Mourners had come from Nairobi and Gilgil, Eldoret and Naivasha—Somalis and Kikuyus and White Highlanders, hunters and gun bearers, pilgrims and poets. No one there hadn’t seen something to love and admire in Denys. He had always been unflinchingly himself, and honourable for that in the way these eagles were honourable, and the grass, too.
During the brief service, Karen’s head sagged to her chest, and I felt a strong urge to go to her. I was the one person there who knew precisely what she’d lost in Denys; she was the only one who could have understood the weight and colour of my sorrow, too. But a shift had taken place, and it held me back. She was his publicly acknowledged widow now. The gods may have stolen him from her, but with his death she had won him back. No one could challenge their bond, or doubt how she had loved him. Or how truly he’d been hers. One day she was going to write about him—write him in such a way that would seal the two of them together for ever. And from those pages, I would be absent.
I didn’t think I could weep any more, that, like Karen, I had spent a lifetime’s worth of tears, but somehow my grief found a way to open wider that day. When the service was over, and the mourners had gone down over the hill to Mbogani, I lingered long enough to reach for a handful of dust from Denys’s gravesite, red as life’s blood and older than time. I closed my fingers around its powdery coolness and then let it go. In a way, it didn’t matter if there was something proprietary in Karen’s sadness, or in how she had loved Denys. I hadn’t loved him any more perfectly—and I understood that, finally. We had both tried for the sun, and had fallen, lurching to earth again, tasting melted wax and sorrow. Denys wasn’t hers, or mine.
He belonged to no one and never had.
—
After Denys’s funeral I went back to his cottage, where I’d been living, but the sight of his books nearly undid me. It was shocking to think how his mind simply wasn’t in the world any longer. I would never hear his laugh, or touch his fine strong hands or trace the crinkles around his eyes. When he fell out of the sky, everything he was and would yet do had vanished. And he’d taken my heart with him, too. How would I get it back again?
I couldn’t think of what I might do with my days or where I might go, but somehow found myself back in Elburgon, at Melela. My father seemed surprised to see me but didn’t ask any terrible questions. I couldn’t have begun to answer them if he had. I only wanted to be alone, and to be near horses, two things that had always soothed my soul in the past. For weeks I stayed, waking before dawn and striding out into the cold morning to think. The colours of the country were beautifully the same. Mist hung stretched over the towering cedars in the forest, and the ragged curve of the escarpment rose and receded off towards forever. But something was missing. For all its beauty, Melela now seemed to mock me. I’d pinned so many dreams on it, believing that if Mansfield and I could rebuild Green Hills here, rewriting the sad changes of the past, some part of me would feel reclaimed and strong in a way it hadn’t, not really, since I was a young girl—hunting with arap Maina, running with Kibii through the tall bleached grasses, slipping out of the window of my hut with Buller at my heels, both of us unafraid of the night.
But all Mansfield and I had truly managed to do was humiliate each other and ourselves, and to carve great big holes in one another. Gervase was a world away. Some days I could barely stand to think of him—and now Denys was gone, too. One crushing loss lay like a black stamp over the other. A shadow smothering a shadow, emptiness and more emptiness, and what could be done?
My father was worried about me, I could see that, but nothing seemed to help until one day, when I heard a familiar sputtering sound echoing through the hills, and there was Tom’s Moth, waggling its way towards the farm through pure and cloudless blue. Using our long paddock as a makeshift runway, he set it down like a feather.
“How have you been?” he asked after he’d cut the engine and clambered out over the wing.
“Oh, you know.” I felt myself give way, and couldn’t manage another word. But I didn’t have to. Tom handed me a flight helmet, and I lowered myself into the rear cockpit, grateful for the sound of the engine rattling to life, the vibration of my small seat, everything shudderingly present as we came to speed. When we roared up over the hills, and the landscape slid sideways and reeled away, my head began to clear for the first time in weeks. Cold air swept against my face and filled my lungs. It was so much easier to breathe up there, and even with the constant noise of the prop and the wind, it was peaceful in a way my wounded spirit had been craving. I remembered how once a native boy had asked me if I could see God from the aeroplane. Tom was there and we had both laughed and shook our heads.
“Perhaps you should go higher then,” he said.