A Spear of Summer Grass

23



Quentin and I retired to the Norfolk where he had checked us in under assumed names. Bathing arrangements had been almost nonexistent at the prison. It was heaven to scrub myself completely clean and I spent two hours in the bathtub, filling it over and over again until my skin was wrinkled as a raisin’s and I smelled like lilies. Quentin was waiting in my room when I emerged.

“Feeling better?”

“Immensely. Is that dinner?”

“It is. I’ve ordered your favourites and three bottles of champagne.”

“That’s a start,” I told him.

It was hours before we finished and when we did the table was littered with soiled dishes and ashes and the dregs of our champagne. We put out our cigarettes in the butter and danced in our bare feet until the manager came to complain. I poured him a glass of champagne and sent him off with a smile. Cables arrived and flowers, too, enormous bunches of them that filled the room with a thick perfume.

“It appears my incognita has been violated. And it smells like a funeral home in here,” I told Quentin, peering at him through the bottom of a champagne bottle.

“Better than a wedding chapel,” he retorted.

I laughed aloud. “Poor Quentin. Marriage hasn’t treated you very kindly.”

“Cornelia’s pregnant. Again.”

I waved my cigarette. “I should have a talk with that girl. Introduce her to the diaphragm.”

“I wish you would,” he said.

“Oh, God, Quentin. Don’t be morose. You’ve money enough to take care of your brood, and I rather doubt you are even that bothered with them.”

“I don’t mind about me. I mind because of what it does to Cornelia. She changed when we had the twins. No conversation but nappies, no interests but gripe water and teething biscuits. It’s only going to get worse with another baby. I married a lovely girl and ended up with my own grandmother.” He nodded to me. “That’s not the smallest of your attractions, you know. You talk about things. You go places. And you’re always lovely and slim and firm.”

“Careful, old boy. You’re leering now.”

“Your robe has come open,” he informed me.

“So it has.” I didn’t bother to adjust it. Quentin had seen it all before. He leaned close.

“What about it, my beauty? A bit of something warm to remember you by before I go back to cold Cornelia?”

I removed his hands from my body and placed them gently in his own lap. “This is all the something warm you’ll be getting tonight. I’m very grateful to you, Quentin. But if you want payment for services rendered, you’ll have to send me a bill.”

His expression was one of frank astonishment. Then he laughed, a great hearty belly laugh that ended with him wiping his eyes on his sleeve. “My God. It’s finally happened. You’ve fallen in love, haven’t you?”

“No. I wouldn’t know how. But I do know that my life is quite complicated enough just now without throwing yet another man into the mix.”

He blinked. “Just how many men are we talking about?”

“Does it really matter? You know I’ve always been good at juggling.”

“I don’t know,” he said coolly. “Sounds to me as if you’re losing your touch.”

He rose and I handed him his shoes. “Don’t be sore, Quentin. I have to figure some things out and I can only do that with a clear head. If I sleep with you now, I’ll only confuse myself more. You always were so good at making me forget everyone else.”

That little piece of flattery did the trick. He gave me a contrite look and dropped a kiss to my cheek. “Darling Delilah. I was being a brute. Forgive me. I hope you manage to get it all sorted.”

“So do I. Will you come to Fairlight?”

“Can’t, I’m afraid. I have to hurry back to England. I left things rather in a muddle when I dashed off to take care of you.”

I put my hand to his cheek. “Dearest Quentin. How good you are to me.”

“But not quite good enough,” he said ruefully. He kissed me again and then he was gone.

That night, alone in my bed, I finally opened Mossy’s letter. I read it over quickly, then twice more, savouring each word. She had a child’s handwriting, loose and loopy, filling the pages with a hasty scribble of violet ink. She wrote that Granny Miette was holding a conjuring and had assured her I would be protected. Mossy related this in stilted words, and I could just picture the tight expression on her face. She claimed not to approve of such goings-on, saying they were backward and silly, but I had known her to ask for a bottle of Follow Me Water when she wanted to turn a man’s head or a pinch of goofer dust to sprinkle in the footsteps of a rival. She went on to say that Granny had made a special trip into New Orleans to light a candle to Our Lady of Prompt Succour. I smiled when I read that and crossed myself quickly. “God bless you, Granny,” I murmured. The Colonel hadn’t taken matters quite so well. He’d cut me off for good, Mossy said. No more tidy allowances coming from the profits of the sugar plantation, and if I ever wanted to come back to Reveille to see Granny, I’d have to do it when he was elsewhere. I muttered a swearword or two as I turned the page. The rest of the letter was just random news of people we knew—who got married, who was getting divorced and who was the cause of it. It was Mossy’s way of telling me that life went on and that this, too, would pass. She carried on in that vein until the last page.





