The Horns of the Buffalo (30 page)

‘How extraordinary,' she said. ‘Has nothing at all come back from him, then?'

‘Oh, some sort of message, I understand, but I gather that it was garbled and virtually useless. If he does come back - which I very much doubt - he will probably face a court martial.' He looked up. ‘Oh, I say. I hope that this is not distressing to you?'

Alice gave a small smile. ‘No, although I feel sorry for his parents. As I say, it is of no importance to me. Now, tell me. How long do you think that this campaign will last?'

She had expected reticence from the Colonel, but to her surprise and delight, he spoke freely of the task ahead. In Cape Town, Durban and Pietermaritzburg, every officer with whom she had discussed the Zulus had dismissed them as Kaffirs: braver, perhaps, than most but still likely to run away once they met British volley firing and the levelled bayonet. The biggest problem would be getting them to stand and fight. Covington, however, was more circumspect.

‘Damned fine fighters, from what I've heard,' he said. ‘Somehow I don't see them running all the time. More likely they will stand and fight on ground of their own choosing. We should be careful. Of course, we shall still knock 'em over, but they might just give us a bit of a shock. Can't quite get anyone to agree with me, so maybe I'm wrong. Confess I'm no great strategist but I have fought a few black fellers in me time and one or two have been quite handy.'

The Colonel, it seemed, had served with General Wolseley in the Ashanti campaign of '73, had received a spear wound there and had gained promotion in the field. The longer the meal progressed and her companion talked, the more Alice found herself warming to him. Beneath the studied elegance and the air of a veteran mountebank lay an obviously experienced and competent soldier and, it seemed, a man of courage. More importantly to Alice, he began speaking with commitment about the problems that lay behind the projected invasion.

Chelmsford, it seemed, had asked for but been refused reinforcements from England and had been told that he had to make do with what he had. The General was confident that his two battalions of experienced infantry, the 24th Regiment, plus an artillery battery, would provide the necessary hard core for the invasion force. But he was woefully short of cavalry and of transport in a country that demanded both. Civilian volunteers of a great variety of backgrounds had therefore been pressed into service and Durnford had been allowed to recruit friendly natives to make up the invading columns. The army would prevail, of course, but it was nothing like the finely honed force that the staff would have preferred.

As Alice listened, she pushed aside her wine glass. She had a good head for alcohol and was not afraid of becoming tipsy, but she was desperately trying to fix in her mind the facts and figures that Covington so freely laid before her. It would not do to take notes but here were the bones of the article she must send to London and she could not afford to let them escape. She concentrated hard, locked into the Colonel's pale blue eyes as he spoke and found it no hardship to do so.

‘Enough of this war talk,' said the tall man eventually. He rose. ‘Now I suppose some of this may turn up in the
Morning Post
but I don't see any harm in letting the public know what sort of mess the Horse Guards have put us in. In fact,' his eyes twinkled as he looked down at her, ‘I don't give a damn. I've thoroughly enjoyed talking to you. Let's have a cognac and sit somewhere more comfortable.'

He grabbed a bottle and balloon glasses from the table and strode to the divan, where he indicated for her to sit beside him. Alice rose slowly to her feet. She was conscious that a slow, burning sensation of excitement was growing within her and that the time had come to make a decision. She moved to the divan and accepted the glass. The cognac was delicious.

She half smiled at him over the top of her glass. ‘What comes now, Colonel - the seduction?'

The ends of the moustaches rose a fraction. ‘You must excuse my language, Miss Griffith, but I damned well hope so. I haven't been seduced for ages.'

‘You should know, Colonel, that I am a virgin.'

‘Flattered, ma'am. Deeply flattered. A great honour indeed.'

She lifted her glass to him and then one foot. ‘Very well. But pray do help me to get these off. I refuse to be deflowered whilst wearing riding boots.'

