Miss Emily’s Smile – by Paul C Venter – Chapter 12

Twelfth chapter

Life is a riddle (Oom Schalk Lourens said) and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

     Bernardus van Aswegen left as soon as he considered it safe enough, meaning as soon as he believed the dangerous bitch with the wicked little pistol wasn’t waiting outside the compartment to shoot whoever came out first.

     There was no-one waiting in the corridor.      

     Behind him Bernardus van Aswegen left considerable chaos. Detective Constables Blair and Thatcher were trying to follow Lieutenant Connelly’s weak instructions, but kept getting in each other’s way. Connelly wanted them to save him by using towels as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding in his thigh. If forced to admit such a ridiculous thing, the policemen would have confessed a certain squeamishness concerning the location of the wound: right next to Connelly’s considerable and ghastly pale member.

     Captain Lawrence had no real interest in this chaotic procedure, but he did wait for the large train conductor (large enough to stop a bullet possibly meant for Lawrence) to exit the compartment before joining him.

     “Where is she?” he demanded to know.

     “She’s still on the train, Captain, unless she can fly safely off a moving train.”

     “We must get the diamond back!” Lawrence screamed.

     For a fleeting moment Bernardus van Aswegen considered teaching this English coward how to fly off a moving train, then decided against it. Hopefully, he thought, before Lawrence did leave the earth, he’ll find out the stone Miss Emily took isn’t the real diamond. Jislaaik, what a lekker thought!

     “I will find the diamond,” he told Lawrence. “Please stay here and take care of Lieutenant Connelly.”

     “Yes, yes, of course,” Lawrence lied. “We will put him off at the next stop, hopefully they have a doctor there.”

     “Good idea, Captain, you think on your feet,” Bernardus van Aswegen lied.

     He had no intention of running all over the train and looking for, as he believed, a fake diamond. Right now he needed to find Gerrit Johannes and he needed to find him fast.

     In the war against the English, loyal Boers like Grootjan and his son Kleinjan had fought the disloyalty of greedy Boers as well. So-called comrades who would reveal the position of their own forces to the enemy for a price.

     So although it saddened them, because they had believed in Uncle Hermanus, they were not completely surprised when he demanded the great diamond instead of giving them fresh horses. They loudly used all sorts of unchristian language to describe his morals but since he did have the shotgun and it did have two barrels, they eventually surrendered the diamond to him. One hand still aiming the deadly weapon at them, he employed the other to hold the stone to the light of his moth-encrusted lamp.

     “You know you can buy half the province with this,” he grinned. “Imagine how many farms you can have on half the province…”

     He stopped talking, staring at the stone glowing in the lamplight.

     “What is it now?” growled Grootjan.

     “You bastards!” Uncle Hermanus roared angrily, forgetting to point his shotgun. “How dare you come here with…”

     Kleinjan shot him in the throat. Uncle Hermanus gurgled, stumbled and fell, bleeding to death with his shuddering hand still clutching the stone.

     Grootjan took it from the greedy fool’s dead fingers and returned it to his pocket. Kleinjan found fresh horses in the barn and saddled them while his father said a prayer over Uncle Hermanus, then went looking for something to eat in the farmhouse. It was a pigsty, usually the case when a man lives alone, but Grootjan did find biltong, sausages, bread and fairly fresh milk.

     Ten minutes later they were on their way again, walking the horses. They still had a way to go before sunrise. With the help of their heavenly Father the last part of their journey, by train from Heidelberg to Pretoria and then on foot to the Prime Minister’s office, would be uneventful. They were looking forward to the look on Louis Botha’s face when they handed him the fabulous diamond.

     Yes, Kleinjan shot too soon. He should have waited for Uncle Hermanus to finish his indignant, furious final sentence:

     How dare you come here with a piece of fake glass?

     Searching from carriage to carriage, Bernardus van Aswegen couldn’t find Gerrit Johannes, Miss Emily or the two killers with their pick-axes. Between carriages he even braved the rushing air of the train and crawled up outside ladders to glare at the roofs of the carriages, with absolutely no luck. Same with the train’s lavatories. He even looked in on Connelly’s soldiers sleeping fitfully in their seats.  

     How can four people disappear from a train moving at this speed through walls of solid Drakensberg rock? Jumping off was not an option, it would be suicide.

     The whole thing was turning into a fucking riddle, and it was driving Bernardus van Aswegen out of his fucking mind.

     Neef Berg opened his eyes in heaven. Well, as white as. Everything was white. The walls, bed, hospital gown, his many, many bandages and the plasters holding his broken legs and arms in place, as well as the uniform of the pretty nurse attending him.

     Pretty and young. Eighteen at the most. Of course, in his mind he could lie to himself and imagine her sixteen.

