A Spear of Summer Grass (5 page)

“Have I, indeed? And what are the terms?”

“Fifty pounds to whoever names the man who beds you first,” he stated flatly.

Before I could respond, the door opened and Bates reappeared.

“Miss Drummond, if you please, the lieutenant governor will see you now.”

I rose and went to the door, turning back just as I reached it. I gave him a slow, purposeful look, taking him in from battered boots to filthy, unkempt hair.

“Tell me, who did you put your money on?”

He stretched his legs out to cross them at the ankle. He folded his arms behind his head and gave me a slow grin. “Why, myself, of course.”

4

Inside the office, a squirrelly fellow with coppery hair—the lieutenant governor, I imagined—was scribbling on some papers and pursing his lips thoughtfully. No doubt he was keeping me waiting to impress upon me the significance of his position, so I looked around and waited for him to get tired of his own importance. After a few minutes he glanced up, peering thoughtfully through a pair of spectacles that needed polishing.

“Miss Delilah Drummond? I am Oswell Fraser, Lieutenant Governor of the Kenya colony.”

I smiled widely to show there were no hard feelings for his less-than-polite welcome, but he continued to scowl at me.

“Now, I understand your stepfather has pulled a few strings with the governor on your behalf.”

I shrugged. “Well, I wouldn’t say—”

“I would,” he cut in sharply. “And I want you to know that it won’t do you any good. Not now. Sir William has found it necessary to return to England and expects to be there for some weeks. In his absence, I am acting governor.” He finished this with a little preen of his mustache.

“How nice for you,” I began, but he lifted a hand.

“I have no wish to spend any more time upon this matter than necessary, so permit me to press on. I am well aware of your reputation, Miss Drummond, and I have no doubt you expect to have as grand a time here in Kenya as you have around the rest of the world. But let me speak with perfect frankness. I will not have it.”

He was so earnest I smothered a laugh and put on my best expression of wide-eyed innocence. I even batted my lashes a few times, but he was entirely immune.

“I am quite serious, Miss Drummond. There are circumstances afoot just now which make it imperative that the colonists here conduct themselves with decorum and respectability. This includes you.”

I gave him a winsome smile. “Mr. Fraser, really, I cannot imagine how you have come to have such a terrible opinion of me, but I assure you I have no intention of misbehaving.”

“Misbehaving?” He reached for the sheet of paper and began to read from it. “Arrested for stealing a car outside a Harlem nightclub and driving it into the Hudson River. Caught
in flagrante
with a judge’s eighteen-year-old son in Dallas. Fined for swimming nude in the Seine. Need I continue?”

“Those incidents were taken entirely out of context, I assure you.”

“I doubt it,” he returned primly. He put the sheet aside, letting it drop from his fingertips as if he could not bear to touch it. “They, and the other incidents chronicled in this report, speak to a lifetime of poor decisions and irresponsible, sometimes
criminal,
behavior. And if this were not enough, I happen to be married to a former schoolmate of yours. Annabel has been extremely forthright about your antics in Switzerland.”

“Oh, dear Annabel!” I said faintly. I remembered her well. A mousy girl with forgettable features and thick ankles. She had taken immense pleasure in carrying tales to the headmistress and then gloating over my punishments. “How is she? Please pass along my regards.”

He refused to thaw even at this little bit of polite flummery. “Remember what I said, Miss Drummond. These are significant times for this colony. I will not have your behavior or anyone else’s coming between us and our ultimate independence from London.”

“Is that why the governor has returned to England?”

To my surprise, at this he actually unbent a trifle. “Well, yes. Parliament has convened a committee to study the feasibility of permitting self-rule here in Kenya.”

I remembered what the ship’s captain had told me. “You mean like they did last year in Rhodesia?”

His mouth dropped open. “I am astonished that you are aware of it, but yes, that’s it precisely.”

“And you and the governor naturally believe that the committee, and by extension Parliament itself, will look more favourably upon the subject of self-rule if the colonists are seen as hardworking and respectable folk.”

“Quite,” he said, his voice marginally warmer. “You see, with decisions being made so far away in London, it’s terribly difficult to ensure that the decisions are the right ones. Take the question of Indian land ownership—” And he did. He took the question and ran with it for the better part of the next quarter of an hour. I smiled and nodded and looked deeply interested, a trick I learned from Mossy when I was five. Men always fell for it, and if you were careful enough to make the occasional “hmmm” sound they thought you were pondering deeply. This freed you to think of stockings or whether he was going to try to kiss you. Not that I wondered the latter about Mr. Fraser. One look at those thin damp lips would have been enough to put me off kissing forever.

