The Map of Bones, page 38
STELLENBOSCH
Wednesday, 5th March
Isabelle parted company with John Turner in Stellenbosch. Of all of the people she had met on her journey, Isabelle realised she would miss him the most. He had been a steady, loyal presence and his quick thinking – both in Klein Bethlehem and at Joubertsgat – had saved her life, as well as that of Xavier’s and Maya’s daughter.
‘I wish you the very best, John,’ she said, as he helped carry her luggage from Mrs Müller’s boarding house.
‘It has been an honour, miss,’ he said, blushing.
He waited with her for the service to Cape Town, then stood watching as she waved goodbye to the beautiful white town set in the sea of vines.
CAPE TOWN
Monday, 10th March
Back in Cape Town, Isabelle found political tensions were still running high. There were rumours of unrest in the Transvaal and daily complaints about the Governor, Sir Philip Wodehouse. There were a great many soldiers on the streets and the Parade Ground was busy with drills and military manoeuvres. Isabelle shut her eyes to it all. She booked herself into a different hotel in Buitengracht Street, refusing to give her custom to the odious manager who had betrayed her to Andries Barenton.
As Suzanne before her, Isabelle started to write her story, meticulously recording everything that had happened since her arrival in southern Africa. She retrieved her bonds and possessions from the Cape of Good Hope Bank, booked herself a first-class ticket on the next steamship sailing from Port Natal in Durban via Cape Town to Portsmouth at the end of the month, and settled her accounts. In the early evenings, she ate in the hotel dining room, then retired to the lounge to write letters to her solicitor and her editor in London – just in case anything should happen to her on the voyage home. She compiled a list of possible benefactors and started to sketch out the design for her Archive and Reading Room.
Finally, there was just one last task remaining.
In the years after the collapse of the VOC and the arrival of the British in the Colony, many records and archives had been lost. The Castle of Good Hope had fallen into disrepair. But, with a great deal of persistence and the help of a secretary at the British Consulate, Isabelle had discovered that some VOC archives from the Castle had been rescued and were stored in an administration building on Adderley Street.
On the morning of Monday the tenth of March, Isabelle presented herself at the featureless building at the commercial heart of the city. She rang the bell and was admitted into a long dark corridor. Her heels echoed loudly as she followed the servant to a desk at the rear of the empty building.
‘A visitor,’ he said, then turned on his heel.
A pale, snub-nosed clerk in a uniform too big for him looked over his pince-nez. ‘May I help you?’
‘I very much hope so,’ Isabelle replied brightly.
With her blonde hair drawn into a coil at the nape of her neck, she was wearing a pale blue hat, blue buttoned jacket and full skirt and black patent buttoned boots. She looked every bit the Victorian lady, nothing resembling the woman who had ridden across the veldt with the wind in her hair and a knife at her side. ‘I am a travel correspondent from England. I write for a periodical, The Leisure Hour. Perhaps you have heard of it?’
‘I have not,’ he said, barely troubling to hide his lack of interest.
‘I wish I had thought to bring a copy,’ Isabelle said, refusing to be discouraged. ‘I am here to visit the VOC archives. I have a letter of authorisation from the British Consulate.’ She paused a moment. ‘Please do forgive me for the imposition. I appreciate the pressure this puts upon your valuable time. I assure you I will be as quiet as a mouse and will take up as little of your time as possible.’
‘We are more than usually busy,’ the clerk said, though she and he appeared to be the only two people in the building.
‘It must be so difficult,’ she said disingenuously. ‘And too often the powers-that-be fail to understand the hard work and the effort that goes in to making such a facility as this run smoothly.’ She leant forward, as if afraid they would be overheard. ‘It is much the same in London, I regret.’
The clerk’s eyes brightened. ‘Is it, is it indeed? Well, in point of fact, I would say that our systems are far superior to anything one might find in England. Was there anything in particular you were looking for?’
