes.
‘You only see them at that angle,’ he thought, and then flattened his hair back from the peak of his forehead with the palm of his hand. There was the pearly gleam of his scalp through the thinning strands, and quickly he fluffed his hair up again.
He wanted to turn away, but the mirror had a dreadful fascination. He smiled: it was a grimace that lifted his upper lip. His left canine tooth was darker, definitely a darker grey than it had been a month before when the dentist had drilled out the nerve, and suddenly Jordan was overwhelmed by a cold penetrating despair.
‘In less than two weeks’ time I will be thirty years old – oh God, I’m getting old, so old and ugly. How can anyone still like me?’
He bore down hard on the sob that threatened to choke him, and turned away from the cruel glass.
In his office there was a note in the centre of the tooled morocco leather top of his desk, weighted down with the silver ink well.
‘See me as soon as possible. C. J. R.’
It was in that familiar spiky scrawl, and Jordan felt a leap of his spirits. He picked up his shorthand pad, and knocked on the communicating door.
‘Come!’ the high-pitched voice commanded, and Jordan went through.
‘Good evening, Mr Rhodes, you wanted to see me?’
Mr Rhodes did not reply at once, but went on making corrections to the typed sheet in front of him, crossing out a word and scrawling a substitute above it, changing a comma to a semi-colon, and while he worked, Jordan studied his face.
The deterioration was shocking. He was almost totally grey now, and the pouches below his eyes were a deep purple colour. His jowl had thickened and hung in a dewlap under his jawbone. His eyes were red-rimmed and their Messianic blue was blurred and diluted. All this in the six months or so since Jameson’s disastrous raid, and Jordan’s thoughts jumped back to that day that the news had come. Jordan had brought it to him in this same library.
There had been three telegrams. One from Jameson himself was addressed to Mr Rhodes’ Cape Town office, not to the mansion at Groote Schuur, and so it had lain all weekend in the letterbox of the deserted building. It began, ‘As I do not hear from you to the contrary—’
The second telegram was from the magistrate at Mafeking, Mr Boyes. It read in part, ‘Colonel Grey has ridden with police detachments to reinforce Dr Jameson—’
The last telegram was from the commissioner of police at Kimberley. ‘I deem it my duty to inform you that Dr Jameson, at the head of a body of armed men, has crossed the Transvaal border—’
Mr Rhodes had read the telegrams, meticulously arranging them on the top of his desk before him as he finished each.
‘I thought I had stopped him,’ he had kept muttering as he read. ‘I thought he understood that he must wait.’
By the time he had finished reading, he had been pale as candlewax and the flesh seemed to have sagged from the bones of his face like unrisen dough.
‘Poor old Jameson,’ he had whispered at last. ‘Twenty years we have been friends and now he goes and destroys me.’ Mr Rhodes had leaned his elbows on the desk and placed his face in his hands. He had sat like that for many minutes and then said clearly: ‘Well, Jordan, now I will see who my true friends are.’
Mr Rhodes had not slept for five nights after that. Jordan had lain awake in his own room down the passage and listened to the heavy tread back and forth across the yellow-wood floor, and then, long before the first light of dawn, Mr Rhodes would ring for him, and they would ride together for hours upon the slopes of Table Mountain before returning to the great white mansion to face the latest renunciations and rejections, to watch with a kind of helpless fascination his life and his work crumbling inexorably into dust about them.
Then Arnold had arrived to take his place as Jordan’s assistant. His official title was second secretary, and Jordan had welcomed his assistance with the more mundane details of running the complex household. He had accompanied them on their visit to London in the aftermath of Jameson’s misadventure, and remained firmly by Rhodes’ side on the long return journey via the Suez Canel, Beira and Salisbury.
Now Arnold stood attentively beside Mr Rhodes’ desk, handing him a sheet typed upon the caligraph, waiting while he read and corrected it, and then replacing it with a fresh sheet. With t
he rancid taste of envy, Jordan recognized, not for the first time, that Arnold possessed the clean blond good looks that Mr Rhodes so much admired. His demeanour was modest and frank, yet when he laughed, his entire being seemed to glow with some inner illumination. He had been up at Oriel, Mr Rhodes’ old Oxford college, and it was more and more obvious that Mr Rhodes took pleasure and comfort in having him near by, as he had once taken from Jordan’s presence.
Jordan waited quietly by the door, feeling strangely out of place in what he had come to think of as his own home, until Mr Rhodes handed the last corrected sheet to Arnold and looked up.
