Vengeance, page 23
So why had he dreamed of her?
In his mind, still half-clouded by sleep, he saw Clara again, the way she had been in his dream. Standing over his bed in a white nightdress, the fabric so thin that he could see her naked body beneath it. Shrugging it from her shoulders, she had let the gown fall – the candlelight shimmering over the pale skin of her small breasts, flickering over the smooth pink of her nipples – until it caught around her hips, beneath the flat skin of her belly. And then, reaching down . . .
A noise in the bush brought Harry back from his reverie. A small herd of springbok had come up the hill, hooves clipping the stony ground. Harry saw their tawny striped backs and the snow-white hair of their underbellies.
They were moving cautiously; he knew well that in a moment they might scent him. Before they could flee, he sighted the rifle on the lead animal and fired.
The herd scattered. Through the powder smoke, Harry glimpsed the animals pronking into the air, twelve feet off the ground, head and necks down, ears out flat, showing him their white rear ends.
Surprised, Harry had snatched at his shot. But he had not missed. One of the animals was not springing away; it was limping, blood streaming from the top of its right foreleg.
With practised hands, Harry reloaded. He vaulted out of the pit and ran after the wounded animal until he was close enough for a clear shot, then knelt and fired. It dropped instantly.
Harry laid down the rifle, drew his hunting knife and walked slowly towards his prey. Squatting down, he gently closed the animal’s eyes, before plucking a handful of grass and pushing it into the animal’s mouth. A Zulu song – that of passing to the other world – came unbidden to his lips as he moved down the still-warm body and skilfully slit the skin of the scrotum. If the gland’s toxic liquid was not released before the blood congealed, the meat would not be edible.
Harry ran his hand over the wound in the springbok’s foreleg. Suddenly, he was cross with himself for wasting a round. From a hide, he prided himself on being able to take a buck with a single shot.
That’s what happens when you pay attention to silly dreams, he chided himself. So why, as he rode back to the mission station, the springbok’s carcass secured behind his saddle, could he not stop thinking about his dream of Clara?
Clara stood in her bedroom in the mission house, stripped down to her petticoat. Her chest rose as she sucked in her stomach, reaching her arms up through the garment that Ann was holding out. It looked like a waistcoat made of quilted linen, with a set of laces across the back.
Clara wriggled into it. Ann went behind her and pulled the laces tight.
‘It’s squeezing me,’ Clara complained. ‘I can’t breathe.’
Ann let out the laces a little. Clara cupped her breasts in her hands and lifted them so they sat more comfortably on the fabric underpinnings when Ann tightened the laces again.
Ann had delayed this moment for as long as she could. Clara’s body had been slow to develop, but in the last six months, since her sixteenth birthday, she had grown vigorously. Ann had found a pair of stays amongst Elspeth’s old clothes, though she’d had to let them out: Elspeth had been thin and bony; Clara had a fuller figure. The undergarment accentuated Clara’s hips and bust, while flattening her stomach, so that in an instant everything was drawn into a new alignment. Almost a different person.
‘Your first set of stays,’ Ann said wistfully. She felt pride in the woman Clara was becoming, anxiety for her vulnerability, and sadness for the girl who was slipping away. Or perhaps, she thought, for the girl that I used to be, with my whole life ahead of me. ‘I remember when my mother gave me my first stays.’
Clara studied herself in the little mirror that hung against the wall. She turned sideways, examining her new silhouette, shifting her shoulders to get comfortable. ‘It still feels tight.’
‘You will get used to it,’ Ann promised her. ‘After a time, you will no longer even notice it.’
She thought of the girl that she had met the day they had arrived at the mission, wild and fearless. The red hair that was now carefully pinned up under Clara’s cap had flown tangled and free; hands and arms that were now red from scrubbing laundry and working hot stoves had been covered in scratches and bruises from her adventures. Is this what we are doomed to? Ann wondered. Betrayed by our bodies, forced to confine ourselves for our own protection?
This is how it must be, she told herself. It is for the best.
