1999 - Ladysmith (18 page)

There was no sign of the oilskin wrapper of his own packet, only its paper contents. These were slightly bloodstained, suggesting the boy had been shot, but it was possible—he studied the brown-red smears as if they were ancient texts—that this had rubbed off from one of the other letters. These included much earlier despatches of his own, as well as ones from Steevens and MacDonald. All were shuffled up together, according to Major Mott (who was furious), having clearly been read carefully from the point of view of intelligence as well as that of sport. Letters were returned to their senders, causing great irritation and distress. When, on top of this, news of Colenso and the other defeats of Black Week filtered through, along with the story of Buller’s heliograph signal (which General White, to his credit, ignored), the morale of the beleaguered town declined still further.

But it was the fate of his runner that was Nevinson’s main concern. Standing there in the night air, he grimaced at the memory of the boy’s angular face, and felt an overwhelming sadness. Now he would have the unpleasant task of selecting another victim to sacrifice on the altar of journalism. He had spent the day interviewing soldiers, and many of them had seemed disheartened too. Everybody was sick of siege. And dying of it as—hour by hour—the casualties mounted. Today he had seen a Dr Stark from Torquay lose a leg on the front porch of the Royal, spattering the steps horribly with blood: he had died on the operating table an hour later.

Tonight, as he stood in the moonlight outside the same place—its steps and veranda freshly mopped—he saw Mr Kiernan, the owner, come out; he had a haversack on his back, out of which poked a long brass telescope. Kiernan gave him a dark look as he passed, and Nevinson wondered where he was off to. There was a founder’s-day party that night for the Carbineers—he had already seen Grimble go in—and he thought the hotelier would have been busy.

He sat down on a low wall opposite the Royal. Save for the chatter from the dining room, the flutter of bats’ wings, and the occasional stamp of a horse’s hoof, the town was quiet that night. There had been no shelling. In the middle of the deserted street he could just make out the dark little islands of horse dung that were now everywhere in Ladysmith. There was simply not enough room in the town for so much livestock. The numbers encouraged disease—the incidence of enteric was increasing daily. Steevens, who was no better, was at least now keeping to his bed. If he grew any worse they would have to get a nurse for him, or send him to the hospital.

One of the main causes of enteric was the animal waste that had tainted the town’s water supply. This and the dire lack of forage led Nevinson to expect that many of the animals would be slaughtered if the siege lasted much longer. There was talk of horseflesh becoming the main source of meat. Where, he wondered, had the Carbineers got the means of their feast? Decent food was becoming impossible to lay hold of.

He looked up at the sky. Every now and then he could see the flash of the night signal, which Major Mott had engineered to shine on the clouds by means of a searchlight and a Venetian blind. The message went out and then the reply would come back, calling ‘Ladysmith’ three times in plain Morse, and then going into cipher before ending ‘Buller, Maritzburg’.

But the Major was not the only man to have been organizing signalling in recent weeks. There was some suspicion the Boers might have been sending the day signal as a decoy (three copies of a cipher had been lost at Dundee). Furthermore, one of the mountain battery was to be hanged tomorrow for signalling to the enemy, and a Cape Coloured muleteer had been shot by a sentry in the very act of sending details of British movements. Others had been suspected of signalling from lighted windows at night. Several of these traitors had already been hanged or shot, but some had slipped the net. A man named Oscar Meyer, known to have Boer sympathies, had hidden in Ladysmith for three whole weeks. Realizing the hunt for him was likely to be successful at some point, he had stolen a horse and saddle and tricked a sentry at the furthest outpost by wearing a helmet wound with the blue and white puggaree of the Guides. Employing some melodramatic business involving the search for a non-existent pass, he had suddenly spurred his horse at full speed towards the Boer lines across the veld.

The lookout for spies had its nastier side. Every day, another ‘shady character’ was arrested in the town. Nevinson suspected that many of these Russians, French and Germans were entirely innocent. Together with the Dutch prisoners proper, they were being kept in the compound of the Dopper Church. Surrounded by a wire fence, it was a curious place these days, full of a cosmopolitan crowd of European faces. Whenever Boer prisoners were brought in, the Africans in the town would shout
Upi pass? Upi pass?
at them—“Where’s your pass? Where’s your pass?”—mocking them with the same question that the Boer authorities habitually put to natives working in the mines.

