‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘I’ve something to show you.’
‘Perhaps we should first sort out the last part of our agreement?’
‘There is no longer any agreement.’
Ana turned on her heel and left the room. Sullivan hurried after her into the courtyard. Ana could see that the news had begun to spread among the soldiers. Sullivan entered the cell. Ana removed the blanket and revealed Isabel’s mutilated body.
‘I know who killed her,’ said Hanna. ‘I’ll give you his name, but he’s bound to be on his way to the interior of the country already, and he knows all the roads. Perhaps he has a horse to carry him? All I can do is to give you his name, then you can decide if you want to send your soldiers out after him.’
She told him about O’Neill, about the attack in her house, and how he had admitted that he was the murderer. Sullivan listened with mounting anger. Ana didn’t know if it was because he had been humiliated or because he would lose all that money in the laundry basket, and could no longer look forward to having sex with her. All she did know is that just now she had the upper hand.
‘Her brother will come to collect the body,’ she said. ‘I shall take the money with me. We shall never meet again. But I want soldiers to continue keeping watch over her, even though she is now dead.’
They returned to the courtyard. Two soldiers carried the laundry basket to the car and put it in the boot.
‘We’ll catch him,’ said Sullivan, who had accompanied her to the entrance door.
‘No,’ said Ana. ‘He is a white man, and you’ll let him escape. I don’t believe a word you say. I had thought of agreeing to your request, but now I feel great relief at never needing to come anywhere near you again.’
Before Sullivan had a chance to respond, Ana had turned away and got into the car. As they drove off Ana saw how the enormous statue of the knight was being dragged out into the street by several black men with ropes round their shoulders and waists. She closed her eyes. She now regretted not having agreed to Sullivan’s request immediately. Perhaps that might have saved Isabel. During the night that turned out to be her last, Isabel might have been with Moses, on her way to freedom in the distant mine tunnels.
The rest of the day passed: Ana couldn’t remember anything about it. Only a bright white light and a deafening roar in her ears. Nothing else.
Moses turned up outside her house as dusk fell. She had been standing by the window, waiting for him. He knew already that Isabel was dead. Ana never bothered to ask him how he knew about what had happened. He stood there, grubby and dirty after the digging he had just embarked upon.
He was digging to make a tunnel, she thought. An opening through which a person would be able to escape into freedom. Instead, what he is doing now is the beginning of a grave.
‘You can collect her body tomorrow,’ she said. ‘It won’t have started smelling by then. If you want me to help you, I will. Nobody will mistreat you at the fort. Soldiers are standing guard over her body.’
‘I’ll collect her myself,’ said Moses. ‘I want to make the last journey with her by myself.’
‘What will happen now to her children?’
Moses didn’t answer. He merely shook his head, muttered something inaudible, and left.
At that moment she was on the point of running after him, following him to wherever he was going — back to the mines in the Rand or Kimberley or anywhere else in the world that extended for ever out there, beyond the mountains and the vast plains.
But she remained where she was. Ana Branca and Hanna Lundmark didn’t know which world they belonged to.
When she returned to the house, she saw that Carlos had returned to his place on the chimney. All that could be seen in the last light of the setting sun was his silhouette. Carlos looked like an old man, she thought. An ape, or a hunchbacked man weighed down by an enormous burden he was unable to free himself from.
That evening she made a note in her diary. She wrote: ‘Isabel, her wings, a blue butterfly, fluttering away into a world where I can no longer reach her. Moses left. I love him. Impossible, in vain, desperate.’
She closed the book, knotted a red linen ribbon around the covers, and put it into the desk drawer.
She didn’t touch the laundry basket full of money that evening.
69
She stood on the veranda as the sun began to rise over the sea, but Moses wasn’t around. Disappointed, she went back into the house, emptied the laundry basket of all the money and packed the bundles of notes into the safe and cupboards and drawers. She had great difficulty in making enough room for it all. When she had finished, she washed her hands thoroughly — but even so there was an unpleasant, lingering smell.
When Julietta came with her breakfast tray, Ana instructed her to go immediately to the fort and find out about arrangements for Isabel’s burial. To Ana’s surprise, Julietta didn’t react to what ought to have been the news that Isabel was dead: she obviously knew about it already. There must be a secret way, she thought, for black people to send out invisible messengers to one another with important news.
‘Be as quick as you can,’ said Ana. ‘Don’t pause to look in shop windows, or to talk to any boys or girls you meet. If you are really fast and get back here so soon that I’m surprised, you’ll get a reward.’
Julietta hurried out of the room. Ana could hear her footsteps racing down the stairs.
Julietta arrived back less than an hour later, panting after all that running up the steep hills. Ana was forced to tell her to sit down and get her breath back, as to begin with she couldn’t understand what Julietta was trying to say.
‘The body has gone already,’ said Julietta in the end.
Ana stared at her.
‘What do you mean by “the body has gone”?’
‘He fetched it as the sun rose.’
‘Who fetched it?’
‘A black man. He carried her away without any assistance.’
‘Did you not see the young commanding officer?’
‘One of the soldiers said he was still in bed in his lodgings, asleep. He’d been invited out yesterday evening.’
‘Invited by whom? Had he been drinking? Do I have to drag everything out of you?’
‘That’s what they said. Then they tried to lure me down into the dark underground prison where Isabel had died. I ran away.’
‘You did the right thing.’
Ana had prepared a reward for Julietta. She gave her a pretty necklace and a shimmering silk blouse. Julietta curtseyed.
‘You may go now,’ said Ana. ‘Tell the chauffeur I’ll be down shortly.’
Julietta remained standing where she was. Ana realized immediately what she wanted.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re never going to be allowed to work in the brothel with the other women. Go now, before I take back what I’ve just given you!’
Julietta left. Ana put on her black clothes, the same ones as she had worn at Senhor Vaz’s funeral. Once again she was going to accompany a person to her grave, someone who had died quite unexpectedly. Unlike Senhor Vaz’s funeral, Ana would be the only white person among the mourners. And any whites who saw her would become even more antagonistic towards her, more adamant in what in many cases had already become their hatred of her. She was not only concerned about the welfare of blacks who were alive, but she also accompanied a convicted murderess to her grave.
She was unsure about black people’s burial rituals, but she picked a few red flowers from her garden and sat down in the car. The chauffeur gave a start when he heard that he was being asked to drive her to the cemetery. He knows, she thought. He knows it’s now time for Isabel to be buried.