Traitors Gate (24 page)

“Have you ever met Lobengula?” she asked curiously.

He laughed, looking up quickly. “Yes … I have. He’s an enormous man, nearly twenty-two stones in weight, and over six feet tall. He wears nothing except a Zulu ring ’round his head and a small loincloth.”

“Good heavens! Really? So big?” She regarded him closely to see if he was joking, although she knew almost certainly he was not.

His smile was steady, but his eyes were full of laughter. “The Ndebele are not a building people like the Shona, who created the city of Zimbabwe. They live by cattle raising and raiding, and making only villages of grass huts covered with dung….”

“I know the sort,” she said quickly, and memory returned so she could almost smell the dry heat in spite of the rushing
and slapping of water all around her and the bright reflections dancing in her eyes.

“Of course you do,” he apologized. “Forgive me. It is so rare a treat for me to be able to speak with someone who needs no explanation or word pictures to imagine what I’m describing. Lobengula holds a very formal court. Anyone seeking audience with him has to approach him crawling on hands and knees—and remain so throughout.” He pulled a face. “It can be a very hot and exhausting experience, and not necessarily with any pleasure or profit at the end. He can neither read nor write, but he has a prodigious memory … for all the good that will do him dealing with Europe, poor devil.”

She waited in silence. Kreisler was lost in thoughts of his own and she was content to allow it. She had no sense of being excluded; it was perfectly companionable. The light, the sound of the water, the wharves and warehouses of the Pool of London slipped by, and the shared dreams of the past in another land, the shared fears for its future as a different kind of darkness loomed over it.

“They duped him, of course,” he said after a while. “They promised they would bring no more than ten white men to work in his country.”

She sat upright suddenly, her eyes wide with disbelief.

“Yes.” He looked at her through his lashes. “Unbelievable to you or me, but he accepted it. They also said they would dig nowhere near towns, and that they and their people would abide by the laws of the Ndebele, and behave generally as Lobengula’s subjects.” The bitterness crept in only at the end.

“And the price?” she asked quietly.

“A hundred pounds a month, a thousand Martini-Henry breech-locking rifles and a hundred thousand rounds of ammunition, and a gunboat on the Zambezi.”

She said nothing. They were passing Wapping Old Stairs on their left as they sped downriver. The Pool of London was teeming with boats, barges, steamers, tugs, trawlers and
here and there the odd pleasure boat. Would the brown, jungle-crusted Congo ever be like this, teeming with civilization and the goods of the world to be bought and sold, and consumed by men and women who had never left their own counties or shires?

“Rudd set off at a gallop to take the news to Rhodes in Kimberley,” Kreisler went on, “before the king realized he had been cheated. The fool almost died of thirst in his eagerness to carry the news.” There was disgust in his voice, but the only emotion registered in his face was a deep and acutely personal pain. His lips were stiff with the intensity of it as if it resided with him all the time, and yet for all his leanness of body and the strength she knew was there, he looked vulnerable.

But it was a private pain. She was perhaps the only person with whom he had or could share the full nature of it and expect any degree of understanding, yet she knew not to intrude into intimacy. Part of the sharing was the delicacy of the silence between them.

They were past the Pool and the London Docks and leaving Limehouse. Still the wharves and stairs lined either side, massive warehouses with painted names above them. The West India Docks were ahead, and then Limehouse Reach and the Isle of Dogs. They had already passed the old pier stakes sticking above the receding water, where in the past pirates had been lashed till the incoming tide drowned them. They had both seen them, glanced at each other, and said nothing.

It was very comfortable not to have to search for speech. It was a luxury she was not used to. Almost everyone else she knew would have found the silence a lack. They would have been impelled to say something to break it. Kreisler was perfectly happy just to catch her eye now and then, and know that she too was busy with the wind, the smell of salt, the noise and bustle around them, and yet the feeling of being detached from it by the small space of water that
separated them from everyone else. They passed through it with impunity, seeing and yet uninvolved.

Greenwich was beautiful, the long green swell of ground rising from the river, the full leaf of the trees and the park beyond, the classical elegance of Vanburgh’s architecture in the hospital and the Royal Naval Schools behind.

They went ashore, rode in an open trap up to the park and then walked slowly side by side through the lawns and flowers and stood under the great trees listening to the wind moving gently in the branches. A huge magnolia was in full bloom, its tulip flowers a foam of white against the blue sky. Children chased each other and played with hoops and spinning tops and kites. Nursemaids in crisp uniforms walked, heads high, perambulators in front of them. Soldiers in scarlet tunics lounged around, watching the nursemaids. Lovers, young and less young, walked arm in arm. Girls flirted, swinging parasols and laughing. A dog capered around with a stick in its mouth. Somewhere a barrel organ was playing a musical tune.

They had afternoon tea, and talked of frivolous things, knowing that darker matters were always there, but understood; nothing needed explaining. The sadness and the fear had all been shared and for this warm, familiar afternoon it could be left beneath the surface of the mind.

In the sunset, with the moth-filled air cooling and the smell of earth and leaves rising from the pathway, they found the carriage which was to take them on the long ride back westwards. He handed her in, and they drove home with only an occasional word as the dusk deepened. The light flared in apricot and amber and turquoise over the river, making it look for a brief moment as if it could have been as magical as the lagoons of Venice, or the seaway of the Bosphorus, the meeting of Europe and Asia, instead of London, and the heart of the greatest empire since Caesar’s Rome.