Ten minutes later, Isabelle was seated at a large table in an otherwise empty room with four dusty ledgers in front of her. Many of the Huguenot refugee families had grown prosperous and become families of distinction in the Colony, their deeds recorded. But others who had touched the lives of Louise and Suzanne had disappeared from sight.
Isabelle opened the first ledger and began her search, patiently tracing her finger down the columns of names and dates until she found one of the things she was looking for. She smiled: to Adriaan and Judith van Dijk, on the fourteenth day of June in the year 1689, a daughter: Florence Suzanne van Dijk.
Isabelle felt tears well in her eyes. Adriaan and Judith had not forgotten their friend and she thought Suzanne would have been delighted. Had she ever known? She had found no mention of the baby girl in Suzanne’s notebooks, but she couldn’t help but hope they had managed to exchange letters despite the thousands of miles between them. Isabelle ran her eye down the rest of the column and found that little Florence was the first of four daughters and five sons born to Judith and her husband.
‘Rather her than me,’ she murmured into the cavernous room, then put that ledger aside.
The second task, she knew, would be harder. Maybe impossible. Away from the main Colony in the countryside, births and deaths often went unrecorded. Life was hard, many children failed to survive in the harsh conditions, their names were never written down. And when women married, if the union was recorded at all, they were subsumed into their husband’s families. But, ever since Isabelle had stood in the graveyard in Franschhoek thinking about the Barenton family line, she had pondered the identity of Théodore’s wife or lover. That there had been someone was not in doubt: Xavier and Andries, with the white strip in their dark hair, were evidence of that.
She doubted if she would find Théodore in the records – he had lived for most of his life outside of VOC jurisdiction. But he had known Adriaan van Dijk and he had, from time to time, come to Cape Town. People must have seen him. It was how Suzanne had tracked him down.
Isabelle had no luck with the second ledger. Among marriages between VOC employees, she saw no names she recognised. The third was the same. Tired now, with her fingers stained black from the ink and dusty pages, she pulled the final ledger towards her and started to run down the names . . . ‘Yes,’ she whispered with triumph. It was as she had suspected, as she had hoped. The record of a marriage on the third day of August 1690, a Khoi servant in the employ of the Van Dijk family of Cape Town had married a bachelor residing in the municipality of Stellenbosch.
Tia Nemen and Théodore Barenton, the founders of a new dynasty.
EPILOGUE
TEN YEARS LATER
LONDON
September 1872
BOUVERIE STREET, LONDON
Thursday, 19th September 1872
It was a quarter to four in the afternoon and Isabelle was relishing the last moments of quiet before her guests arrived. She was on pins, but excited too. This was the day she had been dreaming of for more than a decade: the official opening of the Joubert Family Archive and Reading Room, and the launch of her memoir.
Usually, when travelling or lecturing, Isabelle dressed for comfort rather than style. Today, she wanted to make her father proud. Though he was not alive to see what she had achieved, she felt his gentle presence in the room. She looked elegant and appropriate, a respectable Victorian lady. She was wearing a green silk day dress with a fitted bodice and square neck, sleeves that flared at the wrist and two embroidered buttons at the top of her bustle. A supporter of women’s dress reform, advocating for clothes that allowed freedom of movement, Isabelle drew the line at the tassels, bobs and bows that were currently in fashion. Her thick blonde hair was gathered into a chignon at the nape of her neck. Isabelle grinned. It had taken her maid many hours and countless spoiled pins to fix it into place.
The high windows in the main room of the archive faced west, so the late afternoon sun was shining down in broad slants, making the motes of dust dance in the air. The room itself seemed to gleam. Polished wooden shelving rose floor to ceiling on three sides. In the past ten years, Isabelle had built up a significant collection of books in several languages about southern Africa, memoirs and works of natural history, as well as travelogues about Amsterdam and La Rochelle, Languedoc and the Pyrenees. She also had a good selection of contemporary titles by women on history, suffrage and education. Books about her own Huguenot ancestry, too.
