The Covenant (80 page)

“Indeed, indeed,” Hilary said, twisting his long, thin legs in knots as he tried unsuccessfully to make his point. “What I mean is, the abolition must be done without infuriating the white. Otherwise we’ve accomplished nothing.”

“With a stroke of the pen we accomplish everything,” Keer said, his voice assuming the messianic glory he adopted when addressing church groups.

Hilary, twisting his legs into even tighter knots, began to laugh. “Peter, you’ve never known a Boer, and, Simon, you’ve forgotten. Let me tell you about my neighbor Tjaart van Doorn. Built square like a corncrib. No neck. Big whiskers down the side of his face. Wears a belt and suspenders, and shoes he makes himself. Controls maybe sixteen thousand acres and lives in a fort. How many slaves? Half a dozen?”

“What’s your point?”

“South Africa is filled with Tjaart van Doorns, and one day his white ox runs away. He goes after it, brings it back, and puts it to work. No punishment. No swearing. Two days later the ox runs off again. Again Tjaart goes after him. Same thing. I was there, baptizing a baby, and I saw him. Not a harsh word. So next day the white ox runs away a third time, and this time I go with Tjaart to help surround the beast, and when I get a rope around its neck, Tjaart comes up, blue in the face, and with a mighty roar he hits the ox between the eyes with a huge club. The ox drops dead, and Tjaart says to the fallen body, ‘By damn! That’ll teach you.’ ”

The two listeners said nothing, and before either could respond, Emma appeared with glasses of a drink she and Emily Saltwood had made: cold cider with honey and a dusting of cinnamon.

“Point I’m making, Peter, is that if the laws you pass goad the Boers, they’ll listen once and accept what they don’t like, and they’ll listen twice. But I assure you, if you come at them a third time, they’ll grab that club and bash you between the eyes.”

Very carefully Simon Keer delivered his next observation: “What it comes down to—it appears to me—are we ruling South Africa, or are the Boers, from whom we took the colony some years ago and whom we have cosseted outrageously?”

With equal calm Hilary said, “We did not take it from them. We took it from their supine government in Europe. They’re still there, every one of them, and increasing by the year.” Then he became urgent: “But more important are the Xhosa, the Pondo, the Tembu and the Fingo. They’ve always been there, and they always will. They’re also increasing, and we must act to keep everyone on balance.”

“Can this be done?” Sir Peter asked, and before there could be a reply to a question that permitted no reply, Emma came rushing across the lawn, and when she reached the oak trees she gasped, “Hilary! It’s Mrs. Saltwood. I think she’s dead.”

In the aftermath of the funeral Mrs. Lambton said, in the presence of the two Saltwood boys and their wives, “Hilary, get back to Africa. You should be forever ashamed of yourself. You killed your mother.”

“Now wait!” Sir Peter said.

“She sat with me day after day, weeping. Once she broke into wild laughter and said, ‘The fault’s all mine. I bought that black girl for him. Yes, I sent him the money and he bought himself a wife.’ ”

“Now, Mrs. Lambton,” Sir Peter interrupted, but she had scorn for him, too: “If you’d had any love for your mother, you’d have thrown this pair out—”

“Mrs. Lambton, just last week my mother told me that it was God’s providence that sent Hilary home, and not Richard. We didn’t want Hilary to come. We were embarrassed when he did. But as we lived with him—and these were my mother’s words …”

He broke down. All he could do was grasp his wife’s hand and nod to her, indicating that she must continue.

Lady Janice said, “There was a reconciliation. Among all of us.” She reached for Emma’s hand, welcoming her at last to Sentinels. But at the door Mrs. Lambton cried, “You killed your mother. Go back. Go back.”

It could never be determined who murdered the two missionaries. Before dawn one morning in 1828, when Hilary was only forty-three but looked sixty, distant herders saw fire at the hut, and when they reached it they found the two Saltwoods with their throats cut and all their possessions gone.

Fire consumed the place, so that gathering clues proved impossible. Speculation centered on six groups of suspects: Bushmen who liked to creep into such settlements and steal cattle, but none of the mission cattle were gone; Hottentots who rebelled against authority, but the local Hottentots loved the Saltwoods, who had no servants; Kaffirs who were quick with their assegais, but the Kaffirs in the area were mission hands who knew only peace; Boers who despised most missionaries, but the only Boers in the area lived sixty miles away and they rather liked Saltwood; Englishmen who hated the Saltwoods for besmirching the good reputation of the LMS through their miscegenation, but there were none in the area; and wandering Singhalese thieves off some ship, but the nearest harbor was seven hundred miles away. Perhaps society in the abstract had finished with them.

They had fallen victims to that terrible affliction which brings certain crucifixion: they took religion too seriously; they trusted Jesus Christ; they believed that the bright, soaring promises of the New Testament could be used as a basis for government; and they followed these precepts unfalteringly in the one part of the world where they would cause offense to three powerful groups of people: the old Boers, the new English, the timeless blacks.

In one of his most perceptive sermons Hilary had told his mission: “The perpetual problem of government remains, ‘Am I safe at night when I go to sleep?’ ” Like many others asleep in South Africa, he had not been safe.

It was an act of God, many alleged, that the three Saltwood children were absent when assassins struck. They were trekking in the Great Karroo with a Hottentot family, gathering ostrich plumes for sale in Paris. When they returned, their parents were already buried, and there was heated discussion as to what should happen to them.
Some said they should be freighted down to Grahamstown on the next wagon heading south, but word was received that they were not wanted there. So there was some talk of sending them along to LMS headquarters in Cape Town, but they already had a flood of Coloured orphans and abandoned children. It would be quite improper to ship them off to England, where their ancestry would damn them.

