The Map of Bones, page 32
Isabelle brought herself back to the present. She looked at the fynbos, the green foliage punctuated by pink sugarbush and laurel-leaf protea and kloof pincushion blooms. She saw waboom, wagon trees – so-called because its wood was used for wheel rims and brake blocks – and reddish-brown assegai, wild olive and magnificent yellow-wood trees. It was a vista that could not be more different from the cobbled streets of the medieval citadel of Carcassonne where Minou had grown up, or La Rochelle, where Suzanne had been born, or her own home in London. Those worlds seemed so far away now.
‘How much longer until we arrive?’ she asked.
John looked up at the sky. ‘There is a storm coming from the south-east. Rainstorms are pretty common at the tail-end of summer, and it will make the passes dangerous. When it comes, we will have to take shelter and, depending on how long the storm lasts, either ride hard to escape it or, more likely, wait until morning.’
‘If at all possible, I would keep going.’
To be so close, and yet so far, was unbearable to her. And she did not like the idea of spending a night out in the open.
‘There are shepherds’ huts where we might wait out the storm,’ John said, as if reading her mind. ‘But it would be unwise to travel at night. There are too many wild animals. Hunters, too.’ He pointed ahead. ‘That is the Berg River. Can you see?’
‘I think so.’
‘If we can reach it before the rain starts, there is grassy pasture down there. That will be the safest place to spend the night.’
Isabelle dug her heel into her horse’s flank and set off across the veldt, John following in her wake.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Andries Barenton watched them from behind the cover of the river reeds, swaying in the gathering wind. A storm was coming. He waited a moment more, then stepped out of the cover of the ironwood tree and knelt down.
They were still too far away.
He was a skilled hunter and an excellent shot. His military rifle, taken from the dead hands of a British soldier in an ambush, had an impressive range, but it was not accurate at much over nine hundred yards.
He needed to be patient. He got back to his feet and laid the gun across his arms. He was still weighing up whether to kill the woman first, or the man? He flushed in anger when he remembered how she had taken him by surprise on die Braak in Stellenbosch. She had a knife, he knew that now, and was prepared to use it. But the man would be stronger and, no doubt, carry a firearm. It might be better to eliminate him first.
‘Kom op,’ he urged as they came closer into view. Come on.
He was still smarting from his failure to steal the Will at Klein Bethlehem and, before that, in Cape Town. The vein in his forehead started pumping and his face reddened. La Justice had been in his family for nearly two hundred years, on the site of an even earlier farm. Yet this English hoer thought she could arrive with a piece of paper – a French document at that – and take away all that his family had built.
He would not stand for it.
Andries had heard how several decent Boer families had had their livelihoods taken from them by claimants come from Europe. Whispers carried on the wind from settlement to settlement. One German farmer, faced with the loss of his farm, had taken his shotgun and killed his wife and three daughters, before turning the gun on himself. From then on, Andries had vowed he would not be cheated in the same way. He would do anything necessary to protect what was his. Though he was no thinker, he was cunning. Some years ago, Andries had put in place an arrangement with several hotels to be notified about new arrivals from France or England. It had cost him, but it was worth it. So, as soon as the message arrived that there was an English woman with a French name asking questions about Franschhoek, he had ridden to Cape Town. The maid at the hotel in Greenmarket Square, who was walking out with one of his informants, reported that there was a Will among the woman’s papers in her room. Andries didn’t know anything more than that, but he was not prepared to take the slightest chance. Her name meant nothing – Lepard was not a name he had ever come across – but the maid said her middle name was Joubert, and that name carried great weight.
Andries steadied his breathing and fixed his gaze on his quarry as they came closer, closer. His grip tightened upon the trigger. He set his eye along the muzzle, kept his arm steady and prepared to fire.
A sudden rumble of thunder in the mountains broke his concentration. Andries took aim once more as the first spots of rain began to fall. Slowly at first, then faster and harder, hammering down onto the dry land and obscuring his sight.