At last he finished, and he rose, bringing the interview to a close. “So you see why it’s so very important that you behave yourself, Miss Drummond. And in that vein, I think it best if you proceed to Fairlight without delay.”

“Without delay? But Mr. Fraser, I had thought to spend a few days in Nairobi, meet the members of the club, that sort of thing.”

He shook his head. “Out of the question. In fact, I have arranged for you to be taken to Fairlight first thing tomorrow morning. You will, of course, be welcomed at the Norfolk Hotel for tonight only. Please oblige me in this.”

I hesitated, and then it occurred to me that with the governor out of the colony, Fraser was the most powerful man around. It might not be such a bad thing to have him in my debt.

I shook his hand again and said, in an appropriately sober tone, “Very well, Mr. Fraser. I shall take your excellent advice. You may rely upon me.”

I saw the flicker of doubt in his eyes and knew that Annabel would be getting an earful that night. I took my leave then, passing the scruffy villain from the platform on my way out. Before the door shut, I had just enough time to hear Fraser say, “Blast you, Ryder, what have you done now? Couldn’t you have thrashed the man on his own property instead of the middle of Nairobi station with a hundred witnesses?”

The pirate gave a laugh as the door closed behind him, and I left, adjusting my fur and frowning at the blood on my shoes. So much for decorum and respectability. All I had done was step off a train and got my knuckles rapped for it while the great white hunter knocked a man’s teeth out and was clapped on the shoulder. Men!

* * *

I found Dodo waiting at the Norfolk. She had already checked in and unpacked what we needed for the evening. She clucked and fretted over my ruined shoes while I tidied myself up and told her what Mr. Fraser had had to say on the subject of my arrival in Kenya.

“That’s the price of leading a notorious life,” she said, primming her lips as she sponged at my shoes.

I blew out a smoke ring and lay back in the bath. “I prefer to think of it as energetic. What do you fancy, Dodo? Shall we wear something inappropriate and scandalise the rustics tonight?”

“We shall not. I have already ordered dinner to be served here in our rooms, and our transportation will apparently be here immediately after breakfast, which is also to be served in private.”

I pulled a face at her. “I’m not a leper, you know. Notoriety isn’t contagious.”

She didn’t reply, and why would she? We both knew it wasn’t true. Notoriety was indeed contagious. If you were a carrier, decent people didn’t care to spend time with you lest they come down with it. Infamy was an infection most folks could do without, even if the price for it was living a very small and colourless life. They were beige people in a beige world, and Dora was one of them.

But she had been a swell sport about being dragged off to the wilds of Africa. I could give her an evening of good behavior.

I rose from the tub and dried myself off, dusting thoroughly with rice powder scented with mimosa. I pulled on my favourite Japanese kimono—raw peacock silk embroidered in silver—and slid my feet into satin mules. I unpacked the phonograph and opened a bottle of gin.

“We can have a party, just the two of us,” I told Dora, and by the time dinner was served, she was wearing the window curtain as a Roman toga and an open handbag on her head in place of a crown. She was cataloguing dolefully the men she had loved and never kissed, and didn’t even stop when the waiters began piling dishes on the table. They served up a lovely dinner and I tipped them lavishly as Dora started in on Quentin.

“He has the handsomest mustache. I always wondered what it would be like to kiss a man with a mustache.”

I refilled her glass. “You ought to have asked him. He might have obliged you. Quentin is a very obliging fellow.”

It was proof of her advanced state of intoxication that she even considered it. She shook her head, then put both hands up to stop her head from moving.

“No, I don’t think so. I seem to remember he’s married.”

“To Cornelia,” I supplied, ever helpful.

“But that doesn’t ever stop you.” She seemed genuinely mystified.

I shrugged. “I got there first. I have a prior claim.”

She struggled a moment to count on her fingers. “No, that isn’t right, it isn’t right at all. He was betrothed to Cornelia when he met you.”

“I didn’t say I got to his heart first, Do. I got
there
first,” I explained with a pointed look at her crotch.

She shrieked and pulled her toga even tighter, although I don’t know why she bothered. She had tied it over her clothes and was as safe as a vestal virgin, especially in my company. I had several friends with Sapphic proclivities, but I never joined them. I always liked to be the prettiest one in the bed, so I stuck solely with men. Of course, Misha had come damned close to beating me on that score. He had had the face of a Renaissance angel. I always suspected that was one of the reasons our marriage had failed.

