CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Wednesday, 15th September

The rains of August gave way to a mellow September, bringing with it the promise of spring: soft morning air, a warming sun, apricot skies at dusk. The Colony was coming back to life after the long cold and wet winter.

The passengers and crew of the Zuid-Beveland were also quickly absorbed into the day-to-day life of the expanding refugee community. Pierre Simond held an outdoor service of thanksgiving for their deliverance from the sea, and for the country they were all to learn to call home. Sanctuary, faith, hard work, gratitude; these were the pillars on which the Huguenot community in the Cape would be built. Since no further ships were expected until October, there was a sense of stability in the town: a breathing out, a moment of settling. Of peace.

Cared for by Madame Lombard and Florence, Judith gradually recovered. Adriaan van Dijk was now a regular visitor to the Joubert household. Having secured Commander Van der Stel’s blessing for his marriage, he had offered his hand and been accepted without hesitation. The marriage banns had been published and the wedding set for a date three weeks hence.

Judith had nothing to bring to the marriage, and Suzanne knew this worried her. But several of the women from the meeting rooms presented her with a square of unbleached linen and coloured cotton thread, and so Judith was working in secret to embroider a sampler to present to her betrothed on their wedding day. The border was patterned with ivy to symbolise steadfast love, faithfulness and fertility; a sparkling vine clinging to a tree a symbol of marital love and dependence – and a reference to the country in which they would build their family. She stitched two peacocks, top and bottom, as an allusion to future prosperity. In the centre, exquisitely worked, was an inscription of Judith’s own composition:

FAITH, UNWAVERING AND STEADFAST,

WILL STRENGTHEN BODY AND SOUL

For his part, Van Dijk presented Judith with a pair of gloves to seal their engagement – a Dutch tradition – to be worn on their wedding day. Fashioned from the softest kid, the cuffs were embellished with sea pearls and embroidered violets. A central motif of entwined hands and a basket of fruit spoke to their union and the hope of children to come. They were quite the finest gloves Suzanne had seen and she was astonished that Van Dijk might have acquired such a pair. To her knowledge, there were no glove makers resident in the Colony and few embroiderers capable of producing such delicate work. When she asked, he admitted he had bought the gloves from a merchant returning from the East and paid handsomely to secure them.

Madame Lombard surprised everyone by taking charge of the orphanage girls, moving into their lodgings while Judith was convalescing with Florence and Suzanne. She was brusque, sharp-tongued, wry, and the girls flourished under her firm – sometimes irreverent – guidance. Commander Van der Stel had been as good as his word. The girls now knew that none would be married until the new year at the earliest, so they were free to enjoy their days.

In this frontier colony, Suzanne realised she, too, was healing. The question Madame Lombard had asked her on the occasion of their first meeting – why Louise mattered so much to her – she was now not afraid to answer. She could not rewrite her own traumatic history, but she could do everything to bring Louise’s story into the light and that gave her purpose.

Yet Suzanne could do nothing but wait for Adriaan van Dijk to give her any morsel of information – and he was bound up with preparations for his wedding – and that was a drain on her spirits. She persuaded him to bring her books from the Castle library, though they were mostly dull treatises about trade or moralising volumes to improve the Christian mind. All the while, she held firm to her conviction that Louise had come to the Cape and settled. Her determination to find her remained steady.

Venturing out whenever she could, Suzanne found something different to marvel at on each occasion and wondered if Louise had been moved by the same sense of awe. The fynbos had exploded into life and the ground was carpeted with flowers: red, white, yellow, purple, pink and blue. The world was alive with the chirping of grasshoppers and rock kestrels and black-shouldered kites twisted and turned in the warming air. She was careful never to stray too far from the accepted paths, and never to places where lions or baboons had been sighted. But she took her notebook and she recorded what she saw. Like generations of Joubert women before her, she increasingly found solace and purpose in putting her words down on the page.

Testimony of a new world.

Six weeks to the day since the China had sailed into Table Bay, a small congregation of celebrants gathered at the chapel in the Castle of Good Hope for the wedding of Judith Verbeek, spinster and orphan, to Adriaan van Dijk, son of Johanna Evets and Jakob van Dijk of Rotterdam.

The Dutch pastor of the Colony, Johannes van Andel, conducted the service in the presence of Commander Van der Stel, the groom’s VOC colleagues and the bride’s travelling companions from Rotterdam. Wilhelmina, Petronella and Catrina were flower girls. Suzanne, Florence and Madame Lombard were the only French guests.

In front of their witnesses, Adriaan and Judith exchanged their vows, swearing their troth on the volume of psalms that had saved Judith’s life. Suzanne thought Adriaan had never looked finer, with his brown hair gleaming and his blacks laundered, his cuffs and collar bleached white. The bride wore a pale green dress, with open sleeves and a bodice exquisite with passementerie. She looked radiant in the chapel with her crown of flowers. Suzanne smiled, recollecting Adriaan’s description of Judith’s hair – the colour of autumn leaves – and wished she had the skill to capture it with paint and brush.

A simple wedding feast followed. The spiced wine known as ‘bridal tears’ was served in pewter cups and Adriaan had found someone within the Castle kitchens to bake bridal sugar, the sweetmeats that blessed every wedding table in Holland. It had been, Suzanne thought as she crept to bed some hours later, the most perfect day.