Reluctantly, he let his arm drop as the storm took hold. He stepped back under cover, slung the rifle over his shoulder and took shelter beneath the branches of the ironwood tree. He rubbed the raw stump of his little finger.
He would have to wait.
Isabelle heard another rumble of thunder, an ominous growling in the mountains, like a giant waking from sleep. Above the wild torment in the skies, she thought she could hear the sound of elephants calling to one another across the valley.
‘There,’ John shouted, pointing at a clump of wild olive trees. ‘We’ll shelter there until the storm passes.’
The storm was intensifying. Isabelle could not believe that the sky could contain so much water. The rain was coming down in sheets, as if they were standing beneath a waterfall.
At last, she huddled with John under the olive trees, each soothing their horses as the thunder cracked overhead, shivering in the chilled air.
‘How long do such storms usually last?’
‘Impossible to say,’ he replied. ‘It could last until morning, or else the wind could blow the clouds through in the next few hours.’
Isabelle looked around the little grove. ‘So, will we set up camp here?’
‘I think we had better. It is not ideal, but the weather should keep the worst of the predators at bay.’
Isabelle nodded. ‘The fallen twigs closer to the trunk should still be dry enough for a fire.’ She stared up at the tiny black olives. ‘And at least the rain has driven the mosquitoes away.’
In his hideaway beside the river, Andries Barenton kept watch.
He’d seen them change course and head for the clump of wild olive trees. As the light faded, he had seen the first sparks of a fire, bright in the darkness of the storm-drenched veldt at night. He had seriously considered sneaking up on them. They had no dog, just two horses, and the fire betrayed their position. But caution had prevailed. Though the storm would most likely keep the larger predators at bay, he could hear a pack of jackals, not too distant.
He sat back with his rifle across his knees. He was not worried his quarry would escape him. They would not risk leaving in darkness and he would wake with the first rays of the sun.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
FRANSCHHOEK VALLEY
Friday, 28th February
Isabelle awoke to the sound of birdsong.
She looked out on a world painted new and clean. Everywhere was evidence of the storm – branches down, silver pools of rainwater on the veldt – but it was glorious. Isabelle did not think that she had ever visited so startlingly beautiful a country as southern Africa: the sheer scale of it, the glory of it, the strangeness of it, quite took her breath away. She inhaled, filling her lungs with fresh air, and raised her face to the rising sun.
John had already saddled the horses and was waiting.
Isabelle lifted the edge of her damp skirts and laughed. ‘Although the sun is often too strong for me, I could do with a little this morning to dry myself out.’
‘It will be hot later. It usually is after a storm clears the air.’
‘How far is Franschhoek from here?’
‘No more than an hour or so, all being well.’
As she stamped out the embers of the fire, Isabelle realised she was smiling. She was almost there, the place where Louise had lived and died, the place to which Suzanne had found her way. Soon, she would be there, too, and would lay flowers on the grave.
Both the end of her quest, and its beginning.
The wind had changed direction, so Andries could just make out their voices. Indistinct words carried across the rain-washed valley and down to the river where he was camped. Then, the woman laughed.
The sound enraged him.
He emerged from the reeds and resumed the position he had taken last evening, down on one knee with his finger on the trigger. It was a clear day, he ought to be able to get a clean shot.
Suddenly, Andries knew that he was being stalked. He had been so focused on his own prey, that he had failed to pay attention to his surroundings.
Slowly, with no abrupt movements, he turned. There was a leopard only some thirty paces away, moving sinuously along the bank of the river. Their eyes locked for an instant. Then everything seemed to happen at once. Sensing his prey, the leopard sprang, accelerating along the path in a blur of gold and brown. Andries raised his gun and fired.
Blood exploded from the creature’s chest, red against the tawny pelt. For a moment, he seemed to hold the animal’s gaze, eyes wide and white as its body hung in the air, like a marionette. Then, the leopard fell heavily to the path in front of Andries.
