his eyes narrowed and he scowled ahead down the road.
'Clutch in!' he muttered to himself. 'In gear! Brake off!
Throttle down! Clutch out! ' The Rolls leapt forward so violently
that both he and Mbejane were nearly thrown over the back of the seat.
Fifty yards farther on the machine expired from lack of fuel, a stroke
of good fortune because it was unlikely that Sean would have been able
to remember the procedure for stopping it.
Grey of face and unsteady of limb, Mbejane allgbted from the Rolls for
the last time. He never rode in it again-and secretly Sean envied him
his freedom. He was greatly relieved to hear that it would be weeks
before more fuel could be sent up from Cape Town.
Three weeks before Sean's wedding Ada Courtney went into her orchard
one morning early to pick fruit for breakfast. She found Mary there,
dressed in her white nightgown, and hanging by her neck from the big
avocado tree. Ada cut her down and sent one of the servants to call
Doctor Fraser.
Between them they carried the dead girl to her cubicle and laid her on
her bed. While Doc Fraser made a hasty examination Ada stood staring
down at the face that death had made more pitiful.
'What depths of loneliness drove her to this? ' she whispered, and Doc
Fraser pulled the sheet over the corpse and looked across at Ada.
'That wasn't the reason-in fact, it might have been better if she were
a little more lonely. ' He pulled out his tobacco pouch and began to
load his pipe. 'Who was her boy friend, Aunt Ada? ' 'She had none.'
'She must have.
'Why do you say that?'
'Aunt Ada, this girl was four months pregnant.'
It was a small funeral, just the Courtney family and Ada's girls.
Mary was an orphan and she had no other friends.
Two weeks before the wedding, Sean and Michael finished the season's
cut of bark and switched the Zulus to planting out the blocks destroyed
by the fire. 'together they drew up a draft Profit and Loss Account.
Combining their rudimentary knowledge of accounting and arguing far
into the night, they finally agreed that from fifteen hundred acres of
wattle they had cut fourteen hundred and twenty tons of bark, to gross
a little over twenty-eight thousand pounds sterling.
But here all agreement ended. Michael insisted that the stocks of
material and expenditure on planting of new trees be carried forward,
giving a net profit for the year of nine thousand pounds.
Sean wanted to write all expenditure off against income and show a
profit of one thousand, so they deadlocked and finally sent all the
books to a qualified accountant in Pietermaritzburg.
This gentleman sided with Michael.
They then considered the prospects for the coming season and were a
little awed when they realized that there would be four thousand acres
of wattle to reap and an expected gross of eighty thousand pounds
sterling-always providing there were no more fires. That evening,
without Sean's knowledge, Michael wrote two letters. One to a
manufacturer of heavy machinery in Birmingham, whose name and address
Michael had furtively copied from one of the huge boilers in the Natal
