Company Of Spears

Fairbrother was increasingly charmed by Johnson’s candour (there had been occasions, when first he had joined the Royal African Corps, when he had been derided for his presumed jungle origins). ‘I have. But not, I imagine, as much as Colonel Hervey. And, of course, I have no knowledge of how similar are the forests of India to those of Africa.’

Johnson was not inclined to think the differences very great; he had disliked the forests of India, and he had no doubt that he would dislike those of Africa just as much. ‘So there isn’t any jungles ‘ere, then, sir – in t’Cape, I mean?’

‘No, there is no jungle. There is forest, quite dense, but we are not near enough to the Equator to make it so … fearsome. We may see elephant – I think we shall see elephant – and leopard; or rather we shall hear leopard, in the night. And the going will become thick with scrub near the rivers… ‘

Although he gave the impression otherwise, Johnson was not greatly exercised by the topography, or fauna, of the Eastern Cape. It was merely that the place did in truth resemble Salisbury Plain so much, which he had grown almost as fond of as Hervey had been during their sojourns in Wiltshire. He was intrigued by how quickly the country here might change, and into what. At the edge of the Wiltshire plain there were fields of corn or cattle; what was at the edge of this plain?

Fairbrother truly did like Johnson. Hervey could see it. And yet Hervey could only wonder what would have been his new friend’s reaction had he seen the real Johnson, the man undiminished by the business of the coral smuggling. Johnson had lost a measure of his cheeriness, his unbounded – at times almost senseless – optimism. At first Hervey had enjoyed the respite, for Johnson’s chirpy certainty he at times found decidedly wearing; but after a while he had come to feel it like the loss of an old, if irascible, relative, the loss infinitely greater than the respite. This presage, first-swallow-like, of Johnson’s return to a state of (respectful) familiarity was therefore much to be welcomed. The leaving of Hounslow – of England – had in the end been so precipitate, what with endless duty calls as well as family, and then the requirements of his betrothal, that he had not been able to give his groom-orderly more than passing attention. He had been rather thankful of it in fact, for anger, exasperation and disappointment had been mixed in powerful measure, and it was as well there had been no opportunity to delve into it. Now it was meet to restore their former relations.

* * *

At Graham’s Town, a settlement of few stone buildings but to Hervey’s mind a busy, optimistic sort of place nevertheless, they found the detachment commander was laid low by an attack of dysentery. His lieutenant was new, so it was the landdrost who received them and told them of the ‘Clay Pits Trouble’, as already it was becoming known on the frontier. Hervey listened to the landdrost carefully, glancing periodically at Fairbrother for any sign of dispute, but seeing none. The landdrost was an old Cape hand, who had seen service with both the Cape Regiment and then the Albany Levy. He took the view that General Donkin – and Lord Charles Somerset – had made admirable plans, but that in reality the life of the frontier was not to be regulated as if it were a place subject to the usual laws of property and the border itself a mere party wall. The affair of the clay pits, he observed, was but one example of the ‘untidiness’ of the frontier and the difficulties in applying the ‘Donkin doctrine’ to the letter.

The clay pits, explained the landdrost, were about five leagues due east, an easy enough three-hour ride – two with fresh horses at a gallop. And the Fish River was two and a half leagues beyond. The pits were firmly within the colony itself therefore, not the unsettled, patrolled tract. The clay had been used for generations by the Xhosa for dyeing blankets and to paint themselves. The trouble was, he told them, the clay pits were on the farm of one John Brown, who had come east with the first 1820 settler parties. Brown complained that of late he had lost a hundred and sixty cattle and a dozen horses, and that the occasional patrols from Graham’s Town, or Fort Willshire in the unsettled tract, were no protection. The soldiers, he claimed – Hottentot troops – merely hid in ambush, shot at the Xhosa as they approached the pits and then cut off the ears of those they had killed as proof of their zeal and prowess. This, suggested the landdrost, accounted for growing Xhosa enmity. The trouble was, other settlers in the area were trading with the clay-seekers: cattle, ivory, hides and gum in exchange for beads, buttons, wire and trinkets. And since the settlers’ cattle was for the most part unbranded, it was not difficult to imagine the temptation for the Xhosa. One of the settlers had been killed not many months ago when a patrol had appeared unexpectedly and the Xhosa thought they had been betrayed. It was therefore no longer merely a matter of petty lawbreaking but of murder, and – though he was guarded in his expression of it – the landdrost evidently felt that the military were not cooperating as fully as they might in his investigations.

