Maria gets to her feet, spluttering.
Sleep well, you two turtle doves, she says as she leaves.
A pheasant calls from the other end of the yard. The dog’s snout perks up out of the hole, its ears erect. He wants to take off, then I grab him by the scruff of the neck, drag him back to the hole. I push his head into the loose soil.
There, I say, you wanted to dig. Now dig.
He digs up a bone and trots off across the yard, flaunting the chewed-to-a-pulp treasure in his mouth.
On 4 January 1813 the Ferreira trial has been running for two days. I walk into the little hall. George’s new drostdy, the ancient posthouse, smells of wood oil. There they sit, the whole accursed ruck of them. Every soul in the district crammed in here. The air is saturated with sweat and spite and silence. And in the dock Mad Martha Ferreira, fortyish, stocky and strong, broad shoulders, rhinoceros hide. No tits to speak off, two dried-up dugs under the dark frock. Eight children have emerged from under that frock to date. The muscles in the forearms. The knobbly hands. She is tidy. Even here in the courtroom the audience whispers of her milk tart. The lashless white eyes don’t blink and don’t let go of me. Long Piet is younger than I, but looks older, bowed down prematurely under those eyes of Martha’s. There was a charge against him as well, that he had trampled a Hottentot youth, Kleinveld, with his horse, but the corpse was without any blemish and Piet was not summonsed. He is here as support for his beloved wife.
On the bench with its hopeless carpentry the worthies L.C.H. Strubberg and P.L. Cloete shuffle in their seats in boredom. Landdrost A.G. van Kervel is the plaintiff. G. Beelaerts van Blokland is the prosecutor. The atmosphere is strained, first names too intimate, only initials are tolerated.
Eleven charges. Seven dead by her hand, four mutilated. I slide into the back row. My fingers cramp into claws when I see the grimace around her mouth. She smiles at me, at the whole court, while checking to see who all turned up for the performance. I know that grimace. As the lips curl up for the laugh, the cheeks compress the eyes into smug slits. It’s a laugh that as a child I saw often. It says I am pleased you did that, Coenraad; I am pleased you went too far. Now I have licence to flatten you. Because you are not respectable. Martha is not pretty like my mother, she doesn’t know how to swing her hips. But they are of the same stock. The quiet violence of respectability. This white woman with the bearing of a lady, educated as few women of her class are, schooled and trained and addled, every hair pinned up and covered up; the compression of the corset curdling and compacting everything inside it. Good morning, my dear mother. I smile back.
For four days I sit and listen to the plaints, waiting for my turn to be called. For four days I look at her before I get to say my say. The Hottentots stream into court and confess and cry and malign the Christians. Martha sits and listens. When the proceedings are adjourned, she talks softly to her husband and at times laughs behind her hand at whispered jokes. The Hottentots in the witness stand look bewildered, each one more so than the next, as if they cannot comprehend that a court could listen to them without hanging them afterwards. Some talk at length, others just cry. The witness stand warms up with the bums of the wounded and the chancers. One or two speak their testimony like rhymes learnt by rote; I recognise phrases from Kemp’s catechising. Kemp knew how to train a Hottentot.
Watch her closely when the mad madam defends herself. She hides her big hands under the witness stand. She feigns gently, contemplatively, demurely and serenely. Civilised. She is aware of herself and of everybody around her. She answers two hundred and forty-eight questions. The only thing in this courtroom that is not under her control is her left foot that almost inaudibly knocks on the wooden floor.
I discipline my workers, she says, because I am a precise woman, very set on my work.
And the title Mad Martha, how do you feel about the name?
I know very well that they call me Mad Martha, but that is without foundation. I am no madder than others who are obliged to deal with Hottentots and Blacks. Still, I know I am standing before just judges and in that I trust.
And in that vein the she-wolf talks herself out of a corner.
The Ferreira clan were banished from Algoa Bay in 1803 already, precisely because of all the stories that their farm labourers spread about even then. Piet and Martha move to De Lange Cloof, to Dieprivier, the farm of Piet’s younger brother Naas. Three years later they settle on Elandsfontein, where they are still squatting behind their fortified turf ramparts, breeding like mildew.
Here in George the scandals of Algoa Bay caught up with the miscreant of a woman. At Fort Frederick, so the people aver, the slave woman Manissa was lashed every day with a sjambok, once an eye was taken out. Manissa goes to gather wood and does not return. Martha follows in her footsteps and returns without the slave. Half an hour’s walk from the homestead they find a spoor of blood, a bloodspot, a piece of taaibos wood, drag marks, the small footprints of Martha and a bundle of wood tied with Cape tulip.
Martha Ferreira:
I did not chastise dear Manissa. Perhaps once gave her a few well-deserved lashes across the back. The woman had the Mozambique disease. She died of red diarrhoea, Your Honour, the blood stool. Night before her death I nursed her. Old Esau buried her.
Roosje and her child Hendrik left Kemp’s mission station to go and work for Martha. At Dieprivier Roosje developed a dry cough and the consumptive disease. She couldn’t work any more; she was beaten every day with a stick or sjambok. One fine day she runs away from the cookhouse. Martha is hot on her heels and beats her and hits her in the back with a rock so that she falls down in a ditch and dies next to the kraal. She was buried and three weeks later Martha and Long Piet left Dieprivier.
Mad Martha:
Roosje was a poor, sickly creature, all skin and bones. I doctored her with goosegrass and sowthistle, but nothing could staunch the consumption. We buried her as is the Hottentot custom in a kaross and a rug.
At Dieprivier Martha sends little Hendrik, Roosje’s pride and joy, to go and fetch calves. It starts raining and snowing and he can’t get back over the flooded river. The Hottentot Geduld finds him after three days in the veldt behind a rhinoceros bush, rigid with cold. Back at home Martha puts the child’s feet in a pot of boiling water. He can’t feel that the water is boiling. He just sees steam. Martha treats the sores, wraps the boiled feet in cloth and one by one the toes start dropping off.
Mad Adder:
When Geduld turned up with the boy, I dosed him with warm wine. Added crushed tendrils of sour fig to warm water and warmed Hendrik’s little feet in it. I put a poultice of barley on his feet to draw out the burn. I did my best. I did though once take a paddle to the child’s head because he swore. That I am sorry about, Your Honour.
What is it to me that the woman Bitja went to collect wood at Dieprivier and that Martha caught up with her and gashed open her eyebrow and lips? What business is it of mine that when the lunch meat was spoiled one day, Martha cut the housemaid Lys’ arm with a knife? What does it matter to me, I’m waiting to face the mad bubonic bitch myself.
I settle myself in the witness stand, push the table forward to create space for my legs and my wrath. That woman puts me off my stroke so much, I’m not my normal eloquent self. I stare at my scruffy shoes, the chafed ankles, my trousers that don’t reach where they should. Not that the other Christians in the hall look any better. But the cloak of respectability is not upon my shoulders; the panoply of white conformity I do not wear. Everybody examines me as if I’ve crawled out of a hole. My voice is hoarse, my oration brusque.