19

‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Granville Beaufoy Montague Nash.’

A finger gently prodded four times into each of our chests. A name before which a weaker man might have taken a step backwards.

His own men were lined up behind him, all Zanzibaris, porters and guides. We had anticipated that he might be accompanied by other Company men, or by men acting under the Company’s authority collected at the coast or Stanleyville. These men stood upright, their arms flat by their sides, as though about to be inspected. Those senior among them wore red fezzes and cotton drill suits. Nash himself wore a brilliantly white topee, varnished boots and an alpaca dress jacket with a stiff masher collar. Afterwards, Cornelius said the man reminded him of a tailor’s dummy. It was clear to us all that this one pristine outfit had been saved for this occasion, and that, fitting so closely and cleanly to the man inside it, it was there to serve a purpose, to signal intent.

‘Beaufoy?’ Fletcher said.

And as though on cue, the man said, ‘Henry Beaufoy is my uncle. My father’s brother. I was named after him long before I was called here.’ He relaxed momentarily, tugged by this distant memory, and then he remembered himself and straightened.

Henry Beaufoy had been, or perhaps still was, the Secretary of the African Association. His portrait had looked down on Frere and myself in that overheated library. The man was a Quaker and well known for being governed in all his actions and decisions by the strictures of his religion.

Cornelius was the first to approach the man in greeting.

‘And these are my men,’ Nash said, his first time in command, stepping aside to present them.

I recognized those of the porters who had been here before. They were not reliable men. They had come with Nash because, in addition to their pay, there was some novelty involved, and some distant possibility of further pay.

Cornelius, guessing what was expected of him, walked along the line and looked each of the men in the eye. Most avoided him, but Henry Beaufoy Montague Nash did not see this.

We had known of the party’s arrival since the previous evening, when word of it had come to us from a fisherman who encountered them a mile downriver. Abbot had gone to them, found them exhausted and in disarray, and had then been sent back to us by Nash, who insisted that he would not present himself in that condition. Abbot had asked him where the other members of the delegation were, and Nash, perhaps imagining he was referring to the porters yet to catch up with him, had told Abbot they were coming. It was why, at this appointed hour, we had expected to see other Englishmen standing alongside him.

I alone, I believe, felt some reassurance at seeing him standing there by himself, the thinnest of threads between everything that had happened and everything that was yet to come.

As he waited with his porters lined up behind him, others came into the compound to join them. These late arrivals wore only loincloths or tattered trousers and carried small loads, which they dropped unceremoniously in a mound beside Nash. He told them to be more careful, but they ignored him, and only when Cornelius shouted at them in the language they better understood did they lay down their packages in neat piles.

‘Thank you,’ Nash said to Cornelius. It was the first of his concessions.

Cornelius then invited the man to accompany him to his quarters, where he might wash and change his clothes.

I saw that Nash had expected considerably more of his arrival, to be greeted more ceremoniously. Like Abbot, he was a clerk who had wandered further from his desk than he had ever believed possible, and we all saw that.

‘Are there others yet to come?’ I asked him, meaning more porters – the forty he had with him had brought the loads of half that number.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I am completely alone.’ He looked at the men behind him, his gaze stiffening them further.

I went with him to Cornelius’s rooms. Throughout our encounter he held a leather case, and when I offered to carry it for him, he thanked me and declined.

Cornelius asked him about the route he had taken and Nash explained at great length how he had chosen his guides at each of his stopping points, and how trustworthy they had proved. It was clear that he had been misled, that his journey had been unnecessarily prolonged and made more costly by these uninformed decisions. Neither Cornelius nor I disabused him of his achievement.

He spoke at great length regarding his stay on the coast, what he had seen there, what changes were under way, and how often his expectations of the places he had visited had been exceeded. He looked around him as he spoke – we were then passing the most dilapidated of our timber warehouses – making his silent, disappointing comparisons.

He complained of an ache in both his knees, and of cuts – one on his shoulder, another on his forearm – which continued to suppurate. Cornelius reassured him that they would be treated.

‘They are of little consequence,’ Nash said. ‘What man comes here without the expectation of suffering?’ He laughed at the remark. He seemed bound by and devoted to his own expectation.

I saw myself in him. I had been ready to dislike him, to be offended by him and his purpose there, but I saw that he had arrived just as I had arrived, the only difference being that I had come clothed in uncertainty, and here was a man whose conviction in his work was as certain and as solid and as much a part of him as the legs which carried him and the spine which held him upright.

