The Covenant (46 page)

When they came off the flats, and the river hove into view, and the horses entered the long lane leading to Trianon, Geertruyd Steen saw for the first time the stunning sight of those enveloping arms, the clean white façade of the house and the two Delft benches defining the ends of the stoep. “It’s beautiful,” she whispered.

“And remember,” Annatjie whispered back, “it was Paul de Pré who made it this way.”

“Halloo there!” Paul cried as he bounded out of the door to greet his wife and the stranger from Amsterdam. As soon as Geertruyd stepped forward, shining like a red Edam cheese, he thought:
Mon Dieu!
That one was bred for having children. “Sarel!” he called. “Come out and meet your bride!”

These were words well calculated to embarrass the young man, and Annatjie sought to soften them by calling, “Sarel, here’s the most pleasant girl I’ve ever met.”

From the doorway came the young man, twenty-six years old, weighing not much more than his intended and many times as shy, but when he saw Geertruyd and the frank joy that wreathed her face, he was drawn to her immediately and came forward, stumbling in his eagerness.

“Mind your step,” Paul said, extending a hand to help.

Sarel brushed aside his stepfather’s hand as he moved to greet Geertruyd. “I’m Sarel,” he said.

“My name’s Geertruyd.”

“Mother says you come … from the same place she did.”

“I do,” the girl said, and the meeting was so agreeable that Sarel was put at ease. He wondered if he should volunteer to kiss the girl,
but the question was resolved for him; she stepped forward and kissed him on the cheek. “We’re to be married soon, I think,” she said.

“Let’s not rush things,” Paul said cautiously, but Annatjie said, “It will be arranged. The banns will be read.”

Paul objected seriously to having Petronella and her husband attend the wedding, but when Annatjie insisted, a compromise was worked out. Petronella and Bezel would sit in the rear of the church but not participate; Annatjie said that this was a strange way for Paul to act, seeing that he had given the young couple his house, but Paul said, “What we do at home’s one thing. What we do in public is quite another,” and he simply would not listen to Annatjie’s further plea that the couple be allowed to sit in the family pew.

When the wedding party returned to Trianon, Paul said graciously, “Isn’t it lucky we built the extra two rooms? The young people can have one of them.” So they were installed, and he began to watch Geertruyd meticulously, to see if she showed any signs of pregnancy, for with the birth of her first child, the Van Doorns would have a potential inheritor of the vineyard, and his own design would fall into confusion.

He knew it was inevitable, yet the possibility made him irritable, and one night at supper he threw down his spoon and cried, “Damnit all, it’s been four months since I’ve spoken a word of French. Everybody in this house speaks Dutch, even though I own the place.”

“You don’t own the place,” Annatjie reminded him. “You own part of it.”

“Then we should speak part French.”

“I know not a word,” Geertruyd said, and this simple statement angered him further.

“They’re even threatening to halt the sermons in French,” he wailed. “Every time I attend a funeral, it means one less French voice in the colony. And none to come to replace it.”

“Paul,” his wife said with a certain harshness. “Stop this. It’s long past the time to acknowledge what you already are, a good Dutchman.” The tone of her voice, her easy assumption infuriated him, and he stomped from the room and slept that night among the wine casks.

There in the darkness the ugly thought leaped forward in his mind: Annatjie can’t live forever. She’s almost sixty. One of these days she’s got to die. He had respected her for all she and her family
had done for him, and had honored his obligation to treat her with civil affection, but now the world that he had built was being threatened, and he wished that she were dead—and he began to watch her health as closely as he did Geertruyd’s.

Annatjie did show signs of rapid aging. Her hands were withered and heavy lines marked her face. She moved more slowly than when he had married her, and her voice cracked now and then. Her deficiencies were the more notable in that he continued as young as ever—a vital, hard-working man with a smooth face that displayed his enthusiasm: After all, I am nine years younger. If I had this place by myself … He was thrilled by the prospect of what he could accomplish; and this was not fatuous, for one had only to look at the buildings of Trianon, those handsome, well-proportioned masterpieces, to realize what this man could achieve.

