The Map of Bones, page 37
‘!Gâi.’ Good.
The sweat-soaked blankets were changed, the reeds were cleared from the floor and fresh matting laid down. Louise wiped Gilles’ forehead with a damp cloth.
Suddenly, Gilles opened his eyes.
‘Î,’ said Fala. Yes. Signing to Louise that she should climb onto the pallet and sit behind Gilles, Fala knelt on the ground and put her hands on Gilles’ hips. The baby was coming.
‘This time, try to push,’ Louise said, when another contraction came.
She could see Gilles was now lost in the moment, allowing each contraction to come and go, pushing, getting closer each time. She had no idea how much time was passing, only that the world had shrunk to the three of them. Nothing else mattered. The past was erased, the future was yet to come. There was nothing but now.
As the last of the light slipped from the sky, plunging the bedchamber into shadow, and the cicadas began their night-time song, Gilles cried out again, not in pain this time, but release.
‘It’s a boy,’ Louise cried.
Fala swept the child up, quickly tied the birth cord, cut it, then placed the baby tenderly on Gilles’ breast.
‘He seems to have a good colour.’ Louise put out her little finger against the tiny hand, and he grabbed it. She laughed. ‘And has a strong grip.’
Emotion caught in her throat. Her fear had been that Gilles would reject the child, but one look at her lover’s face told her that there was no question of that. She felt as if her heart would burst with love and with pride.
‘Your son is beautiful,’ she said in wonder, looking at them both.
Gilles smiled up at her. ‘Our son. Théodore, a gift from God. Théodore Joubert Barenton.’
CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE
JAN JOUBERTSGAT
Saturday, 1st March 1862
Isabelle closed the diary. When she looked up, she saw Maya had tears in her eyes and that Xavier was looking into the middle distance, clearly trying to control his emotions. While she had been talking, Magdalena had slipped away.
‘From what Suzanne wrote,’ she said, ‘it’s evident that the Goringhaiqua continued to protect them. Fala told everyone that the women had gone, or had possibly been killed by a white man who had been told of their whereabouts by the chief’s younger son. Whether she did this to protect Gilles and Louise, or whether she simply confused the sequence of events and thought Phillipe had come for them after Théodore had been born, I do not know.’
‘But it left them free to live,’ Xavier said.
‘It did,’ she agreed. ‘By all accounts, a long and happy life. Later, they built a new house on the site of the original hut, which is where Suzanne found Théodore all those years later. Your family farm.’
‘And they are buried in the graveyard below,’ Maya said.
Isabelle nodded. ‘It wasn’t a graveyard then, just a single plot. Théodore planted saplings to provide shade and replaced the wooden cross with a carved headstone.’
Xavier exhaled. ‘How old was Louise when she died?’
‘She died when she was seventy years old.’ Isabelle looked down at the book on her lap. ‘After Louise had gone, Gilles wrote the end of the story. He survived her by ten years.’
Her ears were ringing with the voices from the past, from the weight of history. The thought, too, that while Théodore had been the first of his family, she was the last of her own.
Then her reflections were shattered by a scream, close at hand. Instantly, Maya was on her feet.
‘Magdalena!’ she cried, running towards the sound. Xavier followed.
Isabelle stood up, not sure what to do, then she froze. Coming around the curve on the track was Andries Barenton, dragging little Magdalena by the arm. At her neck, the point of his knife.
‘Andries, no,’ Maya was pleading. ‘She is your niece. Your family.’
‘Where is she?’ Andries demanded in his clumsy English.
Isabelle stepped into the middle of the path.
‘Let her go. It’s me that you want.’ Her heart was thundering with fury – with herself for having brought danger to Xavier and his family, but most of all for the man standing in front of her. ‘Let her go and we will talk. I am not your enemy. I want nothing from you.’
She bent down to retrieve the diary. Thinking she was reaching for a weapon, Andries jabbed the point of the blade at his niece’s neck. Magdalena whimpered. Isabelle heard Maya gasp.
