Lessons From Underground Page 14

That was as far as he got before her fist sent him crashing to the floor.

  XXII

  The Big Hole

  Scant was still rubbing his cheek as we entered the staff room, taking seats at desks piled high with papers, notebooks, and ledgers.

  “Let’s start again from the beginning,” Mr. Scant’s old friend said as she took her place at a desk that faced all the others. She addressed us just as she would a classroom full of children, and if this was the staff room, she probably did the same for everyone who worked for her. “My name is Mrs. Nosuthu Hunter. I am the headmistress of this school, which is the Kimberley Unified School. Now, if you would be so kind, I would like you to introduce yourselves.”

  She spoke clearly and carefully, in the manner of one who had learned English to fluency but never adopted the relaxed carelessness of a native speaker. Her speech was perfect like a crystal vase, with no softness to it.

  We introduced ourselves one by one, Mr. Jackdaw identifying himself as such, presumably to keep things simple. Mr. Scant said nothing, as expected. The Valkyrie slipped in an apology. A second after Mrs. Hunter had punched Mr. Scant, she had surged forward and wrapped a hand around the older woman’s throat, but Mr. Scant called her off.

  “I accept your apology,” Mrs. Hunter told the Valkyrie. “And I offer an apology of my own—to you, Heck. I ought not to have attacked you, so I am sorry.”

  “Apology accepted,” Mr. Scant said, but his hand stayed on his cheek.

  “It was not ladylike, I suppose,” Mrs. Hunter went on. “But then today I don’t feel much like being a lady.”

  “Please, Mrs. Hunter—why did you punch Mr. Scant?” I asked.

  “He has brought back many strong emotions from my past,” she said, shifting in her chair with a dissatisfied expression. “When we hoped for his help, he left us. When we believed he would return to aid us in our darkest times, he never came. He was the ghost that ran from us. The warrior who would no longer fight alongside us. A valuable link with the other side. He could have spoken on our behalf, and yet—”

  “You knew I wasn’t coming back,” said Mr. Scant. “And I wouldn’t have been able to change anything if I had. If the lot of you working together couldn’t do anything, I wouldn’t have made the slightest difference.”

  “I didn’t strike you for failing to save us. I struck you for failing to even lend a hand.”

  Mr. Scant seemed to soften. He lowered his hand. “Was it very bad while I was away?”

  “So very bad,” said Mrs. Hunter. “Some of it, I am sure you know. But living here, it has been atrocious. Not every day, of course. The school brings me great happiness. You guessed, no doubt, that Bart and I married. We had no children, but being together has been blissful for the most part. In these walls and in our home, we have jolly old lives that I feel sure are better than your stuffy king’s. But the fight Bart came here for—that fight was lost.

  “The diamonds,” she continued, “they changed everything. Now that devil Basil Fields owns almost all of this country. Now the government says if your land is not worth £75, you no longer have the right to vote. Before it was £25, and many of us outside white communities met that requirement, but triple that? The door was shut to everyone I know. The law was calculated to shut us out. That Fields’s accursed South African Union Party has sewed up our mouths so they can laugh at our silence.”

  Her lips twitched a little as she paused, polishing the lenses of her glasses with a cloth. None of us dared interrupt.

  “But that was only the beginning. If you cannot read, you cannot vote. If your tribe owns your land, not you, it does not count toward your £75. Bart came here to live in a land where all men had equal voting rights. Now it’s a land where nobody even hides any more the truth of the matter. Men born half a world away, like you, control the law. And we who were born here, or brought here by force, can only submit. Before long they will stop pretending it’s anything to do with money or land and will outright decree that only whites can vote. Just as it is in the rest of this Union of South Africa, so it will be here in the Cape.”

  “But that makes no sense,” I said. “It’s only going to make people want to fight back.”

  “It gives Fields’s party the power to throw anyone who fights back into prison,” said Mr. Jackdaw. “Control, that’s what matters here.”

  “So that is what changed while you were away,” said Mrs. Hunter. “Now, your turn to speak. Why are you here?”

