The Map of Bones, page 31
‘Of course. Good night, mijnheer Van Aarnhem. Gentlemen.’
When father and sons had retired, Isabelle offered to help Griet wash the dishes. Her offer was again declined.
Thinking it would all make good copy for her article, she asked Griet questions about her life and John translated easily. Little by little, she built up a picture of an uncomplaining, hard-working woman, much on her own, but fiercely proud of her home and her family. It was clearly a tough life, not much easier than that of those first pioneers trying to eke out a living in a new and inhospitable land. Suzanne had written of Isabeau Jaubert, the Meinards and the Malans, foraging for food to eat, trying to protect their farms against raids and wild animals, always reliant on the harvest not failing. In nearly two hundred years on the veldt, not much had changed.
‘Do they have trouble with drosters?’ Isabelle asked when Griet had retired to bed. Then, seeing the look of surprise on John’s face, added: ‘It was a word the manager in my hotel in Cape Town used.’
He pushed some tobacco leaves into his pipe, lit it with a faggot from the fire, then sat back in his chair opposite her.
‘This region was a hotbed for the drosters many years ago, but not so much now. There was one nest, as the communities were called, in the Simonsberg Mountains, in the lost world of deep kloofs – gorges – and unscaled precipices.’
‘Who were they?’
‘Men who’d deserted from the army, Dutch and French, German labourers who refused to pay taxes, runaway slaves. Many San and Khoi formed nests too, but it was mostly white settlers. They would descend from their hideaway, steal livestock, burn farms and terrorise families living on the veldt.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘The authorities organised units to hunt them down. The last stronghold I heard survived was between Waaihoek and Wagenmakersvallei, some way north of here. But that was thirty years ago or so.’
‘So, there are no drosters any more?’
Turner shook his head. ‘There will always bands of renegades, those who want to live outside of society. But at this time of year, when workers are in the fields day and night, it is harder for thieves to pass undetected. You are safe enough here, and I will be sleeping outside to keep guard.’
‘I’m sure there is no need.’
‘There is no room in the house and I’m happy to sleep under the stars. Pastor Neethling would never forgive me if I didn’t deliver you safely back in one piece.’
He walked her to her cottage, a lamp lighting the way.
‘Goodnight, miss,’ he said, pushing open the door for her to step inside. ‘Should a snake find its way in, try not to panic. They react to movement. If you stay still, more likely than not it will simply move on. Oh, and shake your boots out in the morning before you put them on.’ He touched his forehead. ‘If there is anything, just shout. I’ll be here.’
Isabelle left the candle burning, wedged the chair against the door and put her satchel below to block up the gap through which a snake might get in. John had closed the shutter, although there wasn’t a latch, and she pushed the net into the corners to fill the holes. Then she climbed into bed, fully clothed, with Suzanne’s dagger under her pillow. With the distant sound of a jackal howling and the sweeter song of nightbirds, she drifted into a fitful sleep.
It was still dark when Isabelle woke with a jolt. Some new sound, or different sound, piercing her subconscious had disturbed her. The candle had almost burnt down, casting no more than a pool of light on the table, so the room was mostly in shadow.
Mindful of John’s advice, she lay very still, listening for the tell-tale slither of a snake on the beaten earth floor, but heard nothing.
Her pulse racing, she lay in bed with the covering pulled up to her chin. A shiny black-backed beetle skittered up the wall beside her. She hated it, the rustling and scuttling in the darkness, then despised herself for being so easily unnerved. She thought of Louise and Gilles, of Suzanne, and compared her relatively comfortable situation with theirs. They had been true pioneers. How could she claim to be following in their footsteps if her nerves were put on edge by the most harmless of insects?
Isabelle made herself think of pleasant things – her own bed in Bouverie Street, the building on the corner with Temple Lane where she hoped to establish the Joubert Family Archive and Reading Room. She would need subscribers, of course, to underwrite the cost of the refurbishment, but with her inheritance and her journalism for The Leisure Hour, she thought she would be able to raise the extra funds she needed easily enough.
She started to picture all the wooden shelving they would need to house Minou’s journals, Louise’s two diaries, as well as Suzanne’s notebooks written over her long life in England.
Isabelle smiled, now imagining a published book with her name on the front cover. It would be a history, a memoir, about the women of the Joubert family, putting their stories back centre stage. She would give a lecture series and offer to speak at her old school in Fleet Street to inspire girls to be ambitious. What would the book be called? Perhaps Miss Lepard’s Amazing Adventures in the Cape? Or maybe The Joubert Family Chronicles would be better?
The candle guttered and died, but she no longer minded. Perhaps she would call her memoir The Map of Bones, as she followed her ancestors from resting place to resting place? For wasn’t that what she had come to the Cape to find? The grave that Suzanne had looked for, the honouring of a woman long dead?
She was just drifting back into sleep when she heard a creak. This time, she knew it was not an insect. Someone was pulling open the shutter from the outside. Moments later, she saw the netting move and a hand reaching down into the room.
Isabelle screamed.
Pulling the knife from beneath her pillow, she acted on pure instinct and struck out, but found only air. The intruder was gone.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Straight away, there was a knocking at the door.
