Theirs Was The Kingdom (8 page)
Almost at once he had an opportunity of gauging the garrison’s chances of survival, for within minutes of his arrival at the summit of the terrace the Zulus advanced in waves against the mission house; once again he heard that unearthly humming sound that seemed to do duty for a battle cry so that the crackle of musketry seemed insignificant. Yet a surprising number of Zulus fell, the nearest less than fifty yards from the breastworks, and soon the survivors retired, falling back among the scrub and the station ovens that offered cover within close range of the buildings.
He was watching them gather there, massing for a renewed attack, when he became aware of a slight movement immediately below him, on a lower spur of the terrace; looking down, he saw a small group of Zulus armed with flintlocks preparing to snipe at the garrison from the elevation overlooking the buildings. Their presence alarmed him. From up here, notwithstanding the antiquity of the weapons they brandished, redcoats inside the compound were easy targets and some of them, manning the far wall, had their backs to the riflemen. He could not watch them for more than a moment, however, for soon, as the humming rose in pitch, his attention was riveted to the new assault: hundreds of leaping figures running directly on to the rifles of the garrison, and sometimes coming to grips with the defenders over the rampart of bags and boxes.
He could judge now the terrible inequality of the struggle. The redcoats, no more than a few dozen of them, were evenly spaced along the walls, whereas the Zulus seemed without number, and were reckless of life in their attempts to clamber over the obstructions and spill into the compound. Prodigies of valour were performed down there, the attackers reaching over the barriers and grasping at the jabbing bayonets with their bare hands. He saw Zulus using the dead as footholds and one warrior, erect on the barricade, grab a bayonet and wrench it from its socket before he was shot down at pointblank range.
The struggle seemed to go on a long time, half-obscured in trailers of smoke, the din rising as a continuous clamour; but then, once again, the Zulus fell back, and he saw a few wounded inside the compound being carried away to the mealie bag citadel adjoining the smaller kraal. He thought, wretchedly, “Next time they’ll do it… I’ll sit here and see every white man down there slaughtered… If the Zulus had the least sense they’d wait until dusk…”
He was wrong, however. Seemingly they did not possess that much patience, or were maddened by their losses, for soon a new attack developed, this time against the barricaded doors and windows of the hospital where the dead already lay one upon the other. The leading Zulus, now using their dead as shields, penetrated to the porch where they were mown down in dozens by the concentrated fire of the defenders. The sun was a red crescent on the ridge before the attack eased off, and he saw that someone inside the compound was organising a withdrawal from that section of the defences and attempting to concentrate the garrison into the smaller area behind the storehouse.
Then, with a soft puff, the hospital roof took fire from a flung torch and a line of violet and scarlet flame began to lick its way along the length of the reed thatch, the smoke rising in a great grey spiral. The glow of the flames cast a lurid light on the embattled rectangle, playing on the buttons, badges, and rifle barrels of the defenders and over behind the oven ditch, where the Zulus were rallying opposite the laagered waggons, on the blades of their assegais and the metal ornaments they wore.
The scene was so absorbing that he completely forgot his own involvement in it, only remembering it when he heard a scatter of shots from immediately below and isolating them in his mind from the sharp, decisive crack of the Martini-Henrys the defenders were using. The snipers he had seen there were at work, using the lull to pick off figures moving about in the compound or standing to at the breastworks. Three Borderers fell as he watched and were carried away by their comrades, but most of the shots went high, passing over the enclosure walls to raise little spurts of dust in the trampled ground beyond.
He had to make a decision then, whether to risk all in an attempt to extricate himself, crawl out of range, and start out for Helpmakaar with the news that the Zulus were this side of the river in force, or stay hidden above the mission house and witness the final overrunning of the defences and the massacre of every man in the garrison. For he could not see how the defenders could hope to hold on through the night and reasoned that if he left now he might manage to find his way down on to the plain in the last glimmer of daylight, making a wide sweep to avoid running into stray Zulus at the foot of the terraces.