  “We’re here about the hero,” said Mr. Scant. “Your husband.”

  “Ha! You are disappointed I married him?”

  “Of course not,” he replied. “In fact your marriage is something I always hoped would happen. I’m disappointed I couldn’t be at the wedding. But you know what he’s done, what he’s doing now?”

  “We no longer talk as much as we once did,” Mrs. Hunter said. “He goes away for weeks at a time. Continuing what the two of you started. And still fighting for the dream you once shared with him.”

  “Did he tell you where he went this time? What he went to do?”

  “No,” she said. “But I trust him. He still fights for this country. A country that is no more his homeland than it is yours, and yet he fights.”

  Mr. Jackdaw, perhaps growing anxious, spoke up next.

  “Madam, your husband assisted in the theft of perhaps the most valuable jewel in the world, property of His Majesty himself. This is no small matter. I’m going to have to ask for your cooperation in recovering the diamond.”

  “One of Kimberley’s diamonds?” said Mrs. Hunter. “I would never believe it. My Bart would never touch a diamond from these accursed mines.”

  “Well, not a Kimberley diamond exactly,” said Mr. Jackdaw. “It was from up near Pretoria. The greatest diamond ever found.”

  Mrs. Hunter smiled slightly. “In that case, I suppose Bart might have had a hand in it.”

  Mr. Jackdaw’s face went a little red. “Madam! I’m not sure you grasp the severity of this situation.”

  “Well, I’m not sure you grasp how little it means to me, your diamond or your king.”

  I decided this was my time to speak. “Do you have any idea when Mr. Hunter will return, or what he’s going to do when he gets here?”

  “My husband is not a man to break his word,” Mrs. Hunter said. “He will continue what he started with his fellow hero so many years ago.”

  I looked at Mr. Scant in confusion, but he said nothing.

  “Ah, I see how it is,” said Mrs. Hunter. “You told them of your time here but not about what was born from it. You know, I feel like a walk. Will you all give me the pleasure of accompanying me?”

  The Valkyrie turned to Mr. Jackdaw, that old fury in her eyes returning. “Why give her the chance to run? We could just twist what she knows out of her.”

  “Oh, worry ye not,” said Mrs. Hunter. “I’ll tell you what you need to know. Even where to find my husband when he arrives two days from now. But first, a walk.”

  Mrs. Hunter used a cane to walk outdoors. She didn’t appear to need it very much but she seemed to enjoy waving it at us as she talked.

  We walked the length of the road outside the school, then stepped onto a street busy with the cries of shopkeepers and the chatter of people going about their daily business.

  “Where are we going?” I asked Mr. Scant.

  “To the mines, I think,” he replied.

  “What did she mean about what was born?”

  “She’s taking pleasure in drawing out my past.”

  I resolved to wait and see what the mysterious old woman wanted to tell us. I noticed a peculiar trend as she walked through the town. Young children seemed to smile at the sight of her, often waving as she passed, but older children and adults gave her a wide berth. I wondered what made the difference.

  Before long, we came to a road with shops and buildings on one side and very little on the other. No buildings or trees, only a mound of dry earth. Mrs. Hunter led us acro
ss the road and started up the mound, beginning to rely in earnest on her cane.

  “The view is quite something,” she said as she reached the top.

  And so it was. Even as I stood still, I felt like I was falling.

  The Big Hole of Kimberley was unlike anything I would have pictured before I saw it. If Mrs. Hunter had asked me to draw my idea of it, back in the staff room, I would have perhaps sketched a large well going down a great distance, or possibly a cave entrance that lead down into a great network of caves. Neither of which was anywhere near what I saw.

  The whole earth opened up as though to swallow the entire city. The chasm that was the Big Hole gaped before me, crisscrossed with toothpick ladders and hair-thin pulley ropes. The number of lives that must have been lost in its teardrop shape was unfathomable.

  “What do you think of that?” said Mrs. Hunter.

  “It’s incredible,” I said. “Terrifying.”