‘It is not good for Clara to stay here,’ Ann had told Andrew, in the desperate weeks after the battle. They wrote to England, asking Elspeth’s surviving brother if he would take Clara in and raise her respectably. They waited two years for a reply, brought by one of the hunters who occasionally stopped at the mission station, and when they read the letter, it was a flat refusal. Elspeth’s brother did not feel any obligation to his late sister’s unwanted step-daughter, who after all was no blood relation of his. Elspeth had made her choices – poor choices, he implied – and they all must suffer the consequences as best they could.
So Ann had no choice but to try to fill the void herself. Clumsily, with many tears and quarrels, she and Clara had fumbled their way to a sort of equilibrium. Not quite mother and daughter, not quite sisters; friends of a sort but never easy together. Another relationship for which there is no name, Ann thought. What is wrong with me?
Still, whatever you called her relationship with Clara, she felt all the emotions that a mother would: love, hope, anxiety, frustration. And lurking behind it all was a sort of dread of what would come next. The mission was its own little society, but Ann could see the world outside creeping nearer. In the six years they had been at Mahikeng, the mission station had become less remote. Visitors were infrequent, but not as vanishingly rare as they had been. Hunters and traders occasionally passed through, sometimes a Boer family who had packed up their lives in a wagon and gone to look, literally and figuratively, for pastures new.
I cannot keep her safe forever. It had been every parent’s sorrow since the beginning of time.
Clara pulled on her dress and adjusted it in the mirror, tugging it this way and that. It refused to sit straight, struggling to fit the new reality underneath.
‘I will take in the waist, and let out the neckline again,’ Ann said, reaching for her pins. ‘But you look very fine,’ she added quickly, lest Clara take her comment amiss. The girl could be moody and prickly, prone to taking offence at the most innocuous comment.
A wailing came from outside. Jack. Of her three children, he was the only one she had actually birthed, and the one who caused her the most worry. Whether from the trauma of being held hostage by Arend when he was barely a day old, or the rigours of their simple life, he had been a sickly child since he was born. He had inherited none of his father’s strength or rugged constitution: even in the clean, dry air of the highveld he managed to catch a steady stream of colds, chills and fevers. Many nights Ann had sat up late cradling him, a little ball of fire against her chest, wondering if he would last until morning, wishing she could draw the heat out of him and into her own body. You must live, she had whispered. Live for me. Live for your father. He had survived, but now, at six years old, he was as different from Harry as two boys could be. He loved nothing more than sitting and reading books.
‘I had better go and see what it is this time,’ Ann excused herself.
Clara nodded. ‘I will go to the kitchens.’
Clara crossed the yard, walking stiffly. She felt uncomfortable, but also grown up. When she glimpsed her shadow in the dust, she was pleased by her new curves.
That is a vain thought, scolded a voice in her head that sounded suspiciously like Elspeth.
The sound of a horse’s hooves drew her gaze to the gate. Harry had come back, his hat low over his forehead and a dead springbok fastened behind his saddle. With stubble darkening his jaw and the rifle holstered by his hip, he looked every inch the brigand. Though, said a voice in her mind – one that sounded nothing like Elspeth’s – not without a certain rough handsomeness.
And that is a wicked thought, retorted Elspeth’s voice.
Harry untied the springbok, lifted it down and carried it to the open-sided thatched hut they used as a kitchen. He laid it on the table.
Clara touched the bloody wound on the animal’s shoulder where Harry’s first shot had struck it. ‘Two shots. You are losing your touch.’
Harry went bright red. ‘I was distracted.’
‘I was only teasing.’ He is always so touchy these days, Clara thought. What had happened to the carefree boy that she used to play with? ‘And the meat is very welcome.’
Harry looked at her. ‘You seem different.’ He squinted, staring at her so openly that she felt the colour rise in her cheeks.
‘I am exactly the same as I always was,’ she said primly.
He grunted, a sound that could have meant anything, and only made Clara more annoyed. He had a unique ability to get under her skin. And he was still looking at her.