Mahogany display cases filled the centre of the room, the glass cleaned this morning with lemon juice – or so her archivist, Anna Peake, had told her – so that the exhibits could be clearly seen. Originally from Manchester, Anna had come to London as one of the first women to be accepted at the University of London. The daughter of a botanist, she had approached Isabelle after a lecture they had both attended at the Royal Geographical Society. She was brilliant and efficient and Isabelle felt lucky to have her.
Slowly, Isabelle walked around the room taking pleasure in the empty space for one last time. She paused before the cases holding the most precious items: Minou’s sixteenth-century journal lay on white satin, opened at the first page. In the case beside it was displayed the Will and Testament that had nearly caused Isabelle’s death in Franschhoek ten years ago. In another case, below the tallest stacks at the rear of the room, Suzanne’s silver dagger with the red garnet was on show and a note explaining how it had been miraculously rescued from the sea during the shipwreck of the Gouw.
A third case was dedicated to Louise, the pirate queen of the seventeenth century. There were nautical maps of the routes the Old Moon had sailed and a replica of the ship itself, created by a toy maker in Holland from the descriptions in Louise’s prison diary. That was here, together with the diary from Olifantshoek that Gilles had finished. Isabelle had also commissioned a watercolour portrait of the court house in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria where Louise had been put on trial.
Most of all, Isabelle loved the long, narrow display case that greeted visitors on their first arrival: a woven tapestry showing Minou and Piet and their two oldest children, rescued by Alis from the castle in Puivert; and a family tree of the Joubert family going back to the early years of the sixteenth century. All the names were here – Joubert and Reydon, du Plessis and Barenton.
For a moment, Isabelle allowed herself a moment of regret. She was forty years old and had no intention of marrying. Her name would die with her. Then she thought of Xavier’s and Maya’s daughter, Magdalena, and smiled. Different branches of their family would rise, and would fall, but the spirit that linked them all together would never be lost.
Anna came striding into the room.
‘Mr Macmillan is here.’
Isabelle felt a flutter of unaccustomed nerves. ‘Is everything ready?’
The archivist nodded. ‘The wine is poured and there are soft drinks for those who are teetotal.’ Anna sniffed with disapproval. ‘Temperance types and the like.’
Some two weeks previously, a consignment had arrived from La Justice, a gift from Xavier Barenton to bring the family’s best wishes for the opening of the Archive. Isabelle had been touched by the gesture, though tasted the wine with trepidation, aware that its long journey from Franschhoek to Cape Town, Cape Town to London, might well have spoilt it. In fact, it was delicious, brimming with African sun, so she had decided to serve it at the opening.
‘Another gentleman from the publishers has set up a desk in the hall for those who want to purchase copies of your book,’ the archivist added. ‘I have put the pamphlet about the Archive there too and suggested he might consider slipping endowment forms inside, in case there are any new potential subscribers.’
Isabelle took a final look around. ‘Then we are set.’
‘We are. It’s going to be wonderful,’ Anna replied. ‘Shall I show Mr Macmillan in?’
‘If you would.’
Moments later, Alexander Macmillan, white-whiskered and with sparkling eyes, came bustling into the room. Still nominally in charge of the publishing company he and his brother had founded nearly thirty years ago, he was gradually passing on control of the thriving business to his sons and nephews. But as an old friend of Isabelle’s late father, he had taken a keen interest in her writing career and offered to publish her family memoir without hesitation. Isabelle was very fond of him.
‘Isabelle, my dear,’ he said, his Scottish accent little dimmed by his years in London. ‘What a day, what a day. You look absolutely charming, if I might say. Your father would be proud.’
She put up her cheek to be kissed. ‘Thank you for coming, Alexander.’
‘I would not have missed it for the world. Have you got a good crowd in?’
‘I think so, if everyone who has accepted makes an appearance.’
‘They will, my dear. We have invited some of our bigwigs, Lewis Carroll and Christina Rossetti included, although of course she won’t be able to come. Her health is not what it was. But the Reverend Kingsley is in town, so hopefully he will find time to grace us with his presence. We’ve issued invitations to one or two select gentlemen of the press. And all your subscribers will be here, will they not?’
