by Peter Rimmer
To the Manor Born
Fourth Book in the Brigandshaw Chronicles
Peter Rimmer
Contents
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1. June 1923 – Out of the Clear Blue Sky
2. September 1923 – London
3. June 1924 – Clara’s Supper Club
4. January 1925 – Dinner at Berkeley Square
5. March 1925 – The Cuckold
6. December 1925 – Love in the Cold
7. June 1926 – Love, or Something Like It
8. October 1926 – Falling Leaves
9. April to May 1927 – Love on the Banks of the River
10. February 1928 – Fathers and Daughters
11. August to October 1928 – When the Curtain Goes Down
12. July 1929 – Doctor Livingstone, I Presume
13. August 1929 – To the Manor Born
14. September/October/November 1929 – The Great Lakes of Africa
15. May to August 1930 – Temptations and Despair
16. September 1930 – New Beginnings
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Publisher’s Note
Principal Characters
About Peter Rimmer
Also by Peter Rimmer
Acknowledgements
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1
June 1923 – Out of the Clear Blue Sky
Their cave looked out three thousand feet above the Zambezi valley with the lip of the escarpment dropping vertically to the valley floor. Keppel Howland. Ralph Madgwick. The sun was rising from the east, promising the warmth of day. In front of the cave mouth, above the great drop, the black man they called Alfred was tending the cooking fire. Inside the cave, a spring welled up with pure, underground water. The spring spilt into a shallow rock pool. Far away, they could see the Zambezi River meandering through the valley. It was beautiful in the morning with the billy boiling for their tea and Alfred crouched at the fire.
One of Ralph’s small fingers was missing due to the war. A sliver of metal from a German shell had cut it off, clean as a whistle. The same shell that had killed Malcolm Scott. The headmaster had said that Malcolm Scott was going to be someone but now he wouldn’t be.
Keppel watched Alfred pour the boiling water into the iron kettle to make the morning tea. They drank tea without milk, as there was no milk three thousand feet up looking out over the Zambezi valley. Livingstone had found the river. He had called the falls further up the river valley after his Queen.
They were looking for gold, diamonds, emeralds. Something of value. They were happy. It was difficult not to be happy down the valley in the dawn before the heat haze took away the sun-glint of the river. They would have liked Malcolm to be with them but he was dead. Pieces of him buried deep in the French mud by the German bombardment that had cut off Ralph’s finger clean as a whistle. The shell that killed Malcolm Scott had brought them to Rhodesia.
* * *
It was Ralph’s turn to shoot their breakfast. With a warm blanket over his shoulder, he watched the fire, drinking his tea. In an hour, the sun would be hot enough to drop the blanket. The tea was hot. Ralph no longer missed the milk and sugar. The one bag of sugar had run out months ago. They never ran out of tea.
No one spoke in the morning. The flames burned the dry wood Alfred had collected the previous day. There was always wood for the fire. In June at three thousand feet, the African night was bitterly cold, making them always build a fire, which they slept around. It burned all through the cold night fed by whichever one of them woke. The fire was as much to protect them from the leopard as the cold. Before they moved into the cave, it was home to a family of leopard. There were droppings around the cave. The white calcium of bones showed in the droppings. Yellow fur tangled in the broken bones where the cats had licked their fur to make them clean. Most nights they could hear the leopards outside their cave. The big cats were frightened of the flames burning in their lair.
In the day when they were away from the camp, the leopards came into the cave to lap at the water in the pool. There would be fresh droppings and the smell of cat. Ralph and Keppel slept with a gun. Ralph said some things in life never changed.
The gun was a Lee–Enfield .303 that had also been in the war. All three of them were good shots. The gun had a bolt action to push the shell into the firing breach.
They mostly ate meat, craving the fatty parts. Sometimes Alfred found them wild spinach. The maize had been finished before the sugar that they had bought in Salisbury just after Christmas. Before the bullets ran out they rode the horses back to Salisbury.
Every year, they had shot elephant, taking the tusks to Salisbury, the capital of the self-governing Crown Colony of Southern Rhodesia. The tusks paid for their provisions. Always an old bull. When they found diamonds, they would not have to shoot the elephant.
* * *
During the day, they looked down at the earth. The bush, outcrops of rock, the drop down to the valley. Wild animals. The birds. Predators circling the canopy of the mopane forest down below in the Zambezi valley. Tiny specks of vultures, eagles and buzzards, too small to identify properly. The thread of winding river. Mist from the water until the African sun ate it away and the heat haze shrouded the earth. Then they looked for shade. Looking down at insects on the dry, dusty ground. The song of crickets, the sound of beetles in the trees, butterflies, all colours and sizes, with some as big as a man’s hand. The feel of eyes from the dappled bush where the buck stood motionless. The sun relentless. Pressing down. Keeping their heads down and looking at the earth.
