A Sin of Omission Read online

  A SIN OF OMISSION

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR:

  FICTION

  Train to Doringbult

  Shades,

  translated into Dutch as Schimmenspel

  Iron Love

  Recessional for Grace,

  translated into French as Cantique pour Grace

  The Keeper,

  translated into Afrikaans as Die bewaker

  NON-FICTION

  The Abundant Herds, with David Hammond-Tooke,

  illustrated by Leigh Voigt

  The Boy in You: A Biography of St Andrew’s College, Grahamstown

  Taken Captive by Birds, illustrated by Craig Ivor

  A SIN OF

  OMISSION

  MARGUERITE

  POLAND

  Published in 2019 by Penguin Random House South Africa (Pty) Ltd

  Company Reg No 1953/000441/07

  The Estuaries No 4, Oxbow Crescent, Century Avenue,

  Century City, 7441, South Africa

  PO Box 1144, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa

  www.penguinrandomhouse.co.za

  © 2019 Marguerite Poland

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

  First edition, first printing 2019

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  ISBN 978-1-4859-0419-9 (Print)

  ISBN 978-1-4859-0428-1 (ePub)

  Cover design by publicide

  Text design by Chérie Collins

  Set in Bembo Std

  IN MEMORIAM

  Reverend Stephen Mtutuko Mnyakama

  (1848?–1885)

  For my beloved family and for Bruce Howard,

  whose dedication and generosity provided

  the key to Stephen’s life.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  They have smashed the bells. All over Kaffraria the sound has ceased.

  There is a great silence. More profound, more still than the dim before the dawn. A great conspiracy of emptiness except for the sound of the wind – vaulting, powerful.

  Once, for Stephen Mzamane, every hour of every day had been marked by the ringing of the bell. In over twenty years, it had proclaimed the time for waking, washing, matins, breakfast, lessons, dinner, handwork, supper, prayers, bed. He had long forgotten how to allot his day by the rising or the setting of the sun, to sense the hour when the seed-eaters gather or the anvil bird marks the meridian at noon. He knew nothing of the swifts and swallows following the herds: this is dusk; this the time when we beg the last sweet drop of milk. All that had been exchanged, when he was nine, for the bell, its gong quartering the hours, hitching men to labour or to prayer.

  Yet one bell had been spared: Albert Newnham’s bell at St Paul’s still hung on its scaffold of logs. Stephen had asked that it should be left alone – in tribute to all the bells that he and Newnham had answered together, especially the great Cathedral bell in Canterbury which had summoned them as students every Sunday, marching two by two in their choir cassocks to the chime of God.

  At his small mission in the hills – barely more than an outstation – Stephen had never had the funds to buy a bell and the Sunday offertories were so erratic it would have taken years to pay it off. Instead, he had hung a piece of scavenged iron piping in the old shrubby tree outside the parsonage door. He would strike it with a shorter piece of pipe to call the faithful to Sunday service and the children to school. The sound had neither melody nor weight. He was like a colonial farmer summoning hands to the fields.

  Now he was glad he was without one.

  Those holy bells he had rejoiced in on a Sunday in England belonged in another world, echoing from church to church, carolling out, underscored by the mighty tongue of the Cathedral bell. Here, at Nodyoba, they were the doleful reminder of bondage to a thing called sin.

  Hated by the heathens. Feared by the converted.

  As he packed his suitcase and rubbed his extra pair of boots with a cloth, Stephen listened to the wind gathering outside, the lift and creak of the iron roof, the thrashing of the sturdy old tree before the house. He glanced at the cross on the wall above his bed, its varnished surface catching a spark of light from his lamp. It was made of English oak, a gift from the Warden of the Missionary College in Canterbury nine years before, in the winter of 1871, on the eve of the voyage home to the Cape.

  How different his journey in the morning was to be – without the hope or exhilaration of that noisy embarkation from a great English port, his fellow students waving their hats as they stood on the quayside, his dear friend – his English ‘brother’ – Albert Newnham among them. The Warden had raised his hand in blessing as the rowing boat filled with passengers pulled away and swung out towards where the ship was anchored. Stephen had shouted his farewell, standing legs astride, the wooden cross held aloft: he, at the start of his great adventure, his crusade of Faith.

  A warrior of Christ.

  He no longer felt like a warrior – nor armoured by his Faith. And in the three years of war that had just passed, he was neither soldier nor, it seemed, priest. He was just a frightened young man, forgotten by his fellow clergy and – if Mzamo’s words were true – a traitor to his own Ngqika people.

  At first light he would saddle up the borrowed horse and start out for the train station in the nearest town. From there, it was more than a hundred miles to Albert Newnham’s mission, and the railway ran only a part of the way. He had no choice but to borrow money from the offertory fund for the journey. He would repay it from his stipend when it came. At Newnham’s he would ask for another mount and travel east across the broken ridge of hills and down the pass into the drier stretches of Thembuland in search of the homestead of his mother’s people.

