Men of Men - Smith Wilbur (книги бесплатно без txt) 📗

It took Bazo a moment to gather his wits from where sleep had scattered them.

"I remember every running ford and every green hill, every sweet watering place along the way," he whispered back, "as clearly as I remember my father's voice and my Mother's laughter."

"Roll up your sleeping-mat, Bazo, the Axe, and show me the road," said Ralph.

Diamond Lil did not smile so readily these days, not since the tooth that held the diamond had turned a dingy grey as the root died, and began to ache until Lil wept with the little explosion of agony against the top of her skull. The travelling dentist from the Cape had pulled the tooth and drained the virulent abscess beneath it.

Relief had been immediate, but it left a black gap in her smile.

She had put on flesh also, the consequence of good food and those little nips of gin which bolstered her day.

Her breasts, always generous, had lost their individual definition and the cleavage that showed above the richly embroidered bodice was no longer a deeply sculptured crevasse but a thin line where abundant flesh packed against flesh.

The hand that held the bone china teacup was pudgy and dimpled over the knuckles, the rings that adorned each plump little finger had sunk into the flesh, but the diamonds and rubies and emeralds sparkled in a royal show of Lil's wealth.

Her hair was still lustrous gold, and crimped into long dangling ringlets with the hot-iron. Her skin was still smooth and rich as Devon cream, except around the eyes where it was just beginning to crack into little spider webs of lines.

She sat at the corner of the verandah, on the second floor above the street, where the eaves of the roof were of intricate white wrought-iron mouldings, pretty as Madeira lace. Although there were other double-storeyed buildings in Kimberley these days, not even the offices of the Central Diamond Company across the wide unpaved street boasted such affluent adornment.

Lil's chair was high-backed, and magnificently carved in dark red teak by oriental craftsmen, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ivory and carried across the eastern oceans by the tall ships of the now long departed Dutch East India Company. It had cost her two hundred pounds, but from this throne she could watch every movement on the main thoroughfares that fed into Market Square, could sense the pulse of the diamond city, could check each coming and going, the scurry of a buyer with a good scent in his nostrils, the swagger of a digger who had turned up a bright one. She could watch the front of the four canteens around the square, all of which she now owned, and judge the volume of trade going through their doors.

Similarly, she could glance to her left, down De Beers Road to the red-brick cottage behind its white picket fence and discreet sign, "French Dressmakers. Haute Couture. Six Continental Seamstresses. Specialities for individual tastes." Business was always brisk there from noon to midnight. Her girls seldom lasted the pace for more than six months or so, before taking the coach southward again, exhausted but considerably richer.

Lil herself worked her old trade only occasionally, perhaps once or twice a week with a favoured "regular", just for old times" sake, and because it got her blood going and made her sleep better at night. There was too much else that required her constant attention.

Now she poured fresh tea from the rococo silver pot into the pretty bone china cups, hand-painted with pink roses and golden butterflies.

"How many spoons?" she asked.

Ralph sat on the cane-back chair opposite her. He smelled of shaving soap and cheap eau-de-Cologne. His chin shone with a burnish given it by the cut-throat razor, his shirt was so crisply ironed and starched that it and crackled at each movement.

Lil studied him speculatively over the rim of her tea cup.

"Does the good major know your plans?" she asked quietly, and Ralph shook his head. Lil thought on that a while and it gave her a ripple of pleasure to have the son of a foundation member of the Kimberley Club sitting on her verandah. Son of one of the Kimberley gentlemen who would not greet her on the street, who had returned her donation towards the new hospital, who had not even replied to her invitation to attend the stone-laying ceremony of her new building, oh, the list of humiliations was too long to recite now.

"Why did you not go to your father?" she asked instead.

"My father is not a rich man." Ralph would not say any more, too loyal to explain that Zouga was destitute, that he would soon leave Kimberley with a cartload of his meagre possessions. He did not want Lil to know that he and his father had turned from each other with harsh words.

Lil studied his face for a moment, then picked up the handwritten sheet of cheap notepaper from the tea tray and glanced down the list and the figures.

"Nine hundred pounds for oxen?"

"A full span of the biggest and best animals," Ralph explained. "The road to the Shashi river is sand veld, heavy going. I want to be able to haul a full load, eight thousand pounds weight."

"Trade goods, fifteen thousand." She looked up at him again.

"Guns, powder, brandy, beads and limbo cloth."

"What type of guns?"

"Tower muskets. Five pounds ten shillings each."

Lil shook her head. "They have seen the breech-loaders. Your muskets won't have much pull."

"I can't afford breech-loaders, and I wouldn't know where to find a load."

"Ralph dearie, I could hire a bunch of Whitechapel hags to run my dressmakers" shop and I could get them cheap.

But I don't. I pick them young and fresh and pretty. If you think small, your profits are small. Don't be cheap, Ralph darling, never be cheap." She poured a little gin from the silver flask into the empty teacup before she went on. "I can get Martini-Henry rifles but they will cost us fifteen hundred more." Lil reached across and dipped her pen in the ink-well, then scratched out and re-wrote the figure.

"Brandy?"

"Cape Smoke in twenty-gallon casks."

"I have heard that Lobengula likes Courvoisier cognac, and his sister Ningi drinks only Piper-Heidsieck champagne."

"Another five hundred pounds, at least," Ralph mourned.

"Three hundred," Lil corrected the list. "I can get it at wholesale prices. Now, ammunition, ten thousand rounds?"

"I'll need at least a thousand for my own account, and the rest to trade with the rifles."

"If Lobengula gives you permission to hunt elephant," Lil corrected.

"My grandfather is one of his oldest friends; my Aunty Robyn and her husband have been at Kharni River Mission for almost twenty years."

"Yes, I know that you have friends at court, Lil pursed her lips approvingly. "But I have heard that the elephant have been shot out across the whole of Matabeleland., "The herds have been driven into the fly belt on the Zambezi."

"You cannot take horses into the fly and hunting elephant on foot in the fly is not work for a white man."

"My father hunted on foot, and anyway I cannot afford a horse."

"All right," she agreed reluctantly, and made a tick on the sheet.

They worked on for an hour longer, going down the list item by item, and then starting again at the head and going over it all once more, Lil ticking and scratching with the pen, fining it down by ten pounds here and a hundred there, until at last she tossed the pen onto the tea tray, and then poured a little more gin into her tea cup and sipped it with a genteel flourish, her little finger raised, the spirit slurping softly through the gap in the front of her teeth.