The covenant - James A. Michener [139]
With the most obvious stratagems Annatjie endeavored to ignite a romance between the two, inviting the Boeksmas twice to her table and lending Bezel for the building of their house, but Paul wanted nothing to do with Sibilla, and she in turn showed herself to be most uneasy in his presence. Before long she was betrothed to a widower from a farm at the north edge of town, and Paul was still without a wife.
When he left his sons with Annatjie for two weeks so that he could journey to Fransch Hoek, she was convinced that he had gone in search of a wife among the other Huguenots, but when he returned alone she found that he had only been agitatingas he had so often beforefor the establishment of a French school. When Marthinus upbraided him for this, he repeated stubbornly, 'If a man loses his language, he loses his soul.'
Two interests kept the families united: their desire to produce a good wine, and their deepening faith in Calvinism. Like all Huguenots, Paul was fanatically devoted to his religion, and because his experience of repression was recent, he was apt to be more fiercely protective than his Dutch neighbors, none of whom had known the Spanish persecution personally. Had the Dutch of Stellenbosch wanted to relax the austerity of their Calvinism, the Huguenot immigrants would have protested. Back in Holland the Dutch were making gestures of conciliation with Catholics, especially their German neighbors, and occasionally a strain of this liberalism would surface at the Cape; when French ships put into the bay, officers and men were treated with respect, even though they were Catholic; but for the Huguenots that religion remained unspeakable, and whatever steps their church took had to be diametrically opposed to Rome.
This preoccupation with religion was illustrated when a band of raiders struck at the cattle of the Stellenbosch farmers. The attackers were a wild bunch of outcasts, slaves and renegade Hottentots who crept into Dutch kraals and in repeated sorties carried off many of the best animals.
Neighboring farmers assembled to retaliate, but their efforts made little impression along a hundred-mile frontier, so the burgher militia had to be summoned to launch a serious offensive. Every adult male in the district reported to Stellenbosch, and it was to this meeting that Farmer Boeksma rode up with three of his Hottentot servants equipped and armed for war.
'Madness!' several of the old-timers argued. 'You heard what the governor told us. "To allow them to bear arms is nothing less than putting a knife in their hands to slash our throats."'
'He was talking about slaves,' Boeksma reminded the men.
Over the years the Dutch had had so much trouble with their slaves, who persisted in trying to escape to freedom, that the most bizarre punishments were instituted: when one black woman enraged the community, the commander ordered that she be stripped, broken on the wheel, and tied to the ground while her breasts were ripped off by red-hot pincers, after which she was to be hanged, beheaded and quartered. When certain settlers protested this barbarity, the commander granted clemency: the woman was sewn into a canvas bag and thrown into the bay, where she struggled for half an hour before drowning.
'We must never arm slaves,' a cautious man warned.
'But these aren't slaves,' Boeksma pleaded. 'They're loyal. They believe in me like my own children.'
As he spoke, the armed servants stood silent. One could still be classified as a Hottentot, but the other two were Coloureds, and when Boeksma called them part of his family he spoke the truth, for there was no tribe or captaincy surviving in this area to which they could give their allegiance, no homeland, no human being except 'Groot Baas Boeksma.' They had accepted his God, his church, his way of life, and this was demonstrated daily in the language they spoke, an exciting