'Please God,' Louise whispered.
'It also means that you cannot try to get out on either the Cape road or the road to the Transvaal. They will be watched.'
'Which way can we go?'
if I were you I would take the track north, it goes to Kuruman. There is a mission station there, it's run by my grandfather. His name is Doctor Moffat. He will give you shelter, and Mungo will need a doctor. Then when Mungo is strong enough, you can try to reach German or Portuguese territory and get out through Mideritz Bay or Lourenqo Marques.'
Neither of them spoke for a long time as Zouga trudged on beside the mule, and Louise crawled out to sit on the bench of the cart, it was she who broke the silence.
'I am so tired of running. We seem to have run out of lands, America, Canada, Australia, we cannot go back to any of them.'
'You could go home to France,' Zouga said, 'to your sons.'
Louise's head jerked up. 'Why do you say that?'
'When Mungo and I first met he told me about you, his wife, that you were of a noble French family. He told me that you and he had three sons.'
Louise's chin sank onto her chest and Jordan's cloth cap covered her eyes.
'I have no sons,' she said. 'But oh how I pray that one day I may have. I belong to a noble family, Yes, but not French. My grandmother was the daughter of Hawk Flies Lightly, the Blackfoot War Chief.'
'I don't understand, Mungo told me 'He told you about the woman who is his wife, Madame Solange de Montijo Sint John., Louise was silent again, and Zouga had to ask: 'She is dead?'
'Their marriage was unhappy. No, she is not dead. She returned with their three sons to France at the beginning of the Civil War. He has not seen her since.'
'Then she and Mungo are,' Zouga hesitated over the unsavoury word, 'divorced?'
'She is a Catholic,' Louise replied simply; and it was fully five minutes before either of them spoke again.
'Yes,' Louise said. 'What you are thinking is correct.
Mungo and I are not married; we could not be.'
'It's not my business,' Zouga murmured, and yet what she had said did not shock him. He felt instead a strange lightness of spirit, a kind of glowing joy.
'It's a relief to speak completely honestly,' she explained. 'After all the lies. Somehow it had to be you, Zouga. I could never have admitted all this to anybody else.'
'Do you love him?' Zouga's voice was rough-edged, brusque.
'Once I loved him completely, without restraint, wildly, madly.'
'And now?'
'I do not know, there have been so many lies, so much shame, so much to hide.'
'Why do you stay with him, Louise?'
'Because now he needs me.'
I understand that.' His voice was gentler. He did understand, he truly did. 'Duty is a harsh and unforgiving master. And yet you have a duty to yourself also.'
The mules plodded on in the darkness, and the swinging lantern did not light the face of the woman on the bench, but once she sighed, and it was a sound to twist Zouga's heart.
'Louise,' he spoke at last. 'I am not doing this for Mungo, even a friendship cannot condone deliberate robbery and premeditated murder.'
She did not reply.
'Many times you must have seen the way I have looked at you, for, God knows, I could not help myself.'
Still she was silent.
'You did know,' he insisted. 'You, as a woman, must know how I feel.'
'Yes,' she said at last.
'When I thought you were married to a friend, it was hopeless. Now, at least, I can tell you how I feel.'
'Zouga, please don't.'
'I would do anything you asked me to, even protect a murderer, that is how I feel for you.'
'Zouga 'I have never known anybody so beautiful and bright and brave 'I am not any of those things 'I could put you and Mungo on the road to Kuruman and then go back to Kimberley and tell the diamond police where to find you. They would take Mungo, and then you would be free.'
'You could,' she agreed. 'But you never would. Both of us are tied, Zouga, by our own peculiar sense of duty and of honour., 'Louise, '
'We have arrived,' she said, with patent relief. 'The crossroads. Turn off the road here.'
From the bench she guided him as he threaded the cart through the scattered bush and the high wheels bumped over rock and rough ground. A quarter of a mile from the road there stood a massive camel-thorn tree,