And now the battle for Trianon began. Sometimes at meals De Pré would seem to strive for breath; he felt surrounded by enemies who were trying to wrest his vineyard from him, and all he could see in the kitchen were hostile faces. Annatjie he could dismiss; she was almost sixty and must soon die. Sarel showed no signs of improving because of marriage, and could be ignored. With peasant cunning Paul saw that his real foe was Geertruyd, this deceptively quiet orphan from Amsterdam. Watching her closely, he found to his dismay that she was watching him. No matter what he did to make his good wine, he could feel Geertruyd spying on him, noting how he acted and why.

She never confronted him, for in the orphanage it had been drilled into her that the sovereign quality in any woman was meekness. So when De Pré railed at her, she kept her eyes lowered and made no response. She also refrained from trying to defend Annatjie when Paul shouted at her, for she was determined to avoid diversionary squabbles. But when De Pré, in his strategic assault, humiliated Sarel, trying to convince the young man that he was incompetent, she felt her anger rise. But still she fought to maintain self-control.

Four times, five times at supper Paul scorned his stepson, without rebuttal from Geertruyd or Annatjie, and this convinced him that he could beat down these women. One evening he launched a series of destructive attacks: “Sarel, wouldn’t it be better if you kept away from the slaves? They ignore your orders.”

Sarel said nothing, only fumbled with his spoon, so De Pré
stormed on: “And don’t meddle with the wine casks. Certain things around here have to be done right.”

The young man reddened and, still silent, looked down at his plate, but when De Pré dredged up a third humiliating point—“Stay clear of the new vines”—Geertruyd had had enough. Very quietly, but with frightening determination, she interrupted: “Monsieur de Pré …”

“Haven’t I told you to call me Father?”

“Monsieur de Pré,” she repeated menacingly, “since Sarel will take over the vineyards when you are dead …” She delivered the word with such brutal finality that De Pré gasped. He had often contemplated his wife’s death, never his own.

“So Sarel and I have decided,” she continued, her face flushed with anger, “that he must become familiar with all stages of making wine.”

“Sarel decided?” De Pré burst into derisive laughter. “He couldn’t decide anything.”

Everyone turned to look at Sarel, and he realized he ought to respond, both to combat his stepfather and to support his wife, but the pressure was so ugly that he could not form words.

So in her first attempt at defiance, Geertruyd lost, and she noticed that this made De Pré even more arrogant. For the first time he put aside his pledge to treat Annatjie with the respect due a wife and became publicly contemptuous. This grieved Geertruyd, for quite properly she placed the blame on herself; she went to Annatjie and assured her: “I shall do whatever I must. Let his wrath fall on me, but you and I together are going to make Sarel strong. You’ll see the day, Annatjie, when he runs this vineyard.”

“Have we the time?” Annatjie whispered.

“I hoped last month I was pregnant,” Geertruyd confided. “I was wrong, but one of these days you’ll have a Van Doorn grandson. This vineyard must be protected for him.”

So in the second year of Sarel’s marriage the two women intensified their efforts in educating him to be a responsible man and themselves to be masters of viticulture. They studied everything about the process and compared notes at night, but what gave them greatest hope was that Sarel appeared to be learning, too. “He’s not dull,” Geertruyd whispered one night when De Pré had left the table, “it’s just his inability to express his thoughts.” They found that he was developing sound ideas on how to tend vines, make casks, protect the must, and manage slaves effectively, and one afternoon, out in the
bright sun, Geertruyd cried joyously, “Sarel, you’ll run this vineyard better than De Pré ever did.” He looked at her as if she had voiced some great truth, and he tried to convey his appreciation, but words did not come easily. Instead he embraced her, and when he felt her peasant body, warm in the sun, he was overcome with love and said haltingly, “I can … make wine.”

That night Paul was unusually obnoxious, for he sensed that Geertruyd, this orphan from nowhere, was on the threshold of transforming Sarel, and it embittered him to think that all the good things he had done at Trianon—and he had done many—would ultimately be for the benefit of strangers. “Sarel!” he lashed out. “I told you to stay clear of those casks—”

“Monsieur de Pré,” Geertruyd interrupted instantly. “I told Sarel to mind the casks. How else can he run these vineyards when you are dead?”

There was that horrid word again, thrown at him by this twenty-three-year-old peasant girl. He beat on the table till the spoons rattled, and cried, “I want no imbecile meddling with my casks.”

