• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3497 0

that it was on the way, so she waited. And then one morning guns fired, and a pitifully small ship limped into harbor with almost half its passengers dead. For a dreadful moment she feared that she might have lost her orphan, but when the survivors came ashore Geertruyd Steen was among them, twenty-two years old, blond, squared-off in every aspect, and smiling. She had a large square face, a stout torso, big hips, sturdy legs. Even her hair was braided and tied so that it accentuated the squareness of her head, and Annatjie thought: Dearest God, if there was ever a woman destined to breed, she is it.

The girl, not knowing what to expect, looked tentatively about her for some young man who might be awaiting a wife, but saw only sailors and Hottentots, so she took hesitant steps forward, saw Annatjie, and knew instinctively that this woman must be her protector. There was a slight pause, after which the two women ran at each other and embraced almost passionately.

'You've come to a paradise,' Annatjie told the girl. 'But it's a paradise you must build for yourself.'

'Are you to be my mother-in-law?'

'I am.'

'Is your son here?'

'It's an important story,' Annatjie said, and on the spur of the moment she directed Bezel Muhammad to take one of the horses and ride on ahead. It was important that she talk with this girl, and a long ride across the flats would give her just enough time.

She whisked Geertruyd out of the Cape that morning, afraid lest she be infected the way Louis de Pre had been, and as they entered the flats, she began talking: 'I shall have to tell you so much, Geertruyd, but every sentence is important, and the order in which it's told is important, too. My husband, your father-in-law, is a remarkable man.'

She explained how he had fled persecution in France, the courage with which he had made his way to Holland, and his great bravery in risking a return trip to fetch the vines which now accounted for the prosperity of Trianon. She told how tough old Willem van Doorn and his nagging wife had ventured out into the wilderness to build their farm, and how Paul de Pre had transformed it into a rural palace.

The first hours were spent in these details, but when they stopped to have their midday meal, Annatjie changed the tone of conversation completely: 'You'll see a dozen kinds of antelope, and hear leopards at night, and maybe one day you'll find a hippo in the river. We have a flower called protea, eight times as grand as any tulip, and birds of all description. You'll live in a land of constant surprises, and when you're an old woman like me you still won't have seen everything.'

She asked Geertruyd to look about her at the endless flatness. 'What do you see?' she asked.

'Nothing.'

'Always remember this moment,' Annatjie said, 'for soon you'll see such a place of beauty that your eyes will not believe it.' Geertruyd leaned forward as her mother-in-law-to-be added, 'If you do your work well, you'll build a little empire here, but only you can do it.'

All elderly people claim that the future lies in the hands of the young people, but few believe it; Annatjie de Pre knew that alternatives of the most staggering dimension depended upon how this particular young girl behaved herself and with what courage she attacked her problems.

'What problems do you mean?' Geertruyd asked.

'Inheritance,' Annatjie said. 'Yesterday you were an orphan girl owning a few dresses. Tomorrow you'll be a significant factor in the ownership of the finest vineyard in the land.'

Geertruyd listened and did not like what she heard. 'I am not penniless,' she said. 'I have guilders in my package.'

Annatjie liked her response, but goaded her still further: 'You come bringing nothing. Except your character. You're being offered everything, if you demonstrate that character.'

'I am not a pauper!' Geertruyd repeated, her square face flushing red.

'I was when I came across these flats,' Annatjie said, and without emotion she told the girl of how she, too, had left that orphanage, and of how her first man had rejected her, and of how