They said there was a curse on us and maybe there is. Maybe we were born under bad stars or maybe for us there’s always a bad moon on the rise. But if it’s true, if sorrow and loss follow us around like mean stray dogs, then that means somewhere, some fighting angel decided we were strong enough to take it. So shine up your dancing shoes and pinch your cheeks and lift your chin, child. Because if we’re on the road to hell, we’re going to dance the whole damn way and give them something to talk about when we’re gone.



And below that, she had signed it, using a word that at her insistence hadn’t crossed my lips since I was five years old.

All my love, Mama

I folded the letter and put it under my pillow and turned out the light. And in the darkness I heard it, the quiet green stillness that comes when the rains end and all the world is limp and soft and ready to begin again. I turned my face to the window where a slender new moon was rising and I slept.

* * *

I had nothing to pack, so I was empty-handed when I strolled down the main staircase of the Norfolk. My bill had been settled by Quentin, and I walked out to find Ryder’s ancient battered truck idling at the curb. I ran to it and wrenched open the door.

“Memsahib Delilah! How good it is to see you! I have come to take you home.” Mr. Patel was wearing his motoring goggles, as was his little monkey. The monkey hopped up onto a hamper and chattered angrily at me.

“Do not mind him, he does not like the city,” Mr. Patel advised. “Come, come! Get in before the reporters realise I have come to take you away.” He beckoned and I slid into the seat.

“How kind of you to come and get me,” I murmured.

He ground the gears to powder and the truck lurched away. “Think nothing of it. The sahib sent word and told me to do this.”

“You’ve heard from Ryder?”

Mr. Patel said nothing for several minutes as he negotiated his way out of the heavy traffic, weaving through ox carts and rickshaws and long, smooth touring cars. Finally, we turned onto the damp murram road out of Nairobi and he spoke.

“What was it that you asked me? Oh, yes, yes, Memsahib Delilah. I have heard from him. He cables me to come to get you, and I am happy to do this thing.”

“He cabled you?” There were few dukas farther out than Patel’s and none were in the direction he was supposed to have taken Gideon. “From where?”

“Egypt.”

“Egypt! What the devil is he doing there?”

“This I do not know. He says he has business and he will come when it is finished.”

I hesitated. “Was there anything else?” I didn’t dare ask about Gideon directly. I didn’t know how much Ryder had told Patel and the fewer people who knew Ryder had taken him, the better.

Mr. Patel’s brow furrowed. “No, memsa. All he spoke of was the package you had entrusted to him.”

“What did he say about the package?”

“That it arrived safely and you were not to worry. He would tell you more about the package when he returns. This is all that I know.”

The monkey began chattering again and it was impossible to talk. I slumped back against the seat, letting the weight of the last weeks roll away with each mile that unfurled over the thin red ribbon of road.

* * *

The drive was long and sticky and I was drooping with fatigue when we arrived. But the smell of the earth after the short rains was intoxicating. Bushes were thick with green leaves and gladioli and wild orchids burst from ripe buds. Everything seemed heightened, the colours brighter, the sounds sharper. The scent of Africa hung in my nose and mouth, the tang of the freshly saturated earth, the green smell of new grass, woodsmoke and dung and that peculiar smell of Africa itself, unlike any other. It was evening when we arrived at Fairlight, and to my surprise, Mr. Patel stopped just inside the gate. He turned off the engine, and in the silence I heard it, a steady pounding, like a great beating heart within the land.

“What is that?”

