“How nice, then,” Mrs. Orchardson said. “I’ll get the tea ready.”
All the way across the yard, I fumed. The world was squeezing in on me, narrowing to the sudden fact of Mrs. Orchardson and what she might mean to do or be. When I returned, she had changed into a simple skirt and shirtwaist, and tied a clean white apron over the top. Her sleeves were rolled up to the elbow. A lock of her silky hair fell over her forehead as she refilled my father’s cup, the kettle steaming in her hands. My father had settled into our one comfortable chair, his feet up on a low table. He was gazing at her familiarly.
I blinked at them both. I hadn’t been gone an hour, and she had already taken over the room. The kettle was hers. She’d scrubbed the oilcloth. The cobwebs were gone and might have never existed at all. Nothing would need much coaxing or breaking in. Nothing seemed ready to resist her.
—
I was to call her Mrs. O, my father said. Over the coming days, she unpacked her steamer trunks and filled them again with things from the house—dusty hunting spoils, odd trinkets or bits of clothing my mother had left behind. It was all part of her plan to run a “tight ship”—two of her favourite words. She liked order and soap and the day sliced up into manageable portions. Mornings were for book learning.
“I have to be at gallops,” I told her early on, feeling fully confident that my father would take my part.
“They’ll make do without you for the time being, won’t they?” she said matter-of-factly while my father made a dry, throttled sound deep in his throat and quickly left the house.
Within a week she’d convinced my father that I needed to wear shoes. A few weeks more and I’d been trussed up in an English frock and hair ribbons instead of a shuka, and told not to eat with my hands. I was not to kill snakes or moles or birds with my rungu, or to take all my meals with Kibii and his family. I was not to hunt warthog or leopard with arap Maina but to have a proper education and learn the King’s English.
“I’ve let you run too wild and you know it,” my father said when I went to him, asking to be left alone. “It’s all for your own good.”
He had let me run, but it had been wonderful. These new restrictions amounted to a conventional life, and we’d never had anything of the sort.
“Please…” I heard myself begin to whine, but then stopped short. I had never been a wheedling or complaining child, and my father wasn’t going to bend anyway. If I really could do something about Mrs. O, I would have to work it out on my own. I would show her I wasn’t a bit of cobweb in the corner, something to be wiped or straightened, but a rival worth her notice. I would learn her ways and habits, and track her closely until I knew what she was and how to best her, and what precisely it would take to steal my good life back.
Coquette was nearing her foaling date. She’d grown rounder and more barrel-like, the new life inside her pushing out against her flesh, those long limbs already trying to stretch and find their way. Somehow the effort of creation had dulled her golden coat. She looked tired and listless and rarely did more than nibble at the sheaves of lucerne I brought her.
For me, the foal couldn’t come soon enough. Thinking about him was how I got through hours of Latin in pinching shoes. One night, I was fast asleep in my hut when I felt Buller rouse beside me. The grooms had come awake in their bunks. My father was awake, too. I recognized the timbre of his muffled voice and dressed quickly, thinking only of Coquette. She was twenty days early, which usually meant a weak or sickly foal, but it might not. My father would know what to do.
Out in the yard, the glow from several hurricane lamps rinsed out through the cracks in the stable door. High overhead, ribbons of stars swirled like milk, and a sickle moon lay hard and bright on its side. The night insects seethed away in the forest and from everywhere, all around, but the stable was quiet. Much too quiet, I knew, before I even came close to Coquette’s box, but I couldn’t guess why until I saw my father stand up. He strode to meet me, stopping me in my tracks. “You’ll not want to see this, Beryl. Go back to bed.”
“What’s happened?” My throat closed around the words.
“Stillborn,” he said quietly.