“What?” I still felt thick and sedated. “How?”
“The doctors say it happens sometimes.” He’d been biting at his lip again. I could see a pale lilac-coloured bruise blooming. “But what if the riding did it, Beryl?”
“Could it have? Is that what you think?”
“Mother’s sure it couldn’t have helped things.”
“Oh.” His words thudded at the back of my skull. “What can they do for him?”
“There’s surgery. If he’s strong enough, there might be several, actually. But he’s not strong now. He’s so small. His breathing isn’t good. They’re saying we should prepare for the worst.”
When Mansfield left my room, I gathered the sheets and blankets around me, but couldn’t begin to feel warm. Our son might die. The very thought had me shaking again—lost and sick and utterly helpless.
In my Lakwet days, I was at the Kip shamba once when a maimed child was born. It had a small stump where one of the legs should have been, the skin pink and raw, puzzle-stitched. No one tried to shield any of this tragedy from Kibii or me. The child would either live or it wouldn’t—it was up to their god. That night the mother placed the babe just outside the door to her hut and slept, as the rest of the tribe did, without answering its cries. The theory went that if the oxen didn’t trample it, the child was meant to live. But that night, a predator came and took it away—probably a leopard or hyena. That was thought to be the god’s will, too.
Would Gervase make it through his surgery, or even his first night? Was some god going to punish me by taking him—or did everything that happened to us on earth come down to a blind roll of clicking dice, without any more reason or plan than chance? I wasn’t sure what I believed and had never learned to pray. I didn’t know how to surrender to fate, either—so I hummed an old African song under my breath as I waited, one full of thin courage…Kali kama Simba, sisi Askari wote ni hodari. Fierce like the lion are we, soldiers all are brave.
Astonishingly, Gervase survived his first precarious days of life. The doctors attached a strange sort of bag to his belly, and fed him through tiny snaking tubes in his nose. He gained an ounce, and then lost two. He came down with jaundice, and they put him under bright lamps. For the most part, we were kept from him because he couldn’t be exposed to even the faintest risk of germs. I saw him only twice as I recuperated in the nursing home, and both times I felt punched in the heart. He was so frail and defenceless—like a broken bird.
On the day before Gervase’s surgery, Mansfield came to my room looking pale and defeated. “I know it’s too soon to be talking about all of this, but if he makes it, I want Gervase to go to Swiftsden for his recovery. Mother can make sure he gets the very best care.”
“Of course, if the doctors approve it.” For myself, I hated Swiftsden, but Gervase came first.
“And what will you do?” he went on. “When you’re released from the hospital?”
“What do you mean? I want to be where Gervase is, obviously.”
“I assumed you’d want to go back home.”
“One day, yes. When we can all go together. What is this about, Mansfield?”
He turned and went to the window, pacing before it, his feet stitching the dark floorboards. The weather was still terrible, and all the panes were rimed over with greenish-looking ice that gave Mansfield’s skin a ghostly cast. He looked different to me now that we’d come to England—not just more pallid, but weaker in spirit, too—almost as if he were reverting to his boyhood self, that invalid who’d spent most of his youth in bed, poring over the Latin names of flowers.
“I’m not sure I’ll go back to Kenya,” he said. “It seems more and more clear…how different we are. I feel a little foolish about it.”
“Foolish to marry me? Why are you saying this now? We’ve made a life together. Do you mean to throw it away?”
“I wanted a new chance; I did. But maybe I was just playing a role. Or you were.”
I felt the room lurch. “I don’t understand. The farm is my whole life, and we have Gervase now. We’re bound to him.”
“I know that,” he said wearily. Then he went to talk to the doctor while everything we’d said—and hadn’t—hung in the room like a cold, crimped fog.
I could scarcely catch up. Mansfield and I had been at odds sometimes, and had never been an ideal match—but we’d wanted the same things and had been friends. Now any affection seemed to have dissolved as quickly as the sun had. It was a different season here, in more ways than one.
While I was still fretting over all of this, I heard a flurry of footsteps outside the door. I assumed Mansfield had returned with news from the doctor, but it was Prince Harry who’d come.