In a freak accident in Amsterdam, Hadley Vanderveer's father has been killed while inspecting a windmill and the relatives have gathered for the funeral.

 

       In the dim light of our front room a shroud of silence hovered over the living and the dead alike. The Vanderveer men, dressed most fashionably in black, their blond hair slicked flat and parted straight down the middle, sat on spindly wooden chairs around our father's coffin in a circle of disapproval as relentless as the path of a windmill blade. The Vanderveer women, heads bowed, hands folded, black skirts chastely defending any unseemly glimpse of an ankle, sat in a circle behind the men. In both circles heads shook in disbelief as they exchanged nods and flicked sidelong glances at my crumpled, weeping mother. . . . The Vanderveers had long believed that if my father had married a nice Dutch girl as his two younger brothers had done, my father, being the eldest and most promising son, would have added a dozen healthy, blond, apple-cheeked Vanderveers to the family tree. Instead, he had married my mother, Margaret Fitzsimmons, an English rose with lustrous dark brown hair and porcelain skin who produced only me and my brother, neither of us blond nor particularly apple-cheeked. As if to confirm the lack of breeding ability of English women, our mother conceived only the one time and gave birth to us both at once.    . . . .

     Ours had been a courteous household. Our father rarely allowed himself an uncivil word and occasionally even let our mother persuade him because he did love her.

       But he also blamed her, and she knew he blamed her. Because of her, our father had disappointed his father.

       Nothing had mattered more to our father than his father's approval and that, I came to realize, made our father a weak man. So even when our mother smiled, there was a sadness from carrying such a heavy burden of blame on her slender shoulders.

       There is little joy for a woman in the love of a weak man. . . .   

        Our mother had ruined his firstborn's life by producing only us, and now she had somehow cut his son's life short. So it seemed to Grandfather Vanderveer only just that our mother must dismiss both servants and sell the carriage and the horses as well. Impoverished widows could walk to the market and tend their own household, and the money resulting from the savings could be transformed into a monthly dole that would stretch endlessly into the future.   . . .

      Since my mother had ruined my father's life, Grandfather Vanderveer also felt quite justified, under the guise of "providing for the future," in reclaiming not only the house but everything of value in it from my piano and the large gilt-framed mirrors down to the last silver teaspoon and Harry's rifle.      

         Harry regretted the rifle.      

       "Be glad," I consoled him, "that they did not also appraise your boots for auction. We're lucky to have kept our clothes.�

       This last outrage, which Grandfather Vanderveer termed "laying final matters to rest," brought our mother out of her shroud. As soon as the door closed behind the solicitors and their clerks, my mother sat down at her small desk and began to write.

       "I will not allow it!" she muttered. "God will not allow it." She looked up to see us staring at her. "I am writing to your grandfather."

         "He won't change his mind," said Harry gently.

       "Your Grandfather Fitzsimmons," snapped my mother and returned to the task of writing her letter.      

       Our mythical Grandfather Fitzsimmons, who apparently had permitted but not admired my mother's choice of husband, in 1879 had sailed from England to seek the glitter of gold and diamonds in South Africa. He had never met his twin grandchildren, and we had no pictures of him. . . . .

       But apparently he had found something down there.  My, mother's frantic letter did reach him. He sent us not only money for passage but enough extra to pay the tradesmen's bills, to ransom from the seamstress our newest gowns with the new, slim, wasp-waisted fashion, and to buy necessaries for the journey.

       These included an extraordinarily ornate black velvet and ostrich feather hat that my mother, with angry defiance, bought so that the Vanderveers' last glimpse of her would be wearing her widow's weeds topped by that very stylish hat. . . .

         I was sailing off into the darkness of some solitary house in a vast, uncharted land where my youthful bloom would wither away until I became that most forgotten and forgettable of creatures, an old maid. This simple reality, to a symphony of creaking shipboards and wind-filled canvas sails and muffled shouts of sailors, swallowed up all the futures I had ever dreamed.  And I was only twenty.        

       Our mother, her duty done and her chicks safely out of the Vanderveers' grasp, kept to her cabin, wrapped again in her grief, her heart far away in a sad place where we could not enter. Harry and I, on the other hand, shunned our cabins where it was too easy to remember our shattered dreams. Shattered dreams are a sorry state of mind. So Harry and I mingled.        

