Vengeance, page 28
‘Where is your father now? Is he still alive?’
Adam flinched. ‘After the Tiger, I could not bear to face him. If he knew that his son had been defeated, that his only grandson was dead . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Better to let him think I was lost at sea. At least there is honour in a sailor’s death.’
‘You never went back?’
‘I sometimes thought, if I had had another son, I would have liked to show him to my father. Show him that I had not failed completely . . .’ Adam trailed off.
‘You have a son,’ Ralph reminded him. ‘It is not too late.’
Pebbles rattled as Adam shifted his weight. ‘You still believe we will escape this place?’
‘If I stopped thinking that, I would never move again.’
When Adam spoke again his voice was harsh. ‘Do you think if you save me, you can save yourself?’
We are like flint and steel, Ralph thought to himself. Even when we do not mean to, we strike sparks from each other. But what other hope do I have?
‘We can think about saving our souls once we have saved our lives.’
By first light, the rain had eased to a fine grey mist. Adam’s ankle had swollen up overnight, and the skin was livid.
Ralph held out his hand. Adam hesitated.
‘There will be time for pride later,’ Ralph told him.
Adam scowled. But he let Ralph put his arm under his shoulders and haul him to his feet.
They splashed through the shallows, barely able to see ten feet in front of them through the mist. In the hushed dawn, every sound they made echoed like a pistol shot. Keeping their balance in the stream bed was almost impossible. When a rock rolled out from under Ralph’s foot, it dumped them both in the water. Adam screamed in agony.
‘God damn you!’ he snarled.
Biting back the retort that came to his lips, Ralph reached down and pulled Adam up again.
They stumbled blindly on, through the icy water. Lost in the simple effort of putting one foot in front of the other, Ralph barely noticed the change in their surroundings. Slowly the sides of the ravine were flattening out, allowing the stream to spread and meander between low, muddy banks.
But as the mist began to lift, Ralph peered ahead.
‘There is a beach.’ A few hundred yards further on, beneath a stand of dark green pines, white pebbles had banked up on the far side of a bend in the stream, held in place by sun-bleached tree trunks. ‘We can rest there.’
Even so close, it took them some time to reach it. The kangaroo meat they had found had long since been digested; both men were famished. When they reached the shingle beach, they could barely manage to stagger three paces out of the water before they both collapsed.
‘We must still be miles from the ocean,’ Adam said.
After a few minutes, Ralph dragged himself to one of the stranded tree trunks and pulled himself up using the skeletal branches. What he saw broke his spirit.
Around the bend, the stream they had been wading through joined a larger, deeper watercourse that swept away through the forest. Neither man had the strength to even hold his head above water, let alone battle the powerful currents that would lie in the river that lay in front of them.
‘What do you see?’ Adam asked. He was lying flat on his back and staring at the sky.
Resting his forehead against the branch that held him upright, Ralph cursed every god he had ever heard of. Did you bring me this far, through so much agony, just to abandon me? Did you give me hope simply to make me despair anew?
He smacked the wood in frustration. A dull clench of pain went through him. His palm had caught a splinter of broken branch, sticking out from the trunk.
He shook his head, and stared at the white wood, now stained red by his bleeding hand.
‘What do you see?’ Adam said again.
Ralph ran his hand over the wood, trying not to let hope overwhelm him. It was old and cracked, but dry. It would float.
‘I see a way out.’
Achingly slowly, they manhandled the trunks down to the water’s edge. The dry wood snapped easily, letting them strip the branches. Finally, they had five trees laid side by side in the shallow water.
Ralph found creepers and vines in the undergrowth on the river bank, and braided them together until he had a good length of makeshift rope. He bound it around the tree trunks, so that the logs were made fast together when he tied it off, forming a narrow raft. A fallen sapling, stripped of its branches, made an adequate steering pole.
Adam studied their creation doubtfully. ‘Will it hold?’
Using the pole for balance, Ralph stepped onto it. He had tied the logs as tight as he could, but it was still a poor excuse for a vessel. The logs shifted and strained under his weight and water flooded up through the gaps between them.
