The covenant - James A. Michener [142]
When Petronella asked what these were, he said, 'First, he can't marry a white woman while he remains a slave.'
'That's simple,' she said. 'Set him free.'
'Not so simple,' Marthinus said. 'Bezel, you must buy your freedom.'
The slave, having anticipated this impediment, nodded to Petronella, who from the folds of her dress produced a canvas bag containing coins, which she emptied onto the table.
'How did you collect them?' Marthinus asked.
'From the wall closets he makes,' Petronella explained. 'I save the money for him.'
Head bowed, Marthinus fumbled with the coins but did not count them. After a while he cleared his throat and pushed the money back toward his daughter. 'He is free. Keep the coins.' Then, sternly, he added, 'But the marriage will still be impossible unless he's a Christian.'
'He's willing to become one,' Petronella said.
'I was speaking to Bezel.'
'I think I'm already a Christian,' Bezel said, and when this was explored, the people at the table were satisfied that he told the truth, but when they approached the predikant to have him verify the fact, Paul de Pre heard of the negotiation and fell into a rage.
He was so eager to gain possession of Trianon, a house he had practically built, with vineyards he alone had saved from decay, that he had been quietly devising his own plans for Petronella. True, she was only fifteen and he thirty-four, but on a frontier where wives often died in childbirth, it was not uncommon for a patriarch to take himself four wives in sequence. The bride was always about seventeen, the man growing older and older. He had been giving serious thought to Petronella and now he heard with dismay that she was about to be married to a slave.
Frantic, he ran across to Trianon, bursting through the doors he had rebuilt. 'I've come to seek your daughter's hand in marriage.'
'She's already taken,' Annatjie said.
'Muhammad? The slave?'
'Yes.'
'But there hasn't been a wedding!'
'Perhaps there was, perhaps there wasn't,' Annatjie said calmly. 'You would never allow a slave . . .'
'Perhaps we will, perhaps we won't,' she said, and when he started to rave, she said without any show of anger, 'Neighbor De Pre, you're making a fool of yourself.'
Paul appealed to Marthinus, but he remembered too vividly his father's dying comment on what marriage meant at the edge of a wilderness: 'Tell Hendrik and Sarel to find the best women they can and cling to them. I could not have lived my life without Deborah's singing in my ears. I could never have built this refuge without Katje's help.'
'I think we'll let things work themselves out,' Marthinus said, and for five months he did not see De Pre at the vineyard, but when the time came to blend the wine, with Trianon's harsher grapes giving character to De Pre's gentler ones, Paul could not stay away, and it was he who made the final selections: 'This wine in barrels, for the slaves in Java. But this good one we put in casks for Europe.' And it was with this vintage that Trianon became an established name, even in Paris and London.
It was Annatjie who first detected Paul de Pre's grand design. She was a hard-minded woman who even as a child had learned to calculate what others might be wanting to do to her. Other unmarried girls at the orphanage had been afraid of emigrating to Brazil or South Africa, but she had perceived this as her only avenue of escape and had never moaned over the consequences of her act. When the man who chose her first at the Cape rejected her, she did not fly to tears, satisfied that someone else would want her in this lonely outpost, and when Marthinus stepped forward to claim her, she was not surprised.
She remembered that first long ride across the flats; how bleak they seemed, how destructive of hopes! But at the worst part of the transit she had known that something much better must lie ahead, and she had gritted her teeth, held fast to the reins, and thought: He wouldn't have settled here if the land were all like