       At least we were fashionably outfitted for it. In his constant effort not to disappoint his father, our father had insisted on camouflaging our lack of blondeness and sturdy apple-cheeks with well cut fabrics. I no longer even owned a dress with great mutton sleeves. They had been out of fashion for a year, as had the staunch gowns they adorned. The graceful, bend-in-the-wind silhouette with lighter materials and, for evening wear, even frothy ones, was the mandate from Paris. Entire herds of women had rushed to their seamstresses like water through a broken dike to renovate and re-create.

 

Mingling was limited on the voyage due to various nationalities but the voyage was pleasant enough and did arrive safely at Capetown. Hadley and Harry convince their mother to leave the ship and explore Capetown briefly.

 

    We walked through the marketplace, marveling at foods we had never seen, and beautiful little wooden carvings of wild animals that we had seen only in picture books, and leather goods and brightly colored woven goods so different from anything in Amsterdam.

       "It is another world," sighed my mother. "I shall not even know how to shop for our dinner."       

       "It is a beautiful, exotic new world," said Harry as he cheerfully stopped to examine this and that and look about him, entranced by that all he saw.    

       "It is to be our world," I said and tried to sound as cheerful as Harry. But he has always been better at "cheerful" than I have.         

       We dared not spend money to shop or buy a meal at a decent restaurant, and while nobody seemed to mind our walking about, the confusion of this new world depressed Mother even more. So we returned to the ship where our passage along with our meals had been paid through to Durban.

 

The trip up to Durban was quite different in that almost all the passengers spoke English, and the twins had no problem understanding Afrikaans. 

 

     We found ourselves socializing so much that we had little time for cards or chess or even conversations in which we were expected to carry our share. Our new fellow passengers, none of them being new to this country, all insisted on seeking us out and orienting us to our new "home." While they respected Mother's privacy and her widow's weeds, Harry and I, always out and about, became prime targets for their wisdom. . . .

       The most persistent purveyor of wisdom was a beefy, red-headed, mustachioed young Britisher named Llewelyn Applegate, or at least that was the name he gave, frequently accompanied by a hearty handshake.

        "Applegate's the name, Africa's the game."   . . .

       Harry, who had been so steadfastly ignored all his life by our Vanderveer uncles and male cousins, was having a grand time in the thick of conversation among men.  Harry's cheerful heart was eager to believe in people, so he listened to Applegate with greater tolerance than I did. Then again, Applegate did not keep winking at Harry and calling him "pretty thing."    

       The second morning Willem Willig, a bushy-bearded Dutchman, a.k.a. an Afrikaaner, a.k.a. a Boer, joined in the conversation. That was when I began to enjoy it as much as Harry. Willem Willig, while he did not strike me as a "farmer," which was the Afrikaans meaning of Boer, was not a pretty sight, a man somewhere in his middle years, so grizzled and unkempt and unwashed that I could only guess his hair was originally a sort of dirty blond and all I could really see of his face was a pair of green eyes that stared right through to the soul.  Willig was also missing a knuckle on the middle finger of his right hand, which I might not have noticed were it not for the heavy gold and diamond ring that adorned the remaining stub.

       Willig constantly threw boulders into the torrential flow of Applegate's pronouncements.

 

   Within a few days they arrive at Durban, the principal city in the British colony of Natal where Grandfather Fitzsimmons is to meet them..

 

     As Mother, Harry and I stood at the railing absorbing our first look at our destination, it was my luck that Llewelyn "Africa's-the-game" Applegate chose to crowd in next to me.

       "Not too bad a little town, Durban. But the decent part of it very Victorian. Hymn-singing eye-rollers, you know the type. So it's nowhere a reasonable man would want to live," he proclaimed just as my mother let out a shriek.        

         "There he is!" she cried and began waving with both her arms.   

       On the decks, a figure returned the wave. "Maggie!" he bellowed.

       Harry and I stared at each other.  Maggie? Then we stared at Mother. She was smiling, really smiling as we had never seen her smile, and tears ran down her cheeks

   "I believe that's Colonel Fitzsimmons," proclaimed Applegate. "Did a nice bit of fighting during the war. Quite the British hero, I've heard. Lucky bloke! Got himself some nice property for it, too, up towards the Boer's Free Orange State. Do you know him?"  

         I wasn't going to say a word, but Harry did.  

        "He's our grandfather." 

       "Really?" Applegate was impressed, so impressed that he leaned towards me and leered. "You know, pretty thing, some day I might just be looking to settle down on a nice piece of land hereabouts. I might just be coming back this way."  