‘Miss Lepard?’ John was calling. ‘Are you all right?’
Her heart hammering, Isabelle leapt from her bed. ‘I’m coming.’
Feeling the rough dust beneath her feet, she pulled the chair and satchel away and John burst into the room.
‘What is it? Are you hurt?’
‘Around the back! Someone was trying to get in. I saw his hand reaching down inside the window.’
John turned on his heel and rushed round the cottage. Isabelle shook her boots, then put them on and followed him outside.
‘Did you see anyone?’
John came back round the corner of the building. ‘No, but there is a box upended beneath the window.’
Isabelle wrapped her arms around herself, relieved that she hadn’t been imagining the intrusion and frightened by what it might mean.
John looked mortified. ‘I cannot believe any of the servants would do such a thing.’
‘I am sure they would not.’
The door to the main house opened. Hans stood there with Griet, holding a lamp.
‘What is it? Are there intruders?’
‘A peeping Tom, Uncle,’ John said, running towards him. ‘Someone opened Miss Lepard’s shutter.’
Griet bustled towards them. ‘Why didn’t the dog bark?’
John shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’
Van Aarnhem called inside to one of his sons. ‘Piet, go and see.’ He turned back to Isabelle. ‘We’ll rouse the servants and search the farm, he can’t have got far.’
‘I want to help,’ Isabelle said.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t want to be worrying for your safety. John, you stay here too, in case the intruder comes back.’
Moments later, they heard a cry from behind the house. Piet came stumbling round the side of the building holding the body of the ridgeback in his arms, the dog’s head lolling over his strong arms.
‘He’s been poisoned!’
Jan ran to his brother and pressed his hand against the animal’s chest. ‘He’s still breathing.’
‘We need to make him sick. Quick,’ Griet said, taking charge. ‘Leave the dog with me. You boys go with your father.’
As Jan rushed to fetch lamps, Van Aarnhem turned to Isabelle.
‘Was he alone, Miss Lepard?’
‘All I saw was a man’s hand, his right hand, reaching down through the window. It was white-skinned and –’ she frowned as the memory became clearer – ‘I think the lower half of his little finger was missing.’
Van Aarnhem fetched his rifle from inside the house then, with Piet and Jan holding the lamps, he summoned three Black servants who were carrying sticks, and the party headed up into the scrubland behind the cottage.
Isabelle saw the lamps jerking in the darkness, two spots of light receding against the dark beyond. The men were shouting, a kind of hunting cry, as they thrashed through the scrub.
‘John, will you help?’ Griet said.
Isabelle watched as Turner carried the dog to the side of the house, while Griet went to fetch a pot from the kitchen. ‘A paste from the cork-bark bird-berry tree,’ he explained. ‘It’s a good purgative.’
With her nephew holding his head, Griet spooned the mixture into the dog’s mouth, then massaged his throat to help it go down. She kneaded his pale stomach until he started to retch, then John hauled the animal upright. They both stepped back as the dog suddenly vomited.
‘There,’ Griet said, standing up and wiping her hands on her apron.
The dog shook its head, then circled around.
‘No, you don’t,’ John said quickly. Griet reached for a pail of water and sluiced the mess away. He pointed. ‘That’s what did it.’ Isabelle peered at some remaining chunks of undigested meat, barely chewed. ‘Your intruder fed him something to put him to sleep.’
‘But why?’
John shrugged. ‘So he would not alert us, I suppose.’
‘Come inside, Miss Lepard,’ said Griet. ‘I make tea.’
Isabelle took a last look into the darkness. In the heat of the moment, she hadn’t thought of anything more than to protect herself. Even though drosters no longer existed in their hundreds, any farm might fall victim to a night-time raid. Now, a cold trickle went down her spine. What if it was nothing to do with Klein Bethlehem? What if it was the same man who had been following her since Cape Town, somehow knowing she was here?
Galloping bare-backed on the bay horse, leading the piebald by its halter, the man cleared the boundary of Klein Drakenstein. He found the wagon trail, and kept moving. He was not worried about anyone seeing him. Farmers went to bed early and rose with the light.
He did not regret trying to steal the Will. His informant in Cape Town had told him it was tucked inside an old leather journal. But he had not expected the woman to be awake, nor to have a knife so easily to hand.
The theft of the horses would at least slow them down. And that would give him time enough to position himself in a spot on the outskirts of Franschhoek. He would ambush them there.
While they waited for the search party to come back, Isabelle drank some sage tea sweetened with honey, and listened while John and Griet talked. She could only make out one or two words, but got the impression that Griet’s main concern was that they had failed as her hosts.
Finally, they heard the tramp of boots outside. Isabelle sprang up as the men came into the house.
‘Hoe is . . .?’ Piet asked immediately.
‘The dog seems fine,’ John replied in Afrikaans. ‘Poisoned meat, but only to make him sleep. There should be no lasting damage.’
‘Did you find anyone?’ Isabelle asked, seeing the grim look on van Arnhem’s face.
‘There was a trail of broken twigs and a path down through the scrub. I regret to say the horses are gone.’