‘What’s to be done?’ asked Hervey.

The landdrost’s jaw jutted. ‘I would wish to have one of Brown’s neighbours by the name of Mahoney arrested for illegal trading, and his land confiscated. That ought to still the activity. I have asked the military to station two men on Brown’s property until such time that I can determine on a conciliatory course with the Xhosa. Brown’s claims of losses I find loose and exaggerated. They’d be wholly impossible to verify without actually tracing the cattle to the Xhosa kraals. Might I accompany you? At least as far as to Brown’s farm and the clay pits.’

Hervey had no objection. He trusted his own powers of observation and discernment in strictly military affairs (if there could be such a thing as strictly military), but in judging the civil conditions at the frontier he knew he would be wise to have counsel of the civil authority.

The following morning, Hervey and his party, accompanied by the landdrost and three pandours who would act as scouts – Hottentots from the Cape Corps detachment – left Graham’s Town for Brown’s farm and the clay pits. It was another fine day, with a few high, barred clouds to remind them that the sea was not so very distant, but otherwise in the vast carpet of green and yellow – rich grass that sorely tempted the horses, and a flower he did not quite recognize – Hervey could have believed himself in the middle of a continent rather than at its furthest edge. Johnson, however, was soon voicing his disappointment by the lack of game, big or otherwise. They saw the odd bush-buck, and plenty of birds, but nothing, he reckoned, they would not have seen in India. The landdrost, drawn in by Johnson’s simple curiosity, as Fairbrother had been the day before, explained that when they reached the Fish River they would see more; and if then they were to ride south towards its estuary, they would see hippopotamus, buffalo, antelope in many guises, and perhaps even the black rhinoceros.

The names meant less to him than the landdrost supposed, especially since Johnson did not reveal his ignorance. He knew what a buffalo was, and for that matter antelope (he understood, too, that there were different types), but hippopotamus and rhinoceros were wholly novel. In any case, what he wanted more than anything to see was elephant. In India he had become quite used to them: they were but a part of the scene of daily life, domestic even. In Africa, however, he had heard that elephants were twice the size of their Indian cousins, with tusks that might gore a horse in an instant, toss it aloft indeed; and that these beasts ranged in herds ten times more destructive than a whole brigade of charging cavalry. This he wanted to see at a safe distance yet close enough to judge for himself the power of those massive tusks – any one of which, besides spelling death, might also bring him considerable fortune.

The road to Brown’s farm was a good one. It was not so much made as well travelled, though not by waggon, so that it was evenly worn rather than rutted, allowing a comfortable pace at both walk and trot. In two and a half hours, as the sun was nearing its highest, though its heat was no more than a June day on Salisbury Plain (and certainly nothing to what they had been used to in Bengal at this season), the party arrived at the farm. There was no marking its boundary save for a stone at the roadside, no fence or cleared perimeter, but half a mile distant they could see a cluster of white-washed buildings, and wispy smoke rising from a single chimney.

‘Do you know where his cattle graze?’ asked Hervey, puzzled that there was no sign of them.

‘Beyond the buildings yonder,’ replied the landdrost, looking about him at the good spring grass. ‘He ought by rights to have driven them up here by now, but the water’s all on the other side of the farm, and it’s easier. Brown’s not the most industrious of men. This is good soil here, and he ought to be growing maize, wheat even; but ploughing’s hard work, especially when cattle take no looking to at all.’

‘Except when the Xhosa take a fancy to them.’

‘Exactly so.’

When they came to the farmhouse, a plain, single-storey, stone-built affair with an iron roof, they found the two men of the Cape Corps saddling their horses in the lean-to stabling.

‘Is John Brown hereabout?’ called the landdrost.

The men, both Irish, red-coated but hatless, looked tired and dirty. It appeared to dawn on them slowly that