  “And made by human hands,” said Mrs. Hunter. “If they can find more diamonds by going deeper, then deeper they go. And around the edges, there are mineshafts you can’t see from here, leading to all the ledges and different flat surfaces down there. If you’re searching for my husband, that’s where he will be. Not in the Big Hole, but in one of the holes leading off from it. And you have no hope whatsoever of finding him without me.”

  “Are you going to help us?” I said.

  “That depends on whether or not you understand. Not about diamonds or stealing—I cannot say what the truth is there myself, and I don’t particularly care. But about purpose. About what my husband and his apprentice over there vowed to do.”

  “And what was that?” I asked.

  “We vowed to bring an end to the mining companies here,” Mr. Scant said. “An end to the system that supported them.”

  “And how did you intend to achieve this?” said Mrs. Hunter.

  “Through a society.”

  “A secret society,” Mrs. Hunter added with a smile.

  “To infiltrate the corridors of power,” Mr. Scant said grimly. “To influence politicians. To take power away from the bloated leeches like the mining companies. To restore it to all the people.”

  “I cannot say precisely what my husband plans to do,” Mrs. Hunter said with venom in her voice, “but I am certain, quite certain, that it will tear apart Fields’s so-called South African Union Party. Pull apart the circles of power, end the cycle of easy deaths for stones. Isn’t that what you founded it for, Scant? Your precious Woodhouselee Society?”

  I had been looking into the hole when she spoke those words, and suddenly felt as though I were being pulled into it. I had to grab hold of Mr. Jackdaw’s wrist to stop myself from falling.

  “And now you’re here to keep the change—the culmination of everything—from happening,” Mrs. Hunter went on. “Finally, a chance to do what you set out to do all those years ago, you and my husband, and me too—don’t forget me. But you’re here to put a stop to it all. Shame on you, Heck Scant. Shame on you.”

  XXIII

  Hunter the Just

  Mr. Scant had been quiet since his encounter with Bartholomew Hunter, now it was as though he had taken a vow of silence. Time passed more and more slowly as we waited for the arrival of Mr. Hunter. We took rooms in the local Savoy Hotel, which was far smaller than the name had led me to expect. I don’t know if Mr. Jackdaw thought Mr. Scant needed space, but he put us all in separate quarters, which I thought was no help at all. Mr. Scant never answered my knocks.

  Of course, I tried to get my mentor to explain what Mrs. Hunter’s words all meant, but all he said was, “The Society that the Hunters and I devised here and the Society you and I fought against have nothing in common.”

  “So you admit you had a part in creating it?”

  At that, he walked away.

  During breakfast on our second day in Kimberley, I said, “The Society didn’t just target Uncle Reggie because was a drunk, was it? It was because they knew he was your brother.”

  “No, that’s not true,” said Mr. Scant. “Not completely. Only Thomasina Binns knew of the connection, and she thought pressing Reginald would bring me back to the Society. It would have been her idea to target him, but she didn’t tell her husband the true reason. He would have worried she wanted to replace him as leader with one of the founders. With me.”

  “I just don’t believe this,” I said. “It wasn’t just here? You were part of the Society in England as well.”

  “Only at the very beginning. It makes no difference to what you and I are doing here and now. We need to concentrate on recovering this diamond.”

  Unsatisfied, I went to talk to Mrs. Hunter alone. I wanted to arrive after school had already finished, but I discovered it finished later in Kimberley than in England. Children were filing out of the little gate when I arrived. Pushing through them would be like trying to swim upstream, so I just waited. The schoolchildren were all different races, though mostly black, and I noticed that only very rarely were any of them talking to a child of a skin color different from their own.

  When the gate was clear, I stepped inside and made my way to the staff room. A teacher I didn’t recognize, a young African man with cropped hair, answered my knocks, so I said I’d like to talk to Mrs. Hunter.

  “Who shall I say is asking?” he said.

  “I’m Oliver Diplexito.”

  The man took a breath, then frowned. “You’re gonna have to say that one more time.”