Up in the hills, Nevinson could see the watch fires of the Boer camps. To his left, suspended in the sky, was the dark shape of one of the British observation balloons, from which the fan of a searchlight intermittently swept across the outer defences. He felt sorry for the fellows who had to spend the night in it, always running the risk that the Boers would take a pot-shot at them, although the balloons had so far proved out of range. His gaze followed the dim outline of the mooring rope down to its anchor point, and then along the kerb until he was looking at the frontage of the Royal Hotel again, its dining-room window displaying the tableau of a mighty army at play: the Carbineers’ party. He saw Mr Grimble standing in front of a tureen, ladling—if he was not mistaken—pears in red wine into bowls. Evidently this was such a special treat that the fruit-grower had insisted on serving his fellow officers himself. Where had those buggers got wine from?

The soaked fruit made Nevinson think of wounds: the doctor from Torquay who had suffered on this very stoep. He raised his eyes from the scene, and looked up and down the calm and innocent facade of the hotel, one golden square after another; he looked—and saw in the tableau death, only death.

B
ella rubbed the pane with a soapy cloth. The gable end of the hotel, the other side from where she was, had received a glancing blow from a shell during the bombardment that had killed Dr Stark yesterday. How horrible that had been: she had asked the Zulu woman to clean up the mess, not being able to face it herself. The damage incurred by the hotel was negligible, but dust and muck from the injured brickwork, blown through by the wind, had lodged in the corners of the window casements on the top floor. How, she wondered, had it got under the doors? It must have been the force of the blast. Father had said clean it, clean it all. But it stuck to the glass, smearing as she rubbed.

Now it was coming up to six o’clock and she was tired. She stopped for a moment and sighed, resenting the burden of the extra chores the siege had provoked. As if it wasn’t objectionable enough having hot lumps of iron pelted at you each day! She looked at the window, where the red brick dust had now dissolved in her soapy, greasy water and transformed itself into something with the consistency of paint. All she could see was her own reflection, distorted by the marks left by her cloth. She was at the top of the hotel now, having done all the other windows, and her back was aching from carrying the buckets. Not just up the stairs, either. The town’s waterworks having been destroyed, she had to bring water all the way from the river. She had remonstrated with Father about the foolishness of this, but he had been insistent.

This room, they called it the Star Room, was where Father kept his astronomy equipment. A great pile of the stuff—brass telescopes and compasses, charts rolled up and tied with purple ribbons, a globe—lay on a big desk to her left. On the right was a large clock, and next to it, on a smaller desk, the workings of two other clocks: gears and springs and faces with the hands missing. What a queer idea that was, she thought—faces with the hands missing! But pride of place, astronomically speaking at any rate, went to the painted description of the sky at night which covered the curved ceiling of the room, and gave it its name. They were all here—Betelgeuse, Saturn, the Pleiades, the cluster in the sword-handle of Perseus—and Father had taught Jane and her the names of each. The difficulty was, it was not a southern-hemisphere map and showed stars which, in the real night sky above Ladysmith, she could never see.

She looked down. On the smaller desk, next to the dismantled clocks, stood a photograph in a tin frame: their mother, dressed in black, holding little Bella in her arms, Father next to her. How many times she had tried to remember this moment, this single recorded moment of contact with Cathleen Kiernan, but all she could muster was a vague sense of absence. This made her feel guilty, even though she knew it was silly that she should feel guilty that her mother, two years after giving birth to her, should have died while being delivered of Jane. Strangely, little Bella looked older than two in the picture; but Father never elaborated on the subject of their mother, even though she and Jane had pressed him to do so.

