“Enchantée,” she murmured—though she didn’t seem remotely enchanted—and settled herself in the best chair to lecture me on the accomplishments of her prizewinning hounds.
At that first tea, I couldn’t stop imagining how Mansfield’s mother would have reacted to me as I was the day I turned up at Cockie’s door with no coat at all, my hands chapped and blue, and my toes nearly frozen off. In Paris and then Milan, Mansfield had taken me to the best couturiers. I had all the right clothes now. Silk stockings, a fur stole, a diamond bracelet that slid up and down my arm like Bishon Singh’s long-ago kara. Mansfield had been so generous. I thought he wanted to buy me beautiful things because they were beautiful, but now that I’d run the gauntlet of Elizabeth Arden and stood in his mother’s jewel box of a parlour, I had to wonder if every gift had in fact been for her.
“She can hardly think I’m a society type,” I told him when we were alone in our room. He sat on the edge of the burnished-looking silk bedspread, while at a long vanity table I swatted roughly at the back of my shingle with a silver-handled brush. “What’s the point of all this fuss? My poor eyebrows will never grow back.”
“Don’t be cross, darling. It’s only for a short while, and then we’ll wear our old clothes again and have a lovely new life.”
“I feel like an impostor.”
“But you’re not, don’t you see? This isn’t dressing-up. You are elegant under everything.”
“And what if I wore my slacks? And behaved like myself? Would she throw me out?”
“Please be patient, Beryl. Mother isn’t modern like you.”
I didn’t want to quarrel, so I told Mansfield I would try. But in the end, the only way we could survive our time at Swiftsden was to divide and conquer. Mansfield looked after his mother, and the chauffeur looked after me. I was driven to London for long excursions, and taken round all the tourists’ haunts: London Bridge and Westminster Abbey and Big Ben. I saw the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, the red-suited sentries filing in and out as if they had cogs and wheels. Afterwards, I went to the cinema to see The Battle of the Somme, the projector and illusion of life transfixing me the way so much about London did—electric lights and electric kettles, music streaming out onto Oxford Street from a Magnavox loudspeaker. But the film’s images of war were terrible. Men crouched in ditches, cowering in pain and terror that made me think of arap Maina, hoping to God he hadn’t died that way. I missed Ruta, and wished he could have been there beside me in the dark theatre, though undoubtedly he would have been just as waylaid by it all, or even more so.
A few days later, Mansfield left his mother’s side long enough to take me to Newmarket to look at a stallion. Mansfield thought we might want some new blood for our fresh start.
“I want us to be true partners in this,” he said. “We’ll find land wherever you like, and stock our stables with the finest horses we can find. You’ll show me everything. I want to learn it all and to be a part of the big decisions.”
I was relieved to hear it. Our shared dream of a horse farm had cemented us from the beginning—but at Swiftsden, under his mother’s imperious gaze, I’d begun to have my doubts. Her opinion seemed to matter far too much to him there. The spine went right out of him when she was around, almost as if she were a grand puppeteer, and he made only of cloth and string. But in Newmarket, he squeezed my hand hard as we moved towards the stables. Of course he wanted a new life in Kenya just as much as I wanted Green Hills back. He meant to be his own man, to claim new territory, and to do it all with me by his side. Until that day, I would have to trust him and myself, too.
—
Messenger Boy was a towering red roan with a flaxen tail and mane, and a bright kind of fire whipping through him. He was the biggest stallion I’d ever seen and one of the most beautiful. His dame, Fifinella, was a derby and steeplechase winner; his father, Hurry On, was unbeaten, and one of the greatest sires of racehorses in the world. But though Mansfield and I were thrilled by him instantly, his trainer, Fred Darling, had a sobering story to tell.
“He’s not going to make anything easy for you,” Fred said. “I can’t lie about that.”
The full truth was he’d put Fred in hospital once. Not long after that, he’d killed a groom, trapping him in the stable and attacking him with his powerful hoofs and teeth. It was murder, pure and simple. If Messenger Boy had been a man, he would have got the chop for it; as it was, he’d been banned from racing in England. Kenya could give him a second chance, though.
“Can he be tamed?” Mansfield wanted to know.
“That’s hard to say. I wouldn’t do it.”
“I want a go at him,” I said, watching the way the sun glinted flame red through the stud’s flared nostrils.