‘Of course,’ Cornelius said.

Around us, men were at work unloading a small half-decked steamer, and he asked me about its cargo. I told him what I knew of it, that it had brought only palm nuts – vividly crimson in a mound ahead of us – and a consignment of greenheart and gum. The load was of little value.

‘No rubber?’ he said.

Cornelius, I saw, continued to make his own silent assessment of the man.

Arriving at Cornelius’s quarters, Nash took off his jacket and undershirts and showed us his wounds. In addition to the two of which he had spoken, there were a further dozen, all displaying various degrees of infection. His chest and neck were covered by insect bites. A lesion ran the length of his ribcage, darkening in the places where the bones came closest to the skin. He studied himself in Cornelius’s mirror and seemed genuinely shocked at what he saw there.

He continued to discuss his journey with us, false familiarity in his voice; he mentioned places neither Cornelius nor I had ever visited.

Cornelius washed his wounds and applied iodine and oil of thyme to them. Nash did his best not to show the pain this caused him. Cornelius explained to him what had bitten him, and in turn Nash listed the medicines he had brought with him, few of which would serve him well. One of his porters had died during the journey, an old man who could scarcely manage a quarter-load. He had eaten his meal one evening and then died in the night. Two other men had absconded, one with his load.

I stopped listening to him. We had all been wrong-footed.

‘And Nicholas Frere?’ I said finally, stopping Nash at the height of another small speech outlining what he considered to be his duties among us.

He looked at me for a moment, angry at my interruption.

‘Where Nicholas Frere is concerned,’ he said, his tone changed, formal, unassailable, as solid as his conviction, ‘I shall determine the facts of the matter – facts of which you are all no doubt already aware; I shall make my assessment based upon those facts; and founded upon that assessment I shall make my recommendations for further action.’

‘Meaning you’ll send him to stand proper trial,’ Cornelius said flatly.

‘That may be my recommendation, yes. How can I decide when I am not yet appraised of the facts?’ His retreat into written orders continued, disappointed that his own part in the proceedings had been so bluntly and swiftly exposed.

‘You will be offered every assistance,’ Cornelius said.

‘I understand that.’

‘Beyond our legal or contractual obligations, I meant.’

‘Of course.’

‘We want this whole thing resolved as much as you do.’

‘As the Company’s representative in the matter, I shall ask nothing of any of you that you cannot already have considered a hundred times over prior to my arrival. I do understand the nature and the depth of your feeling towards me. Nicholas Frere was your companion and friend. I understand what that means in a place like this.’

By which he meant that we were to keep our distance from him, that we were more likely to hinder than to assist him should we insist on our involvement in the matter. We were men uselessly beating our heads together.

I left them soon afterwards and walked through the tall grass to the edge of the garrison yard. Bone and his men were there, but no-one else. It had been my intention to visit Frere in advance of Nash, to tell him of the man come to question him, but instead I turned away, and little caring where I went, I walked to our useless quarry and sat for an hour at its rim watching the tiny brown figures beneath me.

*   *   *

A month after my arrival I had been taken by Cornelius and Fletcher to witness a trial on the far shore. A Manyema stood accused of theft and murder and was being tried by the Belgians. Cornelius had some small role in the proceedings and would be called to testify to the man’s character. Fletcher and myself were invited to attend in the more debatable capacity of ‘official observers’.

We crossed the river on the evening prior to the trial. It was my first time out of the Station, and it surprised me to see how much busier and more obviously prosperous this place was compared to our own.

We were put up at the residence of a man called Henrici, Chief Quartermaster – Cornelius’s counterpart – and it was not until late in the evening that I discovered that he was also to be the acting judge in the following day’s proceedings.

Alone with Cornelius, I asked him by what authority the man played the role, but he dismissed my remark by asking me how else I imagined these things were done. There was no doubt that the accused man was guilty, having confessed to both his crimes.

Henrici had speculated on the punishment he might deliver, but here too there was little doubt. Cornelius told me to say nothing during the trial. The accused man had also been suspected of stealing from us during the time he was in our employ, but nothing had been done to expose or punish him. I saw then how inextricably all these events and their participants were connected.