He had almost decided to take this course when a fresh spatter of shots rang out from the rocks and one seemed to come from very close at hand. He pulled himself forward an inch or so and was just able to see the barrel of an antique sporting gun, of the kind Boer hunters must have used a generation ago. He is familiarity with firearms told him that up here, firing heavy slugs from a greatly depressed angle, the marksman had a fair chance of hitting someone and ought to be silenced if that was at all possible, notwithstanding the terrible risk of betraying his own position.
He drew back and began to work his way round the larger of the rock buttresses that screened him, moving with extreme caution and taking the greatest care not to dislodge small fragments of rock that would alert the sniper immediately below. Presently he could see him clearly, a warrior in his late forties or early fifties, with a red ostrich plume fixed to his headband and, cradled in his shoulder, a wide-barrelled sporting gun of the type hunters still used in the coastal belt above Durban. At that moment, yet another attack developed below, the tireless Zulus swarming out of cover and moving, in obedience to what looked like a concerted plan, on the hospital from which the sick and wounded were still being evacuated in the light of the flames. The renewed uproar gave him the cover he needed and he raised his revolver, steadying it against a small spur of rock and firing from a range of about twelve yards.
The bullet must have struck the sniper in the temple, killing him instantly. He uttered no sound and made no movement beyond a single convulsive jerk. His museum piece clattered down, alerting another man posted below, but the fellow, after a casual upward glance, turned back to watch the fight, so that Alex made up his mind to try and account for him while the attack lasted. He rose half upright in the rapidly fading light and worked his way round the vertical stone and between two rounded boulders, deliberately sealing his mind against the hellish uproar coming from the direction of the hospital, where the Zulus had at last made a lodgement and were scrambling through the shattered door and windows.
It was fortunate that the sniper’s attention was riveted on the battle. Had it not been, he must have heard movement among the loose shale on his immediate right. As it was, he rose excitedly to his knees when a shower of soaring sparks rose as a result of the storming party’s rampage through the hospital, and Alex was able to shoot him at leisure, the impact of the bullet pitching him forward and over the flat stone he was using as an elbow rest. He went on down, head over heels, for twenty yards or more before his body became lodged in a crevice, and as he fell two other snipers rose out from the line of rocks below and began to scramble down to the barricade, evidently satisfied that the post was now enveloped and on the point of falling.
He loosed off two random shots at them but almost certainly missed, for by now his attention was deflected by the garrison’s unhurried withdrawal behind the reserve defences bisecting the compound, and by the maddened rush of the Zulus from the western door of the burning building into the open ground beyond. Here they were cut down in swathes and only a few reached the line of biscuit boxes before the attack faltered and shredded away. In less than five minutes from the tumble of the second sniper, the space between the small kraal and the blazing hospital was empty of living Zulus, apart from the odd one or two who were trying to drag themselves out of range.
It was astounding, he thought, that the post had not been overrun. Whoever was directing its defence down there must have possessed iron nerve and a great deal of imagination, for the garrison was now firing from behind stone walls, and for the first time since he had looked down on the scene Alex had hopes that the place would hold out until Chelmsford’s main column could return via Isandlwana to its relief. He took refuge, meantime, on the little shelf of rock where the dead sniper lay, reflecting that here was the first man he had knowingly killed, but feeling no pride in the achievement. The fellow was grey-polled, wrinkled, and scrawny, a great contrast to the young giants who had run beside the fugitives all the way to the Buffalo River. And as he crouched there, looking at the small, round hole made by his bullet, he remembered a friendly Boer’s parting quip as they shook hands, preparatory to his departure from Helpmakaar with his squadron of the N.N.C. He had said, in his guttural English, “So, my young friend, you’re off to kill a Zulu. How old are you? Eighteen? I killed my first when I was thirteen and out with Retief.”
To kill a Zulu. This, then, was war—not as he had imagined it, turning the leaves of the illustrated magazines his father introduced into the house, not even as it was portrayed by men like Henty, who had actually served in wars and should have known better—but real war, where it was a straight choice of kill or be killed, and in response to a curious impulse, he turned the man on his back, closed his eyes, and loosely folded his arms.