He gestured for me to get out and I did. We walked the last quarter mile, and as we came around the curve where the jacarandas stood in full bloom, I saw them. From every tribe who crossed Fairlight—from the Masai, from the Samburu and the Kikuyu, from other, smaller tribes. They stood, shoulder to shoulder, some of them enemies from the womb, and yet there they were, stamping their rhythms into the soil of their common mother. They were dressed for celebration, wearing their finest skins or kanjas, decked in beads and bracelets, copper wires and necklaces. They lifted up their voices together, a mixture of tribal tongues and Swahili and English, a new Babel, but with one meaning. In every gesture, in every face, I saw the same emotion, and I felt the weight of it so hard upon my shoulders, I almost fell to the ground.

I moved forward and the people gathered about me, closing around like a fist, fingers cradling something precious within the palm. They chanted and sang and stamped, and at length one figure broke forward. It was Gideon’s babu, guided by a moran. He put his hand to my head and blessed me, and when he spoke in his high, reedy voice, it was loud enough to carry over the stamping of a thousand feet.

“Nina mjukuu.” It was Swahili, and his words were halting but I understood them. I have a granddaughter. He carried on, speaking and blessing, but I heard none of it after that first pronouncement. The chanting and stamping was a buzzing in my ears, as if a thousand bees had come home to nest. When he stopped, I took his hands in mine and acknowledged his blessing.

“Nina babu,” I replied to him. I have a grandfather. The people gave a great shout, and I saw that some of the women wept. They came forward then, these aunts and sisters of Gideon, and they enfolded me, smearing my clothes with the red ochre and the grease that they used to make themselves beautiful. They touched my face and hands and embraced me and called me sister. The men stood back, chanting a song of one who would not be forgotten, of loved ones lost and returned to the earth, and of the land itself which does not die but is always born anew with each fall of the long rains. They chanted of life, which is short as a spear of summer grass or long as the heart of the Rift itself, and of the silent land that waits beyond. They chanted of Africa.

They were still chanting when I began to crumple, long after night had fallen and long after the fires had been lit, and when they carried me to my bed and tucked me in as tenderly as a child and left me, it was this song of Africa that was my lullaby.

* * *

When I went to the window the next morning I saw that there was no sign of them save the bright green grass that had been trodden under their feet. After I had eaten a simple breakfast, the Africans came again, but this time it was the farmworkers, neglected after my stay in Nairobi. They came as if I had never left, bringing their wounds and ailments, offering up their pain. I applied ointments and powders, bandaged and gossiped, taking from them their suffering and their stories and giving them relief in return. They told me of two babies born while I was gone and an old man who had died and been given to the hyenas, his bones crunched to nothing in those powerful jaws. Africa had borne him and in the end, Africa had taken him back. There was nothing left to show he had been except the memories of those who knew him, and these they shared with me.

I traded them—salves for salvation because, as I worked, I felt peaceful for the first time in a long while. I gave them food and milk and when they left, I sat on the veranda for a long time, thinking of them and how little of the promise of Fairlight was actually fulfilled.

In the afternoon Ryder came, walking his slow-hipped walk, and I stood in stillness, watching him come near. He stopped a foot away from me.

“Let’s go for a walk.”

I followed him without a word, and he led the way out of Fairlight and onto the savannah. He took a different track, a path beaten hard into the earth and leading to a high rock outcropping. We climbed it together and he gave me his hand to bring me up the last few feet to where he stood. We settled down on the rock and he pointed across the savannah. There, on a termite mound, sat a cheetah, slender and watchful.

“He’s beautiful,” I murmured.

“She,” he corrected quietly. “She just left her cubs two days ago and she’s hunting for herself now.”

“How do you know so much about her?”

She didn’t move as she surveyed the savannah. Only the lightest of breezes ruffled her fur as it did the long grasses. A small herd of Thomson’s gazelles grazed nearby, unaware of her presence.

“I’ve been keeping tabs on her for months.”

“Why? You don’t hunt cheetah.”

“Because something that beautiful and dangerous is worth watching,” he replied.

Just then she darted out, launching herself straight at a small patch of quivering grass. A young tommie huddled under the grass, waiting until the last possible moment to run. Too late, its mother saw the danger and circled back, bleating her distress and throwing herself between the cheetah and her young.

