they remain downcast; to her their expressions seem to say, ‘Hoping for anything in Kivu always brings disappointment. This place will never improve.’ She feels awful.
They drive the car through the high metal gates of the compound. Like any NGO facility it has items of value that could be stolen so it’s surrounded by rolls of barbed wire and there are two watchmen with old shotguns and machetes.
They have a brief meal of foufou, tomato paste and beer and then they are shown to their rooms. As project manager, Sophie gets the luxury of a room to herself across the other side of the compound, a bare, cement-floored place with a camp bed and a candle on a chipped plate.
She sits on the bed in the dim candlelight. Now that she is finally alone her deepest reaction to the turmoil finally comes storming out of her. It’s not that her pride and dignity have been offended – though they have – it’s the memory of her utter helplessness and loss of control that makes her shake with rage. She bends forwards and clenches her fists in front of her face until the knuckles go white. In her mind’s eye she can see the faces of the captain and the sergeant.
‘Bastards!’ she mutters through clenched teeth.
She is a humanitarian charity worker who has made sacrifices and striven hard to get where she is and is passionately committed to her work. She knows that if she had a gun and those men were in front of her now she would calmly shoot each one of them in the head and enjoy doing it.
Chapter Eight
Alex taps the end of a wedge into a log with a sledgehammer and then pounds away at it, swinging the hammer high and smashing down blows repeatedly with all his might.
He is splitting logs out on the estate. The wood divides neatly and the two halves fall over and rock back and forth on the ground until they are still. Alex stands frozen for a long time, looking down at them with the hammer still held in his hands, its head resting on the ground.
That evening he finds he can’t sit still in the drawing room by the fire and starts wandering around the huge, silent house. He opens doors into long-forgotten rooms and stands looking at the dustsheets covering the furniture, remembering scenes from his childhood.
Some of them are happy but a lot are uncomfortable: the noise of angry shouting and blows from his parents’ room, his father passed out drunk on the dining room floor with the dogs settled around him for company.
He walks around the main hall with its large portraits of Devereuxs hung between the high stained-glass windows. He stares up at the pictures: an Elizabethan knight with his head held rigid by a huge lace collar worn over a breastplate, a fleshy Georgian reclining in front of a bucolic scene on the estate, a pompous Victorian in a black uniform with his sword held stiffly at his side.
Communing with his ancestors, that’s what he’s doing. Reliving the sense of what it means to be a Devereux. Throughout the ages they were soldiers – hardly any merchants or lawyers and certainly no priests or artists. Active, restless, aggressive men who had served the Crown all over the world, commanding troops and smiting its enemies with sword and shot. The house is littered with relics from their campaigns, shields and spears from Asia and Africa.
His father might have been an ineffectual aberration but with Alex the genes are back on track. From his army schooling at Wellington (motto ‘Sons of Heroes’) to his professional career, he is an aggressive and successful commander of men. It’s what he does.
He looks at the dark doorway into the tower and crosses over to it, not turning on the light, he knows the distances. As he walks up the stone stairs each step becomes slower than the last until he pauses on a landing by a suit of armour and walks down a narrow, low corridor.
He used to play a game here with his sister, Georgina, when they were children, daring each other to come to this place. His hand finds the light switch and clicks it on. A weak bulb illuminates the short passageway.
Staring at him from the wall at the end of the corridor is a small picture, a foot high with a small title under it: Sir Henry Devereux, 1294–1356.
When Sir Henry had inherited the Devereux lands and title, they had fallen into decay and were under threat from the lawlessness of the times. He had immediately set about the problem by visiting every village in his lands and those just across the border from his and making a point of hanging a man in every one. From then on he was known as Black Hal and is still regarded as a bogeyman in the family.
The head and shoulders painting is by an itinerant Italian painter, with the crude flattened perspective of the day. It looks very formulaic and he is dressed in his armour in a very stiff pose. Even so, the artist has captured something about the man – there is a cold look in his eyes that warned of cruel violence if he was crossed.
Alex stands and looks at him for a while before switching out the light and returning down the darkened tower.
Eve’s father, Laurent, looks round the circle of men.
‘So, what are we going to do?’
He is fifty but looks seventy; his face is worn and creased like an old shoe. His eyes are rheumy and his voice rasps. He wears a tattered brown suit jacket, jeans and a grubby blue baseball cap and is sitting on a three-legged stool outside his shack in the refugee camp.
Sitting on logs and beer crates around him are the men of his extended family and in a half circle in front of him are the men of Gabriel’s family. Some older women sit on the ground behind them. A week has passed since Gabriel staggered back in from his disaster at Pangi market. He sits to one side of the circle, his face still horribly swollen, his body covered in cuts and bruises.
The two families have come together to discuss what to do with him and Eve. She is squatting behind the shack with her two sisters as her fate is decided.
Laurent scans the ring of fourteen older men around him looking gloomy and awkward, holding their chins in their hands. Their faces are lined with fear from the perpetual uncertainty that they live with and their skin is grey rather than black from lack of food. Kivu has rich soils and high rainfall but no one can grow any proper crops because they never know when the militias will come and steal them, so they subsist on cassava – easy to grow but nutritionally poor.
No one wants to respond to Laurent’s question but Gabriel’s uncle Alphonse is famously tactless. ‘Well, it doesn’t look good for her. I mean, first she produces a muzunga and then she gets raped. I think she’s cursed. Why else did the Kudu Noir come for her? Evil attracts evil, that’s what I say. Besides she stinks of piss.’
There is outraged murmuring and head-shaking from Eve’s family but none actively disagree with him: he has said what they are all thinking. She is a burden on them with her wound.
Gabriel clears his throat. Since he heard the news about her rape, he has been thinking about something and knows he has to come out with it now.
‘Well, I want to get married to her.’
‘What!’ There is an outburst from his family.
His father, Bertrand, turns and looks at him. ‘What do you mean, you stupid child? She’s been raped, she’s probably got HIV! She leaks piss the whole time. How can you marry a girl like that?’
Gabriel knows it is a ridiculous idea but since he saw her after it happened he has been mixed up with conflicting