  She would be older, perhaps forgetful. Perhaps she would not recognise him or resent that he had come after being absent for so long, returning to her only as the bearer of bad news. It was eight years since he had seen her face, twenty-one since he was wrenched by his father from her care.

  But he was compelled to go, compelled by the arrival of an official letter from the military prison authorities in the Cape, water-stained and dirty: it had lain unclaimed in Grahamstown, addressed as it had been to Rev. S Mzamane, Kaffraria.

  Days old, weeks old, months old, retrieved by chance by the Director of Missions and sent on, additional directions written in his well-known hand on the front: Trinity Mission, Nodyoba, via Fort Beaufort.

  He stowed it in the inner pocket of his coat, wrapped in a hand-kerchief. When he reached his uncle’s home he would open it and read it to his mother: January 27th 1880, translating every phrase, omitting none of its co
ld, clear words. The signing of the peace, the dousing of the fires, the surrender of all guns had not meant the end of war.

  The smashing of the bells had been a greater, more insidious defiance.

  * * *

  The Reverend Basil Rutherford had found him as a child in the Donsa bush. Searching for shade for his horse, he had dismounted, thrown the reins across a stump, relieved himself contemplatively, the beads of dust rolling in the sudden plash, and seen the boy.

  If only he had taken another path, chosen another byway from the track …

  But he had not.

  He had chosen, for that necessary moment, the privacy of the undergrowth. Had he kept his eyes on the valley falling away below or watched the sky for signs of rain, it would have been no omission, no conspiracy of God’s in which he – unwillingly and with some irritation – became complicit.

  The boy was grey-tinged, a husk-child, motionless in the shadow of a bush.

  Basil Rutherford beckoned and then went forward to lift him onto the saddle of his horse. The child showed no fear, no disinclination: he was much too weak. Rutherford walked the horse the last five miles to his mission station. He laid the boy on the back porch of the church – some strange specimen of drought – and summoned his cook, the wife of the catechist, Mjodi.

  She came, observed, said nothing but fetched a calabash of sour milk from the pantry and sat straight-legged on the ground, the boy between her knees, back to her chest, coaxing the whey into him over patient hours.

  Basil Rutherford called his wife.

  ‘I doubt I can fit another in the orphans’ hut,’ she said. ‘This is not the last. How are we to keep feeding them all?’

  They stood at a little distance and looked at the child mechanically opening his mouth, barely moving in the encircling arms of the cook.

  ‘The people are starting to move west,’ said Rutherford. ‘I noticed at least five deserted homesteads near the pass. I suppose I should go back and make sure that no old people or children have been abandoned there but I dread what I might find.’

  ‘It’s the government’s task to feed them.’

  ‘The government!’ snorted Rutherford. ‘They think this famine is the finest way of forcing labour into digging roads.’

  ‘There’s barely a bag of flour left in the storeroom,’ said his wife.

  ‘Archdeacon Kitton wrote in his last letter that the Governor has forbidden his parish from running a feeding scheme in King William’s Town. It breaks his heart to see the people starving in the street.’

  ‘The Governor should be made to bury the corpses himself! I trust Kitton will ignore him.’

  ‘And lose his parish grant?’

  ‘What about his Christian duty?’ she retorted. She bent to the child. ‘He looks very bad,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you should baptise him at once. As a precaution.’

  Rutherford gazed at him a moment, then he turned to his wife. ‘We shall call him Stephen,’ he said. ‘It’s very apt – he looks more like the relic of a martyr than a living child.’

  Indeed he was, with his emaciated limbs, his sad, wary eyes, no longer vivid with life but already conceding death. Rutherford cocked his head, scrutinising him. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Stephen is his name.’

  But his name was not Stephen. It was Malusi Mzamane. He was nine years old. In foraging for food he had been left behind by his elder brother, Mzamo, suddenly separated by a thoughtless turn where the bush was thick. They were both children, starving and intent – the younger, in wandering off, too weak to call or cry. When Mzamo reached home without him, he could not tell their mother where or how they had been separated.

  Mzamo was too thin to beat. And, besides, their father did not have the strength to lift the stick. Their mother’s tears were shed alone. Despite her own great hunger she went hour on hour searching for her younger son. It was five days before their father ventured to the mission, brought by the catechist, Mjodi, who had gone about the district on Mfundisi Rutherford’s horse asking if anyone had lost a child. He returned without the boy and all he said to his wife was, ‘He is found. He is fed. He will grow fat. He will forget us soon.’

  He turned his back on the mother’s cries.

  Nor did she see her son for thirteen years. When he returned, so briefly, a sudden vision from across an unimagined and unimaginable sea with the gift of a prayer book that she could not read, he was a stranger to her. ‘It is a prayer book, Mama,’ he had said. And Mzamo – the eldest and their father’s heir – had glanced at Stephen, then the book, and laughed.

  This time, Stephen would not come before his mother with a prayer book. He would come with a letter.

  Nor would Mzamo laugh. For he was dead.

