The Burning Shore c-8 Read online

  Odds of a million to one, miss, you don't have to worry at all. just enjoy the voyage. A tall, round-shouldered young doctor with a mild scholarly air and steel-rimmed spectacles stood before Centaine as she rose from the breakfast table.

  I am Dr Archibald Stewart, Nurse de Thiry, and Major Wright has put you in my charge. Centaine liked the new form of address. Nurse de Thiry had a nice professional ring to it. She was not so certain that she enjoyed being in anyone's charge, however.

  Do you have any medical or nursing training? Dr Stewart went on, and Centaine's initial liking for him cooled.

  He had exposed her in the first few seconds, and in front of her new-found admirers. She shook her head, trying not to make the confession public, but he went on remorselessly.

  I thought not. He eyed her dubiously, and then seemed to become aware of her embarrassment. Never mind, a nurse's most important duty is to cheer up her patients.

  From what little I've seen, you are very good at that. I think we'll make you chief cheerer-upper, but only on "A" Deck. Strict orders from Major Wright. "A" Deck only. Dr Archibald Stewart's appointment turned out to be inspired. From an early age, Centaine's organizational skills had been honed in the running of the chAteau of Mort Homme, where she had been her father's hostess and assistant housekeeper. Effortlessly she manipulated the band of young men that had gathered about her into an entertainments team.

  The Protea Castle had a library of many thousands of volumes, and she quickly instituted a distribution and collection scheme for the bedridden cases, and a roster of readers for the blind and illiterate amongst the men on the lower decks. She arranged smoking concerts and deck games and card tournaments, the comte had been a wicked bridge player and taught her his skills.

  Her team of one-eyed, one-legged, maimed assistant alleviators of the boredom of the long voyage vied with each other to win her approval and render their services; and the patients in the tiers of bunks thought up a dozen tricks to delay her beside them when she made her unofficial rounds each morning.

  Amongst the patients was a captain of the Natal Mounted Rifles who had been in the convoy of ambulances during the retreat from Mort Homme, and he greeted her ecstatically the first time she entered his ward with her armful of books.

  Sunshine! It's Sunshine herself! and the nickname followed her about the ship.

  Nurse Sunshine."When the usually surly chief medical officer, Major Wright, used the nickname for the first time, Centaine's adoption by the ship's company was unanimous.

  In the circumstances there was little time for mourning, but every night just before composing herself for sleep, Centaine lay in the darkness and conjured up Michael's image in her mind's eye, and then clasped both hands over her lower stomach. Our son, Michel, our son! The brooding skies and brutal black seas of the Bay of Biscay were left behind on the long white wake, and ahead of the bows the flying fish spun like silver coins across the blue velvet surface of the ocean.

  At latitude 3c, degrees north, the debonair young Captain Jonathan Ballantyne, who was the reputed heir to the 100,000-acre cattle ranches of his father Sir Ralph Ballantyne, Prime Minister of Rhodesia, proposed marriage to Centaine.

  I can hear poor Papa, Centaine mimicked the comte so accurately that it cast a shadow in Anna's eyes. "100,000 acres, you crazy wicked child. Tiens alors! How can you refuse 100,000 acres?"

  After that the marriage proposals became an epidemic even Dr Archibald Stewart, her immediate superior, blinking through his steel-rimmed spectacles and sweating nervously, stammered through a carefully rehearsed speech, and looked more gratified than abashed when Centaine kissed both his cheeks in polite refusal.

  At the equator Centaine prevailed on Major Wright to don the regalia of King Neptune, and the crossing ceremony was conducted amidst wild hilarity and widespread inebriation. Centaine herself turned out to be the main attraction, clad in a mermaid costume of her own design.

  Anna had protested strenuously at the dkollet6_, all the while she helped to sew it, but the ship's company adored it. They whistled and clapped and stamped, and there was another rash of proposals immediately after the crossing.