 

Alice awoke in her tent the next morning feeling that her head had been left out in the midday sun. Despite the pounding, however, there was a feeling of elation, a combination of both sexual and intellectual satisfaction. She luxuriated in it for a moment, stretching out on her camp bed and loosening her hair in a sensual movement so that it spread across the pillow. Her eyes stared at the canvas close above her but she heard nothing of the distant bustle of camp life.
She was no longer a virgin!
How delicious! How magnificent! How . . . how . . .
emancipating
! Good riddance to that girlish, awkward and overrated state. How her life had changed within the last six months. Here she was, living in a completely male-dominated world and making her way in it more than competently. So far she had made few mistakes and now, to top it all, she was a woman who had given and taken full sexual satisfaction.

Alice smiled and stretched her hands above her head and lay in the cot for one further, indulgent moment. Then, with a frown at her throbbing head, she reached across to her valise for a pencil and her notebook and began scribbling on to the lined pages as much as she could remember of what Covington (her
lover
, she smiled at the thought) had told her the previous night: the search for limbers, the pressing of a thousand civilian horsemen into a cavalry screen, the agonies about whether the black levies could be trusted. Slowly she sketched a factual story of an invasion force being created from bits and pieces around the hard centre of veteran colonial fighters. For once, her mind did not intrude with reminders about the injustice of their cause. In her notebook she painted a picture of the camp itself, with its colour, confusion and hustle, gradually moving towards order and determination. For the first time, she felt she had captured the smell and taste of Zululand and the tang of the danger it presented. By midday she had finished and she lay back with a sigh and closed her eyes again. The task of writing it clearly in cablese and of dispatching it safely back to Durban for onward transmission to London could wait until tomorrow.

Over the next few days, Alice maintained a low profile within the camp. She rode down to Rorke's Drift to see the little mission station, which was being converted into a temporary hospital and border post, and then further to the Buffalo River to gaze across its muddy waters into Zululand. The river was swollen and looked unpropitious for the crossing of the central column, which Chelmsford proposed to command himself. But engineers had already erected stanchions from which cables would be extended across the drift to take pontoons. Each day detachments of the column were moving down to the mission station to set up camp in preparation for the crossing.

Two days after her dinner with Covington she returned to her tent - she was now alone, her servant having been dispatched to Durban with her copy - to find, tucked discreetly within the opening flap, a small silver-plated hip flask. Tentatively, she sipped the contents. It was the delicious cognac she had tasted on the chaise-longue. Attached was a small sealed envelope containing a message scrawled in masculine, strongly sloped handwriting:

 

RC? Alice realised that she had no idea of the Christian name of the man who had removed her innocence. Robert? Robin? Randolph? Rodney? Rupert? Most likely Randolph. Yes, Randolph. It sat well on him. She felt no sense of shame or disappointment as she recalled the seduction. Covington had been gentle, considerate and then grandly passionate. She was glad she had acquiesced, glad that she had lost her maidenhood; glad that it was over and out of the way for ever. And also glad that it had happened with some style, with a man of some experience and authority. Now, Simon . . .

Ah, Simon! She blushed to think of how little she had thought of him since the Colonel's dinner, despite the shock of hearing of his alleged disgrace. Somehow, however, she could not accept the story. Simon, with his awkward honesty and natural diffidence, could never be a bounder. But could he be a coward? No. Anyway, it was most unlikely that the Horse Guards would send a coward on a special mission into Zululand.

She turned her head and looked towards the east, to Cetswayo's kingdom. Was Simon somewhere out there? She longed to look for herself.

 

On 6 January, Lord Chelmsford returned with his staff to Helpmakaar and Alice immediately penned him a formal request to accompany the invading force into Zululand. She could travel anywhere within Natal and attach herself to the army there but she knew it would be impossible to enter enemy territory with the central column without permission from and the support of the C-in-C. Almost by return came a polite refusal, giving no reason but enclosing a formal invitation to dine with the General and his staff and senior officers the following evening.