‘No!’ Isabelle cried out. Without them, they would not be able to continue on to Franschhoek.
‘But if he was merely a horse thief,’ John observed, ‘why was he trying to break into Miss Lepard’s cottage? Why draw attention to himself?’
Isabelle was certain it was her fault that trouble had come to the farm.
‘I might know who the man is,’ she began, and felt five pairs of eyes fix upon her like a searchlight. ‘I don’t know his name, but I noticed him first in Cape Town.’
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
Tuesday, 25th February
Over the next six days, there were no further sightings of a stranger at Klein Bethlehem, though they all remained watchful.
While John and his uncle tried to secure fresh horses, Isabelle determined to make herself useful. Because John had taken the bridles and saddles into the barn on the night they arrived, the thief hadn’t taken Isabelle’s side-saddle. It was a significant stroke of luck. It would have been a near impossible task to find another so far from the town. Griet had moved her sons into one bedroom and insisted Isabelle take Jan’s bed, rather than have her sleeping away from the main house in the cottage. Though she had protested, Isabelle felt relieved.
She persuaded Griet to let her help with some of the chores around the farm. She learnt how to milk a goat, fetched eggs from the hens in the morning, mended the kitchen reed broom handle with a strip of rawhide. The enforced delay was frustrating, but working helped keep her spiralling thoughts under control. She was certain it was the same man who had been following her, though what he wanted was still unclear. If it was he who had searched her room in Cape Town, and had attempted to get into the cottage on the evening they had arrived, it suggested he was looking for something particular he believed she had in her possession. Stealing the horses might have been for gain but Isabelle thought it more likely to be an attempt to stop her travelling to Franschhoek. Why that should be, again she could not say.
Each night, after the evening meal, Isabelle recorded her impressions. Her admiration for Suzanne’s fortitude, in coming to the Cape to find Louise and bring her story back into the light, grew stronger with every passing day: the hardships she had faced, her courage and refusal to give in until she had found her ancestor. It made Isabelle even more determined than ever to do both women justice – Louise and Suzanne, and all the women of the Joubert family in whose image she was made.
Thursday, 27th February
A week and a day after they had arrived at the farm, Isabelle and John Turner left Klein Bethlehem and rode east towards the rising sun.
Isabelle was sorry to leave, having become fond of Griet, and her husband, and their sweet, silent sons. She had felt herself at the heart of a family again, something she had not known since she was a little girl before her beloved older brothers had been sent to boarding school.
After they had died, her loneliness had deepened. She and her father had been left alone in Bouverie Street with their ghosts. Isabelle knew that this was, in part, why Minou, Louise and Suzanne meant so much to her. She had never known her grandmothers, or her mother. These distant relatives were the female family she had never had. But, in this out-of-the-way farm, part way between Stellenbosch and Franschhoek, for a few special days she had felt part of something larger than herself again.
DRAKENSTEIN MOUNTAINS
As they rode away from the Drakenstein mountains, Turner told Isabelle that they were nearing Pierre Jaubert’s original plot of land.
Away from Klein Bethlehem, her nerves were on edge. She thought John felt the same. He carried a rifle across the front of his saddle and was always alert, flicking his gaze this way and that as they rode over the veldt towards the rockier passes that led towards the Berg River, and then to the smaller tributary that ran down through the town of Franschhoek.
Her thoughts were much occupied. Partly she was thinking about her destination and what she hoped to find. Once she had located Louise’s grave, if she could locate it, that would be the moment to try to make contact with the Barenton family and explain who she was. She was also constantly worried about the possibility of the stalker making another assault on them. In a way, she would almost welcome it. It was the not knowing where he was, or what he wanted, that was so unnerving. At least if she could come face to face with him, she would feel less powerless. As it was, she felt like an antelope being stalked by a leopard, a constant prickling at the back of her neck and the sensation that somewhere, hidden in the hills, was a person who meant her harm.
Isabelle knew that, during Suzanne’s nine months at the Cape from the winter of 1688 to the following April, she had succeeded in learning what had happened to Louise. Later, having survived the shipwreck of the Gouw, having married and then lived in London, with children of her own, Suzanne had written an account of Louise’s life.
But she had left gaps, not least of all a record of the final confrontation between Louise and Gilles and Phillipe. That diary, written in Louise’s own hand, had remained in Olifant-shoek in the possession of Théodore Barenton and it was this that Isabelle hoped to find. In it, she believed the final chapter of the story of the feud between the Joubert and Vidal families going back generations would be explained.
Isabelle pressed her satchel into her side, feeling the comforting bulk of Minou’s journal. This told the story of a Catholic priest, Vidal, and the feud that had begun in Carcassonne when a Catholic girl, Minou Joubert, had fallen in love with a Huguenot boy, Piet Reydon. From that one chance moment of instant connection, on a misty February evening before France descended into religious turmoil, everything had followed.
Though both the Vidal and the Joubert families had been wealthy and influential in their time, there was nothing left now, no inheritance, no land: the Joubert estate in Puivert had been seized during the first religious war in 1562; and the Vidal estates outside Chartres had been lost during the Revolution two centuries later. Isabelle didn’t care about any of that. What she cared about was the truth.
