The Angels Weep (51 page)

Peering through the drifts of blue gunsmoke, Ralph slowly
traversed the gun from left to right, sweeping the pathway from
the mouth of the gorge to the stone cairn, and from the donga on
each side of him the repeating Winchesters added their thunder to
the din. The gunfire almost, but not quite, drowned out the
sounds from the valley below.

J
uba could not
keep pace with the younger women, nor with the racing children.
She lagged further and further behind, with Tungata urging her on
anxiously.

‘We will be too late, Grandmother. We must
hurry.’

Before they reached the gorge at the end of the valley, Juba
was wheezing and staggering, all her rolls of shining fat
wobbling at each heavy pace, and she was seeing patches of
darkness before her eyes.

‘I must rest,’ she panted, and sank down beside
the path. The stragglers streamed past her, laughing and joshing
her as they entered the gorge.

‘Ah, little Mother, do you want to climb up on my
back?’

Tungata waited beside her, hopping from one foot to the other,
wringing his hands with impatience.

‘Oh Grandmother, just a little farther—’

When at last the patches of darkness cleared from her vision,
she nodded at him, and he seized her hands and threw all the
weight of his tiny body into levering her upright.

Now, as Juba hobbled along the path, they were the very last
in the file, but they could hear the laughter and chanting far
ahead, magnified by the funnel of the gorge. Tungata ran forward,
and then drawn by his duty, skipped back to Juba’s hand
again.

‘Please, Grandmother – oh please!’

Twice more Juba was forced to stop. They were all alone now,
and the sunlight did not penetrate the depths of the narrow
gorge. It was shadowy and the cold coming up from the dashing
white waters chilled even Tungata’s high spirits.

The two of them came around the bend, and looked out between
the high granite portals into the open sunlit grassy bowl
beyond.

‘There they are!’ Tungata cried with relief.

The pathway through the yellow grassland was thick with
people, but, like a column of safari ants on the march that had
come against an impossible obstacle, the head of the line was
bunching and milling.

‘Hurry, Grandmother, we can catch up!’

Juba heaved her bulk upright and hobbled towards the welcoming
warm sunlight.

At that moment the air around her head began to flutter as
though a bird had been trapped within her skull. For a moment she
thought that it was a symptom of her exhaustion, but then she saw
the masses of human figures ahead of her begin to swirl and
tumble and boil like dust-motes in a whirlwind.

Although she had never heard it before, she had listened when
the warriors who had fought at Shangani and the Bembesi crossing
described the little three-legged guns that chattered like old
women. Armed suddenly by reserves of strength that she never
believed she possessed, Juba seized Tungata and blundered back up
the gorge like a great cow elephant in flight.

R
alph
Ballantyne sat on the edge of his camp cot. There was a lighted
candle set in its own wax on the upturned tea-chest that served
as a table, and a half-filled whisky bottle and enamel mug beside
it.

Ralph frowned at the open page of his journal, trying to focus
in the flickering yellow candlelight. He was drunk. The bottle
had been full half an hour before. He picked up the mug and
drained it, set it down and poured from the bottle again. A few
drops spilled onto the empty page of his journal. He wiped them
away with his thumb and studied the wet mark it left with a
drunkard’s ponderous concentration. He shook his head, to
try and clear it, then he picked up his pen, dipped it and
carefully wiped off the excess ink from the nib.

He wrote laboriously and where the ink touched the wetness
left by the spilled whisky, it spread in a soft blue fan shape on
the paper. That annoyed him inordinately, and he flung the pen
down and deliberately filled the enamel mug to the brim. He drank
it, pausing twice for breath, and when the mug was empty, he held
it between his knees, with his head bowed over it.

After a long time, and with an obvious effort, he lifted his
head again, and re-read what he had written, his lips forming the
words, like a schoolboy with his first reader.

‘War makes monsters of us all.’

He reached for the bottle again, but knocked it on its side
and the golden brown spirit glugged into a puddle on the lid of
the tea-chest. He fell back on the cot and closed his eyes, his
legs dangling to the floor and one arm thrown over his face
protectively.

