Vortex

Uitlander.” Emily still wasn’t sure which angered him more: her involvement with Ian, or the possibility that it could be used against him by one of his political rivals. It scarcely mattered. The hard fact was that his anger had put Beatfix Viljoen in the catbird seat.

It wasn’t something the housekeeper ever let her forget.

“Well, mevrou? Am I not right?”

Emily saw the eager look in the other woman’s eyes and bit down the ill-tempered reply she’d been about to make. Quarreling with Beatrix wouldn’t help her escape this trap she’d put herself in to save Ian.

Instead, she quietly picked up her loaded tray, turned, and walked out onto the dim, torchlit patio.

Silently fuming, she orbited through the separate groups of men-stopping only to allow them to pluck drinks off the tray she held in both hands.

As always, their ability to ignore her was infuriating. Oh, they were courteous enough in a ponderous, patronizing way. But none of them bothered to hide their view of her as nothing more than a woman-as a member of the sex ordained by God for marriage, child rearing housework, and nothing more.

She stopped circling and stood beneath the fragrant, sweeping branches of an acacia tree planted long ago by her grandfather. Her tray held more empty than full glasses, but she was reluctant to leave the patio’s relative quiet. Going back to the kitchen meant enduring another verbal slashing from Beaxtrix’s knife-sharp tongue.

Emily took a deep breath of the fresh, cool night air, seeking refuge in the peaceful vista spreading outward from the torchlit patio. It was the one part of the Transvaal that she had missed in Cape Town. Her father’s farmhouse sat on the brow of a low hill overlooking a shallow, open valley. Gentle, grassy slopes rolled down to a meandering, treelined stream-brimming during the summer rains, but dry now. Happier memories of her carefree childhood rose in Emily’s mind, washing away some of the frustrations and tension of the present.

“I tell you, man, the leader is a genius. Practically a prophet touched by God himself.”

“You speak true, Piet.”

Emily stiffened. The voices were coming from the other side of the tree.

Damn them! Was there nowhere she could go to find a moment’s peace? She stayed still, hidden from

view by the acacia’s low, overhanging branches-hoping the two men, whoever they were, would wander off as quickly as they’d apparently come.

Cigarette smoke curled around the tree.

“You remember the bra ai at his home last month? Two weeks before those kaffir swine killed Haymans and his own pack of traitors?”

The other man laughed.

“Of course, I do. I tell you, Piet, at first I thought the leader had been smoking some of his field hands’ dagga.

Telling us to be ready for great change, for our days of power, and all that. But now I see that he was inspired, given the gift of foretelling like our own modern-day Solomon.”

Emily’s stomach churned. Karl Vorster … a prophet? The very thought seemed blasphemous. But could there be a horrifying truth behind the two men’s sanctimonious ranting? Just as the symptoms of a deadly illness could be cloaked by those of another, less serious disease? Until now, she’d viewed Vorster’s rise to power as simply the grotesque side effect of the ANC’s triggerhappy attack on the Blue Train. But perhaps that was too simple a view. Had Vorster known of the ambush in advance?

My God, Emily thought, dazed. If that was true … the events of the past several weeks flickered through her mind -each taking on a newer, more sinister significance. The swift retribution for the train attack.

Vorster’s meteoric assumption of power. The immediate proclamation of various emergency decrees and punitive measures against South Africa’s blacks-measures that could only have been drafted days or weeks before news of the Blue Train ambush reached Pretoria. It all fit. She tasted something salty in her mouth and realized suddenly that she’d bitten her own lip without being aware of it.

The first man spoke again, quieter this time so that Emily had to strain to make out his words.

“Only one thing troubles me, Hennie. I cannot bring myself to trust all of those our leader allows around himself.

Especially… “

“That pretty boy Muller?” the other finished for him.

“Va. That one will be trouble for us all, you mark my words, Hennie.”

Light flared around the tree trunk for a split second as the other man struck a match and touched it to a new cigarette.

“Also true, Piet. And van der Heijden agrees with us. But what can we do about it? So long as

Muller does the dirty work, he’ll have the leader’s ear and confidence.

After all, no man throws away an ax that’s still sharp.”

“Then we must sharpen our own axes, my friend. And I know just the neck

I’d like to use them on….”

Their voices faded as the two men sidled away from the tree, returning to the larger group standing around the open air barbecue pit.