Down below all was relatively quiet. The hospital roof still glowed red and clouds of heavy smoke, caught in the night breeze, rolled towards the river where it could not obscure the garrison’s aim. He had a feeling of near certainty now that he had witnessed the final attack and that all the Europeans who had survived down there would live to boast about their part in an epic. For it was an epic, of a kind that far surpassed anything he had ever read about battles; a few score men, responding to discipline and years of routine training, holding off a mob of gallant savages throughout hours of unremitting pressure, fighting calmly and steadily in the light of a burning building and inflicting losses, he would guess, at a ratio of about ten to one in the process. He thought about that for a moment, relating it to his own childish resolve to follow the career of a soldier, and found that it fused, despite the pity he felt for the ageing Zulu beside him. To become equipped for a performance of that nature; to stand there without losing one’s head or taking to one’s heels, and fight it out against odds. He thought again of Melville and Cogshill, sitting back to back without hope but without fear either, and then of the tall sergeant at Isandlwana, aiming and firing from the eminence of the waggon. Training, inducing that kind of pride and that kind of coolness, was everything and you never heard much about it. The emphasis was always on flags and drums and horses.
A terrible drowsiness stole upon him and he crawled deep into the recess behind the ledge, spreading his legs, propping his back against the cool surface of the rock, and pointing his revolver at the oval aperture lit by a rosy glow. And suddenly, without knowing it, he was asleep.
Three
1
T
HE PADDOCK OAK CAME CRACKING DOWN A FEW MINUTES BEFORE FIVE, THE rending, whickering
snack
of heavy timber rocketing her from sleep much shallower than the sleep she took for granted when he was beside her and her fears and frustrations were subject to his jocular analysis.
Whenever he was absent for more than a few days, however, submerged worries, no more than vaguely bothersome by day, would rise to the surface of her mind when she was lying in what seemed to her—in his absence—about an acre of bed.
Then, as now, sleep would either evade her altogether or she would drift into a series of muddled dreams, rising at odds with herself so that the business of the day would tend to clog, reminding her of her wifely inadequacies in the very earliest days of their marriage when she had no clear idea at all how to run a place like Tryst or hold her own with a pack of quarrelsome servants.
Her current disquiet was uncharacteristic of the mature Henrietta Swann. In the last few years she had adjusted to the uneven rhythm of her life and even when hedged about with a variety of problems had been able to enjoy long periods of tranquillity in the midst of a domestic turmoil that less experienced women would have mistaken for anarchy.
Sometimes she let him persuade her to allow house and family to take care of themselves and accompany him on one of his periodical migrations that took her as far north as Edinburgh and as far west as Plymouth, and when this happened she saw herself as the wife of a prosperous sea captain, with business in every corner of the world, so that her “shore” problems seemed trivial and remote. She had not accompanied him on his latest odyssey, however, and the weeks following the Colonel’s death were unlike any she could recall, if one excepted that awful interval following the Staplehurst rail crash, before absorption in his business had proved such a splendid antidote for fear and loneliness.
Her mood was linked, she supposed, to the old Colonel’s elimination from the family circle, to the sour knowledge, whenever she wandered into his former quarters, that everything was in its place but he—the quiet, watchful, ever-tolerant presence—for so long attuned to her doubts and misgivings whenever she was thrown on her own resources. She told herself, repeatedly, that it was high time she adjusted to his death and to the absence of Stella and Alexander, reminding herself that, with George and Giles away at school, she still had more than enough to supervise, with the three younger children, a fifteen-month-old baby, a house of nearly fifty rooms, and a staff of eight, three of them less than half-trained.
Reassurances, although well enough in daylight, brought no more than marginal peace of mind by night, especially as she was passing through one of her sleepless spells that was due, she decided, to the abominable weather they had been having since the snowfalls of late January and early February.
