‘What about by sea?’ Ralph asked.

  ‘Impossible. There is no harbour for a thousand miles after Port Elizabeth. You have no way in – and no way out.’

  Ralph sat up so abruptly he almost banged his head on the bunk above. ‘That is not true.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There is a place a ship could anchor.’

  Marius eyed him over the bowl of his pipe. ‘I spoke to every sailor I could find and they all told me the same. Rocks, reefs and sandbars – that is all you find on that coast.’

  ‘No.’ Ralph’s voice was quiet but unyielding. ‘There is a bay, but a promontory hides the entrance. Sailors fear the currents close to shore, so they keep out to sea and never see it. There is a narrow channel that leads in, and even then you think you will run aground. Only a madman would risk it. But if you hold your nerve, you come into a bay where there is a landing and a safe anchorage.’

  ‘You have been there?’ said Jobe.

  ‘No,’ Ralph admitted.

  ‘Fairy tales,’ said Marius. ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘My father had a map. He went there. It’s called Nativity Bay.’

  Marius’s face was screwed up with disbelief. But he did not say anything. Ralph spoke with such certainty that both Jobe and Marius felt it might be dangerous to contradict him.

  At last Marius laughed. ‘If you say so, Englishman. And maybe if we ever leave this godforsaken island, we will find a ship and go to this secret bay of yours, and if it exists we will all be rich men.’

  ‘It will not be so easy,’ warned Jobe.

  Marius flicked a piece of plaster at him. ‘No one invited you, Kaffir.’

  ‘How will you speak to the people there? So they do not kill you?’

  ‘The Frenchman said that there was no one there.’

  Jobe rolled his eyes. ‘No people? Or no white people?’

  ‘We will need an interpreter,’ Ralph agreed. ‘All three of us will go – equal partners.’

  ‘Partners?’ Marius shook his head. ‘You are mad, brak.’

  ‘I mean it. We will make our fortunes.’

  Again, there was an unquestionable sureness in Ralph’s voice. To hear it, you knew not only that he believed what he said: you felt you had to believe it yourself.

  Marius blinked. ‘Very well. Partners. And when we have our fortune, we will make an equal split, hey?’

  ‘An equal split,’ said Ralph. ‘Three ways.’

  Jobe spat on his palm, then held it out. Ralph did likewise. After a moment’s hesitation, Marius joined in. The three men gripped one another’s hands in silence, each one of them contemplating his part of the shared dream.

  Then sense reasserted itself.

  ‘Stories and nonsense,’ said Marius, pulling back his hand. ‘They pass the time, hey, but what else are they good for? We are still stuck on this verdoemde rock.’

  Ralph’s eyes gleamed. ‘I told you. I do not intend to be here for long.’

  EASTERN CAPE

  A

  nn Waite lay on her hard bed, listening to the insects chirping in the blackness outside. Her husband, Frank, lay beside her, drowned in a deep sleep. A few feet away, she could hear the boy, Harry, snoring in the stinkwood cradle which Frank had carved for him. Night after night he had sat up in front of the fire, working on Harry’s crib. It was the one thing they owned that had been made out of love rather than from necessity.

  Ann’s aching limbs craved the sleep she had been deprived of, but she forced herself to stay awake. These moments in the dark were the only time she had to herself. She lay awake, hands clasped over her chest, and tried to count her blessings.

  It was not easy.

  The first time Ann had seen their new home, she’d thought that she had gone to Heaven. Standing in a copse of trees at the top of a hill, they had looked out across their grant: whitewashed stones marked the boundaries, where government officials had surveyed the property, stretching out of sight into the blue horizon. In front of them the grant fell towards a gully where the grass grew green and lush on the banks of a stream. ‘So much land,’ she had said, hugging the baby and gazing at Frank joyfully. ‘This is Paradise.’

  ‘Then that is what we will name it,’ Frank had replied. ‘Paradise Valley.’