‘Anything is better than walking.’
Despite the dry timber, the raft sat low in the water. Adam lay stretched out in front while Ralph knelt at the stern and tried to steer with his pole. He hardly dared move for fear of capsizing the raft, or breaking the cords that held it together. He kept to the shallower water, close to the shore, only braving the main channel when overhanging branches or fallen trees threatened their passage.
The rain had stopped. The clouds thinned enough to let a wan sunlight filter through: not enough to dry their clothes, but enough to warm their spirits a little. Adam stared at the water while Ralph watched the forest pass by. They barely spoke. After so much hardship, to be moving so swiftly, without effort or pain, brought a strange kind of peace.
‘It will be no surprise to me if after all of this we find ourselves back at Macquarie Harbour,’ Adam said darkly.
The same worry lingered at the back of Ralph’s mind. They had lost their way completely. For all Ralph knew, they might be navigating a tributary of the Gordon River, floating back down to the island and the prison barracks.
‘At least Jakes might give us a hot meal before he hangs us.’
Ralph scanned the river bank, looking for any sign of the logging camp or the landing stage, any features that seemed familiar.
‘What is that?’
The urgency in Ralph’s voice made Adam turn. The raft rocked; the vine ropes flexed.
‘What?’
‘In the forest. I saw movement.’
Both men stared at the green wall. Behind the foliage, shadows shifted and leaves rustled; a heron flapped past, low over the water.
‘Probably just a bird, or maybe a kangaroo,’ Adam said.
After that, Ralph kept the raft further out from the bank. The river widened; the current carried them on. At each turn, Ralph’s hopes rose that they might see the end of the forest. Adam propped himself up on his elbows so that he could stare ahead.
‘Do you hear that?’ Ralph asked. There was a sound that had been growing for some time, from an almost imperceptible tickle in his ear to a distant but clearly audible roar. When the breeze blew straight in his face, he tasted salt in the air.
It was the sound of surf. It grew louder and louder, until they came around a wide bend, and there – suddenly, miraculously – was the ocean. Ahead of them, the forest gave way to a beach, which stretched to a sandy point at the river’s mouth. A line of white water capped the bar.
The current that had saved them from the forest was now their enemy, hurrying them on towards the thundering surf. Ralph knew a single one of those waves would smash the raft to pieces. Using all his remaining strength, he tried to turn their craft into the shallower water, but his pole gave him little purchase on the sandy bottom. Adam paddled furiously with both hands as waves began to run over the raft’s deck, pushing it lower and lower until it was almost completely underwater.
‘I will not be beaten!’ Ralph yelled, digging in furiously with his pole, aiming for the point.
It was too much for the raft. One minute Ralph was leaning into his stroke, the next he was in the water, trying desperately to avoid the spinning logs that threatened to knock his brains out.
He started swimming blindly, not knowing if he was heading for the safety of the beach, or straight for the waves that pounded the bar. Until, suddenly, his flailing hand touched bottom.
Ralph planted his feet and stood, wiping salt water from his eyes.
The noise of the rollers hitting the bar only a few yards away was deafening; he could feel the spray on his cheeks. Two more minutes in the water and he would have been pulled out to sea. But he was safe – he had reached the promontory. Adam was crouched on all fours beside him. He tried to stand, but the moment he put weight on his injured ankle he collapsed back into the water. Ralph put his arms around his chest and hauled him out. Together, they sprawled on the sand, exhausted, staring out at the expanse of grey water that stretched to the distant horizon while the cold wind snapped at them, blasting their skin with sand.
They must be north of Macquarie Harbour, Ralph decided, though how far north, he had no way of knowing. The beach was vast and – to his eyes – endless, sweeping up the coast until it vanished in a haze.
He thought of the miles they had covered on the raft.
‘We must be days ahead of Jakes,’ he said.
‘That will be no advantage if we cannot get off this beach,’ Adam replied.
