—
In March, Mansfield and I went into Nairobi and found everyone at the club talking about Maia Carberry. Just two days before, JC’s beautiful young wife had been giving a flying lesson to a young student, Dudley Cowie, when her plane spun in at low altitude, crashing at the edge of the Ngong Road, near Nairobi’s Dagoretti Airfield. Dudley’s twin brother, Mervyn, had just finished his own lesson and saw everything, the impact and explosion, the wall of flames that left nothing identifiable of either victim. Dudley was only twenty-two. Maia was twenty-four and had left behind a three-year-old daughter, Juanita. JC was with the child now, at the Carberrys’ farm in Nyeri, apparently too heartsick to speak to anyone or even get out of bed.
When we ran into Denys and Karen at the club, they both seemed stunned. They were also worried about what could be done for the family.
“That poor girl will never know her mother,” Karen said. She tugged worriedly on the cotton shawl around her shoulders. “She won’t even remember her, will she?”
“That might be the biggest blessing,” Denys replied grimly. “It’s JC who’s in real trouble.”
“I’m surprised she wanted to fly when she had so much to live for, so many people counting on her,” Mansfield said, looking at me directly, as if I could possibly miss his meaning. But I wasn’t going to row with him on such a sad day. Our small tensions were hardly the point.
“Aeroplanes might be safer than automobiles,” Denys said. “I don’t think she saw flying as terribly rash.”
“Your views aren’t really the standard, Denys,” Mansfield answered flatly. “Tell me, are you off down the Nile again soon?”
“Not exactly,” Denys said.
“You haven’t heard then,” Karen said. “Elburgon is far north, isn’t it?”
What she meant, we soon learned, was that a royal visit was in the making. The heir to the throne, Edward, Prince of Wales, was set to visit Kenya in late September with his brother, Henry, Duke of Gloucester. Denys had been charged to take them hunting.
“A royal safari?” I asked.
“A royal fiasco, most likely. You’ve no idea the number of preparations.”
“It’s the opportunity of a lifetime,” Karen said sharply. Her shawl was crimson and deep blue with threads in a pattern that overlapped. She held it firmly in front of her chest like a shield. “If you really don’t want the work, give it to Bror instead.”
Mansfield plucked at an invisible bit of lint on his trousers, still clearly disturbed by the news about Maia Carberry. Denys had his mouth set. Karen was feeling spurned in some way I could only guess at until Mansfield and Denys went inside to book us a table for lunch.
“It’s one of the most significant moments in our history, and he won’t take it seriously.”
“He’s never liked fuss or pomp,” I said. “I’m guessing there are ten different committees or subcommittees who’ll want to sort every detail down to the commode.”
“It’s not just the safari that matters. It’s the social event of the decade. Perhaps the century.”
“You know he’s never going to care about parties.” But I’d missed the larger point.
“Bror is newly remarried. I always worried there would be another Baroness Blixen, and it’s happening at the direst moment. Divorced women aren’t going to be welcome at Government House for the principal fêting. You see how impossible it all is.” She clenched and unclenched her hands. Her knuckles were white.
“You want Denys to marry you,” I said quietly, finally putting it all together.
“He refuses.” She laughed icily, a terrible sound. “If he won’t now, for this, for me, he never will.”
For the next several months, I tried to think only about our horses—particularly Messenger Boy, who seemed to be resisting me a little less each day. No one would have called him tame, but some mornings when I rode him I felt something in the rounded smoothness of his back that felt very nearly like forbearance. He might not have liked me yet or even accepted me, but I was beginning to think he understood what I wanted from him, and that he might soon begin to want those things for himself.
One morning I had just handed Messenger Boy to his groom for cooling down when I met Emma in a sun hat as wide as a parasol. “Are you feeling well?” she asked, a strange look on her face. So like Emma. She hadn’t even said good morning.
“Of course,” I told her, but that night, when Mansfield was away in town on errands, I felt a rocking wave of nausea and barely made it out of bed before I vomited. When Mansfield came home, he found me bent in two on the floor, too weak to stand.
“Should we go and see the doctor in town?” he fretted.