Men of Men (60 page)

He rolled up his sleeves and from the black wood-burning stove produced a flow of culinary phenomena – quenelles and soufflés, croques-en-bouche and meringues, sauces both
Hollandaise and Béarnaise – and while Salina hovered near him, eager to learn and help, he quoted to her the entire ‘In Memoriam’ of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from memory:

And she was utterly enchanted by his golden spell.

He showed the twins how to cut and fold from a piece of newspaper all manner of fantastic bird and animal shapes, and he told stories that were the best they had heard since Mungo St John had
left Khami.

For Robyn he had the latest news from the Cape. He was able to describe for her the rising stars on the political horizon, and categorize their strengths and weaknesses. He had the latest
assessments of the political scene at home. Members of both Houses of Parliament, Cape and home, were constant guests at Groote Schuur, so he could repeat the gossip of that ‘wild and
incomprehensible old man’, as the Queen had called Gladstone. He could explain the Home Rule issue and tell her what the odds were for a Liberal victory at the next election, even after
Gladstone’s failure to rescue Gordon from Khartoum and his consequential loss of popularity.

‘At the Queen’s Jubilee the common people on the pavements cheered him, but the aristocracy hissed him from the balconies,’ he told her.

For Robyn, this was nectar to a woman lost over twenty years in the wilderness.

Dinners at Khami usually finished by the fall of dark, and the family was abed an hour later, but after Jordan’s arrival, the talk and laughter sometimes lasted until midnight.

‘J
ordan, there is no doubt that if we want Mashonaland, we shall have to square your aunt. I hear that Lobengula will not make a major
decision without Dr Codrington. I want you to go on ahead of Rudd and the others. Go to Khami and talk to your aunt.’ That had been Mr Rhodes’ parting injunction to him, and
Jordan’s conscience found no conflict between this duty and his family loyalties.

Again and again in that week Jordan returned to extol Mr Rhodes to Robyn, his integrity and sincerity, his vision of a world at peace and united under one sovereign power.

Instinctively he knew which areas of Rhodes’ character to emphasize to Robyn, patriotism, charity, his sympathetic treatment of his black workers, his opposition to the Stropping Act in
the Cape Parliament which, if passed, would have given employers the right to lash their black servants, and only when he judged that she was swayed to his views, did Jordan mention the concession
to her. Yet, despite his preparations, her opposition was immediate and ferocious.

‘Not another tribe robbed of its lands,’ she cried.

‘We do not want Matabeleland, Aunty. Mr Rhodes would guarantee Lobengula’s sovereignty and protect him—’

‘I read the letter you wrote to the
Cape Times
, Aunty, expressing your concern over the Matabele raids into Mashonaland. With the British flag flying over the Shona tribes, they
would be protected by British justice.’

‘The Germans and Portuguese and Belgians are gathering like vultures – you know, Aunty, that there is only one nation fit to take on the sacred trust.’

Jordan’s arguments were calculated and persuasive, his manner without guile and his trust in Cecil John Rhodes touching and infectious, and he kept returning to his most poignant
argument.

‘Aunty, you have seen the Matabele bucks returning from Mashonaland with the blood caked on their blades and the captured Shona girls roped together. Think of the havoc that they have left
behind them, the burned villages, the murdered infants and grey heads, the slaughtered Shona warriors. You cannot deny the Shona people the protection that we will offer.’

That night she spoke to Clinton, lying beside him in the darkness in the narrow cot on the hard straw-filled mattress; and his reply was immediate and simple:

‘My dear, it has always been clear to me as the African sun that God has prepared this continent for the protection of the only nation on earth that has the public virtue sufficient to
govern it for the benefit of its native peoples.’

‘Clinton, Mr Rhodes is not the British nation.’

‘He is an Englishman.’

‘So was Edward Teach,
alias
Blackbeard the pirate.’

They were silent for many minutes and then Robyn said suddenly:

‘Clinton, have you noticed anything wrong with Salina?’

His concern was immediate. ‘Is she sickening?’

‘I’m afraid so, incurably. I think she is in love.’