‘When we were in our cells, you said that if we could reach the ocean, we could find a passing whaler and seek our passage.’ Sitting up, Ralph swept his arm across the expanse of sea that lay in front of them. ‘Well, here we are.’
‘I did not say it would be easy.’ Adam scowled. ‘If we find dry wood we could build a fire to signal passing ships.’
‘If the rain keeps off long enough.’ Ralph stood. ‘And if the passing ship is not a government vessel. In any event, we will get nowhere waiting here.’
Ralph retrieved his pole, which had washed up on the beach, along with the vines that had held their fragile raft together. He snapped the branch in half over his knee and bound the two pieces together, so Adam could use it as a crutch. With Adam limping along, Ralph hurried ahead to spy out the land. He was famished and sore, but after so long fighting through the forest, there was a delight in simply being able to walk unimpeded across the sand.
Ralph soon realised that what had looked from a distance like one unbroken stretch of beach was in fact a series of bays and coves. It made for slow, dispiriting progress. The novelty of ranging freely soon wore off. Walking on the soft sand sapped his strength, and the ache in his stomach grew ever more painful.
There was no reason to keep going. The sun was sinking to the horizon, and dark clouds threatened more rain. Adam had fallen far behind. When he caught up, they would need to think about shelter and food. Yet some stubborn part of Ralph – the part that had driven him through so many miles of forest – would not stop. He trudged on.
Coming around a headland, Ralph peered into the next bay. He was still staring fifteen minutes later, when Adam arrived at his shoulder.
‘I thought you were meaning to walk all the way to China,’ Adam said.
‘I will not be walking anywhere.’ Ralph pointed.
They had passed half a dozen similar bays. But in one respect, this one was wholly different.
There was a boat.
MISSION STATION, MAHIKENG
T
he wagons that Harry had seen approaching were a party of Boers. The men were on ponies, while their womenfolk sat up on the box seats, flicking the stockwhips with deft movements. Children peeked out from inside the canvas tilts or chased the dust devils that the big wheels threw up.
The man leading the party dismounted and walked slowly towards Andrew. He had the stolid, unhurried gait of a man who had spent most of his life amongst cattle and adopted their ways.
‘Henrik Jaeger,’ he introduced himself. ‘Are you Andrew Ryder?’
‘How do you know my name?’
‘Because otherwise I’d have been carrying this for nothing.’ Henrik pulled a folded letter out of his waistcoat and gave it to Andrew. He pointed to the stamp. ‘All the way from London.’
Conflicting emotions coursed through Ann’s heart as she watched Andrew turn the letter over in his hands. A letter containing news of the outside world was a rare excitement in the dull routine of their lives. But without quite knowing why, she feared what this one might contain. ‘Who is it from?’
Andrew read the return address on the back of the letter. ‘The London Missionary Society.’
‘Do you think they have finally answered our requests?’
Andrew had been writing to London for years, begging for more timber to rebuild the church, more prayer books to replace those they had lost in the fire, more tools to teach the Rolong new trades.
Andrew tucked the letter into his coat. ‘We should see to our guests, first.’
Ann served tea on the stoep. The cups were a bizarre assortment: the few pieces of Elspeth’s fine china that had survived the attack, mixed with burnished clay beakers made by the Rolong women. The kettle doubled as the teapot.
‘Where have you come from?’ Ann asked Henrik.
‘We started down by the Black Kei River.’ A thick cloud of tobacco smoke mingled with the steam from the kettle as Henrik puffed on his pipe. ‘Rooineks didn’t like that. Said it was Kaffir land, and we should keep to the right side of the border.’
‘You’re a long way from the border here,’ Andrew pointed out. Ann knew it was forbidden for whites to cross the Orange River without permission. The British government feared it would stir up conflict with the tribes. But two hundred miles beyond the frontier, the point was moot.
Henrik shrugged his meaty shoulders. ‘It’s a big country.’
‘Where are you bound?’ Ann asked.
