CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

OLIFANTSHOEK

‘Gilles Barenton was your mother? But how is that possible . . .’

Suzanne stopped, words now failing her. Théodore was looking at her with a mixture of sympathy and, she thought, something approaching affection.

‘What you are saying makes no sense,’ she said, trying again. ‘In her diary, Louise wrote of her affection for Gilles, of their . . .’ Again, she tailed off.

‘All of that was true,’ he said. ‘Theirs was a love match.’

‘So, help me to understand!’

Théodore walked across the kitchen and pushed open the shutter, letting a shaft of subdued light into the grey-shadowed room.

‘I grew up hearing stories about Louise,’ Suzanne said tentatively, when still he did not speak. ‘My grandmother remembers Louise from when she was a child – but it was only when we arrived in Amsterdam last October, and I read her diary for the first time, that she suddenly came to life for me. After that, I read everything else kept in our old family home – my great-great-grandmother Minou’s journals . . .’

‘Ah, Minou,’ Théodore said warmly. ‘Louise often talked about her.’

Suzanne smiled, relieved that he was finally engaging in the conversation.

‘Also, I read records kept by Minou’s sister, Alis, and her companion, Cornelia van Raay, and pieced together more of Louise’s story. It helped me forget . . .’ She stopped herself, changed tack. ‘It was Cornelia’s house in Warmoesstraat where the archives were kept. She and Alis loved Louise, too.’

Outside, she heard a rumble of thunder behind the mountains. Storms clouds were gathering, masking the face of the sun.

‘As did I,’ Théodore said. ‘She and Gilles, they chose to live a wild and different life.’

‘From the rumours I have heard since arriving in the Colony, they succeeded.’

‘Mostly, yes.’

Suzanne looked at him, trying to understand. ‘Have you lived here your whole life?’

‘For all of my sixty-five years on this earth. This farm is very close to the original patch of land granted to Louise by an old Goringhaiqua headsman when they first arrived.’

‘Which they were forced to abandon after their whereabouts were betrayed, isn’t that right?’

Théodore topped up his wine and sighed. ‘You have discovered a great deal.’

Suzanne blushed, feeling strangely guilty. ‘What I do know – at least, what I think I know – is that Louise and Gilles, for whatever reason, were trying to get away from Phillipe. Your father.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘Is that true, Théodore? Do you know what happened between the three of them?’

He put down his cup. ‘You have to understand that much of what took place – I was only told long after the events in question.’

‘I understand.’

Théodore took a deep breath. ‘Although he lived his life as a man, Gilles was born a woman.’

‘What?’ the word exploded out of her. ‘How can that be?’

‘Gilles’ mother, who was a vile and debauched creature, forced him to dress as a boy from the age of ten, to gain an inheritance from his uncle. This was in La Rochelle in the summer of 1610.’

Now he had started, the words came easily enough. The story was fantastical, astonishing, devastating in parts, but yet she found she had no trouble believing it. It was as if she had spent days looking at the wrong side of a tapestry, all the colours and threads entangled, obscuring her view, but had now walked round to the other side and seen the image as it was supposed to be seen.

Théodore started to pace around the kitchen. ‘Tell me something of your life, Suzanne,’ he said, and she realised he was still not quite ready to talk about what had happened on the day Phillipe found Louise and Gilles again. ‘Why did you leave La Rochelle?’

She took a breath. ‘We lived in Louise’s house. She left it to my great-grandfather when she sailed for Gran Canaria.’

Théodore smiled. ‘Gilles talked often about the grand house on the rue des Gentilhommes.’

‘Things are different now. In their time, La Rochelle was the Huguenot capital of France. Its glory has faded and people of my faith are no longer safe there. Or anywhere. We have all been driven into exile – to Holland or England, Germany or the New World – or made prisoners in our own homes by the dragonnades, soldiers who—’

Suzanne broke off.

‘Something happened to you,’ he probed gently, a statement rather than a question.

‘Yes,’ she said. It was painful to talk about, but she wanted him to understand how her quest to find Louise was tied up with what had been done to her.

