I asked, “Will you kill him?”
He lifted my blanket up over my mouth to keep me quiet, then patted my chest. “Return to sleep, my little gemsbok. You need not worry. I shall be safe.”
I sat up. “But you might need my help.”
“No, Mantis told me that you are to stay here. We Bushmen coat ourselves with a scent that Hyena cannot abide. We are perfectly safe. But a gemsbok” — here he growled and bared his teeth — “a gemsbok would be eaten.” Then he gave me his wide, infectious smile.
Midnight left the house fifteen minutes later. Anxious, I dressed quickly and went to the garden to play with Fanny. After a little while, my father questioned me about Midnight’s whereabouts. I lied, saying that he had gone off in search of rain.
Over breakfast, while handing me my second plate of eggs, Papa cleared his throat and said, “John, your mother and I intend to send you to school in England. We believe you will be happier there.”
“In England?”
“Yes, to a boarding school. It is a grand place that will greatly benefit your education.” He struggled to smile. “The lads stroll around the grounds giving Latin names to birds and reading Shakespeare. It will be just the place for you.”
“No,” I replied.
Mother handed me another cup of tea. “Many a lad would envy your chance to study at such a place.”
“Good, then let them go instead of me.”
Papa glared. “I’ll thank you not to use that tone of voice with your mother.”
“I shan’t, if she will stop telling me how lucky I am to leave behind everything I know.”
Papa had only struck me once in my life, but I could almost feel my backside burning again. “Even you ought to be able to see that this is not your choice. This is a decision we have reached. You shall travel to my sister in England, with a letter from me, and she will enroll you in a proper school. I already have some excellent suggestions from the English consul here in Porto, and he knows all the best schools.”
Though I knew Papa would explode, I was adamant that I would never leave Portugal. “We shall see,” I said, and reached across the table for the salt shaker, to signal that the conversation was at an end.
Mother grabbed my wrist and said, “You are not safe here. You know I would not send you away otherwise. That I should be separated from you — ” Unable to finish her sentence, she withdrew her hand and looked down to hide her tears.
“Will Fanny be allowed to come with me?” I asked.
“No,” Father replied. “But she will be fine. We shall treat her like a queen, and you can see her on holidays.”
“Then I can come back?”
Father’s resolve yielded now to sorrow, which was precisely as I’d hoped. I wanted to punish him for even conceiving of such a plot against me.
“Dear God, lad, do you think we are monsters?”
“And Midnight — I shall have to leave him too?” I asked, purposely ignoring his question.
“Yes,” Papa replied.
“How much time do I have before this sentence begins?” I asked.
“Three weeks, I’d say,” he replied. “Six weeks at the most.”
Mama, sobbing, fled to her pianoforte. Father looked at me glumly and said, “John, you might try sometimes to make the unpleasant matters of life a trifle easier.” Then he went to her.
I listened to their subdued voices from the table, unrepentant, furious at my father’s criticism.
“I cannot,” Mama whispered to Papa.
“You must. At least for a time.”
“For a year, no longer. Any longer, James, and I shall die.”
Midnight failed to come home over the next two days, and I was greatly concerned for his safety. When I asked Papa if he’d seen him, all he would say was “Worry not, laddie. Midnight can take care of himself. I’m sure he’s well.”
Benjamin came to see us the following evening. From the top of the stairs I heard him explain that he had not been granted an audience with the Bishop but had spoken at great length to one of his staff. He had been told in no uncertain terms that nothing would — or indeed could — be done to silence the necromancer, since his activities were outside the jurisdiction of the diocese of Porto, which was a flimsy excuse at best. He suspected that the Bishop had decided to look the other way.
Benjamin believed that rousing the residents of Porto against the
“Then we are on our own,” Father said quietly.
Midnight returned the next day at dawn. He came to my room and knelt down next to my bed. His shirt sleeve was torn and he was dripping with sweat.
“Did you track the necromancer? Did you kill him?”
He smiled. “If I am taken away, my little gemsbok, do not be too upset. The important thing is that you are safe now.”
My father must have heard him come up the stairs, because he appeared now in my doorway, clearly surprised. “Midnight! We were worried.” Noticing the quill on the end of my bed, he said, “Have you been hunting?”
The African stood up and faced him. “I am sorry to have caused you concern, Mr. Stewart. Yes, I’ve been hunting. We must talk.”
Mother then appeared. “What has happened?”
“One moment, Mrs. Stewart,” the African replied. He went to my window and peered out, then closed the shutters. “I may have been followed here,” he explained.
I saw that his hair was matted with wee twigs and that there were soil stains on the back of his breeches. “Who would want to follow you?” I asked.
“The men who were with Lourenco Reis.”
XVIII
Midnight remembered musket and cannon fire exploding around him the first time he was captured by Europeans. But most of all he remembered the horses. “Swiftness and power given life,” he told me. “Even Mantis watched them with awe.”
Dark heavy balls of metal launched from cannons exploded in storms of fire. Blood spilled from his wounded tribesmen; all save three young children were left to rot in the African sun. Midnight never knew what happened to his two surviving kin.
The howls of hyenas gorging themselves could be heard from his new home, a farm owned by a round-faced Dutchman, whose servant he became for a few short months. But although he could carry water, feed the chickens and cattle, and kill snakes with only a stick, Midnight had an enormous appetite and ate more than he could earn.
Rather than slit his throat, as the Dutchman ordered, a Zulu servant, under cover of darkness, walked Midnight an hour into the countryside, offering him to the will of the desert. The land and sky proved generous that night; he found his way by moonlight to a family of Bushmen following the rains to the Shaggy Hills, thirty miles east. They offered him water from a hollowed ostrich shell and some dried meat. They became his new kin.
Fourteen years later by Papa’s estimation, Boer soldiers returned, different ones to a different place but mounted on horses just the same. By now they knew that even Bushmen adults could be “domesticated” with a
