The Dragon Lady

by Louisa Treger

  Gideon returned from compassionate leave, thinner and more restless than ever. The Thompsons had thrown Eliot’s widow, Mary, and her children off their farm and they were living in poverty in Sakubva, the township on the outskirts of Umtali. The Courtaulds decided to take the family in, housing them in their staff quarters and offering Mary a job as their housekeeper.

  A few mornings later, Ginie woke up feeling ill. A touch of heatstroke, probably. She had a blinding headache, it hurt to move her eyes, and she felt sick in her stomach. It was their day for driving into Umtali and they decided that Stephen would make the trip alone. He left after breakfast. Ginie drew the blinds against the harsh light from outside and went back to bed, lying in the hot half-dark.

  Dixon brought her a glass of freshly squeezed mango juice. Jongy lounged beside her, unusually calm. She sipped the drink and began to feel revived. After an hour or so, she decided that she was well enough to get up.

  As usual in the mornings, she groomed the dogs and inspected the rooms of the house with the animals at her heels. Pain still throbbed behind her eyes so she walked to the veranda, thinking she would read or sew. Jongy and the dogs trotted off somewhere and a silence had gripped the garden. A bank of heavy cloud, cast a shadow on the land. Ginie heard branches creak, as though someone pushed them aside and she had the sudden prickly feeling of being watched. She thought she heard footsteps, but they were gone. With her nerves straining, she stood up and looked towards the garden, her gaze focused on the trees at the edge of the Dell. There was nothing to see.

  She told herself she was being fanciful. The dogs wandered around the property day and night and Jongy seemed to know exactly who came and went. Her animals were the best security system she could get. Though she recalled Sandra and Max had been unusually restless early that morning; there had been a rally of frenzied barking. Tensely, she gazed along the road for Stephen’s car. The dust kicked up by an approaching car could usually be seen long before the vehicle was visible, but the road was empty. She knew it was too soon to expect him home.

  As she turned back to the veranda, something caught her eye. An envelope was lying on the table, addressed to her. Had it been there all morning? A feeling of nausea tightened her stomach and her skin pimpled despite the heat, for she recognised the handwriting. She opened it with clumsy fingers.

  YOU THINK YOU’RE SO SAINTLY, BUT YOU ARE DANGEROUS IDIOTS, TOO BLIND TO SEE THE DAMAGE YOU WREAK.

  STOP HELPING THE KAFFIRS IF YOU VALUE YOUR LIVES.

  The veranda darkened for a moment and Ginie sat down. Someone had been loitering in the trees, perhaps a hundred yards away, watching her movements. She looked again to the Dell, but the foliage was so dense, she couldn’t see anything. She began to tremble, half with anger, half with fear. Who was doing this to them?

  Stephen returned from town at two o’clock, weary and on edge after a long morning of driving and dealing with the bank and post office. Dixon brought him a jug of iced water and a ham sandwich and Ginie told him what had happened. She tried to be as calm as possible, recounting the incident as matter-of-factly as she could. He looked at her gently.

  ‘It’s unpleasant, darling, but it’s only words. Some craven person is trying to scare us into taking a different path, that’s all.’

  ‘But who do you think it is – is it Eric? Is he angry that we took Mary and her children in?’

  Stephen put his half-eaten sandwich on the table. He closed his eyes, pressing his knuckles against them.

  ‘I am sure he’s angry. I mean, he would see it as a personal attack, though Lord knows that wasn’t our intention. But the letter writer could just as well be another farmer, or anyone in town. We’ve earned a reputation for sympathising with the Africans – to most whites that makes us traitors.’

  ‘It’s dreadful to think that someone out there hates us so much.’

  Ginie’s lips began to tremble and she surrendered to tears. Stephen crossed the veranda and took her in his arms. She leaned her head on his shoulder, feeling the roughness of his jacket against her cheek and inhaling the familiar scent of soap and sweat. It was a relief to give way, to be taken care of.

  ‘We’re doing good work,’ he murmured. ‘What we’re doing is right.’

  They fell silent, listening to the monotonous high-pitched droning of insects. From the trees, a bird called once.