Then the color faded to silver, the stars appeared to the
south, away from the stir and lamps of the city, and they moved a little closer together as the chill of darkness set in. She could not remember a sweeter day.

6

T
HE MONDAY AFTERWARDS
Nobby spent largely in her own garden. Of all the things she liked about England—and when she thought about it, there were really quite a few—its gardens gave her the greatest pleasure. There were frequent occasions when she loathed the climate, when the long, gray days of January and February depressed her and she ached for the African sun. The sleet seemed to creep between the folds of every conceivable garment designed against it. Icy water trickled down one’s neck, onto one’s wrists between glove and sleeve, no boots kept it all off the feet, skirt hems became sodden and filthy. Did the designers of gowns have the faintest idea what it was like to walk around carrying a dozen yards of wet fabric wrapped around one’s torso?

And there were days, sometimes even weeks, when fog obliterated the world, clinging, blinding fog which caught in the throat, muffled and distorted sounds, held the smoke and fumes of a hundred thousand chimneys in a shroud like a cold, wet cloth across the face.

There were disappointing days in the summer when one longed for warmth and brilliance, and yet it persistently rained, and the chill east wind came in off the sea, raising goose pimples on the flesh.

But there were also the days of glory when the sun shone in a perfect sky, great trees a hundred, two hundred feet
high soared into the air in a million rustling leaves, elms, whispering poplars, silver-stemmed birches and the great beeches she loved most of all.

The land was always green; the depth of summer or the bleakest winter did not parch or freeze it. And the abundance of flowers must surely be unique. She could have named a hundred varieties without having to resort to a book. Now as she stood in the afternoon sunlight looking down her long, shaven velvet lawn to the cedar, and the elms beyond, an Albertine rose in a wild profusion of sprays was spilling over the old stone wall, uncountable buds ready to open into a foam of coral and pink blossom. The spires of delphiniums rose in front of it, ready to bloom in royal and indigo, and bloodred peonies were fattening to flower. The may blossom perfumed the air, as did pink and purple lilac.

On a day like this the empire builders were welcome to Africa, India, the Pacific or the Spice Islands, or even the Indies.

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

She turned, startled out of her reverie. Her maid was standing looking at her with a surprised expression.

“Yes, Martha?”

“Please ma’am, there’s a Mrs. Chancellor ‘as called to see you. A Mrs. Linus Chancellor. She’s very …”

“Yes?”

“Oh, I think you’d better come, ma’am. Shall I say as you’ll receive her?”

Nobby contained her amusement, and not inconsiderable surprise. What on earth was Susannah Chancellor doing paying an afternoon call here? Nobby was hardly in her social or her political sphere.

“Certainly tell her so,” she replied. “And show her out onto the terrace.”

Martha bobbed something like half a curtsy and hurried with insufficient dignity back across the grass and up the steps to discharge her errand.

A moment later Susannah emerged from the French doors, by which time Nobby was coming up the shallow stone steps from the lawn, her skirt brushing against the urns with scarlet and vermilion nasturtiums spilling out of them, almost luminous in their brilliance.

Susannah was dressed very formally in white, trimmed with pale pink and a thread of carmine-shaded ribbon. White lace foamed at her throat and wrists and her parasol was trimmed with ribbon and a blush pink rose. She looked exquisite, and unhappy.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Chancellor,” Nobby said formally. This was an extremely formal time of the afternoon to call. “How very pleasant of you to come.”

“Good afternoon, Miss Gunne,” Susannah replied with less than her usual assurance. She looked beyond Nobby to the garden as if seeking someone else. “Have I interrupted you with … with other visitors?” She forced a smile.

“No, I am quite alone,” Nobby replied, wondering what so troubled the younger woman. “I was simply enjoying the perfect weather and thinking what a delight it is to have a garden.”

“Yes, isn’t it,” Susannah agreed, stepping farther across the terrace and starting down the steps to the lawn. “Yours is particularly beautiful. Would you think me discourteous to ask if you would show me ’round it? It is too much to take in at a glance. And it looks as if there is more of it yet, beyond that stone wall and the archway. Is that so?”

“Yes, I am very fortunate in its size,” Nobby agreed. “Of course I should be delighted to show you.” It was far too early to offer refreshment, and anyway that was not customary during the first hour of time appropriate for receiving. Although, of course, some fifteen minutes was all one stayed; it was also not done to walk around the garden, which would take half an hour at the very least.

Nobby was now quite concerned as to why Susannah had come. It was impossible to imagine it was a simple call for the usual social purposes. Leaving her card would have
been quite adequate, in fact the proper thing, since they were not in any real sense acquainted.

They walked very gently, Susannah stopping every few yards to admire something or other. Often she appeared not to know its name, simply to like its color, form, or its position complementing something else. They passed the gardener weeding around the antirrhinums and pulling a few long spears of grass from the mass of the blue salvia.

“Of course, as close to Westminster as we live,” Susannah went on, “we do not have room for a garden such as this. It is one of the things I most miss. We do go down to the country when my husband can arrange it, but that is not so very often. His position is most demanding.”