A stranger was sitting at the keyboard, his fingers moving effortlessly, caressingly, over the notes. Sitting in the circle of lamplight, he played with absorbed concentration, his eyes closed. I stood in the shadows, listening, and it was only the squeak of my boots as I shifted from one foot to another that broke his concentration. He stopped playing and stood up. “I say, I do beg your pardon. I must apologise for appropriating your piano â it's so long since I played, I couldn't resist ⦔
“Please don't apologise, it was exquisite. That piano's never been played like that before.”
He laughed. “Oh, but you should hear my mother play Chopin, Mrs Armitage.”
“I'm sorry â¦I'm not Mrs Armitage. Hannah Osborne.”
“Oh, Lord. It's I who should be sorry, bursting like this and not introducing myself. I'm Harry Chetwynd.” He smiled and held out his hand and I gave him mine. I saw him looking at my other hand, at my wedding ring.
He was a young man of medium height, with a thin, dark face, extremely good-looking, with winged eyebrows and a mouth that seemed used to smiling. I would have given anything if he hadn't been there at that particular moment. I wanted no one, least of all a stranger with whom I should have to make conversation.
He was looking at my hair, at my damp boots: they hadn't been able to find any others to fit me at the convent. “Mrs
Osborne, shouldn't you sit down? You look pretty well done up, if you'll forgive my saying so.”
“I've just fallen in the sluit.”
“The what?”
“Sluice, you would call it. By the river.” I
was
done up, exhausted to my very bones, and not up to explaining further, and though I could sense his curiosity, he was too polite to ask for any. He was looking less than up to the mark himself. His bush jacket had evidently received a thorough soaking and dried on him, his boots seemed as wet as mine. He looked as drained and exhausted as I felt.
“You must be wondering what I'm doing here.” He told me then that he was a war correspondent, of whom we already had several in the town. “I have an assignment to write something about the way you brave people are surviving in Mafeking. Mr Whale, editor of your local paper sent me to seek out Mr Armitage. The boy let me in, saying Missis would be back presently.”
“You're very brave, coming into Mafeking. Everyone else wants to get out.”
He laughed. “I dare say I can get out the same way I came in, if I want to.” Which had been by way of the old post road from Vryburg, and through the enemy lines with the help of one of the native runners, and so through to the location and thence the town.
“Are you hungry?”
“I had some dried biltong last night. Wasn't bad, if you've the teeth of a tiger.”
“You haven't tried our horsemeat sausages,” I said, with a tired attempt to respond to his joke, mentally taking stock of what food there was. Amos might stretch the bully beef into something passable. He looked cheered by the prospect of something to eat, but then he said, unexpectedly, “Please â sit down and never mind the food. You've obviously had a bad day of it.”
“A bad day? I â I think it's been the worst day of my whole life,” I said shakily, having no intimation then that there was worse, much worse, to come.
He then did something quite extraordinary. He reached out a finger and gently pushed back from my face a lock of hair that
had escaped the untidy knot into which I'd bundled it, an extraordinary liberty which in other circumstances would neither have been taken nor allowed. Why there was such intimacy between us, right from the start, was a mystery to me. We stood looking at one another â and as kindness will, his quite overwhelmed me. I couldn't help it, tears I hadn't shed all day filled my eyes. And it seemed quite natural that I should let this stranger, whom I had not known above five minutes, put his arms around me and press my head into his shoulder.
Afterwards, we were both embarrassed, and slightly shamefaced. I sat on the sofa and dried my eyes. “What about that food? I must tell Amos.” I couldn't remember having eaten a thing all day myself, except for a barely palatable bowl of mealie porridge at lunch.
“Let me tell him â” he began, standing up, wincing as he did so. “It's all right, don't worry. Just twisted my knee getting in. Mistake to rest it. Should have kept it moving. I â I believe it's â” So saying, he turned deathly pale and grabbed on to the nearest thing, which happened to be the shawl covering the piano, and fell to the floor in a faint, still clutching the shawl, bringing down with him in a clatter the photos from the piano top.
His swoon was only momentary, though his colour was still bad, and as I knelt on the floor beside him, I saw that his knee was indeed swollen like a balloon over the top of his high laced boots. There was nothing I could do except help him up off the floor on to the sofa and give him some of Lyall's hoarded brandy before I roused Amos and sent him running for the doctor.
I was past tiredness now. It was all part of this terrible, terrible day.
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When I reached the convent next morning, I went straight to Lyddie's room. She was lying on her back in the bed and the mound of her stomach was flat. Sister Mary Evangelist came in behind me and told me that the baby, a little boy, had been stillborn. Lyddie did not open her eyes, scarcely breathing as I stood by her bedside. I looked at her still, white face, and took her hand in mine. I did not need the nun to tell me she would not live.
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And so it was, through the fortunes of war, that the Fox's and Harry Chetwynd, from a remote part of the English countryside, were brought together in this dusty little town on the South African veld.
“Bless my soul â Harry Chetwynd!”
“Dr Fox, by all that's wonderful!”
They came from the same village in Shropshire. They were near neighbours and friends of long standing. Even more amazing, Robert and Barty were here in Mafeking, too.
“So you left the regiment, then, young Harry?” asked Dr Fox.
“Yes, sir, twelve months ago. Didn't suit me, after all.”
“Never thought it would, my boy.”
“No, sir.”
“Nothing wrong with what you're doing, telling the world what's happening to us here,” said Dr Fox, “as long as you don't go knocking yourself up like this all the time â though there's nothing much wrong with the knee, either, that a bit of rest won't cure.” He strapped up the joint and left it at that. Not so with Louisa, who came to see Harry first thing next day and exchanged hugs with him and so overwhelmed him with questions he held up his hand in defence. She wanted especially to know everything about their families â his brother Sebastian, still at school, and her elder sister and the baby left behind. Which was how I came to know what had brought father and daughter to Africa.