  “It’s okay, Arnold. I know who this is.” Mrs. Hunter stepped into the doorway. “Come. I live in an annex at the back of the building. We’ll talk there.”

  She led me through the school’s corridors to a locked door and—once we removed our shoes—a small but richly decorated living room. It was covered in greens and dark yellows, and on the wall hung a modern picture of dark figures dancing with an eagle.

  “Sit, sit,” said Mrs. Hunter. “The gray owl brought his owl chick with him. So similar in some ways, except that maybe the chick knows how to listen. What do you think of my school?”

  “It seems nice.”

  “Not so big beside your Eton or your Rugby.”

  “I didn’t think about how big it was,” I said. “Honestly, I don’t think I can say if it’s a good or bad school when I’ve never seen what the lessons are like.”

  Mrs. Hunter made a steeple with her fingers. “Interesting answer. Did you talk with any of our students?”

  “No, they were all on their way home. And I know I wouldn’t stop to talk to someone I didn’t know when I could be going home instead. Besides, I didn’t know if they would talk to me anyway. I noticed they were staying in their groups. Everyone with the people who looked like them.”

  She nodded. “For the most part. There have always been divisions here, but never so much as there are now.”

  “I can tell. But the school still exists. They still have the chances to get to know one another if they want to. So it’s not as divided as all that.”

  She lowered her hands and gave me a hard look. “Perceptive. Now why are you here?”

  “You know why I’m here. To talk about your husband.”

  “How you have come to this land to expose him as a villain? To see him taken away in chains?”

  “How can we expose him as a villain unless that’s what he is?”

  Mrs. Hunter leaned forward. “I don’t presume to know your life, owl chick, or what Heck has done since he left this place. But I know he still believes that those who have been robbed are just and righteous when they take it back.”

  “That’s not what Mr. Scant taught me.”

  “Explain.”

  “There’s another step you missed,” I said. “He didn’t just take back what was stolen. He returned it to where it belonged and never asked for anything for himself.”

  “I don’t know the details of what Hunter means to do. But I feel certain that same feeling is inside him too.”

  “Maybe in him,”
I said. “But I don’t think the same can be said for the ones he’s doing business with.”

  “All the same, my husband had to act. When the power of words is taken away from you, all that’s left is the power of actions. Heck understood that once.”

  “They understood each other once,” I said. “It’s so sad they don’t any more. I’ve never seen Mr. Scant so shaken as he has been since he saw your husband again. More than I want to see the diamond returned, I want them to be able to talk. Not fight, but talk.”

  Mrs. Hunter had steepled her fingers again. She rested her chin on her thumbs, looking at me from either side of her fingertips.

  “Will you help me?” I said. “Not a trap or a quarrel, I promise. Just a meeting, so they can talk?”

  “His train arrives tomorrow at eleven. The first thing he will do is come to me. Bring Heck here and they can talk. Bring your flock of owls and jackdaws, it’s all the same. But if you try to double-cross us, I’ll be ready for it.”

  We went to the school again the next day, this time during lessons, and found Mrs. Hunter teaching a class. She introduced us as “observers,” and we stood at the back of the class as she taught a room of five- and six-year-olds how to spell the names of different animals. She was a patient and kind teacher but very firm. Two girls kept playing a game together even after she asked them to stop, so she sent them to stand facing the corners until they “learned to do as they were told.”

  At playtime, we tried to stay away from the children, but the Valkyrie fascinated them. The students came over cautiously at first, but then one took her hand and asked, “Why are you bigger than my mama?” That emboldened the rest.

  “Are you a giant but not all grown up yet?”

  “Do you know the strong lady from the circus?”

  The Valkyrie tried to answer them, but soon there were so many questions nobody knew which one she was answering. After another minute of this, we had to pluck the children from her.

  Around eleven o’clock, we headed back into Mrs. Hunter’s classroom, and soon afterward Hunter the Just appeared. He stepped into the room without knocking, travel gloves in hand, and said, “There she is!” before walking over to his wife for a kiss. It was then that he noticed us.