  It had not worked out that way. Reality intruded: she and Frank learned harsh lessons every day, through a thousand setbacks and disappointments. The stream in the gully dried up; for nine months of the year there was nothing but dust. They had a hundred acres, but more than half of it was so rocky that it was impossible to farm. Frank broke and blunted his tools trying to dig it out, and had to abandon the effort. The wide grassy fields were perfect for cattle, but the governor forbade them from owning any of the animals for fear of provoking raids by the Xhosa tribes across the nearby border.

  Instead, they hoed the field at the top of the slope and planted wheat. Frank dug into the stream bed in the gully and found water not far below the surface. It was back-breaking labour, hoisting the water in buckets and carrying it up the hill day after day. The path from the well, past the house and up to the field, wore into a rut from uncountable journeys Ann made with those heavy buckets.

  Frank grew thin and haggard, his eyes glazed with weariness. Each night he studied his agricultural manuals by the light of the single lamp they owned, but the manuals had been written for English farmers working soft English fields. Even the points of the compass were upended. A south-facing field turned out to not be so valuable here on the far side of the equator, where the sun reached its zenith in the north.

  The hardships fell on them like the strokes of a chisel, carving new lines on their bodies. Worry, pain and hunger were their constant companions. But with every challenge they overcame, a new life took shape. They built a house in the hollow at the bottom of the hill. It was a modest dwelling. Their home in Lancashire may have been a draughty, leaky cottage, but that was a palace compared to where they lived now. It was a single wood-framed room, walled with clay and thatched with reeds. Back home, it would have been no better than a sheepfold. When they lit the fire, the house filled with so much smoke Ann worried Harry would choke; in the evenings, the wind cut through the cracks in the walls. But it was their own, built with their hands on their land. Ann made it as homely as she was able with the few odds and ends they had. She sewed curtains from the tent they had arrived with and brought in fresh wild flowers, yellow proteas and fire lilies. Frank cut turfs to build a wall around the house, and Ann began creating her own garden – larger than anything she could have dreamed of back home in England. She planted the enclosure with pumpkins, carrots and cabbages, together with wild herbs that she found in the surrounding countryside. From one of their neighbours, she managed to obtain a fig tree, which she planted by the wicker gate.

  The land began – gradually, obstinately – to yield to their efforts. When the first green shoots of wheat emerged from the furrows, Ann and Frank danced in the field, spinning Harry around so that he gurgled with delight. Week by week, they watched the crop grow. Leaves emerged; they rose tall, then drooped like limp flags.

  From the uppermost leaves, buds emerged. Each one sprouted into a long ear, packed with kernels that would become the precious grain. Ann, always hungry, tried to imagine how much flour it would produce. Sometimes, in the evenings, she walked between the rows of wheat, now nearly chest high, running her hands through the silky crop. She imagined the grain milled to flour and turned to a hot, golden brown loaf; she thought how it would smell fresh from the wood-fired oven, a trickle of butter – if they could get some – running over their fingers as it melted into the bread. Her belly ached with interminable hunger, but she had to be patient. She put those visions aside, and focused her attention on Harry.

  As the crop grew, so did the boy. He started to sit up, and then to crawl. His body filled out; he began to smile and babble. Harry was the reason she kept working from dawn until dusk. Harry was the reason she scratched at the earth until her fingernails bled and her shoulders ached. He was the most precious gift this land had given her.

  The wheat turned from deep green to yellow, almost gold under the light of the African sky. The ears ripened to fat grains. Frank was often away during those long, scorching hot months, labouring on the farms of richer men so he could buy rice and millet to feed them until they could harvest their crop. For weeks at a time, Ann had to look after Harry, water the wheat, weed the fields and tend the vegetable garden herself. Her arms grew strong from hewing wood. Often at night she lay on her straw bed, Harry hugged close beside her, and listened to the lions roaring in the distance, wondering if the mud walls and wicker door would hold off those wild beasts if put to the test.

  But there were some things she could not shut out.