  Anna huffed and gruffed, but secretly was well content with the change she saw coming over her charge. Before her eyes Centaine was making that wonderful transformation from girl to young womanhood. Physically she was beginning to bloom with early pregnancy. Her fine skin took on a lustre like mother-of-pearl, she lost the last vestiges of adolescent gawkiness as her body filled without losing any of its grace.

  However, more powerful were the other changes, the growing confidence and poise, the awareness of her own powers and gifts that she was only now beginning to exercise fully. Anna had known that Centaine was a natural mimic, could switch from the midi accent of Jacques, the groom, to the Walloon of the chambermaids and then to the Parisian intellectual of her music teacher, but now she realized that the child had a talent for Ian guages which had never been tested. Centaine was already speaking such fluent English that she could differentiate between the Australian and South African and pure Oxford English accents, and take them off with startling accuracy. When she greeted her Aussies with a dinky Gid die! they hooted with delight.

  Anna had known also that Centaine had a way with figures and money. She had taken over the family accounts when the estate factor had fled to Paris in the first months of the war, and Anna had marvelled at her ability to cast a long column of figures simply by running her pen down it, without the laborious carrying over of digits, and without moving her lips, all of which Anna considered miraculous.

  Now Centaine demonstrated the same acumen. She partnered Major Wright at the bridge table and they made a formidable pair, and her share of the winnings flabbergasted Anna who did not really approve of gambling. Centaine reinvested these. She organized a syndicate with Jonathan Ballantyne and Dr Stevens and they were big punters on the daily auction and sweepstake on the ship's I run. By the time they crossed the equator, Centaine had added nearly two hundred sovereigns to the hoard of louis I I d'or they had salvaged from the chateau.

  Anna had always known that Centaine read too much. It will damage your eyes, she had warned her often enough, but she had never realized the depth of the knowledge that Centaine had gathered from her books, not until she heard it demonstrated in conversation and discussion. She held her own even against such formidable i debaters as Dr Archibald Stewart, and yet Anna noticed that she was cunning enough not to antagonize her audience by ostentatiously flaunting her learning, and would usually end an argument on a conciliatory note that allowed her male victim to retreat with only slightly ruffled dignity.

  Yes, Anna nodded comfortably to herself, as she watched the girl blooming and opening like some lovely flower in the tropical sunshine, she's a clever one, just like her Mama. It seemed that Centaine really had a physical need for warmth and sunlight. She would turn her face up to the sun every time she went on deck. Oh, Anna, I did so hate the cold and the rain. Doesn't this feel wonderful?

  You are turning ugly brown, Anna warned her. It's so unladylike. And Centaine considered her own limbs thoughtfully. Not brown, Anna, gold! Centaine had read so much and queried so many people, that she seemed already to know the southern hemisphere into which their ship now thrust its bows. Centaine would wake Anna and take her on to the upper deck to act as chaperone while the officer of the watch showed her the southern stars. And despite the late hour, Anna was dazzled by the splendours of this sky that each evening revealed more of itself before their upturned eyes.

  Look, Anna, there is Achernar at last! It was Michel's own special star. We should all have a special star, he said, and he chose mine for me. Which is it? Anna asked. Which is your star? Acrux. There! The brightest star in the Great Cross.

  There is nothing between it and Michael's star, except the pivot of the whole world, the celestial South Pole. He said between us we would hold the axis of the earth.

  Wasn't that romantic, Anna? Romantic twa
ddle, Anna sniffed, and secretly regretted that she had never had a man to say such things to her.

  Then Anna came to recognize in her charge a talent that seemed to make all the others pale. It was the ability of making men listen to her. It was quite extraordinary to see men like Major Wright and the Protea Castle's captain actually keep silent and attend, without that infuriatingly indulgent masculine smirk, when Centaine spoke seriously.

  She's only a child, Anna marvelled, yet they treat her like a woman, no, no, more than that even, they are beginning to treat her like an equal. That was truly astonishing.

