Conquest

tongues are saying. I’ve a notion that should you pay your addresses there will be an eager listener to the hero of the hour recounting his ordeal . . .’

Kydd smiled lazily. ‘Therese? Perhaps I shall find time to call upon the lady. And your plans?’

‘Ah. As colonial secretary my responsibilities do include the country folk. I’ve a yen to take a visit – see the lie of the land, so to speak,’ he said casually.

‘To see your curiosities of Africa is your meaning, you villain,’ Kydd chided.

Renzi chuckled. ‘All in the way of duty, of course . . . I’m minded to go to Stellenbosch, not so distant and highly regarded for its wine-growing. I may tell you of it on my return,’ he added.

Vastly content after his meal, Renzi sipped his prime Constantia, delighting in its freshness and zest, quite different from the fashionable but sombre European offerings that must make the long passage from the Cape across the equator.

The developing African sunset was at its most compelling: the quality of the spreading blaze of orange and smoky reds exceeded anything he had seen before and he absorbed it in a reverent silence.

‘Another koeksister, Jonkheer Renzi?’ Van der Riet, the landdrost of Stellenbosch and his host, asked politely. Renzi declined, surfeited by the sticky confection, but the large man helped himself to another two. They sat together in comfortable cane chairs on the stoep of the residence.

‘A good day, Mr Secretary.’

‘It was indeed,’ Renzi agreed. A steady stream of the hard-working people of this second oldest Dutch settlement had come to take the oath of allegiance, and the returns of the government muster were in scrupulous order, as were the revenue books.

‘And a splendid repast to conclude the day!’ Renzi added, in praise of the roast hindquarter of bontebok. ‘The bounty of this fine land continues to amaze.’

His heart was full. The Cape was all that could be wished for in a new life, healthy and with limitless prospects for growth. Here, Cecilia and he would put down roots and begin their life together.

‘Do you mind, sir?’ Van der Riet drew out a long clay pipe and stoked it with dagga, the sweet Cape-grown tobacco. ‘I find it eases the mind after a day’s concentration.’

After a few satisfied puffs, he went on quietly, ‘You wonder why we accept your rule so readily. I will tell you. It is because we hanker after the lekker lewe – the good life that comes from the taming of a hard land. Any that can provide us with the security and freedom to do this, we will submit to.’

Unspoken was the other side of the bargain: if security was not provided, neither would be the loyalty. ‘I understand you, Mijnheer,’ Renzi replied. If the French established themselves ashore, this tenuous fealty would evaporate and they would be left to their own slender resources. But, of course, all they had to do now was to hang on until the consolidating troops and support arrived from England and they would be impregnable. But in the meantime . . .

The landdrost took another puff. ‘Did you find your expedition to the mountains agreeable?’

‘Why, yes, Mijnheer.’ It had been only a few days, travelling into the Hottentots-Hollands, but he had encountered a country of fierce grandeur that was boundless and challenging – and one that Cecilia would certainly adore. It had been a dream-like progress: the jog and jingle of the long narrow ox-wagon, the voorloper with an immense whip driving his sixteen wide-horned oxen along crude tracks over the mountains; the slow climb into the dark, contorted ranges rearing steeply from the flats; impossible hairpin turns with jagged crags to one side and a precipice to the other; then a perilous scramble into the Drup Kelder, a cave of ghostly petrified columns and icy streams.

Before sunset each day a halt was called and a fire started while the wagons were outspanned. Then, a delicious supper of ostrich eggs cooked in the embers under a blaze of stars and, after a companionable Cape brandy, a comfortable bed had been waiting in the wagon.

As they had wended their way back, Renzi made acquaintance of the mountain fynbos and the carrion flower, and quantities of springbok antelopes performing their curious pronking. No giraffes or lions, but once he caught sight of a tufted-eared lynx peering resentfully over a rock ledge.

Renzi took another sip of his wine. ‘Mijnheer, Franschoek is a singular place, set so in the mountains. Here, you’re rightly content with your vines, but what about your farmers there?’

The landdrost courteously explained: it was the Boer farmers who were the pioneers in this, pushing the boundaries of settlement into the trackless interior; they laid down their isolated farms and by their own hands carved a living out of the hard ground. They were a stern, independent breed.

Of another sort were the Trekboers who, like desert nomads, moved about the country with their herds, living out of their wagons, while some went even further and scorned any contact with conventional civilisation to the point at which they turned their backs on even their Dutch kin.

And the original inhabitants? The Khoikhoi were peaceable cattle-herders who had come to terms with the white man, but the rising power were the Xhosa, whose warriors were displacing the Khoikhoi and pressing the settlements back from beyond the mountains to the east. An uneasy truce was keeping them at bay along the Great Fish River but anything could set them off on the blood trail again.

Renzi was building a picture of a country that was not yet a nation but had its future before it – could it be said that the accident of external forces that had brought them to take the Cape would be to its eventual advantage? The prime motivator for the British Empire had always been less about glory and more about trade, the establishing of markets and sources of raw materials, and thus great efforts were always made to bring peace and the security to allow this to flourish.

What would not be possible here, given a long period of peace and the world’s markets thrown open? If he and Cecilia could—

A polite clearing of the throat interrupted his thoughts. ‘Er, shall we go in, Mr Secretary? My daughter Josina has been persuaded to play the fortepiano for us and is anxious for your opinion of her Clementi . . .’

As he rose Renzi had a fleeting image of his friend, the picture of a thoroughbred seaman. Now their paths