‘Good gracious.’ He sat abruptly upright in the bed. ‘Who on earth is she in love with?’

‘How many young men are there at Khami at the present time?’

In the morning, on the way to her clinic in the church, she stopped at the kitchen. The previous evening Clinton had slaughtered a pig, and now Salina and Jordan were making sausages. He was
turning the handle of the mincing machine while she forced lumps of pork into the funnel. They were so absorbed, chatting so gaily together, that while Robyn stood in the doorway watching them they
were unaware of her presence.

They made a beautiful couple, so beautiful indeed, that Robyn felt a sense of unreality as she watched them, and it was followed immediately by uneasiness, nothing in life was that perfect.

Salina saw her, and started – and then unaccountably blushed so that her pixie pointed ears glowed.

‘Oh Mama, you startled me.’

Robyn felt a rush of empathy, and, strangely, of envy for her eldest daughter. She wished that she were still capable of that pure and innocent emotion, and suddenly she had the contrasting
image of Mungo St John, lean and scarred and unscrupulous, and what she felt shocked her so her voice was brusque.

‘Jordan, I have made up my mind. When Mr Rudd arrives, I will go with you to Lobengula’s kraal, and I will speak for your case.’

A
fter a prolonged and unprofitable trading expedition as far as the Zambezi, Mungo had returned with Louise to the kraal at GuBulawayo, where they
were kept almost seven months. But Lobengula’s procrastinations worked in Mungo St John’s favour.

Robyn Codrington had refused to speak to the king on Mungo’s behalf, and consequently he was only one among dozens of white concession-seekers camped around Lobengula’s royal
kraal.

The king would not have let Mungo leave, even if he had wanted to. He seemed to enjoy talking to him, and listened eagerly to Mungo’s accounts of the American War and of Mungo’s sea
voyages. Every week or so he would summon Mungo to an audience and question him through his interpreter, for hours at a time.

The destructive power of cannon fascinated him, and he demanded detailed descriptions of sundered walls and human bodies blown to nothingness. The sea was another source of intense interest, and
he tried to grasp the immensity of waters and the blast of storm and gale across it. However, when Mungo delicately hinted at a land grant and trading concession, Lobengula smiled and sent him
away.

‘I will call for you again, One Bright Eye, when I have thought on it more heavily. Now is there aught you lack in food or drink? I will send my women to your camp with it.’

Once he gave Mungo permission to go out into the hunting veld so long as he stayed south of the Shangani river and killed neither elephant nor hippopotamus. On this expedition Mungo shot a huge
cock ostrich and salted and dried the skin with its magnificent plumage intact.

On three other occasions the king allowed him to return to Khami Mission Station when Mungo complained that his leg was paining him. Mungo’s predatory instinct was that Robyn Codrington
was disturbed and excited by these returns, and each time he was able to draw out the visit for days, gradually consolidating his position with her so that when he again asked her to intercede with
Lobengula on his behalf, she actually thought about it for a full day before refusing once more.

‘I cannot set a cat upon a mouse, General St John.’

‘Madam, I freed my own slaves many years ago.’

‘When you were forced to,’ she agreed. ‘But who will control you here in Matabeleland?’

‘You, Robyn, and gladly would I submit to that.’

She had flushed and turned her face away from him to hide the colour.

‘Your familiarity is presumptuous, sir.’ And she had left him so that he could keep his revived assignations under the leadwood tree with the twins. His absence since those first
encounters in his convalescence had not dimmed their fascination for him. They had become invaluable allies. Nobody else could have extracted from Juba the vital information he needed for his
planning. Mungo had expressed doubts as to the existence of the diamonds, and declared that he would only be convinced if the twins could tell him where Lobengula kept the treasure.

Juba never suspected danger from such an innocent pair, and in the late afternoon, when she had drunk a gallon pot of her own famous brew, she was always genial and garrulous.

‘Ningi keeps the diamonds under her sleeping place,’ Vicky informed Mungo.

‘Who is Ningi?’

‘The king’s sister, and she is almost as fat as King Ben is.’

