The Map of Bones, page 29
Sunday, 26th January
Isabelle spent a week in Cape Town, now a sprawling city beneath the mountains, with impressive buildings and a bustling community. In the mornings she visited all the landmarks Suzanne had written about, from the Castle of Good Hope to Gallow’s Hill where her friend Adriaan van Dijk had taught her to shoot. The afternoons she spent making plans for her journey to Stellenbosch and Franschhoek, where Louise, Gilles and their son Théodore had lived two centuries before.
But there was a restlessness in Cape Town, a sense of things being unsettled. Two weeks previously, Sir Philip Wodehouse had taken over as the new Governor of the Cape Colony. His appointment was unpopular, relations between the Boers – the descendants of the original Dutch settlers – and the British were poor, there had been a series of skirmishes between the displaced Khoi population, and the new immigrants from India sailing into Natal were not being welcomed. The atmosphere was charged, as if even the slightest spark might make the whole city explode.
There were two incidents that added to Isabelle’s general sense of disquiet. First, she was sure that, several times, she had seen the same man looking up at her hotel window: loitering in the shadows, a broad-brimmed hat obscuring his face, watching. He always wore a battered jacket and long leather waistcoat, knee-length black boots. After the third time, she went down to the lobby to report her concerns to the manager. A weasel-faced man, with suspicious eyes and brusque manner, he dismissed her concerns.
‘There are any number of drosters hanging about the town, scoundrels with no appetite for work,’ he said, his breath stinking of yesterday’s brandy.
‘Droster?’
‘It’s the old name for outlaws who used to live in the hills. Villains, Black and coloured, runaway slaves, cattle thieves. These days they hang about the town menacing decent folk.’
‘But this man appears to be watching my window.’
The manager snorted. ‘I’m sure he is not, why would he? He’ll be on the look-out for any foreigner stupid enough to carry their valuables in plain sight.’
Isabelle tried to forget about it and dismissed the ineffectual manager from her mind. But two days later, when she returned after a tiresome morning trying to deposit funds at the Cape of Good Hope Bank, a private institution recommended by her London solicitors, she found her door standing open. The maid had serviced her room earlier and Isabelle knew she had not left the door unlatched.
‘Hallo?’ she said in Afrikaans. Tentatively, she stepped inside. ‘Is anyone here?’
The room was empty. Isabelle exhaled with relief, hung her bag over the arm of the chair, removed her hat and her gloves, then looked around. At first glance, everything looked in order. But then she noticed that the papers on her desk were not quite where they should be. The first draft of a letter was no longer on the top and the top drawer of the bureau was not quite shut. Her father’s bible was still on her bedside table, but it was now facing the wrong way. Her notebook was still where she had left it, but she could see her handkerchiefs and stockings had been disturbed. She was relieved that she always took Minou’s journal with her, but the thought of some unknown person handling her personal possessions turned her stomach.
Furious, she stormed down to the lobby and once more demanded to see the manager.
‘I am telling you that someone has been in my room,’ she insisted, refusing to allow him to dismiss her complaint this time. ‘Items have been moved.’
Chewing a match in the corner of his mouth, he narrowed his eyes.
‘Has anything been taken, Miss Lepard?’ he said slyly, stressing the word ‘miss’.
‘Well, no. But that is not the point.’
‘To be clear, you are not accusing members of my staff of acting improperly?’
‘I have already said not. All the same, someone has been in my room, searching through my belongings.’
The manager held her gaze. Isabelle refused to look away. Finally, he turned and pulled a piece of paper across the counter.
‘I will make a note of your complaint,’ he said, making it clear that he considered her protestations a waste of his time.
‘Mind that you do!’
Frustrated, Isabelle turned on her heel and returned to her room.
That night, her last in Cape Town, she pushed a chair against the door and wedged it beneath the handle. She had Suzanne’s dagger in her possession which she hid under her pillow, but she still slept badly. Every noise made her jump, every creak of the landing floorboard had her senses on high alert. She tried to tell herself she was imagining things, but she was glad when the morning came.