  Here were these men according to a young girl the respect that thousands of other women, Emmeline Pankhurst and Annie Kenney at their head, had been burning property, throwing themselves under racehorses, hunger-striking and enduring prison sentences to obtain, so far unsuccessfully.

  Centaine made the men listen to her, and very often she made them do what she wanted, although she was not above using the sly sexual tricks to which women over the ages have been forced to resort; Centaine achieved her ends by adding logic, cogent argument and force of character. These, combined with an appealing smile and level look from dark, fathomless eyes, seemed irresistible. For instance, it took her a mere five days to get Major Wright to rescind his order confining her to ADeck.

  Although Centaine's days were filled to the last minute, she never for a moment lost sight of the ultimate destination. Each day her longing for first sight of the land where Michael had been born, and where his son would be born, became stronger.

  However busy she was, she never missed the noonshot, and a few minutes before the hour she would race up the companion-way to the bridge and arrive in a swirl of her uniform skirts, gabbling breathlessly, Permission to enter the bridge, sir? And the officer of the watch, who had been waiting for her, would salute.

  Permission granted. You are only just in time, Sunshine. Then she would watch fascinated as the navigating officers stood on the wing of the bridge with the sextants raised and made the noonday shot of the sun, and then worked out the day's run and the ship's position and marked it on the chart.

  There you are, Sunshine, 17'23 south. One hundred and sixty nautical miles north-west of the mouth of the Cunene river. Cape Town in four days time, God and the weather permitting. Centaine studied the map eagerly. So we are already off the South African coast? No, no! That is German West Africa; it was one of the Kaiser's colonies until the South Africans captured it two years ago. What is it like, jungles? Savannahs? No such luck Sunshine, it's one of the most Godforsaken deserts in the entire world.

  And Centaine left the chartroom and went out on to the wing of the bridge again and stared into the east, towards the great continent that still lay far below her watery horizon.

  Oh, I can barely wait to see it at last!

  This horse was an animal of the desert, its distant ancestors had carried kings and Bedouin chieftains over the burning wastes of Arabia. Its blood-lines had been taken north by the crusaders to the colder climes of Europe, and then hundreds of years later they had been brought out to Africa again by the colonial expedition of Germany and landed at the port of Uideritzbucht with the cavalry squadrons of Bismarck. In Africa these horses had been crossed and recrossed with the shaggy hardy mounts of the Boers and the desert-forged animals of the Hottentots until this animal emerged, a creature well suited to this rugged environment and to the tasks to which it was committed.

  It had the wide nostrils and fine head of its Arabian type, broad spatulate hooves to cover the soft desert earth, great lungs in its barrel chest, pale chestnut coloration to repel the worst of the sun's rays, a shaggy coat to insulate it from both the burning noon heat and the crackling cold of the desert nights, and the legs and heart to carry its rider to far milky horizons and beyond.

  The man upon his back was also of mixed blood-lines and, like his mount, a creature of the desert and the boundless land.

  His mother had come out from Berlin when her father had been appointed second-in-command of the military forces in German West Africa. She had met and, despite her family's opposition, married a young Boer from a family rich only in land and spirit. Lothar was the only child of that union, and at his mother's insistence had been sent back to Germany to complete his schooling.

  He had proved a good scholar, but the outbreak of the Boer War had interrupted his studies. The first his mother had known of his decision to join the Boer forces was when he arrived back in Windhoek unannounced. Hers was a warrior family, so her pride was fierce when Lothar had ridden away with a Hottentot servant and three spare horses to seek his father who was already in the field against the English.

  Lothar had found his father at Magersfontein with his uncle Koos De La Rey, the legendary Boer commander, and had undergone his initiation to battle two days later when the British tried to force the passage through the Magersfontein hills and relieve the siege of Kimberley.

  Lothar De La Rey was five days past his fourteenth birthday on the dawn of the battle, and he killed his first Englishman before six that morning. It had been a less difficult target than a hundred springbok and running kudu had offered him before.