Elizabeth had put the boys to bed in the wagon, and crawled
into the cot below theirs, careful not to disturb her own mother.
Ralph had not eaten dinner with the family, and he had sent
Jonathan back with a rough word when he had gone across to the
tent to fetch his father to the meal.

Elizabeth lay on her side under the woollen blanket, and her
eye was level with the laced-up opening in the canvas hood, so
she could see out. The candle was still burning in Ralph’s
tent, but, in the corner of the laager, the tent that Harry and
Vicky shared had been in darkness for an hour. She closed her
eyes and tried to force herself to sleep, but she was so restless
that beside her Robyn St John sighed petulantly and rolled over.
Elizabeth opened her eyes again and peered surreptitiously
through the canvas slit. The candle was still burning in
Ralph’s tent.

Gently she eased herself out from under the blanket, watching
her mother the while. She picked up her shawl from the lid of the
chest, and clambered silently down to the ground.

With the shawl about her shoulders, she sat on the disselboom
of the wagon. There was still only a sheet of canvas between her
and where her mother lay. She could clearly hear the rhythm of
Robyn’s breathing. She judged when she sank deeply below
the level of consciousness, for her breathing made a soft glottal
rattle in the back of her throat.

The night was warm, and the laager almost silent; a puppy
yapped unhappily from the far end, and closer at hand a
baby’s hungry wail was swiftly gagged by a mother’s
teat. Two of the sentries met at the nearest corner of the
laager, and their voices murmured for a while. Then they parted
and she saw the silhouette of a slouch hat against the night sky
as one of them passed close to where she sat.

The candle still burned in the tent, and it must be past
midnight by now. The flame drew her as though she were a moth.
She rose and crossed to the tent. Silently, almost furtively. She
lifted the flap and slipped in, letting it drop closed behind
her.

Ralph lay on his back on the steel cot, his booted feet
dangled to the ground, and one arm covered his face. He was
making an unhappy little whimpering sound in his sleep. The
candle was guttering, burned down into a puddle of its own molten
wax, and the smell of spilled whisky was sharp and pungent.
Elizabeth crossed to the tea-chest, and set the fallen bottle
upright. Then the open page of the journal caught her attention,
and she read the big uneven scrawl: ‘War makes monsters of
us all.’

It gave her a pang of pity so sharp that she closed the
leatherbound journal quickly, and looked at the man who had
written that agonized heart-cry. She wanted to reach across and
touch his unshaven cheek, but instead she hitched her nightdress
in a businesslike fashion and squatted beside the cot. She undid
the straps of his riding-boots, and then, taking them one at a
time between her knees, she pulled them off his feet. Ralph
muttered and flung the arm off his face, rolling away from the
candlelight. Gently Elizabeth lifted his legs and swung them up
onto the cot. He groaned and curled into a foetal position.

‘Big baby,’ she whispered, and smiled to herself.
Then she could resist no longer and she stroked the thick dark
lock of hair off his forehead. His skin was fever-hot, moist with
sweat, and she laid her palm against his cheek. His dark new
beard was stiff and harsh, the feel of it sent electric prickles
shooting up her arm. She pulled her hand away, and, once more
businesslike, unfolded the blanket from the foot of the cot and
drew it up over his body.

She leaned over him to settle it under his chin, but he rolled
over again and before she could jump back, one hard muscular arm
wrapped over her shoulder. She lost her balance and fell against
his chest, and the arm pinned her helplessly.

She lay very still, her heart pounding wildly. After a minute
the grip of his arm relaxed, and gently she tried to free
herself. At her first movement, the arm locked about her, with
such savage strength that her breath was driven from her lungs
with a gasp.

Ralph mumbled, and brought his other hand over, and she
convulsed with shock as it settled high up on the back of her
thigh. She dared not move. She knew she could not break the grip
of his restraining arm. She had never expected him to be so
powerful, she felt as helpless as an unweaned infant, totally in
his power. She felt the hand behind her begin to fumble and grope
upwards – and then she sensed the moment when he became
conscious.

The hand slid up to the nape of her neck, and her head was
pulled forward with a gentle but irresistible force until she
felt the heat and the wetness of his mouth spread over hers. He
tasted of whisky and something else, a yeasty musky man taste,
and without her volition, her own lips melted and spread to meet
his.