The criminal showed no remorse and stood before the court wearing only a pair of blue trousers, his feet and hands tied. He frequently shouted out to interrupt the proceedings, and each time this happened he was struck by the guards on either side of him. One of these men was Proctor, though I did not know him at the time.

A junior quartermaster acted in the man’s defence, but this amounted to little more than a recital of his record of employment, doubtlessly compiled the previous day, and being little more than a list of the months during which the man had not been accused of any crime. He was an unreliable and unpopular worker, who stood accused of beating a fellow porter in order to steal a small case of wire rods and polished tortoiseshell. The other man had died of his wounds ten days after the attack, and four days after that the thief had been arrested while attempting to sell what he had stolen.

The court proceedings were perfunctory. At one point, Henrici called for Proctor not to beat the prisoner so harshly, saying that the beatings and the man’s attempts at evasion were holding everything up. There was a small space in the building reserved for the public, and this consisted mostly of traders keen on an hour’s entertainment while they waited for their customers. There were no seats, and these men came and went.

The man’s wife and four children had been allowed into the court at the start of the proceedings, but had then been removed following the woman’s constant wailing. She had thrown a fetish at her husband, expecting him to catch it and protect himself with it, but instead the man had simply stared at it where it fell at his feet and had then ground it into the dirt. Henrici watched this and then called for the thing to be removed, saying it dishonoured the integrity of the court. He consulted frequently with the men sitting alongside him, but I imagine that little of any legal consequence was discussed by them.

The guilty man’s crimes were frequently repeated. Whatever else happened, there was to be no doubt whatsoever that he was deserving of the punishment about to be handed down to him. Cornelius had warned me the previous evening that there was only one possible consequence of a murder charge being proven and that the man would be hanged. This, he said, would take place immediately following the trial. This was not a place for reconsideration or appeals. I asked him if he thought this was fair – I had not known then how inadequate and compromising the man’s defence was to prove – and, suppressing his laughter, he told me I might want to raise the point with Henrici over breakfast.

The following morning, taking his duties seriously, Henrici left for the courthouse before I woke.

The trial lasted two hours, half of which consisted of private deliberations.

Cornelius gave his evidence. He smoked one of his cigars, constantly acknowledging the men he recognized in the crowd. He was asked to tell the court what he knew of the accused man, but everything he said only confirmed what the court already knew. He spoke to those of us in our reserved seats as though we were the members of a jury, and it occurred to me only then that this, unofficially, was what we were.

The accused man was condemned to death by hanging for the murder of his fellow porter. One of the other judges rose at this announcement and asked if there were any relatives of the murdered man present. No-one answered him, disappointing him and causing him to sit back down, his own small role in the proceedings over.

‘He would have offered them a part in it,’ Cornelius said to me, making no attempt to lower his voice. ‘In the name of fairness and retribution.’

There was then a further delay as Henrici announced that he and his judges would now consider the crime of theft.

I asked Cornelius if this was simply another example of the protocol of the occasion being seen to be observed.

‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘They’ll probably want to flog him unconscious before reviving him to hang him.’

I thought at first that he was making a cruel joke at the condemned man’s expense, but a moment later Henrici announced that the man would receive three hundred lashes before he was hanged. He rose from his seat and read from a ledger. Upon finishing, he handed the book to each of the others for their signatures.

Even allowing for the fact that the man had confessed to both crimes and must have known what awaited him, it was evident to most present that the trial was a charade, concerned with a great deal more than the matter of theft or murder.

At this point, Cornelius rose and asked Henrici if the flogging might not be reduced. Henrici shook his head. The ink had already dried on the paper.

I asked Cornelius why he had made the appeal on the man’s behalf.

‘Because they’ll beat him unconscious more than once and we’ll all be kept waiting while he’s brought round. There will have to be a doctor present and he will have to certify that the man is fit enough to go on being lashed. After which, he will have to certify him sufficiently recovered to be hanged.’

I asked him how many of these trials he had attended, and rather than answer me, he began to one by one slowly extend the fingers of both hands.

I looked past him to Fletcher. We had all expected to be back at the Station by mid-afternoon.

We ate lunch with Henrici. His manner was grave, as befitted his new responsibilities. He said it shocked and surprised him to see how these people continued to behave towards each other, how little value they put on life itself. But his tone was more one of excited disgust than genuine, humanitarian disappointment in his fellow man. He drank glass after glass of wine with his food.