Isabelle was frightened for the girl, but was determined not to let it show. Holding her hands up, so that he could see she was no threat, she kept her eyes fixed on his face.
‘I understand that you wish to protect your farm, your birthright. I know that there have been others – from England, from France – who have come here and attempted to take what was not rightfully theirs. I am not like them. The Will that you sought, that you took from me, is a very old document pertaining to land in Puivert in the mountains of the Pyrenees that was lost a long time ago. It is nothing to do with your farm, La Justice. I give you my word that you have nothing to fear from me.’
She took a step closer, hoping to forge a connection with the wild-eyed man standing in front of her. It did not work. He shook Magdalena’s arm roughly, making the girl cry out again.
‘Please, Andries,’ Maya begged. ‘Let her go.’
Isabelle looked down at Louise’s plain brown diary. ‘This is what I came for,’ she said, careful not to make any sudden movements. ‘Not for your land, not vines. Now I have read it, I will be returning to Cape Town. I came in search of the story of my family and I found it. That is all.’
Finally, Andries spoke. ‘You are lying,’ he spat, shaking his head. ‘If I let you go, you will inform the authorities. They will come for me and I will lose my farm all the same.’ He spun round and shouted at his brother. ‘And you, you would work against me with this foreigner. You have always resented me, always wanted to take the farm for yourself. For her.’ He glared at his hostage. ‘I have no children. You are just waiting for me to die.’
‘Andries, put down the knife,’ Xavier said. ‘Let Magdalena go. No one wants to deprive you of what is rightfully yours, not me, not Miss Lepard.’
‘I don’t believe you!’ he shrieked. ‘I don’t believe—’
His words were cut off in mid-air. Isabelle didn’t understand what was happening. One moment Andries had been there, shouting. Now there seemed to be nothing but empty space.
Then the world came rushing back. Magdalena was running into her mother’s arms, weeping; Xavier was wiping his face; Andries was lying on the ground, blood seeping into the dirt. And behind it all, Isabelle saw John Turner, with Andries’ rifle in his hand, his face as white as milk with shock.
‘I didn’t mean to kill him,’ he said in a daze, ‘but I didn’t know how else to stop him.’
Isabelle gently took the weapon from his hands. ‘You saved Magdalena’s life, John,’ she said. ‘We are all in your debt.’
FRANSCHHOEK
Xavier and John made a litter from their jackets and two sturdy branches to carry the body down from the pass to Franschhoek.
‘We will take him to my mother’s house and lay him out there,’ Xavier said in a flat voice. Though he and his brother had been estranged, Isabelle could see how much Andries’ death, and the manner of it, had distressed him. ‘He was not a bad man,’ he said suddenly, ‘not at the heart of it. It was just that the accident damaged his wits. His life had become a burden to him and it made him mad.’
‘I understand,’ she said, though she wasn’t so sure.
In town, though the solemn procession attracted the curious looks of women and men going about their daily business, no one stopped them. They parted at the door to the house where, only the previous day, Isabelle had been kept prisoner. Seeing it in the light, it looked ordinary.
‘Did you find rooms in Dirkie Uys Street?’ she said, looking to John.
He nodded. ‘It’s the one with a blue door and a stoep at the front and side.’
‘I will wait for you there.’ She turned to Xavier. ‘We should tell someone what happened. Report the accident.’
‘Yes. I will fetch the pastor, once I have told our mother. Despite everything he had become, she will feel the loss of her son keenly.’
Xavier went inside and, moments later, Isabelle heard a heart-breaking wail. With a heavy heart, she turned away as the bell began to toll for midday as if for a funeral cortège.
Some two hours later, and after several cups of hot, China tea, Isabelle took herself to the swinging chair on the veranda of the guest house.
She was glad to be on her own. For she felt she owed it to Louise, and to Gilles, to read to the very end of the story, and Isabelle wanted no witnesses to that.