The head gardener told her it was seasonable and perhaps it was: sleet showers that lashed the mullioned windows, and a string of southwesterlies that stormed into the hollow like a stampede of wild horses and set everything billowing and rattling, until they threatened to strip pantiles from beams where they had rested for three centuries and send the sugarloaf chimneys tumbling over the eaves and down into the forecourt.
At the height of such a commotion it was like living on a ship, for up here the entire structure creaked and groaned and stirred and whispered, as though it shared her lifelong detestation for wind and would have welcomed a thunderstorm that neither she nor Tryst minded in the least.
The wind had been particularly tiresome tonight, one of the last nights of winter she supposed, for she always assumed spring was on the doorstep when the hateful month of February was out. Outside, where the double avenue of copper beeches divided the paddocks and ran down to Twyforde Lane, the gale was baulked by rising ground so that having arrived there in such a prodigious hurry it recoiled, not knowing how to circumvent the obstacle, roaring all the way round the house and finally doubling back on the triangular cleft in which Tryst stood under the tall, wooded spur. And here, wretchedly indecisive, it would eddy about restlessly and menacingly, as though searching out an unsuspecting victim, finding none and hurling itself at the chimneys or mounting a fresh assault on the bluff.
She heard the grandfather clock on the landing strike two and then the half-hour, after which she abandoned all attempts to sleep and sat up, slipping into the quilted bedgown Adam had brought her from Paisley and lighting the bedtable lamp that needed trimming and smelled abominably but offered some kind of anchorage in this tempest of sound. Then, soothed to some extent by the familiarity of the room, she set about marshalling the identifiable sources of her unease, arranging them in order of precedence as she had once approached the complexities of his leaderless waggon service during the sombre winter of ’65 and ’66.
The most obvious of them, of course, was concerned with Alex, who might or might not have been involved in that shameful battle at a place with an unpronounceable name, “
I-say”
or
“E-saw”
something, a word that ended, she recalled, in a whistling syllable, like
“woona”
or
“wanna.”
There had been a great deal about it in the papers more than a fortnight ago and even Adam, whose involvement with Imperial affairs was always superficial, had seemed disturbed, muttering that Chelmsford, the general the papers seemed to hold responsible, was no better than the old fossils who had bungled the Crimean campaign and the events that resulted in the Sepoy Mutiny. “The chap they need out there is Roberts,” he told her, grumpily, but she remembered then that the Indian general had been a classmate and war comrade of his before he left the army, and therefore assumed this to be prejudice on his part. It did seem, however, that something was amiss in Zululand, where a few thousand savages were said to have won a decisive victory over half as many Europeans. She had been an attentive reader of war despatches since girlhood and could never recall this happening before. It was always the other way round. As to Alex, Adam had assured her she had no need to worry on his score. Had he been killed or even wounded, they would have been informed before casualty lists were telegraphed to the War Office and printed in
The Times.
There was provision for this kind of thing nowadays, he told her, far more than had existed in his day, when upwards of a year could elapse before people at home were notified that a son or a husband had died in some footling skirmish in a jungle or river bottom. He despatched a wire to his Capetown agents, however, and asked them to make enquiries concerning volunteer officers of the Natal Native Contingents, and after that, or so it seemed to her, Adam had forgotten Alex in the flurry that attended the opening of his Irish branch, a circumstance that whisked him away to Dublin more than a week ago.
She continued to dream about Alex, however, seeing him dishevelled and distraught, as he poked aimlessly about a great, treeless plain, and whenever she came downstairs after one of these unsettling dreams she would enquire sharply if there had been any post other than business mail and would be glum and tetchy when Stillman, the Colonel’s old batman who did duty for butler at Tryst, said there was not.
Thus, getting on for three weeks after the news of Lord Chelmsford’s defeat (the newspapers referred to it as “poor Durnford’s disaster”) her eldest son qualified as the first of her worries, but those of the eldest daughter were also clamouring for priority, particularly since she had talked with her at the Colonel’s funeral tea.