“You were the smart one,” she told me, staring into the contents of her glass as if she wasn’t entirely sure where the gin had come from. “I should have got it over early. Now it’s too late. Things have probably grown shut. You know,
inside,
” she wailed, commencing to weep into the bread basket. “And you don’t even feel the sin of it, do you? You don’t even care that it’s so wrong, so criminally wrong.”

She continued to sob. I rose and slid my hands under her arms and hefted her up. For her bulk, she was surprisingly light on her feet. It was almost like handling a child, and she curled into my shoulder as I helped her to her bedroom.

“You’re tight, Dora. No more gin for you.”

She nodded and immediately groaned. “Why does this hotel have spinning rooms?”

“I think it came with the gin, darling.”

“Oh, that makes sense.”

I pulled the covers to her chin and turned out the light. “Nighty-night, Dodo.”

“Oh, I’m not sleepy,” she announced before turning over and promptly letting out a howler of a snore.

I returned to the table and pushed the food away. I poured myself another gin and lit another cigarette. After a minute I got up and turned out the light and stepped out onto the private veranda. It was late, and Nairobi had settled into the uneasy sleep of a town that straddles the edge between here and there. I could hear an animal cry in the night, a shriek that unsettled my blood. The moon was waning, but the stars shone high overhead, slanting silver light over the slumbering town. Somewhere nearby a monkey chattered in the trees and a drunk was singing a maudlin song in mournful French. I ground out my cigarette and took in a deep, long breath, drinking in Africa, strange and wonderful Africa. And as the stars winked out, one by one, I took myself off to bed and slept the dreamless sleep of a traveller.

5

The next morning I woke to find Dora creeping around the suite, finishing the packing. She looked like hell and moaned gently from time to time as she folded and organised. The porters brought breakfast and I helped myself to the full English while Do sat nursing a weak cup of coffee, a wet handkerchief tied about her brow.

I shook my head. “Do, I hope you’re not going to be difficult in Africa.”

“Difficult?” Her voice was hollow, as if she were speaking from a great distance.

“You take things too seriously, you always have. You ought to have some fun here, kick up your heels a bit. You’re only young once, you know.”

I dunked a bit of toast into my egg and Dora’s face went green.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean. I ought to go see about the bags.”

She fled with the handkerchief pressed to her mouth and went down to supervise the loading as I finished up, taking my time with a second cup of tea. I stopped by registration to settle the bill and collect a packed lunch basket. A charming young man in livery trotted out to the curb with the hamper and added it to the mound of baggage piled on the walk. Parked next to it was an absolute heap of a vehicle. It had clearly started life as an ambulance and God only knew what sins it had committed to have fallen so low. It was pocked with rust and scarred with solder marks from where fresh bits of scrap metal had been used to bandage its wounds.

As I watched, the driver jumped out and began to instruct the porters on where to shove the bags and I recognised him instantly. He was wearing exactly the same clothes as the day before, which didn’t surprise me. He had probably slept in them. I stepped up and fixed my brightest smile.

“I didn’t realise you offered chauffeur service,” I said sweetly.

He turned and pushed his hat back a little with his forefinger. “Only one service of many, Miss Drummond.”

“That truck looks like it’s being held together with spit and a prayer.”

To his credit, he smiled. “It’ll do.” He nodded toward the pile on the curb. “I see you’ve come well prepared for roughing it.”

I shrugged. “I’m a girl who likes nice things,” I told him with the faintest emphasis on the word
nice.
“You haven’t told me your name.”

He removed his hat and inclined his head in as courtly a gesture as I had ever seen. “J. Ryder White.”

“And I detect by your accent you aren’t English, but I don’t think you’re a fellow American either, Mr. White.”

“I go by Ryder. You’ve got a good ear. I’m from nowhere and everywhere, but I was born in Canada.”

“A Canadian! How delightfully rustic,” I remarked in the same honeyed tones. “Tell me, are you housebroken?”

His mouth twitched, but he didn’t smile. He bent to the pile of baggage and selected a long, narrow case chalked with indecipherable symbols from the Mombasa customs house. “I see you’ve come fully armed, Miss Drummond.” He flicked open the latches and threw back the lid. Whatever he had thought to find, the contents surprised him.

“You’re not serious. Did a friend send this with you as a practical joke?”

“I assure you, I am perfectly acquainted with that weapon.”

He hefted the Rigby and smiled a crocodile’s smile. “Princesses shouldn’t try to slay dragons. Leave that to the knights.”

“And the peasants?”