Her senses spun like wheels of flame behind her closed
eyelids, the sensations were so tumultuous, that for long moments
she did not realize that he had swept her nightdress up to the
level of her shoulder-blades, and now his fingers, hard as bone,
and hot as fire, ran in a long slow caress down the cleft of her
naked buttocks and then settled into the soft curve where they
joined her thighs. It galvanized her.

Her breath sobbed in her throat, and she struggled to be free,
to escape from the torture of her own wild wanting, of her cruel
need for him, and from his skilful insistent fingers. He held her
easily, his mouth against the soft of her throat, and his voice
was hoarse and rough.

‘Cathy!’ he said. ‘My Katie! I missed you
so!’

Elizabeth stopped struggling. She lay against him like a dead
woman. No longer fighting, no longer even breathing.

‘Katie!’ His hands were desperate to find her, but
she was dead, dead.

He was fully awake now. His hands left Elizabeth’s body
and came up to her face. He cupped her head in his hands, and
lifted it. He looked at her uncomprehendingly for a long moment,
and then she saw the green change in his eyes.

‘Not Cathy!’ he whispered.

She opened his fingers gently and stood up beside the cot.

‘Not Cathy,’ she said softly. ‘Cathy has
gone, Ralph.’

She stooped over the guttering candle, cupped one hand behind
it, and blew it out. Then she stood upright again in the sudden
total darkness. She unfastened the bodice of her nightdress,
shrugged it over her shoulders and let it fall around her ankles.
She stepped out of it and lay down on the cot beside Ralph. She
took his unresisting hand and replaced it where it had been
before.

‘Not Cathy,’ she whispered. ‘Tonight
it’s Elizabeth. Tonight and for ever more.’ And she
placed her mouth over his.

When at last she felt him fill all the sad and lonely places
within her, her joy was so intense that it seemed to crush and
bruise her soul and she said: ‘I love you. I have always
loved you – I will always love you.’

J
ordan
Ballantyne stood beside his father on the platform of the Cape
Town railway station. They were both stiff and awkward in the
moment of parting.

‘Please don’t forget to give my,’ Jordan
hesitated over the choice of words, ‘my very warmest
regards to Louise.’

‘I am sure she will be pleased,’ said Zouga.
‘I have not seen her for so long—’ Zouga broke
off.

The separation from his wife had drawn out over the long
months of his trial in the Queen’s Bench Division of the
High Court before the Lord Chief Justice, Baron Pollock, Mr
Justice Hawkins, and a special jury. The Lord Chief Justice had
shepherded a reluctant jury towards the inevitable verdict.

‘I direct you that, in accordance with the evidence and
your answers to the specific questions I have put to you, you
ought to find a verdict of guilty against all the
defendants.’ And he had his way.

‘The sentence of the Court, therefore, is that as to you
Leander Starr Jameson, and as to you John Willoughby, that you be
confined for a period of fifteen months’ imprisonment
without hard labour. That you, Major Zouga Ballantyne, have three
months’ imprisonment without hard labour.’

Zouga had served four weeks of his sentence in Holloway, and
with the balance remitted, had been released to the dreadful news
that in Rhodesia the Matabele had risen and that Bulawayo was
under siege.

The voyage southwards down the Atlantic had been agonizing, he
had had no word of Louise, nor of King’s Lynn, and his
imagination conjured up horrors that were nourished by tales of
slaughter and mutilation. Only when the Union Castle mailboat had
docked that morning in Cape Town Harbour were his terrible
anxieties relieved.

‘She is safe in Bulawayo,’ Jordan had answered his
first question. Overcome with emotion, Zouga had embraced his
youngest son, repeating, ‘Thank God, oh thank God!’
over and over again.

They had lunched together in the dining-room of the Mount
Nelson Hotel and Jordan had given his father the latest
intelligence from the north.

‘Napier and the Siege Committee seem to have stabilized
the situation. They have got the survivors into Bulawayo, and
Grey and Selous and Ralph with their irregulars have given the
rebels a few bloody knocks to keep them at a wary distance.