CHAPTER SIXTY
STELLENBOSCH
Friday, 31st January
To Isabelle’s delight, there was a daily omnibus service to Stellenbosch, made possible by the new road over the Cape Flats.
She arrived in Stellenbosch mid-afternoon on the last day of the month, the route taking them through a sea of vines stretching in all directions beneath the Simonsberg mountains. Instantly, Isabelle fell in love with the town: its lime-washed gables, the curves and lines of the white Cape-Dutch houses with pediments and drip mouldings, the glorious cast-iron lacework decorating shady verandas and stoeps. She found it hard to picture the single wagon trail and the drostdij built on Simon van der Stel’s orders a matter of years before Suzanne wrote about her time spent in the original settlement on the banks of the Eerste River.
Isabelle took lodgings on Dorp Street. Her boarding house, which advertised itself as a home-from-home for British travellers, was a two-storeyed building with a white gable and an arched doorway with two long-paned windows either side. Her room on the first floor looked out over a line of green oak trees and little rills of water running alongside. Isabelle adored the room on sight: a ceiling of yellow-wood, a dressing table and wardrobe fashioned from the same; wooden shutters and a small but comfortable four-poster bed. She secured it for two weeks, intending to make it her base from which to travel to Franschhoek and back.
‘Might I have a table brought up?’ she asked the landlady, a red-faced English woman who had emigrated to the Colony as a child from Portsmouth and married a German settler. ‘I am a writer, but I would not wish to monopolise the desk in the parlour.’
‘A writer, who’d have thought that.’
Isabelle smiled sweetly. ‘Might that be possible?’
‘Of course, of course.’ The landlady wiped her hands on her apron then rang a bell. A young Black man, dressed in a white shirt and white culottes, instantly appeared. ‘Jacob, fetch a table for Miss Lepard’s room. The round one from the back parlour will do.’
Deciding it would be sensible to wait out of the way in the hall while the furniture exchange was taking place, Isabelle continued the conversation with her landlady.
‘Where do you come from, Mrs Müller?’
‘Chichester, Miss Lepard,’ she replied. ‘I don’t suppose you know it.’
Isabelle grinned. ‘In point of fact, I do. It is a delightful city.’
‘Oh, it is, it is,’ Mrs Müller sighed. ‘There is a great deal of opportunity here, of course, but I miss Sussex. The Downs and the Marshes. Old Stellenbosch was destroyed by fire in 1710, then the great flood of 1768 swept away the bridge, and on top of that, the hurricane forty years ago flattened nearly a hundred buildings. Everything here is so new in comparison to Chichester.’ She shook her head. ‘Do you come from Sussex, Miss Lepard?’
‘No, I live in London. But I visited often with my father. My cousin is a canon at the cathedral.’
The landlady looked up the stairs as Jacob arrived with the table. ‘Take Miss Lepard the embroidered chair, too,’ she said, before turning back to Isabelle. ‘It will be more comfortable for your working.’
As Jacob trudged away, Mrs Müller sighed again. ‘My folk come from Fishbourne. Christie was my maiden name, one of the oldest families in the village we were. Very well thought of. But my father believed he would have a better chance here, so here we came.’
‘It is very beautiful.’
‘I suppose it is.’ She straightened her apron. ‘Well, I mustn’t keep you, Miss Lepard. Let me know if you need anything, anything at all. We serve a cold supper at six o’clock every day and the front door is locked at eight. After that, you will have to ring the bell.’
‘Thank you. Might it also be possible to have a glass of wine?’
Mrs Müller looked surprised that a young lady might be drinking alone in the middle of the day, but she made no comment.
After a late luncheon of bread and cheese, Isabelle went out to explore her surroundings. Dorp Street was the original wagon trail leading from Cape Town to Stellenbosch. The oak trees were in full leaf, shading the buildings and walkways, and the husks of last year’s acorns crunched underfoot. Isabelle was sure that this was the road along which Suzanne had walked with her friend Adriaan van Dijk as she planned her journey to Olifantshoek, a place now known as Franschhoek in acknowledgement of the Huguenot refugees who had settled there.