But the cheetah would not be diverted. She circled back, cutting sharply and seized the tommie, carrying it off in triumph. The mother sniffed the air and let out another soft cry before returning to her herd. The cheetah took her trophy back to her mound, suffocating it quickly and beginning to eat.

“She doesn’t waste time,” I observed.

“She can’t afford to. She seems fierce but there are lots of things out here bigger and meaner than she is. Any one of them would take that tommie from her and go after her, too. She’s a lot more vulnerable than she looks.”

I sighed. “Did you bring me out here just to show me metaphors for my own life?”

A tiny smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “No. I wanted to talk to you where we wouldn’t be overheard.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly onto the wind. “How is he?”

“Poor. I took him to one of the outlying villages near the Ugandan border, too far for the officials in Nairobi to bother with. He has no cattle of his own and he can’t claim his babu’s property when the old man dies. Without either of those, he can’t take a wife. And he won’t accept handouts from me.”

“So I did it for nothing.”

“He’s alive.” Ryder turned on me fiercely. “And that’s all that matters right now. He will work hard and he will make his own way. Don’t underestimate him, Delilah. He’s stronger than you know, and right now he is walking on his own two legs—a free black man in a white man’s Africa—because of what you did. Don’t ever forget that.”

I said nothing. Guilt was sitting too heavily on my shoulders to talk about it. I had acted impulsively, rashly, as I always had. And while it might have saved Gideon’s life, it also made it impossible for him to have the life he wanted. Once again I had acted from the heart rather than the head, and there were consequences. Only this time someone else was bearing the weight of them.

“Have you thought about what you mean to do?”

I watched the cheetah tearing happily at the throat of the little tommie. Survival was a bloody business. “I mean to leave as soon as I can. Nothing’s changed, Ryder.”

He went very still, but I felt the change in him. Anger shimmered off him, sparking the air between us.

“I should have known. Tusker warned me not to rely on you. She swore you wouldn’t stick it out, but I defended you. I told her she was wrong, that there was something fine in you, something that would see this place for what it was and be changed by it. But you won’t change, and do you know why? Because you never stay anywhere or with anyone long enough to let them in.”

I let out a ragged breath. “Do you know what a cicatrix is, Ryder? It’s a scar, a place where you have been cut so deeply that what’s left behind is something quite different. It doesn’t heal, not really, because it isn’t the same ever again. It’s impenetrable and it’s there forever, to protect you from hurting the same place again.”

“You get maudlin when you philosophise.”

“It isn’t maudlin if it’s true.”

He grabbed my wrist, twisting it hard where the black ribbon bow folded on itself like a mourning flower.

“Can you feel that? Can you feel anything? Christ, Delilah, I thought I was damaged, but I have never in my life met anyone so afraid of feeling anything as you are.”

“You know why,” I said with a shrug.

“No, I don’t. You told me what’s happened to you, but guess what? Bad things happen to everybody. I’ll give you that. But you can’t just shut down and refuse to keep living. Do you think that’s what Johnny would have wanted? You might as well have jumped down into that grave with him and pulled the dirt over you like a blanket for all the real living you’ve done since then.”

He turned and took my face in his hands. “Delilah, this may be the last chance you have to wake up. Life is giving you a new chance every goddamned day that you wake up and you’re throwing it away. Wake up, Delilah. Wake up.” He punctuated his words with his lips, pressing his mouth to my eyelids, my temples, my cheeks, my jaw, and with every touch he murmured, “Wake up.

“Wake up,” he said. “Wake up, wake up, wake up.” An invocation, an invitation, an incantation, but I pulled away from him and shook my head.

He dropped his hands. Silence stretched between us, heavy and thick. He settled back and pulled a cigarette from his case. Wordlessly he lit it and passed it to me before lighting another for himself. We smoked them in silence but I could feel him thinking, planning his next move. He was playing a chess game, trying to win, convinced he could keep me if he could just hit on the right strategy. He just didn’t realise I wasn’t playing the game.