Shaken, he lowered his gun. He, who was an expert tracker and hunter, had let his guard down like a novice. That lapse in concentration had nearly killed him.
He looked down to check the leopard was dead. In normal circumstances, he would find a way of transporting the carcass back to town. Or else, skin it here for the pelt. But these were not normal circumstances. He dragged the animal into the reeds. If other predators did not find it first, he would return and skin it later.
For now, it was more important to get to Franschhoek before his prey and be ready for them.
Isabelle jerked round in the saddle. ‘What was that? It sounded like a shot.’
John did not look concerned. ‘Hunters, probably. They mostly go out early in the day. Or a farmer scaring jackals away from his livestock.’
‘It was very close.’
‘Sound travels differently here.’
Isabelle peered across the veldt. ‘I can’t see anyone.’
‘They are more likely higher up in the Franschhoek pass. It’s nothing to worry about.’
She nodded. ‘Nearly there,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘Nearly there.’
FRANSCHHOEK
An hour later, as the mission bell was ringing for eleven o’clock, Isabelle and John rode into the small frontier town.
Her first impression was that Franschhoek was a place of white and blue. Cape Dutch architecture, of the kind she had seen in Stellenbosch and Cape Town, buildings with gables and peak-arched windows. Everything seemed so new. The church less than fifteen years old – the date of its construction painted black on the white pediment – stood startling bright on Victoria Street, proud against the cloudless blue sky. The houses were mostly single-storeyed and also painted white, simple and comfortable dwellings for the growing population of the town. They were more modest than in Stellenbosch, some with wrought-iron trellises and stoeps at the front. Beyond the houses, stretching right up to the foothills of the mountains, were fields of vines and farms.
There were little children and their nurses, servants in white bonnets and aprons, ladies out taking the air. Yet it was very quiet. The cypress trees in the graveyard were almost black in the strengthening sun. And all around, the magnificent mountains bounded the settlement, their limestone slopes painted copper by the morning sun.
Isabelle exhaled, finding herself moved by this visible evidence of her own history. For these farms surrounding the town were the original plots of land granted to the Huguenot refugees – La Dauphiné, Bourgogne, La Bri, Champagne, La Motte, Cabrière and La Provence, where Pierre Jaubert had subsequently lived. Their lost villages remembered in the names they gave to their new homes. And, if Suzanne’s description was accurate, La Justice would be found at the end of the old wagon trail.
‘There is a boarding house on Dirkie Uys Street,’ John said, breaking into her thoughts. ‘Uys was a Voortrekker, a hero of the Great Trek. They should have rooms and stabling for the horses.’ He dismounted. ‘Will you come with me now or shall I fetch you once I have made arrangements?’
Isabelle swung her leg over the pommel and jumped down to the ground. She sorely needed a wash and a change of clothes, but she wanted to visit the graveyard first. Everything about her journey had led to this point. She didn’t want to wait another moment.
‘I will go to the cemetery,’ she said. ‘Come and find me there once our rooms are ready.’
‘Very good, miss.’
While John led the horses away, Isabelle made her way along Victoria Street towards the graveyard at the edge of the town, where she believed Théodore Barenton once had lived.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
Isabelle stood alone beneath the endless blue sky. Evergreen cypress and rough grasses bounded the graveyard. The few grey headstones had been bleached the colour of bone by the fierce Cape sun.
Hier Rust. Here lies.
She bent forward to read the names and dates on the tombstone, obscured by lichen or moss. Between her high white collar and the dust-caked brim of her leather hat, her skin on the back of her neck was burning. The African sun was too strong for her English complexion and she had been riding across the veldt for days.
Isabelle removed her riding gloves, folding one inside the other. She had mislaid too many in her travels to be careless. She dropped them to the ground at her feet. A powder of copper-red Cape dust puffed into a cloud, then settled. A black beetle, hard-backed and resolute, scuttled for cover.
