The Covenant (75 page)

“There is,” Saltwood replied in deep gratitude. “When we stop at Cape Town, have that miserable blighter thrown ashore. I promised Mother I’d deliver this girl to Hilary, and by God, I shall, damaged or not.”

So when the
Alice Grace
put in for replenishing, none of the passengers belowdecks were allowed ashore, for they were docketed to Algoa Bay, three weeks more sailing along the coast. But the young wagon builder who had dared to make love to a lady of quality was
thrown onto the wharf, with his axes and angles, while the lady of quality wept for him from the railing.

She was rudely dragged away by Richard, who said with fierce determination, “You must go on to Hilary. As you promised Mother.” And all the time the
Alice Grace
stayed in Cape Town, she was kept prisoner in her cabin, guarded by the brother-in-law who stood guard outside, relinquishing his position to the captain when sleep was necessary. Even when the governor invited all the captain’s guests to a gala, she was not allowed to attend lest she meet with Thomas Carleton and run away.

She remained in her cabin even when the ship resumed its journey, as did everyone else who had one, for a wintry gale blew up, driving the vessel far south, reminding the sailors of Adamastor, the tempestuous giant who guarded the Cape in the time of Vasco da Gama, and of whom Luis de Camoens had written with such brilliance.

Day after day the winds raged, forcing waves so high across the bow of the ship that they flooded cabins. At times the vessel plunged downward in such steep and sickening falls that everyone belowdecks was sent flying in one direction and then another as shrieks and wails competed with the howling winds. Sleep was impossible and food unthinkable; at numerous times, when her wet and lonely cabin shivered as if its bulkhead might splinter, Vera huddled in a corner, fearful of the moment when the voyage would end, terrified of its continuance, but never did she give way to superstition and castigate herself or her actions with Thomas as being in any way the cause of this violent storm. She was glad she had known him, even for just their brief passage through the tropics, and she prayed that in some mysterious way she might meet him again.

Alone, at the heart of a shattering tempest, she changed from being a meek English spinster and became a mature woman with a surprisingly independent mind. She had enjoyed being loved by a strong man and realized that she could never return to the dreamy afternoons of a cathedral town. As for marrying a missionary, that was quite impossible, but what she would do she did not know. Once, as the ship fell sideways in a plunge that could have torn it apart, she clung to her bed to prevent being swept away and cried, “If we make land, I’m an African.” And she shook her fist in some wild direction, supposing the storm-girt continent to lie in that quarter.

On the seventh day of the storm, when the little barque was well down toward polar waters, passengers began reciting old tales of ships, rudderless and sails gone, being driven relentlessly southward till ice entrapped them, holding them forever in its embrace: “A graveyard of ships down there, masts erect. Everyone aboard frozen stiff and standing erect till judgment day.” They told also of the Flying Dutchman: “Captain van der Decken, out of Rotterdam. One of his great-grandsons settled at the Cape years ago. Swore he could round the Cape in a storm like this, swore an oath to do so. He’s out there somewhere, still trying to breast the Cape, and will be till the people frozen down there are called to judgment.”

The poor ship was so knocked about that when the storm finally abated and the sun allowed the captain to calculate his position, all were shocked to learn how far south they had been driven; they were indeed on their way to the ice, and now, as they turned north toward Algoa Bay, they were humbled and chastened in spirit, so that even the young captain felt remorse at the way he had wanted to treat the awakened young woman in the cabin next to him, and he knocked on her door to apologize.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m not,” she replied.

“In the storm,” the captain confided, “I thought once or twice we must surely sink. And do you know what I thought next?” He smiled at her engagingly, a man much younger than herself, endeavoring to reach understanding. “I thought how utterly insane I’d been to interfere in your affairs. I wanted to shoot you, you know.”

“I was told.”

“Madam, would you allow me to make amends? I was such an ass. Whom you love makes no difference to others.” And to her astonishment, he fell to one knee, took her hand—and kissed it.

The scene at Algoa Bay in the winter of 1820 was one of historic confusion, confusion because five ships like the
Alice Grace
were trying to unload passengers in the open roadstead without a wharf to aid them, historic because a whole new type of person was coming ashore to add a new dimension to South African life.