“Monsieur de Pré,” Geertruyd said with an infuriating smile, “I think Sarel is ready to take complete charge of the casks. You won’t have to bother any longer.”

“Sarel couldn’t …”

Annatjie had heard enough. Sternly she said, “Paul, must you be reminded that I still have authority in this place? It was I who decided that Sarel must learn how to run it.”

Geertruyd, strengthened by her mother-in-law’s support, said firmly, “Sarel will start tomorrow.”

“That one couldn’t line up three staves,” De Pré snarled, and he was about to hurl additional insults, but under the table Geertruyd quietly pressed her hand against her husband’s knee, and with courage thus imparted, Sarel spoke slowly: “I am sure that I … can build good casks.”

The battle for the control of Trianon was interrupted by an event so arbitrary that men and women argued about it for decades: it seemed that God had struck the Cape with a fearful and reasonless scourge. One day in 1713 the old trading ship
Groote Hoorn
docked with an accidental cargo that altered history: a hamper of dirty linen. It belonged to a Compagnie official who had been working in Bombay;
upon receiving abrupt orders to sail home, he had been required to depart before he could get his shirts and ruffs washed, so he tossed them into the hamper, proposing to have them laundered while he stopped over at the Cape. Unfortunately, the hamper was stowed in a corner where men urinated and where a constant heat maintained a humidity ideal for breeding germs. This condition was pointed out to the owner, who shrugged and said, “A good washing ashore and more careful stowage on the rest of the trip will correct things.”

At the Cape the hamper was carried to the Heerengracht, the canal where slaves did the laundry. Six days later these slaves began to show signs of fever and itching skin; three days after that, their faces erupted in tiny papules, which soon enlarged to vesicles and then to pustules. The lucky slaves watched these festering sores change to scabs and then lifetime scars; the unlucky ones died of shattering fevers. Smallpox, that incurable disease, was on the rampage, and whether an afflicted person lived or died was not related to the care he was given.

Forty out of every hundred slaves died that year. Sixty out of every hundred Hottentots at the Cape perished, making their survivors totally dependent on the Dutch. The turbulent disease traveled inland at the rate of eight miles a day, ravaging everyone who fell within its path. One strain leapfrogged the flats to strike at Stellenbosch, and on some farms half the slaves died. The Hottentots of this region were especially susceptible, and many white farmers perished also.

It struck with peculiar fury at Trianon, killing Petronella in the first days and annihilating more than half the slaves. No one in the area tried more diligently to stem the awful advance than Paul de Pré; he went to every afflicted house, ordering the people to burn all clothes related to the dead, and in certain instances, when an entire family had died, he burned the house itself. He quarantined the sick and dug a clean well, and in time the tide abated.

But on the sixteenth day he fell ill, and began to tremble so furiously that Annatjie and Geertruyd put him to bed in the little white outbuilding marked with rake and hoe. There these good women cared for him, assuring him that they would send for Louis at the Cape—if that young man had survived the plague. Wrapping their faces in protective linen, they moved like ghosts about the improvised hospital, comforting him and promising to protect his vineyards.

They were heartsick when the pustules on his face proliferated
until they covered all parts of his skin; and when his fever rose so that he shook the bed, and his eyes grew glassy, they knew he could not survive. Still wrapped in cloth to protect themselves from infection, they stayed with him through the night, their candle throwing shadows on the white interior, their forms moving like phantasms come to haunt him for the ill will he had borne them.

He did not become delirious. Like the fighter he was, he followed each step of his decline, and asked, when morning broke, “Am I dying?”

“You still have a chance,” Annatjie assured him.

When he began to laugh wildly, she tried to ease him, but he would not cease cackling. Then, looking at the ghosts, he pointed at Annatjie and said in a hollow voice, “You should be dying, not me. It was intended that you should die, you’re so much older.”

“Paul, lie still.”

“And you!” he shouted at Geertruyd. “I hope your womb is dry.”

“Paul, stop—please stop!”

But the agony of death was upon him. The vast dreams were vanishing. His sons were alienated; the slaves were dead; the vineyards would be withering. “It’s you who were supposed to die!” he screamed, and the sores on his face showed fiery red as he dragged his fingernails across them. “It wasn’t planned for me to die. You infected me, you witches.”