  One morning, she walked up the rutted path to the wheat field in her bare feet, cradling Harry to her breast. Frank was away. The sun had risen over the ridge, bathing the hillside in an ochre dawn. Every rock and blade of grass seemed to glow with a numinous light. The wheat had turned from gold to rose-red. She walked across the field, carrying Harry in one arm and letting her free hand caress the budding ears of grain. Surely they must be ready to harvest soon.

  Then she glanced down, and saw her hand was stained crimson and her nightdress streaked with thick red smears as if she had walked through a slaughterhouse. Where had it come from? In mounting horror, she looked at the crops around her and realised that the red was on the wheat itself, a russet powder streaking up the stalks and over the leaves like rust on a piece of iron.

  At first she could not think what it might be. Then she remembered a phrase she had read in one of Frank’s agricultural manuals– words to make any farmer despair.

  ‘Rust blight,’ she murmured.

  It was a fungus that grew on wheat. Uncontrollable tears washed down her cheeks. When she wiped them away, she saw that they left dark red smears on her hand.

  There was no remedy for this. The crop was lost.

  Frank returned that evening. He was heartbroken, too, but he comforted her as best he could.

  ‘Next year will be better.’

  She felt the knot of hunger tighten in her stomach. ‘If we last until then.’

  They survived on the kindness of others. On the voyage out, Ann had made friends with a couple called Simon and Margaret Armstrong. Although the Armstrongs had suffered many of the same hardships as the Waites, their land was better supplied with water, and the blight had not affected their crops. Ann tried not to feel jealous of her friends’ good fortune.

  Frank started to work on the Armstrongs’ farm, and Ann helped Margaret with her laundry and housekeeping. It earned them enough to survive the winter, and to plant a new crop of wheat in the top field. But the following spring, the blight appeared again.

  ‘How can it have happened twice?’ Ann wept. She felt as if they were suffering the ordeal of Job, that God had decided to punish them for reasons she could not fathom.

  But the rust was not their only affliction. Caterpillars ate their vegetables and lice infested the cabbages. Hot winds in summer made the beans wither. After two years, they had saved enough from Frank’s labour to buy a cow for milk. The owning of cattle was expressly forbidden by the governor, but Ann told herself that it was just one cow and she knew of ten other families that had done the same. But then the rains stopped, the grass went brown, and the cow starved. They had no choice but to kill it, and the beast was so thin that there was hardly any meat left on its skeletal frame.

  Ann’s one consolation was Harry. He was three, now: a bouncing toddler who tore around the property with mischief permanently on his mind. Many times, Ann had to rescue him from a tree he had climbed too high, or bandage up a cut knee from the rocks in the gully. She marvelled at his energy, even as she was tormented by guilt at the fact that she could not feed him enough. Every meal she gave him almost her whole portion, but it was still not enough for the growing boy.

  The third spring, planting the wheat felt like an act of defiance, an assertion of hope. Every morning, when Ann carried water up to the field, she felt sick with fear at what she would find. Surely it could not happen a third year in succession. We have endured so much, she prayed at night. Grant us this one mercy.

  When the red marks appeared again, she barely had tears left to weep. They burned the field, and hoed the ashes into the earth. At the little church they attended, six miles away, some of the congregation brought baskets of food or loaves they had baked for the less fortunate members of the settler community. But even these good people kept a wary distance when they thought Ann was not looking. The Waites are bad luck, they whispered. They are being punished by our Lord for something they have done. Better to keep a safe distance, and avoid the taint of it.

  Even as the drought stretched on, and their Indian corn failed, and their sack of rice shrank to nothing, there was one thought Ann never voiced: We should return to England. Frank had given his heart to this plot of land. To admit failure, after everything they’d endured, would break him.

  Ann felt disloyal even thinking about going home. She still loved Frank, though hardship, hunger and the constraints of a one-room house had tested their marriage. But once the thought of England had sprouted in her mind, she could not dislodge it. At night she dreamed of rain and green grass, and soft butter and roast meat. And tried to count her blessings.