She turned to the end and saw the different handwriting. Not Louise’s open, sometimes chaotic, hand, but rather a clear and elegant manuscript, precise words set down in the closing pages. Isabelle smiled. This was the handwriting of someone who once had worked as a secretary for his living. Before love took him away to sea, and he turned pirate.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO
OLIFANTSHOEK
December 1655
‘Is there anything I can do?’ Gilles asked. He knew it would not be long. ‘Anything that you need, my love?’
Gilles thought it strange how his thoughts kept returning to when he and Louise had first met. They had lived in Africa for more than thirty years, but it was the cathedrals and churches of La Rochelle and Amsterdam that filled his mind now. Perhaps it was natural, he thought, that at the end our hearts went back to our beginning?
He rubbed his face, then got up from the chair and pushed open the shutter to let in a little air. He was exhausted. He had barely slept for days, wanting to be available at any moment Louise might stir. Since dusk on the previous evening, though, she had not moved. She was no longer drinking, no longer speaking. He rearranged the blanket, pulling it up to her chin and laying her hands on the top. It was a hot day, but Louise was never warm any more. Her skin hung loose over her bones; her flesh had wasted away. Her extraordinary eyes, one brown and one blue, were dulled now.
He did not know how he could bear to live without her.
Louise knew her time was coming and had tried to prepare them. Gilles had taken longer to accept it, trying every remedy the Khoi had to offer, even travelling with Théodore to the new Colony being built by the Dutch in Table Bay in search of modern medicines that might help. Nothing had made any difference.
‘I am old,’ Louise had said, placing her hand against his cheek. ‘I have had my time. I am ready to go.’
‘But I am not ready to lose you,’ he’d cried. He was ashamed of that now, putting his own feelings before hers. ‘And what of Théodore?’
Louise had smiled that slow, wise smile of hers. ‘Our son is a grown man, Gilles, a fine man. You will comfort one another, and walk forward into the future together. Find him a wife. He deserves to have a companion.’
When Gilles had relayed the conversation later, Théodore had laughed and said he had everything he needed. But the idea had lodged in Gilles’ mind.
Now Théodore came quietly into the chamber. ‘Is there any change?’ he asked quietly.
‘No change,’ Gilles replied.
Half sleeping, half dreaming, Louise was running through the cobbled streets of Carcassonne where, in the summer of 1610, she had stayed with her beloved grandmother, Minou, and her grandfather, Piet, after the assassination of the old king. Louise had been twenty-five and Minou had been dying.
Then, she had not understood Minou’s determination to prepare her family for her passing. Now she did. She knew how hard it was to watch someone you loved suffer, she could see the pain of it in Gilles’ drawn face and Théodore’s over-bright eyes.
Louise was comforted by the thought that Minou was waiting for her on the other side. Her grandfather, too, and her mother, Marta. And Alis and Cornelia, whom she had not seen since she had sailed from Amsterdam in the spring of 1622.
Remembering the conversations she and Minou had had in the tiny house in Carcassonne with wild roses around the door, Louise had tried to do the same for Gilles and for Théodore. But she did not think it had made any difference. Their hearts were breaking, as hers had done so many years before.
Louise was proud of the life she had lived, a wild and exceptional life. She had refused to be bound by the limits the world put on a woman’s existence. She had loved and she had fought and she had survived, she had lived a good life. There could be no better epitaph than that. If it had been possible, she would have wanted her body committed to the sea. For she still missed the roll of the waves beneath her feet, the buck and the tilt of the ship, the solitude of the night watch and the black sky painted silver with stars. The endless, treacherous, beautiful shifting water.
But she would be content to be laid to rest in African soil, here where she and Gilles and their son had made their home. No monument for her, no effigies of weeping angels. Just a simple wooden marker set in the land she had come to love.
Gilles put his hand on Louise’s cheek, as he had done so many times before, and instantly knew something had changed.
‘Louise?’ he said, his voice rising like the wind in autumn, calling her name louder and louder. ‘Louise, Louise . . .’
