Jordan decorated the borders of the menus with romanticized scenes of the diggings: the stagings soaring above the gaping pit, heroic figures working on the walls of yellow earth, a sorter at his table, and at the head of the sheet a man's cupped hands overflowing with uncut diamonds, and he coloured the illustrations with water paints.
'What's Veloute de la Nouvelle Ruee?' Ralph asked.
'Soup New Rush,' Jordie told him without looking up from his artistic labours.
'What's going to be in it?
'Marrow bones and pearl barley.'
'- And what's Quartier de Chevreuil Diamant Bleu?'
'Haunch of springbuck in the style of a blue diamond.'
'I don't know why we can't just speak English,' Ralph complained. 'What's the style of a blue diamond, anyway?'
Tart with bacon fat, marinade it in olive oil and cognac with wild garlic, and then bake it in a pie crust.'
Ralph swallowed his saliva. Jordan's culinary skills were always a source of delight to him.
'All right, I'll eat it.'
Jordan licked his brush, leaving a streak of Prussian blue on his tongue, and then looked up at his brother.
'You are going to serve it, not eat it -' Jordan paused portentously, 'mister Rhodes is coming to lunch,' as though that explained it all.
'Well, if I'm not good enough to sit at the same table as your famous mister Rhodes, I'll be damned if I'll play waiter. You can get Donsela. For a shilling Donsela will spill soup on mister Rhodes, for a shilling Donsela would throw soup on King Lobengula himself. I'm going to bribe him.'
However, in the end curiosity and Jordan's promise of the leftovers prevailed and Ralph dressed himself in the ridiculous monkey-jacket that Jordan had designed and tailored for him and carried the tray of Veloute out on the wide verandah of Zouga's camp, and there nearly dropped it.
'Madame, you remind me of the heroine from mister Longfellow's poem,' Neville Pickering complimented Louise Sint John, and she smiled back at him from her seat at the centre of the luncheon table.
'Thank you, sir.'
Her jacket was in pale creamy buckskin with tasselled sleeves, and the bodice was crusted with bright-coloured beads in bold geometrical patterns. Louise had parted her thick black hair in the centre, braided a blue ribbon into each of the thick tresses, bound them with a band about her forehead, and then let them hang onto her bosom.
The soft tanned buckskin was divided into ankle-length culottes, and her boots were also of soft beaded leather.
Louise was the only woman at the long trestle table on the open verandah of Zouga's camp. The men seated on each side of her were already emerging as the most influential subjects on this continent of an omnipotent queen. Like the men that another English queen had sent out to the corners of the earth, these were the new Elizabethans, most of them already rich, all of them restless and consumed with their lust for power, for wealth, for land. Each with a separate dream that he would follow relentlessly all his life, every one of them driving, ruthless men.
Ballantyne. Beit. Jameson. Rhodes. Robinson. The list of names read like a roll-call for a regiment of filibusters, and yet here they were listening to a discourse on women's fashion as though it were a company report on tonnage treated and cartage recovered.
Only Zouga Ballantyne was not smiling. The woman offended Zouga. Her beauty was too flamboyant, her colouring too vivid. Zouga preferred the pale gold blond hair and the complexion of sugared cream and strawberries. An Englishman's idea of beauty.
This woman's dress was outrageous, the styling of her hair pretentious. Her gaze was too direct, her eyes too blue, her conversation too easy and her style of address too familiar. Of course American women had the reputation of affecting masculine manners, but Zouga found himself wishing that Louise Sint John had kept those manners on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean where they belonged.
it was enough that she had galloped into his camp ahead of her husband, riding astride, and dismounted by freeing both of her narrow booted feet from the stirrups and vaulting lightly to the ground; but then she had come up onto the stoep with an assured stride and smile, her right hand out like a man, and without waiting for her husband to introduce them had said: 'You must be Zouga Ballantyne. I'd recognize you anywhere by Mungo's description of you.'
Her hand was narrow, the skin warm but dry, but the grip of her fingers was unfemininely firm, the grip of a skilled horsewoman.
These leisurely Sunday luncheons at Zouga's camp were his one extravagance, and they had become one of the traditions of Kimberley, when excellent fare and good liquor and the company of intelligent men made for memorable afternoons.
Women were very seldom invited to these gatherings, and Louise Sint John would not have been there if Zouga had been able to have her husband come alone, but Mungo Sint John had replied pointedly to the invitation, 'General and missis Sint John have pleasure in accepting. The friendship between Sint John and Zouga had begun many years previously, and he was the kind of man whom Zouga could admire: a man like himself, hard and determined, one who lived by his own code without compromise. One who expected no preference nor favour, but whose triumphs were of his own engineering and whose disasters were met with fortitude, without plea or excuse, even when occasioned by cruel circumstances beyond his control.
In the late 'fifties Sint John had built up a commercial empire, a fleet of trading vessels which had carried the black ivory of slaves from the African continent to that of North America. Legend was that in three voyages, in the course of a single period of twelve months, across the notorious middle passage of the Atlantic, he had transported almost two million dollars' worth of slaves, and with those profits he had acquired vast estates in Louisiana.
It was at this time that Zouga had first met him.