Isabelle drew breath, allowing everything to still for a moment.
She had followed this trail from the banks of the Thames to the Aude, to the Garonne and the Amstel, across the English Channel and over the wildest seas to where the Atlantic Sea meets the Indian Ocean. Sometimes the trail had blazed bright. The story of two families and a secret passed down from generation to generation. More than three hundred years of women’s lives, lost and now found. Some of their names had been obscured by time, taken up in those of their husbands and brothers and lovers, but their spirit lived in her.
Finally, her quest had come to an end here. In Franschhoek.
Ci gît. Here lies.
Isabelle removed her leather riding hat and fanned herself. The wide brim shifted the blistering air, but there was little respite. She wiped her forehead with a stained handkerchief and her blonde hair was damp with sweat. She cared little for her appearance. She had survived this journey, survived the assaults on her person and the attempted theft of her possessions. All to bring her here.
To this unkempt cemetery in this frontier town.
Still, Isabelle could not bring herself to look at the name on the gravestone. Wishing to savour this last moment a little longer, she undid the buckle on her satchel and reached inside. Her fingers skimmed the small antique bible that had once belonged to her father, but it was Minou’s journal that she took out. The words were etched on her heart, the spidery browned ink, the antique language reaching forward to her across hundreds of years. She knew every syllable like a catechism learnt in Sunday School from the last entry to the first.
This is the day of my death.
She heard the whistling of a red-wing starling in flight at the boundary of the cemetery. Her knuckles were white, clasped tight. What if, after all this, there was nothing left to find?
As the Lord God is my witness, here, by my own hand, do I set this down. My last will and testament.
Isabelle did not pray. Though she was the daughter of a clergyman, the history of the injustices done in the name of religion to her Huguenot ancestors surely proved that there was no such thing as God. For what God would allow so many to die in agony and terror in His name? Besides, she was a blue-stocking, a scholar educated in natural sciences and philosophy. Superstitions – old mythologies to keep women in their place – were not for her.
All the same, Isabelle glanced heavenwards. The sky here in Franschhoek in February was the same vivid blue as it was in Carcassonne. The same kind of fierce winds caught the dust in the hinterlands of the Cape of Good Hope as they did in the garrigue du Midi. She belonged in neither place – she was English to her bones – yet she could see that the two landscapes were mirror images of one another, Languedoc and southern Africa. This was her heritage.
The air was still. Little was stirring in the graveyard in the heat of the day. Almost all living creatures had taken shelter in the shade. Iron railings marked out each plot – the de Villiers family, the le Roux family, the Malan family, the Jourdans, the Hugos and the du Toits, the Retiefs and the de Villiers – all those of the Reformed Religion who had fled France in search of sanctuary in the year of Grace of the Lord 1688.
Her ancestors, too.
Finally, having prepared herself, Isabelle crouched down and traced the letters carved on the headstone. And saw the names she had hoped to see. She gave a long sigh of relief. It was all true, then. The two names she had hoped to find inscribed in stone. This had been the very first grave in the cemetery, built on the land of the first wine farm in Olifantshoek.
‘La Justice,’ she said, remembering what Suzanne had written in her notebooks.
Isabelle was so absorbed, so held by the moment, that she did not hear the footsteps behind her in the dirt. She did not register the sudden shadow blocking the sun, nor the smell of sweat, of clinker and leather, of a long journey across the veldt. She noticed nothing until the push of the muzzle of a gun was at her neck.
‘Staan op.’ A man’s voice speaking in Afrikaans, then in English. ‘Get up.’
Isabelle tried to turn, to see him, but the cold metal jabbed against her skin and, momentarily, she glimpsed the deformed little finger on his right hand.
Slowly, she did what she was told.
‘Give me the Will,’ he said. ‘If you do, I will not harm you.’