‘Ah, Jordan,’ he said. ‘I wanted to warn you that I am advancing the date of my departure for Bulawayo. I think my Rhodesians need me. I must go to them.’
‘I will see to it immediately,’ Jordan nodded. ‘Have you decided on a date, Mr Rhodes?’
‘Next Monday.’
‘We will take the express to Kimberley, of course?’
‘You will not be accompanying me,’ said Mr Rhodes flatly.
‘I do not understand, Mr Rhodes.’ Jordan made a helpless little gesture of incomprehension.
‘I require utter loyalty and honesty in my employees.’
‘Yes, Mr Rhodes, I know that.’ Jordan nodded, and then slowly his expression became uncertain and disbelieving. ‘You are not suggesting that I have ever been disloyal or dishonest—’
‘Get that file, please, Arnold,’ Mr Rhodes ordered, and when he fetched it from the library table, he added, ‘Give it to him.’
Arnold silently came across the thick silk and wool carpet, and offered the box-file to Jordan. As he reached for it, Jordan was aware, for the first time ever, of something other than openness and friendly concern in Arnold’s eyes, it was a flash of vindictive triumph so vicious as to sting like the lash of a riding-whip across the face. It lasted for only a blink of time, and was gone so swiftly that it might never have been, but it left Jordan feeling utterly vulnerable and in dreadful danger.
He placed the folder on the table beside him, and opened the cover. There were at least fifty sheets in the folder. Most of them had been typed on the caligraph, and each was headed ‘Copy of original.’
There were stockbrokers’ buy and sell orders, for shares in De Beers and Consolidated Goldfields. The quantities of shares in the transactions were enormous, involving millions of sterling. The broking firm was Silver & Co., of whom Jordan had never heard, though they purported to conduct business in Johannesburg, Kimberley and London.
Then there were copies of statements from half a dozen banks, in the different centres where Silver & Co. had offices. A dozen or so entries on the statements had been underlined in red ink: ‘Transfer to Rholands – £86,321 – 7s 9d. Transfer to Rholands – £146,821 – 9s 11d.’
The name shocked him, Ralph’s company, and though he did not understand why, it increased his sense of peril.
‘I don’t understand what this has to do with me—’ He looked up at Mr Rhodes.
‘Your brother entered into a series of large bear transactions in those companies most drastically affected by the failure of Jameson’s enterprise.’
‘It would appear—’ Jordan began uncertainly, and was interrupted by Mr Rhodes.
‘It would appear that he has made profits in excess of a million pounds, and that he and his agents have gone to extreme lengths to disguise and conceal these machinations.’
‘Mr Rhodes, why do you tell me this, why do you adopt that tone? He is my brother, but I cannot be held responsible—’
Mr Rhodes held up one hand to silence him. ‘Nobody has accused you of anything yet – your eagerness to justify yourself is unbecoming.’
Then he opened the leatherbound copy of Plutarch’s Lives which lay on one corner of his desk. There were three sheets of writing-paper lying between the pages. Mr Rhodes took out the sheets, and proffered the top one to Jordan.
‘Do you recognize this?’
Jordan felt himself blushing agonizingly. At that moment he hated himself for ever having written this letter. He had done so in the terrible spiritual travail following the night of Ralph’s discoveries and brutal accusation in the private pullman coach from Kimberley.
‘It is the copy of a private letter that I wrote to my brother—’ Jordan could not lift his eyes to meet those of Mr Rhodes. ‘I do not know what possessed me to keep a copy of it.’
A paragraph caught his eye, and he could not prevent himself re-reading his own words.
‘There is nothing I would not do to convince you of my continued affection, for only now, when I seem to have forfeited it, am I truly conscious of how much your regard means to me.’
He held the sheet possessively. ‘This is a private and intimate communication,’ he said in a low voice, which shook with shame and outrage. ‘Apart from my brother, to whom it is addressed, nobody has the right to read it.’
‘You do not deny that you are the author, then?’
‘It would be vain of me to do so.’
‘Indeed, it would,’ Mr Rhodes agreed, and passed him the second sheet.
Jordan read on down the page in mounting bewilderment. The handwriting was his, but the words were not. So skilfully and naturally did they continue from the sentiments of the first page, however, that he found himself almost doubting his own recall. What he was reading was his own acquiescence to pass on to Ralph confidential and privileged information related to the planning and timing of Jameson’s intervention in the Transvaal. ‘I do agree that the contemplated venture is totally outside civilized law, and this has convinced me to give you my assistance – this and the moral debt that I feel that I owe to you.’