‘Most of them, yes. People have been very generous.’
‘Well then,’ he beamed, ‘it is all going to be tremendous.’ He looked towards the hall. ‘Now, what about a glass of that family wine you have been telling me about?’
An hour later and the room was filled to the gunwales. Isabelle was delighted to see that most guests were clutching a copy of the museum pamphlet and a fair few had a copy of her book under their arms, too. She didn’t expect her family history to be a bestseller like Mrs Seacole’s memoir, but she hoped it might find a modest audience.
Anna was conducting a tour of the section devoted to Suzanne’s notebooks. A knot of male students, possibly her friends from the university, were peering into the display case containing Suzanne’s dagger.
‘Of course, Miss Lepard herself has visited all of these places,’ Isabelle heard Anna say. ‘Her recollections are from first-hand experience.’
Isabelle glanced at the clock on the wall above the door, watching the hands move inexorably towards five o’clock. It was then that the speeches were due to start. She had a list in her pocket of all the people she had to thank, all those who had invested in the Archive or donated money. Only when that was over would she be able to enjoy herself.
Too nervous to stay still, Isabelle continued her circuit of the room. She was pleased to see the Director of the French Hospital, La Providence, was among the guests. A Huguenot almshouse for poor French refugees, it had recently taken possession of new purpose-built premises in Hackney, in East London. Isabelle had not yet found the time to visit, but she had continued her father’s commitment of making a donation to the almshouses every year in remembrance of their Huguenot antecedents.
She noticed her former editor at The Leisure Hour talking to one of her fellow contributors and was pleased to see that Charles Kingsley, author of The Water Babies, had indeed come and was deep in conversation with her solicitor, Samuel Watson. The firm Watson & Sons was resident in Bouverie Street and old Mr Watson had been a friend of her father’s, even though the family was non-conformist. Isabelle smiled at Sam and nodded to his wife, Lily. A self-possessed, thoughtful young woman some ten year’s Samuel’s junior, she had given birth to their first child, a daughter, last year. Since they lived out in the country in Brixton, Isabelle was surprised – and pleased – that Lily had accompanied him today. She was someone Isabelle would like to know better. Perhaps she would invite her to tea when all this was over.
Isabelle felt a touch on her elbow.
‘Mr Macmillan would like to know if you are ready?’ Anna asked.
‘As I’ll ever be.’
She took a deep breath, then walked to the back of the room where a small platform had been set up. Alexander smiled encouragingly, then stepped up to the podium brandishing a copy of her book in his hand.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed guests,’ he boomed. ‘On behalf of Macmillan and Company, it is my very great pleasure to be welcoming you here today. We are honoured to be publishing the travel memoir of Miss Isabelle Lepard, The Joubert Family Chronicles, and to be playing a small role today as we gather to celebrate the opening of this magnificent Archive and Reading Room.’
While he talked, Isabelle watched the expressions on the faces of the guests in the room: curiosity, pride, interest. These were the women and men who had believed in her and she was grateful to every one of them.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Macmillan concluded, ‘I give you Miss Isabelle Lepard.’
She felt a hush fall over the room: the slightest chink of a glass being put down; the ruffle of a brochure being used as a fan; somebody cleared his throat, another sneezed.
‘Ladies and gentlemen . . .’
Isabelle looked down at the list in her hands. She knew the speech she was supposed to make, but it didn’t feel right. There would be time enough to thank everyone and say all the official things that needed to be said. Now, though, what she wanted to do – what she had to do – was to explain why she had dedicated ten years of her life to this project. She had to explain why it mattered. She put her list away.
‘Friends, you are most welcome. Today is an important day in my life. For I come from a line of extraordinary women. Loyal, courageous, brilliant women who refused to allow their lives to be circumscribed or limited by the societies in which they lived. My ancestor Louise Reydon-Joubert, in the early years of the seventeenth century, captained her own ship, the Old Moon. We might say she was an early abolitionist, hunting down slaver ships in the Atlantic Ocean.’