Stellenbosch felt cultured, welcoming and it was bigger than she had expected, boasting a hotel, several inns and boarding houses. There were two distilleries, a butcher’s shop and a post office, pharmacies and two physicians. Isabelle counted four bakeries and as many blacksmiths. Residents would have little need to ever leave the town.
Here, perhaps even more than in Cape Town, Isabelle could see the influence of generations of Dutch and German immigrants. In between the colony houses that spoke more of Amsterdam than Africa, were many private residences in the Cape style. The most magnificent building was the Oude Leeskamer, the Old Reading Room, on the corner of Dorp Street and Drostdij Street, with its latticed balconies and long sash windows. She also passed the Stellenbosch gaol though, from Suzanne’s descriptions of the fledgling town in 1688, Isabelle doubted it could be the place where Lars Eltorp had met his end. A little further and she came to the Old Police Station, which had housed a school for the children of enslaved people – testament to the vigour of German missionaries who believed that education was the path to godliness.
Hidden behind walls in the residential quarters, Isabelle could see evidence of kitchen gardens: the green and silver tips of orchards, medlars and red wemmershoek apples, saffron pears. Exuberant oleanders and japonicas, and butterflies half the size of her hand provided beautiful bursts of colour. Layered beneath the sounds of servants gossiping on the street and ladies walking to and fro in the shade, was the squawking of hens and geese and a raucous shrieking from the long-beaked birds they called ibis.
As the shadows lengthened, and the mission bell rang the labourers home from the fields, Isabelle returned tired, but content, to her lodgings and slept the clock round.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Sunday, 2nd February
After luncheon two days later, Isabelle went to church. She put on her Sunday best and finest blue lace gloves and, holding her father’s bible before her like a shield, made her way to the afternoon service. Building work was about to begin on the new Dutch Reformed Church on Kerk Street, which meant that all services were being relocated to other venues in the town for the duration.
The afternoon services were held in the Lutheran Church in Dorp Street, not far from her lodgings. As Isabelle took a seat in an empty pew, she looked around her. The pews at the front were filled by British, Boer and German families, their Black servants sitting at the back of the church. From Suzanne’s notebooks, she knew about the early history of the Colony, and from the newspapers, she was aware there was currently great opposition to British rule, particularly from the Boers in Natal, and that those disagreements over land and sovereignty were widespread. Here in Stellenbosch, though, the atmosphere seemed less bellicose.
Nevertheless, Isabelle was aware that her presence was attracting notice. She supposed it was natural enough in a small town. One man in particular seemed to be staring intently. Isabelle looked away, then back again to find his eyes still fixed upon her. She tried to tell herself she was mistaken, but he looked very similar to the man who had stood beneath her hotel window in Cape Town. Unlike every other man in the congregation, he had not removed his hat.
For the entire service, Isabelle felt his eyes drilling into her back. She tried to ignore him, focusing instead on the white walls and the way that the wood seemed to shine in the afternoon sunlight. The service was in Dutch, so Isabelle understood little of it, but she recognised the psalms and bowed her head at appropriate moments.
Isabelle allowed her mind to wander. She had come to church for reasons of tradition and propriety, but also to enquire about someone who might help with arrangements for her journey to Franschhoek. She wanted to keep her true business to herself so far as possible. Although she was open about the fact that she was here as a travel correspondent, she did not want anyone in Franschhoek to know she was coming. Isabelle had discovered there were still Barentons living in the valley on the site of Théodore’s original wine farm, La Justice, and realised there might conceivably be a concern that she was here to stake a claim to the land. She had been told that there was a deal of sensitivity about French descendants of those original Huguenot families, believing ownership belonged with them and not the Boers who had owned the land since.
At the end of the service, Isabelle spoke to the pastor at the door. He had good, but strongly accented, English.