  The sound of thunder woke her. She listened to the echo roll around the valley. As it died away, she heard another noise, a sort of rustling, so long forgotten that at first she did not recognise it. Then, with a rush of delight, she knew what it was. Rain.

  Rain meant hope. It was too late for their Indian corn, but she might get some vegetables out of the garden. If there were enough, maybe she could sell some at the market in Algoa Bay.

  The fat drops drummed on the roof: not Lancashire rain that you hardly felt until your skin was soaked, but African rain that fell like stones and forced its way through the feeble thatch. She felt a drop wet her face, then another. Soon water was running down the walls and pooling on the earthen floor.

  More thunder crashed around the valley. Would it wake Harry? The hammering rain sounded like a stream of gravel being poured from a great height. And there was a new sound, too, a low roar so deep it seemed to shake the earth, like a peal of thunder that never faded.

  She reached out to Frank, lying beside her.

  ‘Frank . . .? Frank . . .? Wake up! What is that noise?’

  He lifted his head a moment, getting his bearings. ‘It must be the stream flowing in the gully.’

  ‘Will it reach us?’

  He kissed her. ‘It would take a flood of Biblical proportions to threaten us here.’

  Still, she wanted her child beside her. She got out of bed and crossed towards Harry’s cot.

  She was halfway across the room when a flash of lightning tore open the sky, illuminating the cottage through the back window. She looked out to see the landscape bathed for a split second in the electric blue light.

  Then the night went pitch-dark again, even while her mind was catching up with what her eyes had seen. The hillside had vanished, and what looked like an ocean wave was bearing down on the house.

  Frank had been right – only a flood like the one described in Genesis could reach them. And it had. It was as if God had decided to once again rid the earth of sinners.

  A column of water burst through the window as if someone had opened a sluice gate. There was no glass, though if there had been it would simply have shattered. Ann took the impact of the water full in her face and chest and was thrown across the room. Holes popped open in the mud wall as the water broke through.

  In the darkness, she felt the water rising frighteningly fast. The room was filling up.

  Ann struggled to her feet, fighting against the water that poured over her, soaking her nightdress and pinning her down. She was back in the ocean the day she found Harry, the whole world moving against her. She had to find him.

  The lightening flashed again and with horror Ann realised that the water had lifted Harry’s cot and was carrying it towards the door. In a moment, it would be swept out into the darkness, down into the gully and smashed to pieces.

  She threw herself across the doorway, bracing her arms against the frame. The wooden cot, now a raft, bumped against her. She was all that stood between it and the storm outside.

  Harry had started to scream and move about – but that only unbalanced the cot. It tipped over; Harry rolled into the water, his cry choked off as he started to sink.

  Ann lunged forward. She flailed desperately in the darkness, felt Harry’s body in the water and snatched for him. She managed to grab the collar of his nightshirt and drag him back to her – but she had let go of the door frame. Without that to anchor her, the weight of the flood lifted her off the ground and carried her out of the door on a surge of foaming water.

  A huge crash sounded behind her. The house vanished in an explosion of spray and mud and broken wood. The wattle and clay walls had buckled and the roof had collapsed, washed away on a tide of destruction.

  ‘Frank!’ she screamed, again and again, gripping her child tightly as the surging water tossed and spun her about. Something caught her, like a web or a giant hand. It held her up so that the onrushing current broke against her. Water forced its way into her mouth and down her throat. She thought she would drown. However hard she writhed and thrashed, she could not get free.

  And then she could breathe again. The water drained away. Soon it was down to her ankles.

  She opened her eyes, though it made little difference. The night was too dark to see anything. Feeling around with one hand while she clutched Harry in the other, she felt the prickle of branches, and realised that the flood had carried her into the fig tree she had planted by the garden gate. If it had not caught them, she and Harry would both have been carried away down the gully. She could hear the roar of water funnelling through it, a roiling cascade.