When I could finally travel by cart to Nairobi, and then home to Njoro by train, it was as though I’d finally been released from a prison of my own. One made of Paddy’s awful noises. But I didn’t truly stop thinking about Paddy or dreaming terrible dreams about him until I was able to tell Kibii what had happened. He and some of the other totos sat as still as posts while I drew every detail out, my story growing longer and more harrowing, and me growing braver, steelier, a hero or warrior instead of something that had been hunted and only narrowly rescued.
Every Kipsigis moran in training had to hunt and kill a lion in order to earn his spear. If he failed, he would live in shame. If he succeeded, nothing could be more magnificent. Beautiful women would sing his name, and his deed would pass into history, in verses his own children would learn and act out in games. I had always been wildly jealous that Kibii could look forward to so much daring and glory, and couldn’t help but feel a little satisfied, now, that I had survived something he hadn’t yet faced. And the truth was, no matter how I embellished or shaped the story of what had happened with Paddy, it had happened, and I had lived to tell the tale. That alone had a powerful effect on me. I felt slightly invincible, that I could come through nearly anything my world might throw at me, but of course I had no idea what lay in store.
—
“Emma and I think you should go to school in Nairobi,” my father said a few weeks after I had returned home from the Elkingtons’. His tented fingers rested on the dinner table.
I jerked up to look at him. “Why not another governess?”
“You can’t run wild for ever. You need schooling.”
“I can learn here at the farm. I won’t fight any more, I promise.”
“It’s not safe here for you, don’t you see?” Mrs. O said from her chair. Her untouched tableware gleamed, mirroring back chips of red light from the hurricane lamp, and it struck me all at once that all of this was happening because I had never found a way to properly best her. I had grown used to her ways. I’d been distracted by foals and gallops and hunting games with Kibii. But she hadn’t grown used to me.
“If you mean Paddy, that should never have happened.”
“Of course it shouldn’t have!” Her violet eyes narrowed. “But it did. You seem to think you’re invulnerable, running around half naked with those boys, out in the bush where anything could get you. Anything. You’re a child, though no one around here seems to know it.”
I clenched my fists and brought them down hard on the edge of the table. I yelled all sorts of things and pushed away my plate and sent my tableware clattering to the floor. “You can’t force me to go,” I finally cried, my throat hoarse, my face hot and swollen feeling.
“It’s not up to you,” my father said, his mouth stern and unyielding.
—
The next morning I woke at first light and rode to Equator Ranch to see Lady D. She was the kindest and most reasonable person I knew. She would have some sort of solution, I believed. She would know what to do.
“Daddy seems set,” I began to rant before I was halfway through the door, “but he’s only going along with Mrs. O. She told him that I’m going to be torn to ribbons by another lion if I keep going like this, but she doesn’t really care. I’m in her way. That’s really what it is.”
Lady D led me to a comfortable place on her carpet and let me spit out everything without stopping for breath. Finally, when I had settled down a little, she said, “I don’t know Emma’s reasons, or Clutt’s, but I for one will be proud to see you come back a young lady.”
“I can learn what I need to learn here!”
She nodded. She had a way of doing that, warmly, even when she disagreed with every word you said. “Not everything. One day you’ll think differently about education and be glad for it.” She reached for one of my hands, gently pried it from my lap, and turned it over in hers. “Proper learning isn’t just useful in society, Beryl. It can be wonderfully yours, a thing to have and keep just for you.”
I probably scowled at her or at the wall because she gave me a look flooded with incredible patience. “I know this feels like the end of the world,” she went on, “but it isn’t. So much will happen to you. So much, and it’s all out in the world ahead of you.” Her fingertips moved in slow circles in the centre of my palm, lulling me. Before I quite knew it, I began to nod off, tucking in beside her, my head on her lap. When I woke a bit later, she got up and asked the houseboy to bring us tea. Then we sat at her table, thumbing through the giant atlas I loved, the page falling open to a broad map of England, green as a jewel.
“Do you think I’ll ever go there?” I asked.
“Why wouldn’t you? It’s still your home.”
Running my fingertips over the page, I traced the names of towns that were both foreign and familiar, Ipswich and Newquay, Oxford, Manchester, Leeds.
“Does your mother ever write to you from London?” she asked.
“No,” I said, feeling a little disorientated. No one ever mentioned my mother, and life was so much easier that way.
“I could tell you things about her if you ever want to know.”
I shook my head. “She doesn’t matter now. Only the farm does.”
Lady D looked at me for a long moment, seeming to mull this over. “I’m sorry. It’s not my place to pry.”