The silence wanted to be anywhere else but where it was.

Although Spokes had not spoken for quite some time, a man’s voice said, ‘This young man should shut his mouth! Shut up and leave our village this very instant.’

‘No. This young fellow has done the right and honourable thing,’ Msimanga said. ‘Imagine the bravery it has taken him to tell the truth with so much to lose. Imagine the integrity. Imagine the intelligence … I doubt our Loveness could find a man more worthy in whatever corner of the world she looks.’

The silence was not as convinced about Spokes’s virtues and attributes as Msimanga was. Spokes was lost in that silence until the gunshot rang out and alerted him to the fact that Msimanga had left the clearing and returned to his hut. After the gunshot, the silence turned into chaos that could not contain Spokes within it. In fact, the chaos made it very clear that it wanted him gone. So when Raftopoulos arrived to collect Spokes, the chaos unceremoniously ushered Spokes into the caravan. The last thing that Spokes saw as he was driven away was the lovely Loveness crying as she sat forlornly in the middle of the clearing. He knew then that bravery, integrity, and intelligence could certainly be costly possessions.

Once he was inside it, Spokes realised why Raftopoulos’s caravan could only accommodate one person. It was not so much that he had too many wares – bales of mostly second-hand clothing, stacks of threadbare blankets, mounds of blue and green soap, gallons of multicoloured oils, packets of cheap toffees and caramels, boxes of that greatest creation of all: condensed milk; it was that alongside all this and his own bedding, he had impressively crammed in the complete works of Charles Dickens. The leather-bound volumes were neatly piled on top of each other in an area so clean it could pass for an altar.

Spokes reached for the book at the top of the pile, A Tale of Two Cities, opened it and was shocked by what he saw – such a quantity of marginalia that he, who had never been permitted to make a mark of any kind in a book, felt it was a desecration. He looked at some of the notes, and they all were about how to properly pronounce words. So this was how Raftopoulos had taught himself to speak English, Spokes deduced, as he looked at the scribblings with a much kinder eye.

Once in Krum’s Place, Spokes was both surprised and pleased to discover that it was beautiful country with a river running through it – a river he could fish in the way his father had taught him. He saw himself happily settled there, and became convinced that, for him, Krum’s Place was the promised land. He would only fish again in that river; it would make the realisation of his dream that much sweeter.

Having found the land, Spokes made his way back to the place where the promise had been made: the corner of Lobengula Street and Selborne Avenue. The War Office where he had signed his name and joined the African Rifles had expanded over the years and now contained many offices, the smallest of which was set aside for returning native soldiers. It was in this office that he was told that Great Britain thanked him for his service but regretted to inform him that viable, commercial farmland had been set aside for returning British and European (but not German) soldiers and any British people who wanted to settle in the colony as they were the ones with the modern farming practices that would make the country a post-war agricultural giant. There was a proposed scheme to do the same for returning coloured soldiers, only on a smaller scale, of course: where Europeans would receive hectares of land, quite naturally, coloureds would receive acres of land. Perhaps a similar scheme, on a much smaller scale, could be proposed for the returned African soldier.