At night, it was different. In the cold black air away from the light of the fire. Without a moon. They looked up and wondered. Three layers of stars in the pitch black dome of heaven. All the stars twinkling with light from only God knew where.
For hours, they watched the heavens and the nights without the moon. The splash of the Milky Way. Milky lace splashed from a bucket across the heavens. The Southern Cross writing the poles in the heaven for man to find on earth. Distant signs for the sailors on the seas. For men in the vast wilderness of the African bush.
It made them puny. Ralph. Keppel. Alfred. Insignificant. Less concerned with themselves. Their petty problems of a life so brief. Each, silently, asked themselves if there was any point to life. To being who they were if they could only understand. Silently.
They never spoke of the awe they felt looking up at the stars, wondering what they were about.
Ralph wondered if eyes from so far away were seeing earth as a point of light. He thought, just maybe, Malcolm Scott was up there somewhere. It made him think of God and his lack of faith… Malcolm Scott was as dead as mutton.
The skies at night were too big. Too mocking. Too big to understand in his mind. Man, Ralph thought, was conceited to believe his soul had a place among the stars. He would look one last time with awe and go into the cave to the burning fire. He slept quickly on those nights. At peace with the world. At peace with the stars. He never dreamt on nights like that.
Those same nights Alfred watched Ralph sleeping soundly, the strange man from far away. Alfred told himself he did not understand the men who had left their homes. He would never leave his. On the black nights in heaven, he would feed the fire with wood and lie back to sleep feeling the outside presence of the leopards in the dark of the moonless night.
* * *
The night of the comet, the day a
fter Ralph had shot a kudu for their breakfast, it was a black night in heaven. The three men were gathered around the cooking fire on the lip of the great cliff. The fire was low, dancing small sparks at the heaven on the draft of heat. They were tired from a week’s worthless searching in the vast bush away from the cave. More dispirited than tired.
“What are we going to do, Ralph?” asked Keppel.
Alfred heard the spoken sounds and barely understood. Only the gesture of despair from the young man with a face as smooth as a child. It would be a long time before they could have a conversation, Alfred thought. The two Englishmen were not interested in learning Shona. Alfred spoke the Kalanga dialect of Shona. The two men were often distracted. They spoke to each other of a great war. That much he understood. There was great noise in this great war. Always this noise. In the war his grandfather had fought against the impi of the Zulu, Lobengula, it had been quiet. Stealth and stabbings in the dark of the night. Only in open battle did they shout their war cries to give them courage before they died.
He tried often to pick out words. Mostly he failed, the sounds of the English flowing along as a single, unintelligible sound. Like the constant chatter of the small birds in the mopane forest searching for the big worms that lived in the trees, hairy big worms, and the most delicious food in the bush when cooked on the fire.
The man called Ralph first pointed up at the long line of fire streaking the heavens, the question of what they were going to do unanswered.
Alfred looked up at the black sky. Fear gripped him. Worse than a lion. Worse than a snake. The heavens were falling apart. He screamed, the sound running out and around in the night without moonlight. He ran into the cave and hid himself as far back as he could find… He heard Ralph follow him. Felt Ralph put a hand on his shoulder. He knew it was Ralph.
“It is only a comet, Alfred. A piece of rock from space cutting into our atmosphere. So long as it doesn’t land on top of us it will do us no harm.”
Calmed by the human hand on his shoulder, Alfred told Ralph in Shona it was a sign in the heavens of eternal death. Earth’s destruction. The end of life. The end of man.
Neither man had understood each other’s words.
Keppel made some black tea for Alfred, bringing a full mug into the cave.
That night Alfred watched the Englishmen sleep perfectly. Alfred slept not a wink. He was still shivering in the morning when the sun came up. He knew it was eternal death. Not the death of war. Of age. Of pain. His ancestors had spoken to him from the heavens. His ancestors who were close to God. There would be nothing from before. No back or forward. Just a void of nothing.
* * *
The next morning, Keppel made the cooking fire, boiling the water for their tea.
“For a black man he looks awful white,” Ralph joked in the light of day ruffling Alfred’s woolly head. They could see he was still trembling. Nothing would make it stop. Not even the heat of the morning fire outside in the morning sun.
Tentatively, Alfred looked out at the world. It all seemed the same. By lunchtime, his trembling had stopped. When dusk came, he went into the cave as deep as possible. He was never again going to look up at the heavens. Silently, he prayed to his ancestors to intercede with God and save them from eternal destruction.
Eventually that night, driven to the fireside by the intense cold in the cave, Alfred fell asleep from mental exhaustion.
There were so many contortions in his dreams he remembered none of them when he woke. Only the fear of nothing.
* * *
By mid-morning a week later, they had eaten three times from the roasting meat of another kudu. Each time letting the hot coals cook the outside flesh. The thin, brown and crumbly slices eaten in their fingers, the fat dripping from their chins. It was a young bull and easily chewed. A lazy morning watching the meat brown, waiting for the exact right moment to slice again the sweet slivers from the carcass. The rich smell of roast venison made them perfectly content.