Put simply, there was no place for them. No one felt any responsibility for the offspring of what from the start had been a disastrous marriage. So the children were left with the Hottentots with whom they had hunted ostrich plumes.

For a few years they would be special, for the older ones could read and write, but as time passed and the necessity for marriage arrived, they would slide imperceptibly into that amorphous, undigestible mass of people called Coloured.

T
HE BOY
N
XUMALO
,
LIKE HIS DISTANT ANCESTOR
,
THE
N
XUMALO
who left the lake for Great Zimbabwe, had been reared to believe that what his chief said was law, no matter how contradictory or arbitrary. “If the chief speaks, you leap!” his father told him, and the boy extended this sensible rule to all who gave orders. He was born to obey and trained to do so instantly.

One bright, sunny day in 1799, when he was eleven, he learned the real meaning of obedience. It would be an especially bitter lesson, since it came about because his father, an energetic man who loved the bursting flowers of spring, felt such a surge of joy that he could not keep from whistling whenever he walked through the fields near the kraal.

The sound of Ndela’s happiness reached the ears of a suspicious woman who had concealed herself next to the footpath. A gnarled hunchback, she was the most powerful diviner in the region, a woman who held in her hands the balance of good and evil, of life and death. Now satisfaction spread across her face, for the spirits who lived in darkness had finally given her a sign. “Ndela whistled!” she cackled to herself. “Ndela whistled!” At last she knew why sickness lay like a cloak of winter mist over the herds of the Sixolobo. She was ready to act.

That afternoon the entire Sixolobo clan was summoned to the chief’s place and the exciting word was passed: “The diviner is going to smell out the wizard who has infected our cattle.”

Ndela arrived with no reason to suspect that he might be connected with the sick animals, but even so, when the divination began he behaved with his usual circumspection, because there was always the possibility that it was in his body that the evil forces hid without his knowing it.

A divination was a fearful experience. The old woman’s body was smeared with a loathsome mixture of animal fats; her arms and parts of her face were streaked with a whitish clay; her hair was rubbed with red powder; and about her neck hung strings of roots and bones. Animal bladders dangled from her waist and in her hand she carried a weapon of dreadful power: a switch of wildebeest tail. About her shoulders, obscuring her hump, was draped a cloak of black material, while strips of animal skin were fastened to various parts of her body.

“I bring words, my people,” she intoned in solemn accents. “I have dreamed these many nights and I have seen the evil that attacks our cattle. I have walked in darkness and Lord-of-the-Sky has made all things known.”

She began to dance, her bare feet slapping the earth, and when her pace had increased to leaps and bounds, the onlookers sang to give her encouragement, for they knew that she was reaching out for the spirits of the clan’s ancestors. There was not one in the audience who doubted a life after death; they were all convinced that spirits who had gained more than the normal wisdom of the earth guided the destinies of the clan through the being of the diviner. Words that fell from her mouth were not hers, but the wishes and judgments of their forebears; they must be obeyed.

Suddenly she stopped dancing to take from a gourd at her side a pinch of snuff. When this caused a paroxysm of sneezing, the onlookers applauded, for they knew that spirits of the dead dwelt deep within the body of the living, and any tempestuous sneeze released their powers. Now came a hysterical screech of laughter, following which the diviner slowly and dramatically sank to the earth. Squatting, she took the cloak from her shoulders and placed it over her knees so that it cast a shadow before her. Opening a skin bag, she exhaled into it a pungent odor of the herbs she had been chewing and then removed from it the charms which would encourage the
spirits to identify the contaminating wizard. For each item she laid before her she chanted words of praise:

With a flourish she threw the items on the ground in front of her, swaying above them. Keeping her head downcast for a long time, she muttered and moaned, then pointed with her left forefinger at one grisly treasure and another. All were silent, for the terrible moment was at hand. Finally she rose and walked boldly toward the chief, and many gasped, for it seemed that she was about to accuse him.

“They have given me the answer, my Chief!”

“What did they show?”

“A great black beast with a hundred legs and a hundred eyes and the mightiest of horns. And it was revered by my chief, for it was the fattest animal in the land, because in it dwelt all those that had gone before. But this great beast was grieved. At a time when your cattle are ailing, one of those men out there”—and here she pointed generally at the silent crowd—“one of them, at this time of sorrow, did not lament. One of them was happy that the animals are sick.”

“Who was that one, Mother-with-Eyes-That-See-Everything?”

“The one who sings like a bird has brought this evil.”

When the diviner had said these fatal words, Nxumalo remembered immediately that his father sometimes “sang like a bird” with his whistling, and he had a terrifying premonition that Ndela might be the man carrying the evil spirit that caused the cattle sickness. He watched with horror as the diviner began to stalk among the people, her wildebeest switch dangling loosely at her side. Whenever her eyes met those of another, the one under scrutiny would shake with fear, then breathe again as she passed on.

But when she reached Ndela, the whistler, she leaped high in the air, screaming and gesticulating, and when she came down, the switch was pointing directly at him. “Him!” she shrieked. “The happy one! The ravager of cattle!”

A cry rose from the crowd, and those nearest Ndela moved away. The great hump beneath the animal skins on the diviner’s back was accented as she twisted about to address the chief: “Here is the wizard, the one who has brought the evil.”

Briefly the chief consulted with his councillors, and when they nodded, four warriors seized Ndela and dragged him forward. “Did you whistle?” the chief asked.