The covenant - James A. Michener [563]
The detective squared his shoulders and read a concise account of the Albertyn record:
'The charge that Mrs. Albertyn is Coloured is completely false. There is no blemish of any kind on her family record. The possibility that she may have had sexual intercourse with a Bantu is remote, for not only does she have an impeccable reputation, but we can find no occasion when she could have been in contact with a Bantu. Also, since her other children all look like Petra, there would have to have been repeated acts of intercourse with the same black man, and that seems positively impossible.
'Mr. Albertyn, however, is another matter. He is contaminated doubly, and proof of the contamination is contained in a straight, unbroken, demonstrable line back to 1694 when the Coloured slave Bezel Muhammad married the Trianon spinster Petronella van Doorn.
'Bezel and Petronella had four children who carried no last name, and they might have been lost in the general Coloured population except that neighbors kept track of them, knowing them to be Van Doorns. We have found numerous families well regarded today containing the blood of Bezel and Petronella.
'In or about the year 1720 their daughter Fatima, named after Bezel's mother, became the third wife of the notorious frontier outlaw Rooi van Valck, who had four wives, one yellow, one brown, one black and one white. Fatima was the brown one, and she became the progenitress of a large unruly breed.
'One of her daughters married an early Albertyn and was thus the direct ancestor of our Henricus Albertyn. Without question, he is doubly Coloured. Without question, his daughter Petra must be so classified.
'Our investigators could not avoid remarking upon the extraordinary fact that our Petra thus becomes a lineal descendant of the original Petronella, who broke the rules of her community. Could this be an an example of Divine intervention?'
When Mr. Op t'Hooft finished reading the report, he waited in some confusion as to what he should do next. He looked in vain at Chairman van Doorn for instructions, but Detleef was too shaken to act intelligently, and as for Mr. van Valck, whose redoubtable ancestor Rooi had been dragged from his stormy grave, he was in a state of shock.
Dr. Adams reached for the report, but Mr. Op t'Hooft was not sure he should deliver it to a man known to be difficult where Afrikaner matters were concerned. Dr. Adams solved this by snatching the paper and holding it aloft. 'Did you say this was the only copy?'
'Yes. Not even one carbon was made.'
'Good. I want you to watch what happens to your one copy.' Crumpling it in his left hand, Dr. Adams produced a match, scratched it across the top of the polished table, and set fire to the report. Holding it by one end, he watched the flames creep closer to his fingers, then dropped the burning paper on the table, where it vanished, leaving a scar.
'I think we should all forget this report,' Adams said. 'It can do no one in this room any good, and it could do distinguished citizens outside a great deal of harm.' When Mr. Op t'Hooft, completely bewildered, left, Adams said, 'It looks to me as if I'm the only one here who is not related to this little Coloured girl.'
Van Valck and Van Doorn glared at him, but he ignored them, saying brightly, 'I propose we declare the child white and end this farce.' He supposed that the shaken men, in order to hide their own involvement, would agree, but he underestimated Detleef's moral tenacity.
In silence the Commissioner on Racial Affairs lowered his head and pondered what to do. In his anxiety he could hear the voices of his family orating savagely on the problem of the