‘I wonder if I might ask your advice?’ she asked. ‘I am a visitor from England, hoping to travel to Franschhoek. I need a reliable guide to take me there.’
Johannes Neethling looked down his red, bulbous nose. ‘Indeed.’
She smiled. ‘I am writing a travel article for a London periodical, so I would do the country and its people justice. I regret my knowledge of Afrikaans is meagre, so if there was someone who spoke passable English?’
Neethling looked at her for a moment longer. ‘Leave it with me, Miss . . .?’ He left the question hanging.
She bowed her head. ‘Forgive me. Isabelle Lepard. From London.’
‘Very well. If you would come to the Parsonage at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, Miss Lepard, I will see what I can do.’
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
Monday, 3rd February
Isabelle slept well again and was ready in good time for her appointment.
A Black maid showed her into a gloomy parlour with heavy curtains. A beautiful longcase clock at least six feet tall dominated the room. Fashioned, she thought, from oak, Isabelle could hear the pendulum swinging ponderously in the tower. The dial was highly ornamental: roman numerals to mark the time and, inset into the face, paintings of two figures – a man holding a panel with tiny numbers showing the month, a woman opposite showing the day and date. But what made it exceptional was the tableau of delicate wooden ships, like children’s toys, set above the clock face against the backdrop of a painting of the harbour at Amsterdam seen from the water.
Entranced, Isabelle stepped closer. She did not know Amsterdam well, having been there only once last year, but she could identify several landmarks, including the spire of the church of Sant Nicolas and that of the Oude Kerk just a little way behind. The purpose of her trip had been to retrieve the precious Joubert family journals and writings, not to mention Louise’s prison diary, and arrange for the complete archive to be shipped back to England. The documents had been languishing in storage for many years, having been removed from the house in Warmoesstraat when the property was sold in the early1800s.
‘Miss Lepard, I am sorry to keep you waiting.’
‘Pastor Neethling, not at all. I was just admiring your magnificent clock.’
‘Ah, not mine, I regret. I inherited it from a predecessor, who had it brought here at great expense. Perhaps he was missing his homeland? It is a beautiful piece of work, all the same, and it keeps excellent time.’ He gestured she should sit. ‘Do you know Amsterdam?’
‘I have made one visit,’ Isabelle replied. ‘I was particularly enchanted by the religious community, Begijnhof.’
Neethling nodded. ‘Such an interesting history. After the Alteration of 1578, when the city transferred from Catholic to Calvinist rule in the space of an afternoon, it was the only papist institution allowed to remain for the sisters to continue to live there. Subsequently, the chapel was ceded to the English, I regret to say, rather than the Dutch Reformed Church. There are, I understand, very few beguines left in the community now.’
‘Your knowledge far exceeds mine. My Huguenot ancestors were given sanctuary in Amsterdam during the sixteenth century, so the city holds a place in my heart.’
‘Quite so.’ Neethling rang the bell. ‘Might I offer you a little brandy?’
Although Isabelle felt it was rather early in the day, she accepted.
‘Thank you. If it is not forward of me to say so, your English is very good.’
He smiled. ‘I shared rooms with an English missionary when I was studying in Utrecht. And these days, of course, it is useful to be able to speak the language of the administration.’
The speed with which the maid arrived suggested that Neethling perhaps often had a restorative at this time of day.
Isabelle removed her gloves and hat, and accepted the glass of brandy.
‘Why did your ancestors go to England rather than remain in Amsterdam?’ Neethling asked, once he had taken a sip.
‘It was not by design. My family is part Dutch, by blood as well as adoption. Two of my ancestors came to the Cape after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. One died here, the other was shipwrecked returning to the Netherlands and found sanctuary in England.’
‘On which ship?’
‘The China, which sailed from the Rotterdam Chamber in March 1688 and arrived in Table Bay in August of that same year.’
Neethling frowned. ‘But I do not believe I have encountered the name “Lepard” before . . .’
‘My family name was Joubert.’