The sound brought Théodore running to the bedside. He put his hand on his mother’s shoulder, then dropped his head and started to weep.
‘Go in peace, my love,’ Gilles managed to say. ‘Go in peace.’
Outside, the December sun sank behind the hills on the longest day of the year.
They buried Louise the following morning, as she had wished, on the small patch of land above the farmstead in the shadow of the Olifantshoek mountains. They lowered her down into the grave, her red scarf around her head, and placed her silver dagger in her hands. Neither spoke, they just stood with their heads bowed in front of a wooden cross:
LOUISE REYDON-JOUBERT
14TH MAY 1585–21ST DECEMBER 1655
Beneath that were three simple words that said everything:
CAPTAIN AND COMMANDER
They weighted down the grave with stones to keep predators away and, in the spring, a carpet of pink and yellow flowers sprang up in the cracks between the slabs. Théodore planted saplings around the grave and it became a place of comfort, where he would go to talk to Louise when he was lonely or worried.
When Gilles’ time came, a decade later, Théodore laid him to rest beside the woman he had loved: Louise and Gilles, reunited in death as they had wanted. As the Colony grew, Théodore ventured out from the farm, making occasional visits to the new town of Stellenbosch. On one such visit, he acquired a piece of granite. By the light of a candle at night, and the warmth of the sun in the daytime, he made a new headstone for them both. Beneath Gilles’ name and his dates, just a single word was carved in the same block capitals:
BELOVED
FRANSCHHOEK
Saturday, 1st March 1862
‘Are you all right, Miss Lepard?’
In her mind’s eye, Isabelle had been back in the cemetery, where she had stood twenty-four hours previously. It was a surprise to find herself on the pretty veranda of the boarding house with John Turner’s worried face looking down at her. A climbing fig wrapped its tendrils around the wrought-iron lattice work and a row of wild olive trees separated the house from the street. She was aware of the humming of the bees and the gentle chirruping of songbirds in the trees.
‘Miss?’
She smiled, breaking the spell. ‘I am fine, John. Thank you.’
‘You have everything you need?’
‘It has been quite a day,’ she replied, unable to think of anything better to say. Then she added: ‘You mustn’t worry. We will see you right. No blame will be laid at your door.’
‘Thank you, miss,’ he said, clearly relieved. ‘These small towns, they protect their own.’
‘Andries Barenton’s character was well known. Xavier and his wife will speak in your defence. You have nothing to fear.’ The young man was still holding his cap and looking at his feet. ‘Is there something else?’
‘I wondered how long we might be here? The landlady was asking and I said I would find out.’
Isabelle nodded. ‘Please tell her that I would be grateful for rooms for two nights, tonight and tomorrow. There are still some matters outstanding. After that, we will return to Stellenbosch, where I will take my leave of you.’
‘Are you going back to Cape Town?’
‘I’m going home to England, John.’ She patted the diary on her lap, her eyes shining. ‘I have a book to write.’
CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE
FRANSCHHOEK
Monday, 3rd March 1862
Isabelle waited until after the funeral before leaving Franschhoek. Andries had been buried privately and without ceremony in the same graveyard where Louise, Gilles and Théodore lay, the first inhabitants of that city of the dead.
It was emotional taking her leave of Xavier, Maya and Magdalena. They all knew it was unlikely that they would meet again, but Isabelle promised to talk of La Justice in Cape Town. Now the farm had passed to him, Xavier had ambitious plans of how the farm could expand and bring prosperity to Franschhoek. He had retrieved Minou’s journal, with the Will and Testament, from where Andries had hidden it in their mother’s house. On their last night together, he had also given her Louise’s Olifantshoek diary to take back to England after learning about Isabelle’s intentions to write the history of their family, and endow an archive and reading room in the Joubert family name.
‘I would rather the diary be there, where everyone can see it,’ Xavier had said. ‘And how proud we will be to see it there in pride of place if we ever visit London.’