‘I am so sorry,’ he said, when she had finished.

‘It is a common story. Others have suffered just as much, sometimes much more.’

‘That doesn’t make your experience any the less terrible.’

In the west, the sun was slipping from the sky. Suzanne heard another rumble of thunder, closer now. All the same, she felt calm. Somehow, in these five months, the burden had lifted from her shoulders. What had happened that night – her rape, she could name it now – did not define her. It was one incident, traumatic and violent, but she would refuse to give it more weight than any other experience of her twenty years on the earth.

‘What are you thinking?’ Théodore asked, noticing the altered expression on her face.

‘About being whole again,’ she replied, with a catch in her voice. ‘About the possibility of beginning anew.’

‘Here?’

She shook her head. ‘I understand, now, that it lies within me to heal myself. It is not distance that makes the difference, but my own courage.’

Théodore got up, walked to the door and pushed it open to let in a little air. ‘You have spoken plainly with me, Suzanne.’

‘I have tried to.’

‘I owe to you the same honesty. You want to know what happened between Louise, Gilles and Phillipe – how I come to be here?’

‘Yes,’ she replied simply.

She saw the anguish on his face. ‘The fact of the matter is that it is hard for me to speak of it. Indeed, I never have.’

Outside, Suzanne could see how the clouds had turned from grey to black, and were now covering the top of the mountains. There was another cascade of thunder and the first spots of rain started to fall. And Théodore began the hardest part of his story.

‘When you were attacked in your home, there was no child?’

Suzanne shook her head. ‘That, at least, I was spared.’ Then, she turned cold. ‘You were conceived – you are the result of . . .’ She found she could not say the word out loud.

‘A rape, yes.’

‘Théodore, I . . . I don’t know what to say.’

He sighed. ‘I did not learn this until I was an adult, you understand. I knew nothing but love from Louise and from Gilles.’

‘Why would Phillipe do something so heinous?’

He held up his hand. ‘To make sense of it, we have to go back to the beginning. As you know, Louise and Gilles dropped anchor in Table Bay on the seventh day of May in the year 1622 . . .’

When Théodore had finished talking, Suzanne sat in silence. She hardly knew what to say, how to express what she was feeling. Everything she had imagined was wrong but, at the same time, her instincts had been right.

‘I feared that Phillipe had killed Louise, not the other way around,’ she said eventually. ‘I never imagined . . .’

Théodore’s eyes dimmed. ‘He was a wicked man, and I regret with every sinew of my body that he was my father.’

She exhaled. ‘Thank you for telling me the truth. It cannot have been easy.’

He gave an exhausted smile. ‘It was easier than I thought it might be. Given what you have suffered, I thought you would understand.’

Suzanne took Louise’s prison diary from her satchel and pushed it across the table to him. ‘When I found this in the archive in Warmoesstraat, it became the focus of my determination to find Louise.’

Théodore stared at the leather cover as if he was scared to touch it.

‘There is also this,’ she added, taking out the Justice card. ‘I don’t know why it was so important to Louise, nor why she kept it. She never struck me as a superstitious woman, but it must have meant something for her to have gone to such lengths to preserve it.’

Théodore’s weather-worn face lit up. ‘It did mean something, but not to Louise. It belonged to Gilles. It was the only thing he possessed from his younger life in La Rochelle.’

Suzanne passed it across the table. ‘You should have it. It rightly belongs to you.’

He smiled. ‘The card meant a lot to him. To them both, the ideal of justice. It is what they fought for all of their lives.’

Suzanne watched as Théodore went into his bedchamber, then returned moments later with a book with plain brown boards, like a child’s school jotter.

‘Louise continued to keep a diary of our lives here,’ he said. ‘It was the reason I accompanied Gilles to Table Bay from time to time, to trade furs and timber for the paper and ink the ships brought back from China.’

He put it into her hands, then went to the door.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To give you time to read this. While you do so, I will check on the animals and pay a visit to our house guest. The storm is nearly upon us.’

‘There he is,’ Harrie said, pointing as a white man came out of the farmhouse.