The confusion was monumental, both in the bay and ashore. Captains endeavored to anchor their ships as securely as possible, but wind and tide tossed them vigorously, so that anyone trying to debark
was in peril. Long ropes were led ashore through the water; they would be used to haul the boats to the beach. Women and children, of which there were aplenty, were crowded into the rude boats and taken ashore through the surf. Occasionally a boat broke loose to wander off, passengers screaming, until some stout-hearted swimmer came to rescue it.

Some women, having come seven thousand miles to their destination, flatly refused to debark, trusting neither the frail boats nor the men guiding them, but bellowed orders from the ship’s officers usually forced them loose from the railings to which they clung; a few had to be dropped bodily into the tossing boats, and these ran the risk of broken limbs. Some daring children, unable to wait any longer to reach the paradise about which they had been constantly told, leaped gaily into the water as the lighters neared the beach, gasped and spat and spluttered toward shore, screaming their delight. Their mothers watched anxiously till they were lifted out of the water and onto the shoulders of men who would carry them through the surf. Among those who helped the immigrants to safety were some Xhosa who only a year before had flung themselves against Grahamstown.

Ashore the confusion worsened: “The party from Manchester, over here! Liverpool, over there! Glaswegians, stay by that dune. Please, please! The Cardiff people must come over here to the big man with the top hat!” Dashing from one end of the beach to the other, instructing everyone what to do, was Colonel Cuyler of Albany, New York, now in charge of a much more pleasant task. But even here the energetic man encountered troubles, for the government had appointed him to instruct the immigrants in harsh facts overlooked in England when the glories of South Africa were being extolled: “This is not yet a land of milk and honey. It’s a land of guns. Never, never go into your fields without your muskets.”

In addition to the scrambling immigrants, the shore was cluttered with Boer farmers who had driven in, from sixty and seventy miles away, in heavy wagons pulled by fourteen or sixteen or twenty oxen, and these men forced hard bargains with the newcomers, offering to cart them and their possessions to their new homes for outrageous prices. But what alternative did the immigrants have? So day after day wagons were loaded, whips were cracked, and teams of stolid oxen began the long journey to the new paradise.

In the waiting crowd ashore was Reverend Hilary Saltwood, come to greet his bride. He was still extraordinarily thin and visibly
entering middle age, for he was thirty-five and showed the effects of his hard life. He was certainly not an attractive bridegroom, and few women would have sailed so far to claim him, but when his present duties ended and he could be got back to England for some fattening up, and settled in some quaint rural parish, he might prove acceptable. The outstanding thing in his favor was the gleam that suffused his face: it was the countenance of a man who believed in what he was doing and found constant reassurance in the honesty of his calling. He loved people; his expedition to Grahamstown with the commando had taught him even to love the Boers who opposed him so vigorously, and the fact that he had fought well against the Xhosa warriors had earned him respect, so that the ox wagon that waited to take his bride to Golan Mission had been volunteered by Tjaart van Doorn himself.

There the two men waited amidst the wild confusion: the tall dark-suited missionary so ill-at-ease; the short, squared-off Boer with the heavy beard; the sixteen lumbering oxen indifferent to the whole affair. “Dear God!” Hilary cried. “It’s Richard!” And he ran to the beach to embrace his brother coming wet and dripping out of the waves.

“Where’s the lady?” Hilary asked in some apprehension, forgetting to introduce Van Doorn, who stood nearby, testing his hippopotamus-hide whip.

“She’ll be coming,” Richard said. “Who’s this?”

“Oh, this is my neighbor, Tjaart van Doorn.”

“You live at the mission?”

“Thirty miles north.”

Richard blinked. Neighbors at thirty miles? But then he heard a shout from the
Alice Grace
’s lighter. It was the captain, with Vera Lambton beside him: “Richard! Ho, Saltwood! Here comes the bride!”

His cry was so hearty, and the message so warm in this scene of new lives beginning, that everyone in the vicinity stopped work to watch the arrival of Miss Lambton, who looked quite pretty in her rough traveling clothes. Three cheers went up as the lighter was slowly pulled ashore, strong hands grasping the rope and guiding it to the beach.

