Lord Delamere was D to me and to anyone who knew him well. He was one of the colony’s first important settlers and had an unswerving sense for which bit of land would be most fertile. He seemed to want to take over the entire continent and make it all work for him. No one was more ambitious than D or more headstrong or blunt about the things he loved (land, the Masai people, freedom, money). He was driven to make whatever he touched or tried a success. When the risks were great and the chances were dim, well then, so much the better.
He told good stories, his hands and shoulders moving so wildly that his untrimmed red hair slashed back and forth across his forehead. When he was a young man, he’d walked two thousand miles through the Somali desert with one ill-tempered camel for company and found himself here, in the highlands. He fell instantly in love with the place. When he went back to England to drum up the funds to settle here, he’d met and married Florence, the spirited daughter of the Earl of Enniskillen. “She’d no idea I would drag her here by the hair one day,” he liked to say.
“As if you could drag me,” Lady D often answered, her eyes playful. “We both know it’s typically the other way around.”
After our tired hacks finally got the water they’d earned, the Delameres walked us out to the small paddock where Coquette was at pasture with a few other brood mares and a handful of foals. She was the prettiest to look at by far, compact and flaxen, with a sloping neck and well-made chest. Her legs narrowed into shapely fetlocks and pasterns. As we watched, she pitched her head and swung round to look at us straight on, as if she were daring us to find her less than perfect.
“She’s beautiful,” I breathed.
“Aye, and she knows it,” D said cheerfully. He was thick bodied and always seemed to be sweating, though he was generally cheerful about this, too. He swatted at the salty trickle along his temple with a blue cotton handkerchief while my father bent through the slats of the fence to get a closer look.
I rarely saw a horse startle or run from my father, and Coquette was no exception. She seemed to sense immediately that he was in command of the situation and of her, too, though she didn’t belong to him yet. She shook her ears once, and blew air at him out of her velvety nostrils, but held still as he examined her, running his hands along her crown and muzzle, and then more slowly fingering her withers and spine, looking for any bump or sway. Over her loin and rump he slowed again, his fingers doing their work. He was like a blind man feeling along each of her lovely back legs, the gaskins and stifle joints, hocks and cannons. I kept waiting for him to straighten or for his face to cloud over, but the examination went silently on, and I grew more and more hopeful. By the time he’d finished and stood facing her, his hands grazing over her forelock, I could barely stand the suspense. If he couldn’t love her now, after she’d passed all of his tests, it was going to break my heart.
“Why are you parting with her then?” he asked D without taking his eyes off Coquette.
“Money, naturally,” D said with a small snort.
“You know how he is,” Lady D said. “The new obsession always chases out the old. Now he’s on to wheat, and most of the horses will have to go.”
Please please say yes, I thought in a fierce running string.
“Wheat, is it now?” my father asked, and then he turned away and strode back towards the fence, saying to Lady D, “I don’t suppose you have anything cool to drink?”
I wanted to fling myself at Coquette’s knees, to grab a handful of her pale mane and swing up over her back and ride away into the hills on my own—or home with her, latching her up in a hidden stall and guarding her with my life. She already had my heart, and she’d won my father over, too—I knew it—but he wasn’t ever spontaneous. He kept his emotions locked away behind a wall, which made him a wonderful negotiator. He and D would be at this for the rest of the day now, sorting out the terms without stating anything directly, each carefully guarding what it would mean for him to win, or lose. I found it all maddening, but there was nothing to be done but make our way to the house where the men settled themselves at the table with rye whisky and lemonade and began to talk without talking and bargain without bargaining. I threw myself down on the carpet in front of the hearth and sulked.
Though the Delameres had more land and at least as many workers at Equator Ranch as we did at Green Hills, D hadn’t made many improvements to their own living quarters, two large mud rondavels with beaten-earth flooring, rough windows, and burlap curtains for doors. Still, Lady D had filled the place with nice things that had been in her family for hundreds of years, she’d told me—a heavy mahogany four-poster bed with a richly embroidered quilt, pictures framed in gilt, a long mahogany table with eight matching chairs, and a hand-bound atlas that I loved to pore over whenever I visited. That day I was too anxious to look at maps and could only lie on the carpet and click my dusty heels together, biting my lip and wishing the men would get on with it.
Finally, Lady D came over and sat near me, settling her white cotton skirt out in front of her and leaning back on her hands. She wasn’t ever fussy or prim, and I adored that about her. “I have some nice biscuits if you’d like.”