They had not gone out prospecting on the horses since the comet streaked the night sky. Alfred had mostly recovered from his fear. Secretly, without telling the other, Ralph and Keppel had given up hope of making their fortune in Africa.
The sun had been up for five hours. They ate in the shade of a gnarled tree that grew from a split in the rock outside the cave, perched on the lip of the great escarpment.
The sound came first on the wind and went away again. All three had heard the sound. Ralph and Keppel looked up. The sound had come from the sky. Alfred, unable to look up, began to tremble. The wind brought back the sound, only stronger.
“It’s one of ours,” he said.
“It’s a bloody Handley Page bomber,” said Keppel. He also got up.
They had seen them fly over the trenches every day towards the end of the war in France.
Alfred looked up, screamed and ran back into the cave. Ralph thought the pilot had seen the smoke from their fire. The aircraft, with its two propellers, was turning, flying straight at them from across the valley. They could see the front of the biplane with the pilot looking out from his open cockpit between the propellers. One of the engines was running rough, backfiring.
“What on earth is he doing here?” asked Keppel, standing closer to the lip of the escarpment. He was waving madly with both hands, the sun in his eyes, the bush hat pulled down over his face with just enough vision to watch the oncoming aircraft. The noise from the engines was echoing back from the face of the cliff, sending the sound back into the valley. Ralph and Keppel began to share in their excitement, yelling at Alfred over their shoulder to come back and look at the aircraft.
“It’s civilian,” said Keppel. “No roundels on the wings or fuselage. One man flying alone in the middle of Africa.”
“He’s got to be English,” said Ralph as the aircraft flew in low over their heads making them turn quickly to follow its passage over the mouth of their cave. The pilot was waving a gloved hand, his head trailing a silk red scarf, the man’s face hidden by a leather flying helmet and goggles. Another face appeared from the observer’s cockpit. It was a small boy with his hands on the leather hide of the cockpit surround. He was gripping it with both hands but they could hear his treble voice yelling at them after the first rush of sound from the engines, the propellers thrashing the air to keep the craft in the sky.
“Well, I’ll be buggered,” said Ralph. “Did you see that?”
“Poor old Alfred. He’ll never be the same again. First the comet in the night sky and now this.” Keppel was grinning at the empty entrance to the cave. The sound of the plane was receding.
“Pinch me, Keppel,” said Ralph.
“It was real. One of the Rhodesians must have flown in the war and brought a plane back with him.”
“One of the fighter aces was a Rhodesian. Harry Brigandshaw. Shot down twenty-three Germans. He was one of the few aces they never gave a Victoria Cross. There was a scandal in the press. Something to do with Brigandshaw’s commanding officer. You ever been up in the air?”
“He’s coming back again… Go and get Alfred.”
“He won’t come out of the cave.”
They watched the aircraft fly back and circle over their heads, the meat still roasting over the fire. Something was thrown out of the pilot’s cockpit, tied in the red silk scarf. The scarf trailed down like an unopened parachute they had once seen in France when a British observer jumped from a basket under an observation balloon that a German fighter was shooting up. The observer had broken both his legs and was sent home to Blighty… The boy was looking straight down at them as a package bounced inside the mouth of the cave. The pilot raised his gloved fist and the aircraft droned away until the sound was gone from the sky.
Keppel easily found the scarf. Tied at the end was a tin of navy cut tobacco. The tin was weighted with a small spanner when they opened the lid. Inside was the message, scrawled badly on a calling card similar to the ones Ralph and Keppel had used in the mess during the wa
r. They read the message.
CALL IN AT ELEPHANT WALK ON YOUR WAY BACK TO SALISBURY
On the other side of the card was engraved:
COLONEL H BRIGANDSHAW, ROYAL FLYING CORPS
“Well, I’ll be buggered,” said Ralph again. “The comet was a sign of our luck changing. Not the end of the world. Alfred! Come on out. We’re leaving. Load up the packhorses.”
“You want to go now?”
“Chances like this never came before. Do you want to wander around the bush for the rest of your life? Let’s face it. We’re lousy prospectors. Not surprising when we don’t know what we are looking for… Oh my God! A hot bath followed by a plateful of fresh vegetables. The smell of a woman. The voice of a woman. Oh my God! It’s a double message from heaven. Come on. Get cracking. No time to waste. It’s the first bloody invitation we’ve had since coming to Africa.”
“What’s Elephant Walk?” asked Keppel.
“The name of his farm. I saw the sign on the road the morning before we crossed the Mazoe River. Twenty miles out of Salisbury thereabouts. Some hundred miles from here. Go and get Alfred before he tries to run off into the bush… I wish he could speak English… Can’t believe it. Bloody civilisation beckons again. Maybe Brigandshaw can give us a job… You think knowing his name had something to do with dropping the message? Telepathy. There’s a lot more to this life than we understand.”