  ‘Whoever wrote that letter, they’re going to act again. You know that, don’t you?’

  His lips moved against her hair. ‘Let them write what they want – words can’t hurt us.’

  ‘But the staff don’t know how the letter got here,’ she said hoarsely and broke away from his arms. ‘No one came to the door. It means there was an intruder on our property, watching me, stealing onto the veranda while my back was turned. . . He could have got into the house and helped himself to our things. . . he could have done anything at all.’

  ‘But he didn’t,’ said Stephen, firmly. ‘Anonymous letter writers are cowards. They don’t have the guts to own up to their threats, let alone carry them out.’

  She became aware of Jongy tugging at her skirt. He had an uncanny ability to sense her distress. She picked him up and he gazed at her, chittering softly. For a few moments she held him to her face for comfort. She felt utterly lost.

  18

  Catherine, Rhodesia, 1950s

  I missed Mufaro terribly. I refused to take off his bracelet, even though Mum said it was probably full of germs. She suggested that I invite school friends home, but they were scattered all over the district and transport was a problem. Besides, there was no one I was drawn to like Mufaro.

  ‘Well, I can’t say anything constructive, except that you are going to grow up,’ my father said one day. ‘It’s rotten being at this in-between stage.’ He had started making an effort to spend more time with me. He was a wonderful companion, and a walking encyclopaedia when it came to nature, be it bird, animal or insect. If it was still light when he came home we would sit on the veranda and watch all sorts of birds swoop down to drink and bask in the birdbaths he had built, fluffing themselves. Dad would point out the different breeds. ‘When you study them, you realise that they’re among the most delightful creatures on the planet,’ he said.

  He began to select a book for me to take to bed each night, telling me to make sure I read it and didn’t swap it for anything else. Books became my friends: The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Shakespeare’s poetry anthologies, the Greek Myths and the classics. Immersed in their worlds, I was at peace. But the moment I closed the pages, I was filled with an emptiness that felt like hunger.

  One evening, Dad brought home a baby hornbill whose feathers were just starting to sprout. He held it cupped between his hands and it was about the size of my fist, with pale eyes, soft sooty plumage and a curved bill. It was making weak plaintive trumpet-like calls – Chleeoo! Chleeoo! – that sounded like a baby crying. I was filled with tenderness for the small, lonely creature.

  ‘I found the nest abandoned,’ explained Dad. ‘I presume the parents were killed.’ The web of lines around his eyes seemed deeper today; he looked sucked dry.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Oh, it’s hard to tell. A farmer might have shot them. Farmers hate hornbills because they break windows. They’re territorial birds. If they see their reflection, they think it’s an intruder and smash the glass trying to attack it.’

  We made a nest for the creature in the silver teapot, padding it out with rags. Dad mixed up a solution of water and sugar and I tried to trickle some into its beak from a dropper, but the liquid dribbled out and ran down its chest, wetting the feathers.

  ‘It will die if it doesn’t take anything,’ I said, anxiously.

  ‘You mustn’t force it,’ Dad counselled. ‘Be patient.’

  I sat beside the hornbill all evening, stroking its trembling little body with my finger and willing it to drink. Dad encouraged me whilst carrying out his usual evening activities of writing notes, cataloguing
his specimens and reading. He said it was a male bird, so I decided to call him Tucker. At last, Tucker accepted a few drips of sugar water and I was overjoyed. When bedtime came, I took his teapot into my room and slept with him on my bedside table.

  It had rained in the night, which made the morning feel fresh and relaxed. Tucker had some more sugar water. Within a few days he was devouring pieces of banana and cold chicken. He also ate grasshoppers, but they were harder to catch. The more he ate, the more he messed in the house. Dad said that adult females seal themselves into their nests with their own faeces and are fed by the males through a vertical slit. Mum wasn’t happy about having to clean up after Tucker, so we had to put him in the garden. But he never ventured far, and he always came back to the house, morning and evening, to be fed.

  One day, as Dad was walking near the Mozambique border, he collected several specimens of a small butterfly. Their wings were deep purple with black edges, and the underpart was brown with a number of eyespots. My father was alive to the subtle differences between and within species and he recognised at once that these were uncommon.