Clearly all was not well over at Courtlands. Any mother with half an eye could see that, but it was quite another thing to run down the cause or causes of Stella’s lacklustre expression, her reluctance to communicate, and her overall listlessness, for these might stem from a variety of reasons, anything from a clumsy husband’s bridal-bed fumblings to his father’s debts, or possibly the desire of an inexperienced girl to bring some kind of order into that place of theirs across the county border.
She wished then, and with all her heart, that she had insisted on a much longer engagement, if only to give her time to assess Lester as a husband, and the Moncton-Prices as a family. She wished also that she had been more specific with Stella in the one wary discussion they had had on the subject of marriage, for it seemed to her, in retrospect, that she had done the girl an injustice by not giving her the benefit of her own experiences of twenty years ago, when she had married at approximately Stella’s age.
At this distance it was difficult to recollect the gist of such advice as she had given her. Something along the lines of keeping a sense of proportion, she fancied, a hint or two that most people talked a great deal of nonsense about sharing a bed with a man and having babies and that, once one adjusted to it, it could be both rewarding and amusing. She had to admit, however, that these hints had not had much effect on the girl, who really could be extraordinarily stupid concerning everything outside fashions and horseflesh. They said she had a wonderful seat on a horse but that was no qualification for marriage. Or was it, if one was marrying into a horsey family like the Moncton-Prices? It was all very frustrating, this lack of news about Alex, and this fog of uncertainty surrounding Stella and that dandified husband of hers. And then, as if all this was not enough, there was Giles’s cough and Giles’s martyred expression when the Christmas holidays ended and he was packing his boxes for school.
Giles had gone to Mellingham as a matter of course. No one, least of all Giles himself, had questioned the wisdom of sending a very sensitive child of thirteen to a Spartan establishment that catered, she was told, for embryo soldiers. Alex had been happy there and so, it seemed, was George, but then Alex had more or less set his mind on soldiering whereas George, confound the boy, would be happy upside down in a barrel of treacle and had learned the trick of infecting everybody around him with his own high spirits before he was three. Giles was not remotely like either of them, lacking Alexander’s heavy predictability and George’s gaiety and ebullience; Giles had always seemed to her to live a private, self-contained life, thinking his own thoughts, making his own judgements, drawing on reserves of wisdom, distinctions that set him apart as a kind of pocket soothsayer so that it was very difficult to treat him as a child in need of a child’s protection.
She was aware, of course, of the reason for this. It was not Giles’s gravity or the sense of stillness that set him apart in her mind, but the memory that he had, as it were, registered himself as an adult before he was born, for she had been carrying him through all those wretched months when Adam was dead to her, and later when he was learning to walk again in that Swiss hospital across the sea.
In those days the child in her womb had been a source of enormous comfort to her, a part of Adam left behind to sustain her; but this, of course, she had later come to regard as pure fancy. It was daunting, over the years, to watch fancy resolve itself into fact.
She made a decision then and it helped to settle her mind. The moment he returned she would consult Adam about finding Giles a smaller, less prestigious school, where they would foster his individuality instead of trying to mould him to a pattern. She would also consult Doctor Birtles about that cough of his, for what the boy needed was bracing, upland air which he was unlikely to find in Berkshire.
She was getting her bothersome problems into some kind of order now. Alex and Stella were old enough to look to themselves. Giles should have her championship the moment Adam returned. And as soon as it was light she would address herself to the minor irritations—that new girl’s dreadful memory concerning the weekly laundry cycle, the increasing slovenliness of Stillman now that the Colonel was not there to keep him up to his duty, young Hugo’s habit of talking with his mouth full, the frequent squabbles of Joanna and Helen over the ownership of hair ribbons and the like; the small change, she supposed, of any woman with a growing family, a husband who spent most of his time out of reach, and a house the size and age of Tryst. The landing clock struck half past three. She turned down the lamp, wriggled lower in the bed, and slept.
But then, as though circumstances were sworn to deny her a night’s rest, the paddock oak came crashing down fifty yards from her window, and the uproar brought her bounding out of bed and peering into the windy darkness, half expecting to hear the house erupt behind her and see Stillman or Phoebe Fraser, the governess, light the downstairs lamps and run out to discover what was amiss.