Ashore, men quickly learned that she was the intended of Reverend Saltwood, and cheers were raised in his behalf. Even Tjaart van Doorn, moved by the spectacle of a wife arriving in such manner,
relaxed and clapped the minister on the back: “Exciting, eh?” And he moved forward to help bring his neighbor’s betrothed ashore.

In the boat Vera sat rigid, her eyes down; she did not want to scan the shore lest she see the missionary she had been sent to marry. She did not want him, her heart lay elsewhere, and she doubted she could ever mask that fact; but the fierce rejection she had voiced during the storm had subsided, and now, faced with the prospect of making her way alone in a strange continent, she supposed that she must accept him: God forgive me for what I am about to do.

At the last moment she looked up, and what she saw banished all her fears—and although she endangered herself, she stood up in the boat, waved both hands, and screamed, “Thomas!”

Thomas Carleton, wagon builder of Saffron Walden, had galloped at breakneck speed across the flats, across the mountains and the long reaches, to intercept the boat, and there he stood, arms outstretched, to greet his love. Disdaining the hands that waited to lead her onto dry land, Vera leaped into the shallow water, lifted her skirts, and ran through the waves, throwing her arms wide to embrace the one man she could ever love. She was twenty-nine, he twenty-five; she was educated in Bible, painting and music, he in wood-handling; but they were joyously committed to living in South Africa the rest of their lives. They were the English settlers of 1820.

Vera’s arrival in this dramatic manner dominated the attention of everyone, even Richard Saltwood, who stood aghast as he watched her. Reverend Hilary was left standing alone, off with the oxen and the waiting wagon that would never carry his bride to the mission. Gradually people on the shore became aware of him, and turned to look at the forlorn figure, and as they did so, they broke into laughter. Harsh words were thrown, and ribald ones, and he stood apart, allowing them to fall over him like a cascade of icy water. He sought condolence from no one, nor did he try in any way to dissuade Miss Lambton from her extraordinary behavior. He could not guess what had precipitated it, but he was sure it must have been an emotion of powerful force, and certainly it was God’s will that she should go with the other and not with him.

He did not demur when Tjaart came back and said apologetically, “Since I’m here, I’ll cart the couple to their new home … if it’s all right with you.”

“That’s what you should do,” and when Richard, having assembled his own gear, said that he, too, must find a carter and be on his way, Hilary nodded. In the end, all the immigrants found transportation of some kind or other and were off to try raising wheat and mealies on land that could scarcely grow weeds; the government had not been entirely honest with these settlers, neither in Cape Town nor in London. They were not supposed to be farmers and merchants in the old sense; they were to form forward hedgehogs of self-defense along the border, keeping the Xhosa away from the established farms farther inland. Vera and Thomas, in their frontier home, were supposed to take the brunt of any Xhosa attack, so that established settlements like Grahamstown could exist in safety.

Hilary, who understood this conniving strategy, was saddened to see his intended bride and his brother heading eastward into such a situation, and as he stood alone he prayed for them, that God would give them strength for the trials that lay ahead. That done, he watched their wagons disappear, then mounted his horse and rode slowly back to Golan Mission.

He would never forget 1820. For him it was a year of tragedy, with both the Boer and the English communities sneering at him, not even conceding that he was a well-intentioned dominee. His mission was characterized as a farce where blacks could escape honest work; his attempts at agriculture were pitiful; and his constant insistence that Hottentot and Xhosa be given fair treatment was seen as weakness of character. The Boers despised him for his antagonism to coerced labor, the backbone of their existence, while the English dismissed him as socially unacceptable.

His position worsened whenever Dr. Keer, in London, issued a new publication or caused an inquiry to be made in Parliament. The little agitator was finding that his diatribes against the Boers were popular with the English press and his passkey to the highest ranks of English society. He wrote and preached and lectured, uttering the most inflammatory accusations against the Boers, but whenever he thundered from the safety of London, the lightning struck Hilary Saltwood in his exposed mission, and there was serious talk among the farmers of burning the place.