—
We moved to the Muthaiga Club, where I rented Denys’s old cottage, and Ruta and his family found a house in the native quarter nearby. The sight of Asis running alongside his mother or clambering into Ruta’s arms had me missing Gervase so much it was often almost enough to double me over. According to Mansfield’s letters, he was still fragile but getting stronger all the time. Along with news, Mansfield had also begun sending a small allowance. Though he had been aggressive with threats of divorce when I was still in London, now he dragged his heels on the actual proceedings. But it didn’t matter. He would see things through when he was ready, and I found I didn’t champ at the bit to be fully free of him the way I had when things were so impossible with Jock. I was a mother, but couldn’t hold my child in my arms. Freedom didn’t mean the same thing that it had before. Nothing did.
One day Karen came to my cottage for drinks, and I was surprised to learn she’d been in England, too, just past the time of my well-publicized tangle with the Markhams and the monarchy.
“I can’t imagine how awful it all was,” she said. I’d told her a little about Mansfield and Gervase, but kept the most painful details to myself.
“I’m not the only supposed courtesan on Fleet Street. Some other girl will come along soon, and everyone will forget about me.”
“If that was a wager, I wouldn’t take it.” She sighed and touched her drink to her lips, her gaze turning inwards for a moment. “While you were away, I had locusts at the farm, and then frost. Everything withered. It’s why I went over, to see if there was any way Denys could help save me from my debts.”
“And was there?”
“No,” she said quietly. “He’s promised to take me flying, though, when he returns. The princes are coming back for more safaris, too, though no doubt you already know that.”
“David needs his lion.”
“Naturally,” she said bitterly.
“It’s not all terrible. You know how much Denys has wanted his plane.”
“Yes. And now there are more clients grovelling to throw in with him than he could ever accommodate. I should be happy for him, shouldn’t I? And yet I’m afraid it will ruin us.” Her eyes were lined and impenetrable. I had no idea if she was sharing the truth with me—that she and Denys were near the end—or spinning out a dramatic story. I wasn’t sure how their unfolding drama affected me, either. But it did.
—
Denys returned a few months later and began to make arrangements for the princes’ next visit. I didn’t see him at first but heard from Cockie that he was planning to move into town from Ngong.
“Tania has given back his ring,” she told me when we met in town for lunch. “Apparently the separation is mutual, but that doesn’t mean it’s not killing her.”
“What do you suppose finally broke them?”
“She wanted more than he is capable of.”
“That’s no one’s fault. They both tried as hard as they could, didn’t they?” I paused, trying to find words for my tangled feelings. “We can only go to the limits of ourselves—I’ve learned that if nothing else. Anything more and we give too much away. Then we’re not good for anyone.”
“She may have to sell the farm, you know. After everything, and all her fighting for it. She’s been undeniably brave.”
“She’s been a warrior,” I agreed. And she had. For nearly two decades, Karen had set her complete self on the line, gambling against impossible odds, mortgaging everything, loving her land too much to let it fail. And yet it would fail. I could scarcely imagine Ngong—or Kenya—without her. “The only happy thing I can think of is that you have Blix finally. Was it worth everything you went through to win him?”
“I don’t know.” She twisted the ring on her finger, a square yellow diamond bright as the sun. “I’m not sure it matters anyway. I couldn’t have made any other choice. He is my heart. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” I told her. “I think I do.”
—
I was reading in bed a few nights later, in my cottage, when Denys came rapping on the door. I knew it was him before I answered. I’d been waiting for weeks—for years. But this time I knew he’d come.
Throwing on my dressing gown, I turned up the lamp and poured us each a generous glass of scotch. Even tired and unshaven, with a nasty scrape along the back of one arm, he looked like a piece of heaven to me. We sat without speaking for a long time, until I thought that it almost didn’t matter what we found words for or didn’t. His breathing steadied me. The rise and fall of his chest, the soft creaking of the chair under his weight, and his fine rounded fingers locking around the base of the glass.