     Her name was Evelyn, very English. She wouldn’t give him her surname. She did give him the name of the town: Bergville. Had to be named something with berg in it. It was a short distance south of the Drakensberg, the lamp-lit town spotted with dark empty plots he had seen through the cleft in the mountain.

     Nurse Evelyn injected him with morphine for the pain. Neef Berg loved her even more for that. It made him deliriously silly and somewhere in the happy haze he dictated, in English, a longish telegram to Prime Minister Louis Botha and it impressed Nurse Evelyn no end.

    He obviously still had a way with young girls, but unfortunately not the body to do anything about it. Even the bones in his fingers and shoulders were broken.

    Bergville did not have a train station, the nearest one being at Frere on the main railway line to Durban, but you could send a telegram from the police station. It was across the road from the tiny hospital so Nurse Evelyn quickly took Neef Berg’s rambling dictation there.

    The English police sergeant read it bug-eyed and hurriedly accompanied her back to the hospital. Neef Berg had to relate the whole terrible adventure to him, and he took copious notes which he later transcribed into an urgent telegram for the personal attention of Prime Minister Louis Botha, Pretoria.

    It reached Botha in the hour before dawn, just as his wife Annie brought him his first coffee of the day. The news of William Gibson’s death shocked both of them, and the loss of the lovely balloon somewhat depressed Botha, actually more than the infirm condition of Neef Berg did.

    “Bergville is such a nowhere place,” his English wife said. “You have to get Neef Berg to Frere on the main railway line, from there they can put him on a train to Pietermaritzburg and proper medical care.”

   Annie, born Emmett, orginally came from that part of the Natal province.

    “Yes, my dear,” Botha promised.

    “If it’s his time to meet his Maker,” she said grimly, “I hope the Lord has mercy on his wicked soul.”

    That told Botha his wife knew more about Neef Berg than she ever let on.

    After Annie had gone down to organise breakfast, Botha quickly got out a military map and studied it. Ja-nee, his memory had not failed him, there were indeed small commandos of Boer rebels still active in the Bergville, Winterton, Frere and Coligny districts of Natal. They would, like the two rebels on the way here with the real Gibson diamond, serve his dark purpose very well.

    Poor Willy didn’t need his unfaithful young wife anymore, did he?

    And deeply loyal Bernardus van Aswegen would gladly give his life for the greater cause, wouldn’t he?

    At that moment, with the early morning light turning red outside the moving train’s windows, Bernardus van Aswegen finally gave up his search and headed for his wagon at the back of the train. He needed to eat and rest before they reached the next water stop at some Zulu place in the mountains.

     When he entered his wagon, Gerrit Johannes smiled at him from the long seat under the little window. “Bernardus, jislaaik, it’s about time. Did you bring us some food? We’re close to starving here.”

     “Ja-nee,” grinned Johnny Zulu, sharing the seat with Gerrit Johannes and Manny Porra. “We can eat lots, boss.”

     “Lots and lots,” giggled Manny Porra.

     They were armed with their own weapons, the three of them.

     Miss Emily sat on the train conductor’s cot, apparently unarmed and obviously deeply unhappy.

     Neef Berg woke to early sunlight and a great deal of throbbing pain. Thank heaven, Nurse Evelyn was at his bedside with morphine and a telegram message handwritten in Dutch. The message had lots of spelling errors, proving to Neef Berg’s relief that the English transcriber couldn’t understand a word of it and he thanked his heavenly Father for that as well.

     The telegram was from Je vriend Lewis, Dutch for Your friend Louis, instead of openly from Prime Minister Louis Botha. That told Neef Berg, even before he read the message itself, that the message was meant to be secret.

    After he read it, he knew why it had to be secret. This could, in the wrong hands, cost Louis Botha his job as prime minister.

    Nurse Evelyn was working the morphine into the glass tube, getting ready to inject him, the last task of her night shift.

    “You’re an angel,” he said kindly, “but I have to meet with someone first.”

    She frowned. “You are going to hurt quite a lot, Doctor will be very angry.”

    “Don’t you worry, sweetness, I’ll tell him this was extremely important. Tell me, if I dictated a letter and you sealed it for me, could you find a trustworthy person to deliver it personally?” When she hesitated, he added, “Dearest, there will be a considerable financial reward, I give you my word.”

     “Is it a message to someone here in Bergville?” she asked.      

     “No, someone in Winterton,” he said.

     “Then the trustworthy person will have to ride,” she said. “On a fast horse it will take at least fifteen minutes.”

     “There will be a financial reward for her horse too,” he smiled.

     Nurse Evelyn nervously returned the smile. Neef Berg sincerely hoped she really didn’t understand Dutch, because if she did, and after she delivered the message, he was going to have to find a way to kill her.