Only then he noticed the slant and form of a letter that was not in his hand. The entire page was a skilful forgery. He shook his head wordlessly. He felt as though the fabric of his existence had been ripped through and through.
‘That your conspiracy was successful, we know from the rich fruits your brother harvested,’ said Mr Rhodes wearily, in the voice of a man so often betrayed that this no longer had the power to wound him. ‘I congratulate you, Jordan.’
‘Where did this come from?’ The page shook in Jordan’s hand. ‘Where—’ He broke off and looked up at Arnold, standing behind his master’s shoulder. There was no trace of that vindictive triumph remaining; Arnold was grave and concerned – and unbearably handsome.
‘I see,’ Jordan nodded. ‘It is a forgery, of course.’
Mr Rhodes made an impatient gesture. ‘Really Jordan. Who would go to the trouble of forging bank statements that can readily be verified?’
‘Not the bank statements, the letter.’
‘You agreed it was yours.’
‘Not this page, not this—’
Mr Rhodes’ expression was remote, his eyes cold and unfeeling.
‘I will have the bookkeeper come up from the town office to go over the household accounts with you, and to make an inventory. You will, of course, hand over your keys to Arnold. As soon as all that has been done, I will instruct the bookkeeper to issue you a cheque for three months’ salary in lieu of notice, though I am certain you will understand my reluctance to provide you with a letter of recommendation. I would be obliged if you could remove yourself and your belongings from these premises before my return from Rhodesia.’
‘Mr Rhodes—’
‘There is nothing further that we have to discuss.’
Mr Rhodes and his entourage, Arnold amongst them, had left on the northern express for Kimberley and the Matabeleland railhead three weeks before. It had taken that long for Jordan to wind up the inventories and complete the household accounts.
Mr Rhodes had not spoken to Jordan again after that final confrontation. Arnold had relayed two brief instructions, and Jordan had retained his dignity and resisted the temptation to hurl bootless recriminations at his triumphant rival. He had only seen Mr Rhodes three times since that fateful evening, twice from his office window as he returned from those lo
ng aimless rides through the pine forests on the lower slopes of the mountain, and the third and final time as he climbed into the coach for the railway station.
Now, as he had been for three long weeks, Jordan was alone in the great deserted mansion. He had ordered the servants to leave early, and had personally checked the kitchens and rear areas, before locking up the doors. He moved slowly through the carpeted passageways carrying the oil-lamp in both hands. He wore the Chinese silk brocade dressing-gown that had been Mr Rhodes’ personal gift to him on his twenty-fifth birthday. He felt burned out, blackened like a forest tree after the fire has passed, leaving the hollowed-out trunk continuing to smoulder within.
He was on a pilgrimage of farewell about the great house, and the memories that it contained. He had been present from the very first days of the planning to renovate and redecorate the old building. He had spent so many hours listening to Herbert Baker and Mr Rhodes, taking notes of their conversations and occasionally, at Mr Rhodes’ invitation, making a suggestion.
It was Jordan who had suggested the motif for the mansion, a stylized representation of the stone bird from the ancient ruins of Rhodesia, the falcon of Zimbabwe. The great raptor, the pedestal on which it perched decorated with a shark’s tooth pattern, adorned the banisters of the main staircase. It was worked into the polished granite of the huge bath in Mr Rhodes’ suite, it formed a fresco around the walls of the dining-room and four replicas of the strange bird supported the corners of Mr Rhodes’ desk.
The bird had been a part of Jordan’s life from as far back as his earliest memories reached. The original statue had been taken by Zouga Ballantyne from the ancient temple, one of seven identical statues that he had discovered there. He had only been able to carry one of them. He had left the other birds lying in the ancient temple enclosure, and taken the best-preserved example.
Almost thirty years later Ralph Ballantyne had returned to Great Zimbabwe, guided by his father’s journal and the map he had drawn. Ralph had found the six remaining statues lying in the temple enclosure of the ruins just as his father had left them, but Ralph had come prepared. He had loaded the statues onto the draught oxen he had brought with him and, despite the attempts of the Matabele guardians to prevent him, had escaped southwards across the Shashi river with his treasure. In Cape Town a syndicate of businessmen headed by the multi-millionaire, Barney Barnato, had purchased the relics from Ralph for a substantial sum, and had presented them to the South African Museum in Cape Town. The six statues were still on display to the public there. Jordan had visited the premises, and spent an hour standing transfixed before them.