He spoke quietly, weighing his words. “You aren’t like anyone I’ve ever met, Delilah. You are the most appallingly selfish person I have ever known. I thought once that there might be something good in you, something worth saving. But now I think there isn’t, there can’t be, if you could look at this place and how wretched it is and turn away. There is real good we could do here if you would only stop feeling sorry for yourself and have a care for anybody else. But you would rather dance off and leave it all behind, let someone else clear it up. Well, what if no one else will? What if you’re the only one who could make a difference and you don’t? It’s sinful, that’s what. And I don’t use that word lightly. I’m barely religious. I hardly say my prayers and I almost never go to church, but I do believe in God and I believe some things are flying in his face. Walking away from here now is one of those things.”

I opened my mouth to answer him, but I never got the chance. A cloud of dust was rising on the savannah, and as we rose and watched it started moving closer. Whatever it was, it spooked the tommies and they hurried on, dragging their gangly offspring with them. By the time the cheetah had left, picking her way delicately across the savannah, the apparition was almost upon us. It was the motorbike. Mr. Patel was riding it, his eyes shielded by his motoring goggles, his robes fluttering behind him like a knight’s pennant. We descended from the rock as he skidded to a stop and jumped from the bike, heading straight for Ryder.

“This came and it was most urgent,” he said, proffering a telegram. Ryder went to take it, but Mr. Patel shook his head. “For Memsahib Delilah,” he corrected, nodding towards me.

I stepped forward and took the envelope. The ripping sounded unnaturally loud in the wide emptiness of the plain. Ryder had moved behind me, shielding me from Patel with his body. It was an exquisitely considerate gesture and a futile one. There is no such thing as privacy in Africa.

I read the lines twice, then three times.

“Who?” Ryder said quietly. I turned to him and he was staring at me intently. I don’t know how he understood. Cables bring good news just as often as bad. But not this one.

“My stepfather, Nigel. He suffered a heart attack at his club in London. He died almost immediately.”

Ryder said nothing. He opened his arms and I went into them. There was nothing in that embrace beyond what a parent might offer a grieving child. It was comfort and solace, and after a long moment he released me.

“Let’s go.”

“Where are we going?”

“I’m taking you home. To Fairlight.”

But he was wrong. Fairlight was part of Nigel’s estate. It belonged now to his eldest son, Edgar. It would never be my home again.

We made our way slowly back. There was nothing to hurry for. I could not make it to England for Nigel’s funeral in any event. I sent cables via Mr. Patel to Mossy and to Edgar and turned my attention to the scenery itself. I did not expect to come this way again, and I found myself staring at the horizon, memorising Africa against the day when all I would have were my own sepia recollections.

We parted at Ryder’s boma, each of us heading our separate ways and saying nothing. I stripped off my filthy clothes and tossed them in the corner, too tired to care. I barely washed before I fell into bed and down into a heavy sleep.

I awoke suddenly, startled by the screech of a monkey in the garden. A leopard must be roaming, I thought sleepily, but there was no familiar rasping cough. Instead, there was a strange, silken noise rustling in my ears and the smell of smoke in the air. I decided someone must be up early, starting a cooking fire against the morning chill, but even as I thought it, I knew it was wrong. It was the middle of the night, far too early for the hearth fires.

I sat bolt upright, throwing off the blanket and calling out. “Ryder!” I don’t know why I shouted his name. He hadn’t come home with me, but in that moment of horror, his was the name that I shouted.

I ran through the house and to the outbuildings, screaming for the men. The barn burned hot and high, and the harsh light against the western sky must have alerted Ryder at his rondavel. By the time he arrived, the barn was gone and the kitchen was fully engulfed. Pierre and Omar had rallied the men and they were passing leather buckets of water, but even as they worked I could see it was futile. The lake was full of water but there was no pump to bring it up, and so they worked as best they could, carrying the heavy buckets and passing them from hand to hand. Ryder soaked a handkerchief in water and tied it over his mouth before climbing up to the roof of the house, bucket in hand. He made the trip dozens of times, determined to save the house if nothing else. We worked all the rest of that night, and when the sun rose, it rose upon a battlefield. Two of the workers had fallen from the roof, breaking bones in the process, and several others had collapsed from the smoke and the exertion. Omar had burned his hand badly and Pierre’s eyebrows were singed off. The barn was nothing but a charred ruin and the kitchen with all its stores had been utterly destroyed. The fences and half the garden burned as well, and the guest wing of the house had been gutted. Only the main living area remained, although the drawing room was heavily damaged by smoke.

