The covenant - James A. Michener [157]
Forty out of every hundred slaves died that year. Sixty out of every hundred Hottentots at the Cape perished, making their survivors totally dependent on the Dutch. The turbulent disease traveled inland at the rate of eight miles a day, ravaging everyone who fell within its path. One strain leapfrogged the flats to strike at Stellenbosch, and on some farms half the slaves died. The Hottentots of this region were especially susceptible, and many white farmers perished also.
It struck with peculiar fury at Trianon, killing Petronella in the first days and annihilating more than half the slaves. No one in the area tried more diligently to stem the awful advance than Paul de Pre; he went to every afflicted house, ordering the people to burn all clothes related to the dead, and in certain instances, when an entire family had died, he burned the house itself. He quarantined the sick and dug a clean well, and in time the tide abated.
But on the sixteenth day he fell ill, and began to tremble so furiously that Annatjie and Geertruyd put him to bed in the little white outbuilding marked with rake and hoe. There these good women cared for him, assuring him that they would send for Louis at the Capeif that young man had survived the plague. Wrapping their faces in protective linen, they moved like ghosts about the improvised hospital, comforting him and promising to protect his vineyards.
They were heartsick when the pustules on his face proliferated until they covered all parts of his skin; and when his fever rose so that he shook the bed, and his eyes grew glassy, they knew he could not survive. Still wrapped in cloth to protect themselves from infection, they stayed with him through the night, their candle throwing shadows on the white interior, their forms moving like phantasms come to haunt him for the ill will he had borne them.
He did not become delirious. Like the fighter he was, he followed each step of his decline, and asked, when morning broke, 'Am I dying?'
'You still have a chance,' Annatjie assured him.
When he began to laugh wildly, she tried to ease him, but he would not cease cackling. Then, looking at the ghosts, he pointed at Annatjie and said in a hollow voice, 'You should be dying, not me. It was intended that you should die, you're so much older.'
'Paul, lie still.'
'And you!' he shouted at Geertruyd. 'I hope your womb is dry.'
'Paul, stopplease stop!'
But the agony of death was upon him. The vast dreams were vanishing. His sons were alienated; the slaves were dead; the vineyards would be withering. 'It's you who were supposed to die!' he screamed, and the sores on his face showed fiery red as he dragged his fingernails across them. 'It wasn't planned for me to die. You infected me, you witches.'
He tried to leap from the bed to chastise his tormentors, but fell back exhausted. He began to weep, and soon pitiful sobs racked his body as mortal grief attacked him. 'I was not meant to die,' he mumbled. 'I am of the elect.' He stared accusingly at the shrouded figures waiting to collect his fever-wasted bodyand then he died.
Geertruyd, shattered by his hideousness, tried to throw a sheet over him, then broke into convulsive sobs, whereupon Annatjie took hold of her, shook her vigorously, and whispered, 'These are things that are not to be remembered.' And they prepared his body for quick burial.
As soon as Paul was buried, and trenches were dug for the accumulated corpses of the slaves, Annatjie and Geertruyd made a sober calculation of their position, and it was the younger woman who perceived most clearly the danger threatening Trianon and the strategy by which it might be averted.
'At the Cape, in Java, and in the offices of the Lords XVII men will argue, "No women should be