Later, the proceedings resumed and the condemned man was unceremoniously tied to a crude frame erected in the space outside the court. A larger crowd gathered.

Proctor and two of his men carried out the beating, one man counting aloud each time the cane connected with the man’s back.

Mercifully, the flogged man screamed only at the first thirty or so lashes, and after that he seemed anaesthetized by his pain. Blood sprayed the ground in a wide circle around him. I even imagined I felt the finest flecks of it on my own forehead twenty yards from where he was whipped.

After sixty lashes, he fell unconscious, and Proctor and his men revived him by pouring water over him. The man groaned – sufficient for the doctor to signal to Proctor to continue – and the flogging resumed. Men and women in the crowd called out continually and I saw that wagers were being made on how much more the beaten man might endure.

He passed out four more times before the first hundred lashes were administered. After this he was revived, allowed to rest for a few minutes, swilled with clean water, and his flayed back pointlessly sprayed with sulphur powder. The doctor moved closer to oversee this, standing with a cloth pressed firmly to his nose and mouth. The man’s injuries did not concern him, merely his capacity to endure having more inflicted upon him.

The flogging resumed, and this time the man passed out almost immediately. It was by then three in the afternoon and the sun was at its hottest. A cloud of flies hung over the beaten man. The men with the canes paused and Henrici went to them. After a brief conference, Henrici announced to the crowd that nothing would be served by further reviving the man and that the flogging would continue even though he was unconscious. The men with the canes worked less energetically at this, and the man counting the lashes lowered his voice until he was almost silent. An air of shameful expediency now hung over the proceedings.

In this manner, the punishment was soon over and Henrici finally called a halt to the proceedings.

The man was again doused, and when, after fifteen minutes, he showed signs of responding to the water thrown over his near-skinless back, he was released from his frame and carried to the tree where he was to be hanged. All that was required now, apparently, was that he was able to stand upright, unaided, for a full minute before his punishment was completed.

Henrici stood in front of him, his pocket-watch in his hand, counting. The condemned man stood upright for only a few seconds before swaying and falling. He was helped back to his feet, but fell again soon afterwards. This happened several more times, until Henrici finally called for a chair to be taken to the man. The man sat on it, crying out when his back was pushed against its slats. After conferring with the doctor, Henrici announced that to insist on the man standing and repeatedly falling was beyond him and that this requirement need not now be fulfilled if the other judges were in agreement. They were.

After this, the condemned man was given a drink of water, and a rope was thrown over the branch of the tree above him and its noose placed round his neck. He seemed barely to notice what was happening to him. A minister approached him and read aloud from a Bible. Then, even as the reading continued, the man was helped up onto the chair and held steady at his waist.

The minister turned from the man to the crowd, still reading, and walked slowly away from him. The slack was taken in from above the man and the rope secured to a hook in the trunk of the tree. Henrici and the other judges stood shoulder to shoulder facing the man on his chair.

A signal was given to Proctor and the chair was kicked away. The man dropped, jerked, appeared to kick out two or three times, and then hung limp, dead, his feet inches from the ground.

The crowd fell silent for a few seconds, and then, one by one, began to cheer and applaud. Henrici motioned for the doctor, who in turn called for Proctor to unfasten the rope. Proctor did this and the hanged man fell into a sitting position beside the fallen chair, his legs splayed. The doctor touched a finger to his forehead and the body fell backwards. The crowd pushed forwards for a closer look at the corpse.

I rose and was caught in the movement, having to fight to extricate myself and push a way through to where Cornelius and Fletcher awaited me. They were determined to leave as soon as possible.

The river, I remember, was low and there was great demand for the small boats now that the proceedings were over. Cornelius insisted on seeking out Henrici and thanking him for his hospitality.

‘Thank him for the show, too,’ Fletcher told him.

Cornelius left us and I went with Fletcher to find a boat.

As we returned, I looked out over the brown, sluggish water to see our own Station in its entirety. I saw how whitely our distant buildings shone in the fierce sun, saw smoke rising through the trees in unbroken columns into the windless air. I remember then, in that brief moment of calm after all that I had just witnessed and hoped never to see again, asking Fletcher if we ever held our own trials, and him telling me that we didn’t, that we no longer possessed the authority. I remember the relief I felt at hearing this, and at leaving the far shore and all that had just happened there behind me, my thoughts then distracted by the flock of birds which rose screaming all around us at our intrusion.