‘It is rude to stare at a lady.’ Her voice was angry now. She was more conscious than ever of the stays that circled her ribs, and the way the tops of her breasts protruded from the neck of her too-tight dress. Despite being constricted, her whole body felt exposed.
He looked down.
Say something, Clara wanted to shout. Apologise, or defend yourself, or change the subject completely, but tell me what you are thinking. She would willingly have listened to anything he wanted to say, but she could not endure this wall of silence that he threw up against her.
Why is it so hard for us to speak to each other now? she asked herself. What has changed?
The first time they had quarrelled was a month after that day. The days in between had passed in a numbed blur: they had buried their dead, cleared away the rubble and wept for what they had lost.
At last, Harry could bear it no more. One afternoon, when the grown-ups were busy, he had gone to find Clara.
‘There’s an old bull buffalo near the river,’ he told her. ‘I heard the Rolong talking about it. We should go and see.’
Clara had been kneeling at the washtub, pounding a soggy mass of shirts and petticoats with a dolly stick. She didn’t look up at him.
‘Why are you doing that?’ Harry asked. ‘They’ll just get dirty again.’
‘We have to keep up standards.’
‘You sound like Elspeth.’ Harry had never seen the point of doing laundry. ‘You can do it later.’
Clara stood and carefully lifted out one of the dripping shirts. She had to stand on a rock to peg it out, stretching on her tiptoes to reach the washing line.
‘Come and see the buffalo,’ Harry said again. ‘Before it goes away.’
‘I told you, I can’t.’
‘I could help with the washing, then we can go together.’
‘You’d only make it worse. Your hands are filthy.’
‘Would not.’ Though secretly he was relieved that she had turned him down.
A gust of wind blew across the yard. The shirt on the line rippled as if alive.
‘Oh!’ A black smudge had appeared on the white shirtfront, ash carried from the ruins of the church by the breeze. Clara pulled the garment off the line and thrust it back into the tub. ‘This ash ruins everything.’
‘Washing won’t make any difference,’ Harry said matter-of-factly. And then, peering closer: ‘Are you crying?’
‘No.’ Clara wiped her nose on her arm.
‘It’s only a shirt.’
Harry had meant to cheer Clara up, but his words had had the opposite effect. She suddenly lifted the dolly stick out of the tub and hurled it across the yard.
‘It’s all my fault!’
Harry was confused. ‘It’s not. The wind’s blowing the ash everywhere.’
‘Not the shirt. This.’ She swept her hand across the ruins of the mission station. ‘Everything.’
‘How is it your fault?’
Her lip trembled. ‘I said I wanted Louis to die. And Elspeth. And then they did.’
Harry thought of all the things he had ever wished for in his life. ‘Wanting something doesn’t make it happen.’
‘But then we ate the communion bread. We drank the wine.’ Her eyes flooded with tears.
‘That was to save my mother.’ Harry frowned. ‘It was a good thing. It worked.’
‘My father said that it was a terrible sin. He said that God would punish us and He did.’ She grabbed Harry’s arm, her red-rimmed eyes staring into his. ‘We made it happen.’
Harry pulled away, bewildered. Nothing she said made any sense. ‘We fought.’ He held up his hand. A bandage still covered the puckered scar that the hot coal had left. ‘We won.’
‘It was all our fault,’ Clara said again. Her voice had become a whisper. ‘You remember what it says in the Bible: “Sin is lurking by the door, waiting to capture you.” I won’t let it catch us again.’
After that, however often Harry tried to encourage or cajole or bribe Clara to come exploring with him, she never did. She put her hair under a bonnet, started wearing shoes and devoted herself to her chores, spending long hours in the ruined church.
‘What do you do in there all day?’ Harry had asked once.
‘Pray,’ she had said simply.