  The bells. The voice of Thixo, a reinvented God, ringing out across the pastures and the bush at morning and evening and five times on Sunday, when a white flag was hoisted on the hill above the mission to remind the people that they should not work – neither gather wood, nor hoe their fields. Not even milk the cows. The clang of the mission bell would cut across the notes of singing in the heathen homesteads. Each Sunday morning as Stephen had helped Mfundisi Rutherford push the heavy flagpole upright on the hillock near the church and heard the sombre bell tolling for service he had seen old heathen women shaking their hoes defiantly at the sound.

  The younger women sometimes hesitated, then retreated from the fields: better not tempt fate; better not defy the wisdom of the evangelist, Mjodi, always coming to their homes, talking of the Sabbath and of sin.

  ‘God has given us six sheep,’ he might say. ‘But the seventh He has claimed as His own. What a sin’ – hand raised in admonishment – ‘to kill the sheep belonging to God! What a sin to ignore the voice of God calling the faithful to service by the bell!’

  Stephen knew why the rebels had left Albert Newnham’s bell unharmed. It was due to his own urgent intercession with his brother Mzamo – and Mzamo’s own obligation to Albert Newnham, even though Newnham was a man he had never met. That, and Stephen’s promise to Mzamo: as solemn as if he’d made a covenant with God.

  Stephen hung his travelling coat on the cupboard door, slipped his prayer book into the pocket, knelt by the side of his bed and said the Lord’s Prayer as he had since he was nine years old except that when he was a child – coaxed by Mrs Rutherford for her own diversion – the words had been quaintly prefaced: ‘God bless Stephen Mzamane and make Stephen Mzamane a good boy.’

  Now he was not sure that God even knew that Stephen Mzamane existed.

  It had been an unseasonably wet and windy December night in 1878 when Stephen’s brother Mzamo had come to Stephen’s parsonage door – unannounced – to warn him of the danger to the bells. It had been startling to see him carrying a stick and spears, a fusty old jacket keeping out the cold beneath the folds of an ochred cloak.

  Stephen knew that jacket well. It had once belonged to Albert Newnham, worn with a nosegay in the buttonhole whenever he had gone to visit Miss Unity Wills. Now it was mud-streaked and shabby, the buttons lost, the sleeves too short for Mzamo’s long arms. Gone, too, were Mzamo’s tailored trousers, the stiff collar, the white waistcoat, gloves and cane, the rakish bowler hat he had worn when Stephen had seen him last.

  And yet, there was something magisterial about him now. An innate authority and grace.

  ‘Come in, brother,’ Stephen had said in a low voice, standing quickly aside to let him pass, closing the door behind him and turning the key. ‘Did anyone see you?’

  Mzamo shook his head.

  The greeting was brief and then Mzamo had walked to the furthest wall of the small room and gazed at the framed photograph of the Missionary College in Canterbury, his head on one side, saying nothing, just touching it with his stick. He could have lifted his weapon and smashed the glass. Stephen had half expected it.

  ‘They chose you instead of me,’ Mzamo said.

  Stephen inclined his head.

  Mzamo had glanced at him then. ‘I’ve learned not
to believe the lies of Englishmen.’

  Stephen did not contradict him.

  ‘You say nothing, Malusi – just like them. That, I think, is the same as a lie. The choice of a coward.’

  ‘I heard that you had joined the rebels,’ said Stephen. ‘At first I did not believe it but now I see it’s true.’

  ‘We are not rebels. We are soldiers fighting for our land.’

  Again, Stephen did not contradict him, his dark suit and clergyman’s collar sombre in contrast to the ochre of his brother’s robe.

  ‘You should be fighting for your father’s people,’ said Mzamo. ‘There are others from Grahamstown who have joined us. Gonya Sandile. The Duke. Julius Naka. They know where their duty lies. Why should you support the Church when it has not supported you? They promised you an English missionary to work with you and here you sit alone like a hen on a nest without eggs. Where is he, that missionary? They say they will pay you as they pay the other clergymen – yet I know you earn half. They say they will ordain you priest when you can pass an examination in Greek and Latin. But here you are, still only a deacon, with no one to teach you. They send you to England where your comrades die from consumption like cattle with lung-sickness and yet they told us we would be healthy if we were chosen to go. All lies.’

  Stephen had remained silent, the small flame of his hearth flickering and sending the shadow of Mzamo up against the whitewashed wall, subverting the neat arrangement of the pictures he had framed from the Illustrated London News, sagging now from the damp in the plaster. ‘Brother,’ he had said at last, ‘you may no longer be a Christian and we may not serve the same God but I ask you not to doubt my Faith.’

  ‘There is one God,’ said Mzamo. Mveli-Nqangi. He is not an Englishman.’

  ‘Nor am I.’

  ‘You are no longer a Ngqika.’

  No: he had not been circumcised, he had not been mkhwetha, he had not learned the lore of manhood, the rituals of an heir. Nor did he know anything beyond the rudiments of Greek and Latin, the sole barrier to his ordination and the only hurdle to be overcome. But where would he learn them on this barren hillside with his promised mentor, Albert Newnham, so far away and preoccupied with minding a mission, with preaching and ploughing and raising a child?