I sat on what was left of the lawn, both of us muddy, stinking wrecks at that point. As I watched, the tortoise crawled out from under the veranda and made for what was left of the jacarandas, giving me a baleful look as he went. Ryder came to sit next to me, his hands blistered and raw from the night’s work.

“At least no one died,” he said drily.

“Leave it to you to find the silver lining.” I fished in my pocket for a cigarette, but the case had been damaged. All that was left inside were sodden shards of loose tobacco and a few shreds of paper.

“I would have thought you’d have been cured of that after what you just went through,” he said. I gave him an evil look and he smiled. “Cigarettes are in my truck. I would be the gentleman and get them, but if I stand up I’ll probably fall over.”

Soot was ground into his skin, but when he smiled the lines appeared, white and sharp, highlighting his good humour even at the worst of times. I fetched the cigarettes and a flask I found in the glove box. We each took a cigarette and a long pull from the flask before he passed it to the men who stood, shocked and exhausted, at the periphery of the garden. Their women had come to tend them, and for once I wasn’t the one doing the mending and patching. The two with broken bones had been carried off to their homes. Until the swelling went down, the bones couldn’t be set. Pierre applied salve to Omar’s burns and covered them loosely, and the others needed only rest and a good meal to put them right.

“Do you suppose this place is cursed?” I asked Ryder. “Was it built on an ancient Masai burial ground?”

“The Masai leave their dead out for the hyenas, princess. No, you’re just unlucky all on your own.”

“You mean Fairlight never had trouble until I came?”

“I mean you are trouble,” he said. He took a deep drag from the cigarette and immediately started coughing. He spat black soot into the grass and ground out the cigarette on the sole of his boot before clearing his mouth with gin. “If you’ve ruined me for cigarettes I’ll never forgive you.”

I said nothing and he leaned over, pushing his shoulder firmly into mine. He lowered his head, his voice consoling. “You can always rebuild.”

“I can’t rebuild what isn’t mine,” I reminded him. “Fairlight belongs to Edgar now, and for all I know, he’ll want the whole place torn down and the land sold.”

“Pity,” Ryder said lightly. “This place could be a real goer with the right hand at the helm.”

He rose slowly to his feet and put out a hand to help me up. He winced a little as I grasped his blistered hand. “If the smoke gets to you, you can come stay with me.”

“You don’t have a guest bed,” I reminded him.

He gave me a slow smile. “I know. That’s why you would be sleeping out in the boma.”

He bent and kissed me gently on the mouth, then walked away. I sat on the remains of the veranda, too tired to do anything else, until Moses appeared. He brought a bowl of corn gruel compliments of his babu, and motioned for me to eat while he sat next to me.

I forced down a few spoonfuls. “I’m happy to see you, Moses.”

He gave me a smile, his broad, perfect smile. He sketched a few words onto the ground with his stick.

“You want to stay with me? But I have no cattle for you to tend, Moses.”

He made a putting away gesture with his hand.

“You might think it doesn’t matter, but you will miss the cows very much.”

He put a finger to his chest, then to mine, hovering just over my heart.

“You are in my heart also, Moses.”

My throat was too tight to swallow, so I handed him the bowl. He finished off the gruel happily.

Together we watched the giraffe come and drink at the far edge of Lake Wanyama. It was a small herd, just a few cows with their calves and a few adolescent males trailing behind. They were graceful and silent, bobbing their heads down at a ridiculous angle to get to the water. A crowned crane waded nearby, breaking the water into small ripples that flowed over to our edge, connecting us. And suddenly, the feeling Moses had conjured grew so strong and so deep I felt I could just float away on it. I was in love, really in love for the first time in a very long time, maybe the first time ever. And it was with this place, this Africa, as real to me as any man. The grey-green water of the Tana River was his blood and his pulse was the steady beat of the native drums. The red dust of his flesh smelled of sage from the blue stems of the leleshwa and sweetness from the jasmine and under it all the sharp copper tang of blood. In the heart of the Rift lay his heart, and his bones were the very rocks. Africa was lover, teacher and mentor, and I could not leave him.

I brushed the tears from my cheeks as I rose and put out my hand to Moses. “We’re going to Nairobi.”

