me.' Ralph's voice was flat, angry. 'You go back to Cape Town. Go dream your old man's dreams. I am sick of them., 'You dare to use that tone to me?'
'Yes, I dare. And by God, I'll dare more than that. I'll dare what you are too weak or afraid to dare'
'You insolent and stupid puppy!'
'You toothless old dog!'
Zouga threw himself half across the table, and his right arm lashed out. He caught Ralph open-handed across the face, and the crack of palm on flesh was stunning as a pistol shot.
Ralph's head snapped back, and then slowly he brought it upright again. 'That,' he said, 'is the last time you will strike me, ever.'
He stood up and strode towards the door, and there he turned. 'Go dream your dreams I will go live mine out.'
'Go then,' said Zouga, and the scar on his cheek was glassy and white as ice. 'Go and be damned to you., 'Remember I took nothing with me, Papa, not even your blessing,' said Ralph, and stepped out into the night.
Bazo woke instantly at the touch on his cheek, and reached for the assegai at his side, his eyes wide in the faint glow of the ashes. A hand closed on his wrist, holding his spear hand from the weapon, and a voice spoke softly above him.
'Do you remember the road to Matabeleland, O Prince of Kurnalo?'
It took Bazo a moment to gather his wits from where sleep had scattered them.
'I remember every running ford and every green hill, every sweet watering place along the way,' he whispered back, 'as clearly as I remember my father's voice and my Mother's laughter.'
'Roll up your sleeping-mat, Bazo, the Axe, and show me the road,' said Ralph.
Diamond Lil did not smile so readily these days, not since the tooth that held the diamond had turned a dingy grey as the root died, and began to ache until Lil wept with the little explosion of agony against the top of her skull. The travelling dentist from the Cape had pulled the tooth and drained the virulent abscess beneath it.
Relief had been immediate, but it left a black gap in her smile.
She had put on flesh also, the consequence of good food and those little nips of gin which bolstered her day.
Her breasts, always generous, had lost their individual definition and the cleavage that showed above the richly embroidered bodice was no longer a deeply sculptured crevasse but a thin line where abundant flesh packed against flesh.
The hand that held the bone china teacup was pudgy and dimpled over the knuckles, the rings that adorned each plump little finger had sunk into the flesh, but the diamonds and rubies and emeralds sparkled in a royal show of Lil's wealth.
Her hair was still lustrous gold, and crimped into long dangling ringlets with the hot-iron. Her skin was still smooth and rich as Devon cream, except around the eyes where it was just beginning to crack into little spider webs of lines.
She sat at the corner of the verandah, on the second floor above the street, where the eaves of the roof were of intricate white wrought-iron mouldings, pretty as Madeira lace. Although there were other double-storeyed buildings in Kimberley these days, not even the offices of the Central Diamond Company across the wide unpaved street boasted such affluent adornment.
Lil's chair was high-backed, and magnificently carved in dark red teak by oriental craftsmen, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ivory and carried across the eastern oceans by the tall ships of the now long departed Dutch East India Company. It had cost her two hundred pounds, but from this throne she could watch every movement on the main thoroughfares that fed into Market Square, could sense the pulse of the diamond city, could check each coming and going, the scurry of a buyer with a good scent in his nostrils, the swagger of a digger who had turned up a bright one. She could watch the front of the four canteens around the square, all of which she now owned, and judge the volume of trade going through their doors.
Similarly, she could glance to her left, down De Beers Road to the red-brick cottage behind its white picket fence and discreet sign, 'French Dressmakers. Haute Couture. Six Continental Seamstresses. Specialities for individual tastes.' Business was always brisk there from noon to midnight. Her girls seldom lasted the pace for more than six months or so, before taking the coach southward again, exhausted but considerably richer.
Lil herself worked her old trade only occasionally, perhaps once or twice a week with a favoured 'regular', just for old times' sake, and because it got her blood going and made her sleep better at night. There was too much else that required her constant attention.
Now she poured fresh tea from the rococo silver pot into the pretty bone china cups, hand-painted with pink roses and golden butterflies.
'How many spoons?' she asked.
Ralph sat on the cane-back chair opposite her. He smelled of shaving soap and cheap eau-de-Cologne. His chin shone with a burnish given it by the cut-throat razor, his shirt was so crisply ironed and starched that it and crackled at each movement.
Lil studied him speculatively over the rim of her tea cup.
'Does the good major know your plans?' she asked quietly, and Ralph shook his head. Lil thought on that a while and it gave her a ripple of pleasure to have the son of a foundation member of the Kimberley Club sitting on her verandah. Son of one of the Kimberley gentlemen who would not greet her on the street, who had returned her donation towards the new hospital, who had not even replied to her invitation to attend the stone-laying ceremony of her new building, oh, the list of humiliations was too long to recite now.
'Why did you not go to your father?' she asked instead.
'My father is not a rich man.' Ralph would not say any more, too loyal to explain that Zouga was destitute, that he would soon leave Kimberley with a cartload of his meagre possessions. He did not want Lil to know that he and his father had turned from each other with harsh words.