Ningi would be the most trusted of all Lobengula’s people – and her hut in the sanctuary of the forbidden women’s quarters was the most secure in all Matabeleland.

‘I believe you now. You are clever girls, both of you,’ Mungo told them, and they glowed with pleasure. There was nothing he could not ask of them.

‘Vicky, I need some paint. It’s for a secret thing, I will tell you about it later, if you can get the paint for me.’

‘What colour?’ Lizzie cut in. ‘I’ll get it for you.’

‘Red, white and yellow.’

In the end Lizzie stood guard while Vicky raided Cathy’s paintbox, and they delivered their offering to Mungo and basked in his extravagant praise.

In his planning, it was not enough merely to get the diamonds into his hands; even more vital was to escape the consequences. No man or woman could hope to reach the frontier without the
king’s permission; it was hundreds of miles of wild country patrolled by the border impis. He could not grab and run. He had to use guile and perhaps turn the Matabele dread of darkness and
witchcraft to his own advantage.

So he planned with meticulous concentration, and waited for the right moment with the patience of the stalking leopard, for he knew that this was his last attempt. If he failed this time, then
not even his white skin nor his status as a guest of the king could save him.

If he failed, the Black Ones would wield their knobkerries, crushing in his skull – and his corpse would be flung from the cliffs to the waiting vultures or into the flooded river pools
where the crocodiles would rip it into chunks with their spiky yellow saurian teeth. Louise would suffer the same fate, he knew, but it was a chance he was prepared to take.

He was careful to conceal his preparations from her – and this was made easier by the distance that she had for long now been maintaining between them. Though they shared the thatched hut
that Lobengula’s men had built for them in the grove beyond the royal kraal, and though they ate the same meals of beef and sour milk and stone-ground maize cakes that the king sent down to
them each evening, Louise spent her days alone, riding out on one of the mules in the early morning and not returning until dusk. Her mattress of straw in the farthest recesses of the hut she had
screened with the tattered canvas sunshade from the cart, and he only once tried to pass the screen.

‘Not again,’ she hissed at him. ‘Never again!’ And she showed him the knife that she kept under her skirts.

So he was able to work uninterrupted, during the day, and to hide his equipment under his own mattress each evening. He carved the mask from the naturally curved portion of a hollow tree trunk,
a hideous grimacing apelike visage with staring eyes and a gaping mouth full of white fangs – and he painted it with the colours from Cathy’s paintbox.

From the plumed ostrich skin he tailored a cloak that reached from neck to ankles, and for his feet and hands he made grotesque mittens of black goatskin. In full costume he was enough to
paralyse even the bravest warrior with supernatural terror. He was the very embodiment of the
Tokoloshe
of Matabele mythology.

Robyn Codrington had given him repeated doses of laudanum for the persisting pain in his leg, but he had saved these for the occasion. He had decided on one of the Matabele festivals, and he
waited until the third night when every man and woman of the entire nation, surfeited with beer and three days and nights of wild dancing, had fallen asleep where they fell.

At nightfall he gave the laudanum to Louise in a cup of soured milk, and the tart flavour concealed the musky taste of the drug. An hour after dark he crept across the hut, drew aside the screen
and listened to her even breathing for a minute before leaning over her and slapping her cheeks lightly. She did not move nor murmur, and the rhythm of her breathing did not alter.

He dressed swiftly in the feather cloak, not yet donning the mask and mittens – but blackening his face and limbs with a mixture of crushed charcoal and fat. Then with the mask and a
length of rope under one arm and a heavy assegai in the other hand, he crept out of the hut.

The grove was deserted, no Matabele would venture here when the spirits were abroad, so he hurried through it – and from the treeline surveyed the stockade of the royal kraal.

There was a sliver of the old moon rising, and it gave just enough light for him to pick his way, but not enough to betray him to watchful eyes. There would be few eyes open on this night. Even
so he crouched low as he crossed the open ground; the cloak made a shaggy hyena shape that would excite no real interest.

At the outer stockade he paused to look and listen, then flicked the length of manila rope over the barrier of sharpened poles.