They ate their meals together, stood next to each other at the Sunday service, and did their lessons together. But even as they did so, Harry could feel Clara distancing herself from him. Many things had changed since then. Day by day, week by week. They had rebuilt the church, repaired the fences and prised the musket balls out of the woodwork. The new church was smaller and meaner than its predecessor; the walls were not straight, and the roof sagged. On the rear wall, Andrew had mounted the charred crucifix. It was too big for the new space, and Jesus’ face and body had been blackened beyond recognition, but Andrew had insisted. ‘All the sufferings of this world are merely to remind us what Jesus suffered,’ he preached. Harry shook his head, wondering why anyone would want to be reminded of their suffering – or need to be.
In the past Clara would have taken a sharp knife to skin the springbok. She had done it many times before, but this time she hung back, reluctant to make the first cut.
‘It’s dead,’ Harry said impatiently. ‘It won’t bite.’
‘I do not want to get blood on my dress.’
He sighed. It was the same dress that she always wore, yet somehow it seemed to fit her differently. For the first time, he was acutely aware of the swell of her breasts; and now that he was aware of them it was difficult to look at anything else. They kindled a warm feeling inside him – pleasurable and awkward in equal measure – that he had never experienced before.
Flushing red, Harry took the knife and with deft strokes began cutting through the thin skin on the inside of the animal’s rear legs. Clara watched from a safe distance, her face screwed up in an expression he couldn’t decipher.
MACQUARIE HARBOUR
A
nother cell. There had been so many that Ralph had lost count. This one was a stone box with no windows, four feet wide and seven feet long. It stank like a sewer.
I’ve survived worse, Ralph told himself. A bamboo cage in China. Breaking rocks on Robben Island. Locked in a beehive hut at Shaka’s court, waiting to discover if he had been sentenced to death. And Hobart Town had been one giant open-air prison. The walls were always there: solitary confinement only brought them closer.
But this time, for some reason, it was harder. Lying there in the dark, something gave way inside of him. Jakes had exacted his revenge for Ralph’s assault before the redcoats had put him in the cell: four dozen strokes with the cat; triple-knotted cords that cut through flesh like razors, administered in full view of the other convicts. Blood still oozed from the flayed flesh of his back. Sometimes he thought he could hear the bones in his back clicking together.
Ralph thought of Ann and Harry often, trying to imagine them standing on the highveld, the sun setting behind the high kopjes and the lions roaring in the distance. But though he could see the red dust and the yellow grass and the thorn trees, somehow Ann and Harry were not there. Try as he might, he could not summon them.
Panic rose within him. He spoke to Ann, but she did not answer. He tried to recall Harry’s eager young face, but even that was dim and smudged, as if seen through smoked glass. And anyway, Harry would be – what? Fifteen, now? Sixteen? Almost a man. But what sort of man would he have become, believing the only father he’d ever known had abandoned him.
A man like me?
The thought made Ralph want to weep. I wanted to be different to my father. To look after my wife, to protect my son. To be a rock for them.
Was it fated? Was it possible for a son to escape his father’s shadow, or were the same mistakes to be repeated, generation after generation?
Ralph lay curled in a ball, shivering, his mind filled with the faces of men he had killed or betrayed, women he had lain with and then lied to, comrades he had abandoned. Sometimes he cried out, to banish the torment, but after the sound died away the gnawing thoughts came at him again.
The only sounds he heard were the drip of water, that somehow trickled through the ceiling, and the twice-daily clatter of his food being pushed through the hatch in the door.
Somewhere during the eternal night – it might have been after ten days, twenty . . . Ralph had lost count – he heard a new sound. A scratching in the walls. Rats? He still had enough life in him to feel a prickle of fear. If they broke through, they would gnaw at his wounds, eating him away from back to front.
The sound began to obsess him. He forgot his pain, and listened.
It was not the frantic scratching of an animal, he soon realised. There was a percussive rhythm to it, and in his mind a metallic sheen coloured the sound that rippled through the wall.
Ralph put his hand against the chill stone. He ran his fingertips over the rough surface, feeling his way up and down until he found what he was searching for. He put his head to the place and listened. A faint vibration echoed in his ear, like a distant heartbeat.