  Lothar, one of the five hundred picked marksmen, had stood to the parapet of the trench that he had helped dig along the foot of the Magersfontein hills. The idea of digging a trench and using it as cover had at first repelled the Boers, who were essentially horsemen and loved to range fast and wide. Yet General De La Rey had persuaded them to try this new tactic, and the lines of advancing English infantry had walked unsuspectingly on to the trenches in the deceptive early light.

  Leading the advance towards where Lothar lay was a powerful, thickset man with flaming red muttonchop whiskers. He strode a dozen paces ahead of the line, his kilts swinging jauntily, a tropical pith helmet set at a rakish angle over one eye and bared sword in his right hand.

  At that moment the sun rose over the Magersfontein hills, and its ripe orange light flooded the open, featureless veld. it lit the ranks of advancing highlanders like a stage effect, perfect shooting light, and the Boers had paced out the ranges in front of their trenches and marked them with cairns of stones.

  Lothar took his aim on the centre of the Englishman's forehead, but like the men beside him was held by a strange reluctance, for this seemed not much short of murder. Then, almost at its own volition, the Mauser jumped against his shoulder and the crack of the shot seemed to come from very far away. The British officer's helmet sprang from his head and spun end over end. He was driven back a pace and his arms flew open. The sound of the bullet striking the man's skull came back to Lothar, like a ripe watermelon dropped on to a stone floor. The sword flashed in the sunlight as it fell from the soldier's hand, then with a slow, almost elegant pirouette, he sank into the low coarse scrub.

  Hundreds of highlanders had lain pinned in front of the trenches all that day. Not a man of them dared lift his head, for the waiting rifles in the trenches a hundred paces from where they lay were wielded by some of the finest marksmen in the world.

  The African sun burned the backs of their knees below I the kilts until they swelled, and the skin burst open like over-ripe fruit. The wounded highlanders cried for water and some of the Boers in the trenches threw their water bottles towards them, but they fell short.

  Though Lothar had killed fifty men since then, that was the day he would remember all his life. He always marked it as the day he had become a man.

  Lothar was not among those who had thrown his water bottle. Instead, he had shot dead two of the Englishmen as they wriggled forward on their bellies to try and reach the water-bottles. His hatred of the English, learned at the knees of both his mother and his father, had truly be, zun to flower that day and had come into full fruiting in the years that followed.

  The English had hunted him and his father like wild animals across the veld. His beloved aunt and three female cousins had died of diphtheria, the white sore throat, in the English concentration camps, b
ut Lothar had made himself believe the story that the English had put fish-hooks in the bread that they fed the Boer women to rip out their throats. It was an English thing, this war on the women and the young girls and the children.

  He and his father and his uncles had fought on long otter all hope of victory was gone, the Bitter Enders, they called themselves with pride. When the others, starved to walking skeletons, sick with dysentery and covered with the running ulcerations which they called veld sores, caused by exposure and malnutrition, dressed in their rags and sacking, with only three rounds a piece remaining in their bandoliers, had gone in to surrender to the English at Vereeniging, Petrus De La Rey and his son Lothar had not gone in with them.

  Witness my oath, oh Lord of my people, Petrus had stood bareheaded in the veld, with his seventeen-year-old son Lothar beside him. The war against the English will never end. This I swear in your sight, oh Lord God of Israel. Then he had placed the black leather-covered Bible in Lothar's hands and made him swear the same oath.

  The war against the English will never end- Lothar had stood beside his father as he cursed the traitors, -he cowards who would no longer fight on, Louis Botha and jannie Smuts, even his own brother Koos De La Rey. You, who would sell your people to the Philistine, may you live all your lives under the English yoke and all burn in hell for ten thousand years. Then the father and the boy had turned their backs and ridden away, towards the vast and land that was the domain of Imperial Germany, and left the others to make peace with England.