EXTRACT | ‘The Ghost of Sam Webster’ by Craig Higginson

ABOUT THE BOOK

Writer Daniel Hawthorne is packing up his mother’s house in Johannesburg when he hears about the disappearance of Sam Webster, the beautiful daughter of his friend, the famous historian Bruce Webster.

When Sam's body appears briefly on the banks of the flooded Buffalo River, Daniel decides to visit the Websters’ luxury lodge in the heart of Zululand.

Under the guise of researching a new novel about his disgraced ancestor — the lepidopterist Lt Charles Hawthorne, who fought in the Battle of Isandlwana — Daniel starts to investigate the reasons for Sam’s disappearance.

The lines between loyalty and betrayal, love and hate, cowardice and courage, and redemption and shame soon become blurred as Daniel gets closer to the truth.

Written in Craig Higginson’s masterful prose, The Ghost of Sam Webster is at once a war novel, a murder mystery, a multilayered love story, and a robust reassertion of what it is to remain human during the most challenging times.

PART ONE

THE WRITER

Last summer, Daniel learnt the names of all the butterflies.

He was planning to write about his disgraced ancestor, the soldier and lepidopterist Lt Charles Hawthorne, who fought — though perhaps not as hard as he ought to have — at the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879. For this, Daniel travelled to Zululand and stayed at Bruce Webster’s lodge. There he became friendly with the family and he met Sam, Bruce’s daughter, who had recently turned sixteen. Sam was the kind of girl Daniel would most likely have fallen in love with when he was a boy. She was also the kind of girl who would not have noticed him as he entered her atmosphere, all awkward angles, to approach her sun.

He stares at the ceiling of his old bedroom.

He has been living in his mother’s house since the day she died.

There are florescent stars above his bed that he stuck there when he was about nine. They have not been painted over since. He remembers that he did his best to recreate the constellations. The Southern Cross, the Pointers, the Seven Sisters — and his sister’s ill-fated star sign, Scorpio. He remembers looking up at the stars on the ceiling as if he was lying under the night sky, staring into infinite space. These days, all he sees are the stickers. The crooked dimensions. The failed representations. Everywhere he looks in his mother’s house, all he finds is failure, all he finds is loss. Not only has he lost his sister and his father and his mother — he has also lost the boy who stuck those stickers across the ceiling, believing he could map an inner landscape and an outer landscape, so that there would no longer be any division between himself and the stars.

As a boy, Daniel knew every part of what was always referred to by his parents as “the plot”. The house, which is situated between Johannesburg and Pretoria, has always been long and low and unattractive. Though it might have appeared modern in the sixties, it now resembles a poor person’s home, with its missing roof tiles, rusted gutters and kakiebos growing tall in the pond where the ringhals used to emerge from the rockery to drink. Below the house is his father’s collection of decayed army trucks. On the other side of the driveway, which is still no more than a dirt track lined with aloes, is the round concrete reservoir and the broken windmill where some red and golden bishops still nest in the reeds. Below the reservoir, in what was the peach orchard — now a few black skeletons overgrown with Black-eyed Susans — his father used to feed the guineafowl, carrying chicken feed inside the Second World War helmet that had belonged to his father. After his mother’s death, Daniel found the helmet inside his grandfather’s army trunk and restarted the tradition. The guineafowl are long gone, but he has been feeding the doves, sparrows and weaverbirds instead.

It is interesting what having a cowardly ancestor has done to the men in his family. Lt Charles Hawthorne is notorious for three times abandoning his fellow soldiers at the height of battle. Once at a rocky outcrop as the army was withdrawing back to the camp at Isandlwana, again on the retreat between Isandlwana and Fugitives’ Drift, where Charles was accused of abandoning a higher-ranking officer, and finally after he had crossed the Buffalo River, when he was said to have made off with another man’s horse. Charles is inevitably depicted in the history books as a disappointment in the otherwise heroic narrative of Isandlwana and Fugitives’ Drift.

Yet it has always seemed to Daniel that each of the accounts that condemns his ancestor is little more than speculation. The rest of his actions on that dark day — it became dark literally, since, at the height of the battle, the moon eclipsed the sun — are left unmentioned. That Charles was part of an army of a few thousand men that faced a Zulu force of over twenty thousand soldiers, and that the British army spent most of the day retreating as fast as possible — these circumstances in the story of Daniel’s butterfly-collecting ancestor are passed without comment.

Charles Hawthorne’s own father had died honourably in the Second Anglo-Ashanti War in present-day Ghana. Charles himself left behind a son who died in Verdun, who in turn left behind a son who was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of East London, South Africa. Daniel’s own father fought in the Zimbabwean War of Independence, which he preferred to call the Rhodesian Bush War. He was said to have behaved as heroically as his father and grandfather before him, flying supplies over the border from South Africa at night over bush occupied by hostile forces and once landing a plane with a blasted tail in the middle of a game reserve, where he was soon surrounded by a pride of hungry lions. The shame associated with Daniel’s disgraced ancestor gave birth to a line of men who might have come straight out of the pages of a Rider Haggard or Wilbur Smith novel.

But what if Charles was merely like the rest of us? What if he was merely human, sometimes mastering his fear and sometimes allowing his fear to master him? What if he found during those hours of mass slaughter that he did not believe in the whole endeavour? What if it wasn’t the Zulus he was trying to get away from, but something he had discovered inside his fellow British soldiers? Or even inside himself?

These are questions that had always interested Daniel. After the publication of his most recent novel, he decided to do some reading about the Anglo-Zulu War. In the formal historical accounts, he soon came across the version of Charles Hawthorne that he had come to expect. The famous coward. The man who had thrice betrayed his fellow man, like Peter betraying Christ. It was only when Daniel started to look further, into the journal entries and correspondence of the soldiers who had reputedly fought alongside Charles, that he found the traces of an altogether different version of events.

By this point, Daniel had already read about the famous historian Bruce Webster. He had even listened to recordings of Webster’s stirring narrations of the events surrounding Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift. During a break from work that winter, he decided to pay Webster Lodge a visit and conduct some further investigations. He drove down from Johannesburg, leaving the national road after crossing the Vaal River and heading off across the open country, along tarmac roads with potholes that were filled with cow dung and dirt roads criss-crossed by low cement bridges and the dongas left from long-forgotten floods. At first, he was disappointed in the landscape. Everything was dry and dead-looking and covered in a fine patina of red dust. It was difficult to imagine that any of the events described so stirringly in the history books could ever have taken place in somewhere so mundane, so commonplace. When he entered the Isandlwana valley, with its randomly arranged homesteads and its lodges — some of them grandly arranged down a mountain — he came upon the modest, lion-shaped mountain of Isandlwana. Was this what everyone had been fighting over? Seen from the road, the mountain looked meagre and the village flanking it was a mess. Though the veranda and the yard of each homestead had been swept clean, the boundaries of the properties and the sides of the dirt roads were piled with rubbish. Scraggy chickens and wizened goats wandered about in the ruined road. Something synthetic and toxic-smelling was being burnt in a nearby bonfire.

Daniel tried to summon up some feeling for the men who had fought and died in this valley, both British and Zulu. But he did not find much to work with. Whatever had happened here, it had nothing to do with him.

Extract provided by Pan Macmillan