  The butterflies were all in the same valley and they were resting on the tangled stems of lianas; woody vines that trailed through plants and bushes and hung from trees. Their flight was slow and Dad found it easy to lure them into his nets with a bait of rotting bananas, brown sugar, rum and beer – a mixture that was irresistible for butterflies.

  They turned out to belong to a new species of nymphalidae butterfly. The Museum of Natural History in London bought the specimens. Dad sent them to England by parcel post and received a handsome cheque in return some weeks later. The museum wrote that it had decided to name the butterflies after him: Apatura riccardi.

  We had a celebration. Mum teased her hair into a chignon and put on one of the dresses she’d brought with her from England which she usually kept in a trunk beneath her bed. The dress was dark blue chiffon, long and form-fitting, with embroidered cuffs and hems, and a deep V neckline. She cooked a side of beef without burning it and my parents held hands over the supper table. Mum’s lips were parted and her eyes were bright. It was a good evening.

  I began to spend afternoons reading under the big mawonga tree in our garden, its trunk firm against my back. Tucker was nearby, scratching around for food, making sounds that were like mournful whistles interspersed with strange ticks. While I read, I ate pink, fleshy plums, which were so sour they made the back of my throat tingle. I had just started Wuthering Heights and for the next few hours, I was transported to the Yorkshire Moors.

  When I returned to the house, I was aware of a sour, musty smell. In the light from the door, a spider’s web glinted, full of flies and insects. My mother was sitting on the sofa in the living room, gazing into space. It took her a whole minute to register my presence.

  ‘My sweet girl,’ she said sadly. ‘Wandering about in the forest by yourself.’

  It wasn’t the forest that upset her. I threw my arms around her neck. ‘Don’t worry about me, Mum. I’m fine, I was just reading. I’ll take care of you.’

  This was what she wanted to hear.

  ‘I’m not cut out for Africa,’ she said, hugging me back.

  19

  Ginie, Rhodesia, 1950s

  A few days after the delivery of the anonymous note, Jongy failed to appear, though Gideon had put out the usual chopped banana and saucer of milk for him. Puzzled and a little worried, Ginie went to the garden to look for him. She passed the ruffled surface of the swimming pool, crossed the lawn and came to where the cultivated section of the garden merged with the Dell.

  Ginie paused at the edge. She shouted Jongy’s name and heard her own voice echoing back. She waited, then called a second time and a third. After some time, there was a different sound. She listened closely, for she could not identify it. It came again. The noise was quite close and it wasn’t a bird’s cry, or water splashing from one of the underground streams. It was a howl of pain, sounding again and again; a gasping howl, as if whatever it was had no strength left to call out.

  Ginie walked forward, past Jessica’s grave. Fear was coursing through her, making her tremble so badly she could barely will her legs to walk. She blundered into a spider’s web and dashed the tacky threads from her face and neck in horror, watching a large black and yellow spider fall to the ground, its legs waving. She peered into the dense shade cast by the trees, for coming from bright sunlight, it was hard to see. She kept walking, but more slowly and looking all around. Then, suddenly, she wavered and came to a stop.

  What greeted her was a vision from a nightmare. Propped against a tree trunk sat a creature that had legs and a long tail, but was unlike anything recognizable. It looked like a small monkey, covered in mangy tufts of fur, mingled with bits of raw, sticky flesh. The limbs were covered by shifting waves of blackness, which pulsed over and over in different places, and all the while the beast shuddered and thrashed and cried out breathlessly. Suddenly Ginie understood. Shock slammed through her chest and she retched. It wasn’t a monkey.

  It was Jongy.

  She became aware that the grass around her was seething and slithering to and fro. Looking down, she saw the ground was thick with ants – large soldier ants that rushed towards the struggling shape. A dark army, intent on feasting. Jongy toppled over and the howling ceased. There was no sound except for her own ragged breathing. Ginie screamed and stamped her feet, trying to crush as many ants as she could. She looked around frantically for stones to throw, wondering how to get the creatures off Jongy, but there were too many. However many she killed, more took their place, keeping up their relentless march. She could feel them getting inside her sandals, biting her feet. The thought that they might turn on her scared her, so she gave up and watched Jongy in despair as he was gripped by violent spasms.