‘North.’ Henrik swept his hand slowly across the horizon, and though it was a vague gesture, it seemed to Ann that it indicated infinite possession. ‘We mean to cross the Oliphants River, and find our way to Lourenço Marques.’
Lourenço Marques was a Portuguese settlement, almost the only port on the coast of south-eastern Africa other than Nativity Bay.
‘That must be five hundred miles away,’ Andrew said. ‘And a hard road, too.’
‘We make our own road,’ Henrik said proudly. ‘But we go one day at a time: one day, then another, and then we get there.’
He had already drained his tea. Ann refilled his cup.
‘Do you mean to settle at Lourenço Marques?’
Henrik shrugged. ‘Who knows where we will settle?’
‘We would make our home in the Cape Colony if we could,’ his wife put in. She was a plump, round-faced woman, with arms made for kneading and butchering. ‘But the British make it impossible.’
‘They have made it illegal to keep servants,’ added another woman indignantly.
‘Servants?’ Ann was surprised. ‘How can that be against the law?’
‘Blacks,’ Henrik clarified. ‘Wilberforce, Clarkson, Sir Robert Courtney and the rest have got their way at last. Parliament has made a law to free all the blacks.’
‘Emancipation?’ Andrew looked as if he wanted to clap his hands in delight. ‘Truly? Everywhere?’
‘Everywhere the British flag flies.’
‘It is nothing to celebrate.’ Henrik’s wife looked as if she would choke on her tea. ‘They have taken our property. Our own money we spent: buying them, giving them food and clothes. Treating them like family.’
‘Of course, the law says that they will pay us back,’ Henrik sneered. ‘But do you know how I get my compensation? I have to present myself in London, in person. Do they think I can drive my ox-team all the way to the Bank of England? I would rather live in my own country, than under a government that robs a man that way.’
Ann watched Andrew run his eye over the wagons. ‘So, you are looking to start a new country with five wagons?’
‘Others will follow.’ Ann could not tell if it was a boast or a threat. ‘There are many who think like we do.’
‘What would the British say to that?’
Henrik’s chair leg scraped the beaten earth floor as he pushed it back and stood.
‘I see you, clergyman. You are one of those Kaffir-loving Englishmen who would rather let the blacks sit idle than have his own race flourish.’ He pointed his finger at the Bible that sat on a side table, where Ann had been using it to instruct the children. ‘You know what it says in that book? Noah cursed the sons of Ham and ordained that they should be slaves to the righteous. We are doing God’s will.’
‘Henrik, these are our hosts . . .’ his wife reproached him. Then she turned to Ann: ‘We have troubled you long enough. It is time we tended to our wagons and livestock.’
Ann saw the fire in Andrew’s eyes and laid her hand on his arm.
‘Thank you for your hospitality,’ Henrik said stiffly.
As night fell, Ann put Jack to bed, then kissed Harry goodnight. She checked with the herdboys that all the cattle had come in, and made sure the kraal gate was firmly shut. Then she went down to the village to visit one of the Rolong, a beautiful young woman named Baone, who had recently given birth to her first child. Ann gave her a vial of camphor oil to rub into her cracked nipples.
Lastly, Ann crossed the yard to the church. There had been no wood for pews after the fire, so she had to kneel on the earthen floor, clasping her hands and looking up at the darkness where the burned Jesus spread out his arms.
She prayed for her children. First for Jack, always at the forefront of her thoughts. So delicate, so ill-suited to the harsh highveld environment, yet refusing to be cowed by it. God keep him safe.
She prayed for Harry. God, give me patience, was her refrain for him. If she tried to pull him close, he pulled away; if she gave him space, he sulked as if she was neglecting him. She knew it was natural, he was a child growing into young manhood, but still she missed the boy who had held her hand unselfconsciously and crawled into her bed for warmth.
Perhaps it was her fault. She knew she spent more time with Jack, and Harry resented it. But an infant, especially a sickly one, needed so much time and care. And there was the household to manage, Andrew to look after, and Clara, too. She had become a young woman: she had so many questions, and no one else to look to for answers.