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There was no privacy in the cramped rooms which Harry had been allotted to share with several other war correspondents, and Lyall told him he was welcome to use his house whenever he needed quiet to concentrate on his reports. It was empty enough during the day, for Lyall himself could not bear to be in the house now, and spent most of his time living with a rifle in his hands, crouched in a trench behind a rampart of sandbags. I suspected he was as much afraid as I was of the darkness left behind after Lyddie had died.
Harry took full advantage of the offer. If he wasn't at the house when I returned after finishing work at the convent, he would often arrive during the evening, his quick stride announcing his arrival, his hat immediately flung on to the nearest
surface. So darkly handsome, and debonair despite the difficulties of keeping up appearances in the present circumstances, stirring the dark shadows with his magnetic personality.
We were too often alone. I knew it, and the thought of it spelled danger to me. But his presence brought in a breath of the outside world and re-awoke in me a longing for something I had long been suppressing. And he alone â perhaps because he knew nothing of my previous life â could lift my spirits when I felt depressed by the misery all around us and the sadness of being here, without Lyddie, so far from home and the people I loved. At first, I thought him flippant and often cynical, though his unfailing good humour and his malicious asides still had the power to amuse me. I was not sure yet whether I liked or approved of him.
But Harry was a mass of contradictions. He was different; he questioned. He didn't believe everything we were told and didn' t think that people back home should be told it, either. He let me see the despatches he contrived to have sent out by a native runner. I expected a hidden cynicism, but didn't find it. He said the truth must be told, though I wondered, as I read, whether such heresies would ever be published. The readers of the
Daily Bugle
would undoubtedly rather read more stories of the valour and praise of the gallant commander in Mafeking over their breakfast tables. Well, Harry was fair enough in giving praise where it was due â and much was due to Baden-Powell. But for his continual encouragement and cheerfulness, morale would have become non-existent as the circumstances of our penned-up, hazardous and yes, despite the danger, often monotonous life wore us down.
More than ever, Hugh allied himself to his leader. When the colonel was rallying the men in the trenches, or braving the enemy by showing himself on the redoubts, Hugh was never far away; he sat with him when he led a council of war; together they invented new gadgets, some schoolboy trick to fool the enemy, such as moving a searchlight devised from a biscuit tin from place to place so that it appeared we had dozens. The dapper, familiar figure of B-P in his wide brimmed hat with its four pinches in the crown and his cheery smile was seen everywhere,
opening baby shows and sports days (designed to keep up morale), perching by the river bank in odd spare moments to make the most appealing and lively drawings in his sketchbook. And Hugh usually contrived to be in attendance somewhere, though he did not go so far as to do comic turns in the Sunday concerts, as Baden-Powell did.
“What a prince of good fellows!” said Harry, handing me a copy of his latest report, “Plucky chap, what's more. Nothing we British admire more than pluck.
Nil desperandum.”
I couldn't help smiling, something I rarely did these days. The other railway towns of Ladysmith and Kimberley had also been besieged at the beginning of the war, but Kimberley had been relieved after four months and Ladysmith after five. Whereas we in Mafeking had become so accustomed to the non-arrival of relief which was reported a few days away and then never arrived, that we had almost ceased to believe it ever would â that we should all die here, trapped.
We had no news of our families in England, while they, one assumed, held their breath and prayed for us. I was very much afraid that Ned might have enlisted, and like his sister, have died far from his loved ones.
As supplies of everything dwindled, Harry became adept at winkling out anything that was scarce: even a bottle of French scent for me in a pretty, cut-glass bottle, for instance. Scent! A sweet breath of what now seemed a lost life. How on earth had he managed to get hold of it? Charm, I suppose. He wouldn't say. (When I opened it later, it had gone off, so someone had been hoarding it too long, but I kept the bottle.) I was shocked, however, when he brought things like corned beef, coffee and even tea, which had become scarce as gold dust. I should have refused them. Instead, to ease my conscience, I gave them to Amos and Lemuel, whose families were by now in dire straits as far as obtaining food went, far worse than we whites were: to put it bluntly, they were on the verge of starvation.
As the siege and the eternal, everlasting shelling dragged on into its fourth, fifth, sixth month, rescue did not come and we lived among constant noise, dust and confusion and danger, we whites were rationed to a pound of meal a week to make bread,
no more than a spoonful or two of sugar, a cupful of coffee beans and half of tea. A tin of bully beef, and that was it, if you were honest. Many were not, and got their food by the back door. There was also something called âsowens', a sort of meal made by grinding up grain husks, which you then sifted and blew away as much as you could of the chaff, to make gruel, but even with the most ingenious methods to make it palatable, it was sorry stuff. Nowhere was there any starch to be had, because it was now used to enrich and thicken soup. The sight of a horse carcase hanging from a tree waiting to be butchered became a common sight. Horsemeat sausages, when they were available, had begun to taste like a luxury.
“What's all this about not letting the natives share the rations?” Harry demanded, a snap in his eyes.
A good deal of brutality existed towards the blacks' condition. People shrugged and said the niggers were used to fending for themselves, they were expert cattle raiders, and they would eat anything that moved. I began to believe this when I saw one of the Fenji tribe kill one of the silent yellow dogs that abounded in the town by hitting it on the head with a stick. The smell of its roasting was perfectly sickening. Someone swore they had smelled roasting human flesh, too: how they knew it was human, I couldn't say, but there was no doubt of the Kaffirs' desperate situation. The men and women were gaunt as spectres, the children pot-bellied, their eyes protruding. It broke one's heart to see them begging for food and to have nothing to give them.