Adriaan, Tia and Harrie watched him head first to the animal pen to check on the sheep, then to lead the horses from the kraal to a shelter behind the house. This had to be the man Eltorp had met near Stellenbosch several weeks before.

‘He knows the storm is coming,’ Tia said, as a roll of thunder echoed overhead.

The man then headed to the nearest hut. Adriaan watched the two San get to their feet, then all three went inside. Moments later, they came out with another man between them.

‘Is that Kmame?’ Adriaan asked.

‘That is him,’ Tia hissed behind him.

Adriaan was failing to understand the relationship between the four men. They had been working on the assumption that Kmame had more warriors at his command and that he had kidnapped Suzanne. Tia was certain that was what had happened. Now Adriaan wasn’t so sure. Kmame was holding his hands behind his back. He couldn’t tell if they were bound there or if it was simply how he was standing. Might he be a prisoner rather than captor? And what of the white man? Adriaan knew Suzanne had been convinced that he was someone connected to Louise, but had not made it clear if she thought he was someone she could trust. Perhaps it was he, rather than Kmame, who had kidnapped Suzanne to ransom for a reward?

If she was there at all.

Suddenly, a huge fork of lightning split the grey sky and thunder erupted almost directly over their heads. Rain started to fall: furious, torrential, blinding.

Kmame took advantage of the diversion and started to shout. There was an altercation between him and the white man, who turned his back and started to walk towards the house. He had nearly reached the door, when there was another clap of thunder.

Then chaos broke loose.

Kmame screamed at the top of his voice, a battle cry to chill the blood, then swung round with what looked like a rock in his hand. He smashed it once, then again, into the face of the San warrior closest to him, who fell to the ground without a sound. The other guard readied his spear, but he was too slow. Kmame delivered a ferocious blow to the side of his head. He bought the rock down on the back of his neck until the second San also lay motionless in the dirt.

All this had taken no more than seconds.

The white man was running back to confront him, but Kmame grabbed the spear of one of the fallen San.

‘Stop him!’ Adriaan shouted at the top of his voice.

Harrie instantly broke cover, racing down towards the farm, slipping and sliding in the mud. Adriaan followed, his pistol in hand but, in the driving rain, he couldn’t get a clear shot.

Then, to his amazement, he saw Suzanne standing in the doorway of the farmhouse with her musket in her hand. Adriaan saw Kmame pull back his arm and aim the spear directly towards the white man, who threw himself to the ground as the iron point whistled past his ear. Harrie burst into the compound and tried to reach Kmame, who now had the second spear in his hand.

Then, he saw white smoke and the explosion as the ball left the muzzle of the gun. Suzanne’s aim was true. Kmame’s body was thrown back by the impact and fell, bleeding red into the dirt. His legs twitched, his feet tracing patterns on the drowning land, then nothing.

Adriaan watched Suzanne slowly lower her arm. Then, as carefully as if she was releasing a child, she put the musket down on the ground. The white man pulled himself to his feet, then he opened his arms as Suzanne ran to embrace him. They stood there for a moment, drenched by the driving rain, then stepped apart.

‘Miss!’ screamed Tia, hurtling past her brother and throwing herself at Suzanne. ‘You’re alive!’

Suzanne was in shock. She seemed barely to notice the rain pelting down upon their heads.

‘Adriaan, may I present Théodore Barenton to you,’ she said, as if they were at a reception at the Commander’s residence. ‘He is a distant cousin of sorts. His father was Louise’s half-brother, though what relation that makes us to one another, I cannot say.’

‘Suzanne, are you . . .?’ he began.

‘Théodore,’ she continued in a daze, ‘this is Adriaan van Dijk, the husband of my dearest friend in the Colony. It is he who taught me how to shoot on the sand dunes at Gallow’s Hill.’

The two men looked at one another, then Théodore put out his hand. ‘In which case, mijnheer Van Dijk, I am very much in your debt.’

Finally, Suzanne’s composure cracked. She began to laugh until the tears mixed with the rain on her cheeks.