Traitors Gate - Anne Perry [78]
She waited in silence. Kreisler was lost in thoughts of his own and she was content to allow it. She had no sense of being excluded; it was perfectly companionable. The light, the sound of the water, the wharves and warehouses of the Pool of London slipped by, and the shared dreams of the past in another land, the shared fears for its future as a different kind of darkness loomed over it.
“They duped him, of course,” he said after a while. “They promised they would bring no more than ten white men to work in his country.”
She sat upright suddenly, her eyes wide with disbelief.
“Yes.” He looked at her through his lashes. “Unbelievable to you or me, but he accepted it. They also said they would dig nowhere near towns, and that they and their people would abide by the laws of the Ndebele, and behave generally as Lobengula’s subjects.” The bitterness crept in only at the end.
“And the price?” she asked quietly.
“A hundred pounds a month, a thousand Martini-Henry breech-locking rifles and a hundred thousand rounds of ammunition, and a gunboat on the Zambezi.”
She said nothing. They were passing Wapping Old Stairs on their left as they sped downriver. The Pool of London was teeming with boats, barges, steamers, tugs, trawlers and here and there the odd pleasure boat. Would the brown, jungle-crusted Congo ever be like this, teeming with civilization and the goods of the world to be bought and sold, and consumed by men and women who had never left their own counties or shires?
“Rudd set off at a gallop to take the news to Rhodes in Kimberley,” Kreisler went on, “before the king realized he had been cheated. The fool almost died of thirst in his eagerness to carry the news.” There was disgust in his voice, but the only emotion registered in his face was a deep and acutely personal pain. His lips were stiff with the intensity of it as if it resided with him all the time, and yet for all his leanness of body and the strength she knew was there, he looked vulnerable.
But it was a private pain. She was perhaps the only person with whom he had or could share the full nature of it and expect any degree of understanding, yet she knew not to intrude into intimacy. Part of the sharing was the delicacy of the silence between them.
They were past the Pool and the London Docks and leaving Limehouse. Still the wharves and stairs lined either side, massive warehouses with painted names above them. The West India Docks were ahead, and then Limehouse Reach and the Isle of Dogs. They had already passed the old pier stakes sticking above the receding water, where in the past pirates had been lashed till the incoming tide drowned them. They had both seen them, glanced at each other, and said nothing.
It was very comfortable not to have to search for speech. It was a luxury she was not used to. Almost everyone else she knew would have found the silence a lack. They would have been impelled to say something to break it. Kreisler was perfectly happy just to catch her eye now and then, and know that she too was busy with the wind, the smell of salt, the noise and bustle around them, and yet the feeling of being detached from it by the small space of water that separated them from everyone else. They passed through it with impunity, seeing and yet uninvolved.
Greenwich was beautiful, the long green swell of ground rising from the river, the full leaf of the trees and the park beyond, the classical elegance of Vanburgh’s architecture in the hospital and the Royal Naval Schools behind.
They went ashore, rode in an open trap up to the park and then walked