Both of them believed that his recurrent black moods were on account of their mother’s death, which had taken place back in Ireland and which, along with the harshness of life there at that time, had led Leo Kiernan to bring his two young daughters out to South Africa. Of the rest of the family they knew little, except that their father once had a brother. He had died too, Father had said. Both the sisters wished he would be more forthcoming about that part of his life. It was hard for them to accept, when they thought about the past, that there was nothing there: but Father just kept silent when they asked him, or stood up and went into another room. Sometimes Bella wondered if there was a secret in the family.

She picked up the picture in its tin frame. Even when he was in his darkest moods, as he had been all this day, Bella felt sorry for Father. She was old enough to realize how hard it must have been for him to make the journey from Ireland, still more bring them up in these inhospitable environs. Well, mostly that had been done by a string of Zulu nannies. Now, whenever she thought of her mother, a black face came into Bella’s mind, rather than that of the woman whose frozen image she was holding in her hand. It was a composite black face, though, because the nannies—actually they called them ayahs, after the Indian fashion—always left after a while. Father drove them too hard. He was always shouting at them, not out of anger, as Bella saw it, but out of guilt. She could see this clear, how after sweating late into the night at the bar, he woke every morning to the soul-searching realization that his ‘two little darlin’s’, as he called them, had no mother. He was thought strange by the town for not remarrying, she had heard the conversations, but something else she saw clearly also: Father had loved Cathleen Kiernan, this…that distant figment, with all his heart. He just was not the sort of man to take another woman.

One result of the string of nannies was that both she and Jane spoke fluent Zulu, or ‘Kaffir’, as most of the townsfolk called it. This was actually quite useful. She had recently taken on a new maid and boy for the hotel. The pair, a mother and son, spoke only a little English. The previous servants, like many of the Africans and Indians, had fled or been sent out of the town when the siege began. Some of the bigger shops, which before had up to fifty natives on their books, now had only one or two.

But the Boers had lately begun forcing in upon them hundreds of native refugees from the north; as they were here, Bella had reasoned, the hotel might as well make use of one or two of them. Father had grumbled about the cost but had eventually agreed that Nandi and Wellington—as they were called—should join the staff for the duration of the siege; which, as everyone had thought, would only be a couple of weeks. After all, when the relief column had begun its march in earnest, it had only been twenty-five miles away. But now, she thought, we have been shut up for nearly a month. Food was running low. They were being issued with daily rations by the military commissariat—tooth-breaking biscuits, bully beef and other horrible stuff—and the hotel menu had become as regular a text as the Bible; they were lucky to have the vegetable garden to supplement it.

Father had been in a reasonably placid mood when he had agreed to take on their new employees. This was a relief, since he and Bella had had some bitter arguments in the weeks preceding the siege. She had wanted—still wanted now, as she dusted the glass cabinet in which his astronomy books were ranged—to go away and get some further schooling; and then, as she had explained to Jane, meet a different stamp of husband than those offered by the careful tradesmen and brawny pioneers of Ladysmith.

She had thought maybe the Cape, or even Britain. This last suggestion had met with her father’s extreme displeasure. His refusal even to countenance the possibility of such a move saddened her greatly. How she longed to go to London and see everything! Really, the isolation of this siege was just another wall around her. Some days, she felt like an egg waiting to be cracked.

Bella’s thoughts—half-formed, as idling as the Klip river—were interrupted by the unearthly moan of a shell. She looked out of the window, which was still emblazoned with roundels of scum from her efforts at cleaning it, and caught a glimpse of flame. Earlier in the day she had seen a man take the blast of a shell full in his back. There was a time when she would have run down to help him—point-lessly, since he had clearly been killed—but after a month of ceaseless bombardment she had learned to look on death and injury with disregard.

What a time it had been, since the first shell had fallen. At first, all shops and businesses, including the Royal, had closed, but within a day or two they were open again, each remaining so until its proprietors had nothing left to sell. The railway had stopped that day too, and many women and children had left on the last train to Pietermaritzburg. She and Jane had laid in a stock of provisions—biscuits, sugar, rice, mealie meal, tinned meat—enough for a few weeks. Father had then told them to go back and duplicate it, “in case we are shut in for a month or two.”