       I gave him my unflinching smile. "Excuse me. I have to be ready to disembark."

         I moved closer to the gangplank and kept looking out at the dock and my Grandfather Fitzsimmons. He was not at all what I expected. Of course he was tall and robust like Harry, just as Mother had tried to explain to the Vanderveers. But I had expected a tall, robust, scruffy sort of man, weather-beaten by years of hard living, a sort of Willem Willig type but related by blood to me.

       My Grandfather in no way resembled Willig. He was tanned from a life outdoors and silver-haired with age, but even the Vanderveers would have been impressed by the cut of his linen coat. He stood at the edge of the gangplank and watched us walk down with a smile as broad as the ocean and wily dark blue eyes that seemed to see around the edge of things.

        Mother flew into his arms.

       He held her there so tightly that for a full minute neither of them moved. Then he made room for me, putting his arm around my shoulder and giving me a hug. Then he shook hands with Harry .

       "Good for you, boy. You take after me, not that short, squat side of the family. And look at you, Hadley! You're your mother re-born. She looks just like you did, Maggie. Just as I have always remembered you. We shall have the merriest Christmas of your lives, now that you've come home."

       Standing in my Grandfather's embrace, I looked about me. Carts, crates, white faces, black faces, soldiers, seamen, sellers, buyers, all in a jumble around the docks.  

       I sighed. It was Christmas, and we were "home."

 

   Their new home was quite different from what Hadley had envisioned. It was a large, well furnished home on the edge of the veldt with a spacious porch all around it.   Hadley's mother is soon a much happier person, free from the long burden of guilt. She is an excellent cook, reveling in the abundant kitchen and the wonders of the ostrich egg. Harry, too, adapts quickly..

 

     I watched Harry's familiar figure, his rifle slung under his arm, his sketchpad in the other, emerge from that infinity and grow against the distant horizon. Behind him the sun sank slowly into theDragonbreath Mountains, setting the sky ablaze and washing the veldt dark gold. As Harry passed a lone baobab tree, its flat top silhouetted against the red sky, he stopped a moment to admire it. He took another two dozen steps and turned to gaze back at the mountains. He shook his head in wonder, then turned back and opened his arms towards me as if to say, isn't it grand.

       I marveled at Harry. In spite of everything he had forsaken, in spite of that last bitter disappointment of love, Harry was happy. He was not happy just because we had finally arrived, nor because in Grandfather Fitzsimmons we had found a loving grandfather, nor because we had at long last heard our mother laugh, nor even because Grandfather was rich and had bought Harry the finest rifle available in Durban during our "merriest Christmas ever", which truly it was, with feasts and gifts and carols sung to the tune of my lute. Of course Harry was happy about all that. We both were. How could we not be?

       But above all that, Harry was happy with this land. In less than a week's time he had fitted into it like a chick nestling under its mother's wing. Or perhaps more accurately, like a chick daring to spread its wings under its mother's watchful eye. Harry had found freedom here. Even his hair found freedom, no longer slicked back and parted down the middle in the Vanderveer way, but following its natural curl with no part at all.

       As he neared the house, our tiny pinpoint of civilization in this vast expanse, Harry waved a farewell to the two Zulu "boys" who had accompanied him. They returned his wave and veered off down the walkway and through the shade trees to Mgumbu's house. Harry leaped onto the porch, acknowledged Napoleon's and Donovan's thumping tails, kissed me on the cheek, and then stood beside me to survey it all again.

        "Now which boys were those?" I asked.

       "The tall, cheerful one is Tsonga. I let him try my rifle today. He�s good with it. The other one is Mbele. He�s quiet, thoughtful, but a great tracker. We found hippos. And the most beautiful sable antelope." Harry took a deep breath and grinned at the veldt. "Isn't it magnificent, Hadley?"

     Only a fool would disagree.

 

   They also have a variety of neighbors, some within a little as an hour's ride. Life begins to unfold pleasantly, with romance for Harry and two suitors, one of them Boer, the other British, for Hadley.   But the shadow of war hovers over them, and before they have been there a year the Second Boer War breaks out because Britain wants for itself the small little countries of Transvaal the "mineral state" and The Free Orange State, known as the "sheep and cow" state. Although Natal is British, the war is on its borders and within Natal loyalties sever ties, split families, and cause all the usual havoc of war.