Later that day, a message came to her from Pietermaritzburg. It had been forwarded from Durban and it lifted her heart. The cable was from her editor and read:

 

Alice dressed for dinner with the General and his staff with more care than she had lavished on Covington. Carefully uncreasing, as best she could, her only formal dress, she struggled into it and then added pearls, face powder and a little rouge. She permitted herself a flush of excitement at seeing Covington again.

The evening, however, was an anticlimax. She was placed at table in the seat of honour between Chelmsford and his Chief of Staff, an excitable little old India hand named Lamb. The General spoke little to her, although he was impeccably polite, and on her right, Colonel Lamb declined to say anything about the coming campaign and was rather boring about India. Alice did consider asking him about Simon but was doubtful if he even knew about his existence so thought better of it. Covington had held her hand a little longer than was necessary on greeting her but, with a twinkle in his eye, had allowed himself to give way to the young staff officers who clustered round her over the pre-prandial sherry. In fact, with some chagrin and realising that, as the only woman present, she was restricting the after-dinner conversation, she retired before ten p.m. and allowed a young subaltern to escort her to her tent.

Three days later, on instinct, Alice moved her tent to Rorke's Drift. This time she asked no one's permission but camped in the lee of the little hospital there and rose when she heard the reveille bugles sound early in the darkness. Dressing hurriedly and nibbling a biscuit, she crawled out into a thick fog and light rain and hurried down to the Buffalo. She was in time to observe the first companies of the 24th Regiment embark on punts and cross the river. The invasion of Zululand had begun.

For Simon and Jenkins, the days that followed Dunn's departure were the worst of their captivity. After a week, they expected every night to be woken by their rescuer, so they stood watch, turn and turn about, to ensure that they would be ready when the call came, but the system failed because even the one who was off watch stayed awake to ensure that every sound, however faint, was heard. The excitement faded after ten days and the old mantle of depression and boredom descended upon them again, except that this time it was harder to bear, because it seemed as though their hopes had been raised only to be dashed again. Each began to fear that Dunn had somehow fallen foul of the King and would never return. He had given them a calendar torn from a pocket diary and they passed a joyless Christmas together, the day exactly the same as the many that had preceded it. They were seventeen days into the New Year of 1879 before, at last, relief came.

The captives were dozing uneasily, about to slip into that final portion of the night before morning that brought them about two hours of reasonably full sleep, when both men were instantly awake. Outside the hut, by the entrance, there was a faint whispering and then, soundlessly, the curtain was drawn aside and a slight, slim figure entered quickly.

‘Nandi!' cried Simon.

‘Blimey!' said Jenkins.

She raised a finger to her lips and beckoned them to her. They crawled to sit by her in the dim half-light. ‘Don't say anything, just listen,' she whispered. ‘The invasion has begun and you are in great danger. You must leave Ulundi tonight and try and reach the main British column that is advancing westwards from Rorke's Drift. It is difficult country, about sixty miles as the crow flies, but,' Nandi looked pityingly at their white faces, ‘you are not crows. It would be best if you try and hide during the day and travel only by night. There is no moon tonight but it will rise tomorrow, so you must go now.

‘Here.' She handed them identical buckskin satchels. ‘There is food and water enough for four days, if you are very eumonical . . . er . . . ecomi . . .'

‘Economical,' prompted Simon.

‘Yes. You must eat and drink little and save it. Papa says that you must head due west and you will then strike the Buffalo, if you don't meet with the British column before then.' She opened a bundle she was carrying. ‘You must wear these blankets when you leave the hut, and here are scissors, razor and soap. Zulus don't have long beards like that so you must shave them off.' They could see now that her face was sad and that she had been crying. ‘You don't look like Zulus,' she went on, ‘but in the darkness I think you will pass well enough. I could not bring rifles, of course, because I could not hide them, but here is another of the handguns with some cartridges. I know you have one already.'