  Perhaps she could get Stephen to shoot him and put him out of his misery. She began to run towards the house, but stopped and turned back. Her pet was gone and no longer in pain, his movements were nothing but muscle reflexes. She wept at the agony he must have endured.

  A visceral, metallic smell filled the air as ants carried morsels of meat bigger than themselves. Tears poured down her face. What on earth had happened? Surely a nimble, fleet-footed creature like Jongy couldn’t have been ambushed by ants? Struggling to understand, Ginie watched in horror as a fly crawled around one of the eye sockets in Jongy’s head, and remembered the fiery amber of his eyes. Unable to look away, she studied his form until she noticed a bullet lodged in his thigh bone. So that was it: Jongy had been shot. Limping and bleeding, the swarm of ants had attacked him and he couldn’t get away.

  Still, her mind could not take it in. Who could have shot Jongy? Who would want to hurt a defenceless animal? At last she understood and chills ran through her, making the muscles of her stomach heave. Crouching low, she vomited onto the ground until there was nothing left in her stomach. Whoever had shot Jongy had done it to hurt her.

  And this person meant business.

  PART FOUR

  20

  The Courtaulds, London, 1930s

  In December 1934, Ginie’s father was struck down by a massive heart attack in Santa Margherita, collapsing whilst out walking on the promenade. He had been in the best of health, with no intimation that anything was wrong with his heart. The suddenness of his death hit Ginie hard: no chance to say goodbye, no way to resolve their unfinished conversations. She decided not to travel to Italy for the funeral. Her father was gone and she couldn’t face the contact with Rosa.

  Worn down by grief, London seemed more relentless and unfriendly than ever, a place determined to suppress a stranger. The acceptance she craved eluded her, yet the desire to make her mark was stronger than ever. She had never lived in one house for more than a few years and they had been in Grosvenor Square for several. She craved change and a new project, something to take her out of herself. With the help of the architects John Seeley and Paul Paget, she and Stephen started looking for an out
standing house and garden; a property that would make people sit up and take notice. Nothing they saw was quite right.

  They discovered Eltham Palace quite by accident. One Sunday, the retired Bishop of Chester gave a sermon at Eltham Parish Church, where he heard that the Palace was uninhabited and slowly going to ruin – nobody knew what to do with it. The Bishop was Paul Paget’s father. He sent details of the estate to Stephen and Ginie and the three of them drove out to see it.

  Eltham Palace was built on a peaceful hilltop that separated Kent from London. It had been given to Edward II in 1305 by the Bishop of Durham and from this time until the middle of Henry VIII’s reign, it was one of the main residences of England’s kings and queens. During the Civil War the palace was ransacked and shattered, the deer in the parks were slaughtered and it never recovered.

  When Stephen and Ginie first saw it, there were bits of wall strewn around the overgrown garden and only the medieval great hall was still standing; an impressive Gothic structure, enclosed by a moat. The hall had been used as a barn. It was fitted with a range of cow stalls at one end, and it held the lingering smells of hay, animal hides and dung. Although dilapidated, it was still intact and the tracery on the open timber roof beams was virtually unscathed.

  ‘It’s called a hammerbeam roof,’ Paul explained. He had a pale face with pointed ears like a faun’s and brown eyes that glowed with intelligence. ‘This is the third largest roof of its kind in England, after Westminster Hall and Christ Church, Oxford.’ They all gazed upwards. ‘Edward III founded the Order of the Garter in this hall,’ he continued, with his best tour guide patter, ‘and Eltham was the favourite Christmas resort of kings like Richard II and Henry IV. Imagine the feasts, tournaments and hunting expeditions that must have been held here.’

  ‘It’s quite extraordinary,’ Ginie replied softly.

  When they had finished looking round, Paul said: ‘Now, dear people, I’m going take myself off to the car and leave you to discuss everything in peace.’