He raised his hands palm up, questioning.

“Because I’ve been holding hands with ghosts for too long.”

I motioned for him to get into the truck Ryder had left and we headed for the duka. Mr. Patel was sewing on his veranda, running up long lengths of sari silk.

“I am making curtains,” he said, waving excitedly. “For Fairlight. To replace those which burned up. Only the best for Memsahib Delilah.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I couldn’t pay for them. I couldn’t even be sure Edgar would want them for what was left of Fairlight. But I smiled anyway. “Mr. Patel, I need to go to Nairobi. Have you seen Ryder? I want to take the truck, only I don’t want to leave him without it if he needs it.”

He waved a hand. “The sahib has already left on my motorcycle. He will have no need of the truck. If I see him, I will tell him you have taken it to the city.”

I didn’t stop to ask where Ryder had gone. I waved and floored it, heading as fast as I could to Nairobi. Unfortunately, I had a puncture and Moses proved as useless with machines as he was gifted with cattle. It took me more than an hour to wrestle the wheel off and patch it, and by the time we reached the city, the afternoon was sitting in long shadows.

I had given it some thought on the drive and it seemed to me my best chance was to head straight to the top. I hadn’t bothered to wash or change my clothes and by the time I walked into Government House, I looked like something three days past death. My clothes were stiff with mud and sweat and my face was covered in streaks of soot. Mr. Fraser jumped to his feet as I strode into his office, Moses following close behind.

“Miss Drummond! What on earth—”

“I have a crime to report. Gates tried to burn down my farm.”

Fraser looked pained. “Do you have evidence to this effect?”

“No, but who else would it have been? I have a witness that he threatened me when I discharged him.” I jerked my head to Moses.

The lieutenant governor narrowed his eyes. “Is this the same boy that you reported Mr. Gates as having struck during the incident which caused you to discharge him?”

“Yes, but I hardly see—”

The inspector, who hadn’t even opened his notebook, rose and gave me a pitying look. “I understand your frustrations, Miss Drummond, but I’m afraid this matter is at an end.”

“At an end? Did you even hear what I said? The man tried to burn down the farm where I live.”

“Was anyone killed?”

“No, but that’s—”

“Was anyone materially injured?”

“Two with broken bones and one with a burned hand,” I recited. “Still, I hardly think—”

He gave me a cool look. “Miss Drummond. Africa is a difficult place. Too difficult for some. Now, I suggest you book passage back to England or New York or wherever it is that you came from and forget all about this.”

“That’s it? That’s all the Kenyan colonial government can offer? I am patted on the head and told to go home like a good little girl?”

“As I said, Africa is a dangerous and difficult place to live. This colony demands a very specific type of temperament to thrive here. One must be resourceful and strong and able to withstand anything. Very few people manage to live here happily.” He gave me a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I think it has become quite apparent that you, Miss Drummond, are not one of those people. And in light of this most recent development, I feel I ought to warn you that steps will be taken.”

“Just what does that mean?”

“It means that you will be asked to leave the colony. I’m afraid your time here is at an end.”

Moses’ hand crept into mine, and I tightened my fingers around it. “You can’t do that.”

“I think you will find that I can. The governor is indisposed with an attack of malaria and not expected to resume his duties here for at least a month. In his absence, all trivial matters are being handled by me. And you, Miss Drummond, are a trivial matter.”

“But I have permission,” I said, my voice hollow.

“Permission that may be rescinded at any time by this office. I did warn you of that when you arrived,” he said, a trifle more kindly. “But it would seem you have made a habit of trouble, and you have overstayed your welcome here. You may return to Fairlight to collect your things. Passage will be booked for you on the steamer leaving out of Mombasa in a fortnight. That should give you ample time to say your farewells.”

I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me beaten. I gave him as dazzling a smile as I could muster, the one that got me the best room at the Hotel de Crillon even when I was skint. “I’ve learned a lot from my time in Africa, Mr. Fraser, a lot about how to survive here. And one of the first things I learned is that before you count your kill, you better make damn sure you’ve done the job. Because something you’ve only wounded will have just enough fight left in her to make her dangerous. Come on, Moses. We’re leaving now.”