The Little Karoo
Ludovic and Otto also, who worked always together for good, bought back Anna’s furniture and settled it so that Anna should have it as long as she lived. But because not one of my brothers knew that Philip had left my sister Anna, for he left her that day when he rode off with the Jew, there was not one of them that went to Brandtwacht to see her. And all that day, and all that night, Anna sat alone in the grey stone house my father had built for her.
That night, late in the night, Otto and Ludovic came to my mother and me at Welgevonden. They told us all what they had done, and while my mother lay crying quietly in her bed I said to Ludovic:
“But where, then, is our sister Anna?”
Ludovic said: “Now surely she is at Brandtwacht with her husband Philip.”
I said to him: “God forgive you, Ludovic, but for a good man you are also a fool. There is not one of us, neither Anna nor another, that will see young Philip Coetzee
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