He laughed aloud at that and replaced the Rigby, snapping the case closed. “Oh, I think we’re going to have fun.”

“Don’t bet on it,” I told him, baring my teeth.

I moved aside to let him get on with the business of loading his monstrous vehicle. Dora was standing at the passenger door and I went to shove her in. She shook her head desperately.

“I need the window,” she whispered, pleading.

“Oh, for God’s sake, when will you learn to hold your liquor?” The question was rhetorical. Dora got tight on a thimbleful of sherry and I had poured half a bottle of gin down her. The least I could do was give her a chance to be sick discreetly. I sighed and clambered into the wreck, settling myself in the middle while Dora crammed herself up against the door.

“Stop moaning, Do. We haven’t even started moving yet.”

“Maybe you haven’t,” she retorted. She closed her eyes and slumped, her head angled out the window. A moment later a shadow fell over her face.

“Miss?” Ryder’s voice was gentler than I had yet heard it. Dodo lifted her head like a dog sniffing the air. He smiled at her and handed her a tin cup. “This might help.”

She took an experimental sip. “Oh.
Oh.
What is it?”

He shrugged. “Cure of my own making. Pawpaw juice, ginger, a few other things. Just keep drinking. I’ve got a flask full of it.”

She stared up at him, her expression worshipful. “Thank you.”

I slanted him a look and he smiled over her head at me, then lifted his hat and actually bowed to Dora. “Anytime, miss.”

A moment later he was sliding into the seat next to me until his thigh touched mine. “Shove over, princess. I’ve got to work the gears.”

I moved over as far as I could and gave him another sweet smile. “And where is my morning libation?”

“You’re not hungover,” he pointed out.

“I’m not hungover,” Dora put in as forcefully as she could. “Ladies do not imbibe to excess. I am merely overtired.”

“Of course,” Ryder said soothingly. He winked at me and I folded my arms over my chest. Dora had her eyes closed again and was sucking hard on the cup.

“What did you put in that?” I demanded.

He leaned a trifle closer than absolutely necessary, his voice low. “Exactly what I said. Pawpaw juice, ginger. And half a bottle of gin.”

“That’s what got her into this in the first place.”

He shrugged. “Best cure for a hangover is to get drunk again. Believe me, I wouldn’t do this drive sober if I could help it. She’ll thank me later.”

“Yes, but will I?”

His only answer was a laugh and a crash of gears.

“You
are
the driver arranged for by that nice Mr. Bates from Government House, aren’t you? I should hate to be abducted and not know it.”

“You are my passengers. Paying passengers,” he added meaningfully.

Dodo opened her eyes and reached for her bag. I slapped her hand. “Don’t you dare. Not until he’s seen us safely to Fairlight. He might just dump us in the desert and then where would we be?”

He flicked me an amused glance. “The desert? Princess, where do you think you are? This isn’t the goddamn Sahara.”

With that he gunned the engine and we roared off, away from Nairobi and the last vestiges of civilisation.

* * *

We drove for a little while in silence as he negotiated the traffic out of Nairobi. It was surprisingly busy—donkey carts and rickshaws jostling with sleek new automobiles and pedestrians laden with bundles of fruits and firewood. He did point out a few of the local landmarks, including the Turf Club and Kilimani Prison and the Japanese brothel, but I didn’t ask questions and Dodo was too busy nursing her “cure.” I stared out the window, watching as the shabby little bungalows that dotted the outskirts of Nairobi fell away. The
murram
road stretched upwards now, carving its way through the wilderness, a wilderness that hadn’t changed since Eve went dancing in a fig-leaf skirt. The soil was as red as good Georgia clay, and here and there a flat-topped thorn tree shaded the high savannah grasses. As far as the eye could see there was nothing but land and more land, an emptiness so big not even God himself could fill it. The miles rolled away and so did my bad mood, and when the first giraffe strode gracefully into view, I gasped aloud.

Ryder stopped the vehicle and gestured. “She’s got a foal.” I peered into the brush behind the giraffe and noticed a tiny version, teetering on impossibly long legs as it emerged. The mother turned back with a graceful gesture of the head and gave the little thing a push of encouragement. They came closer to the truck and I saw it wasn’t tiny at all—it was frankly enormous, and Ryder eased down the road, slowly so as not to startle them.

“Why did we leave?” I demanded. “I would have liked to have watched them.”

“Second rule of the bush. Never get too close to anything that has offspring.”

“What’s the first rule?”

“Food runs. If you don’t want to be food, don’t run.”

I smiled, expecting him to laugh, but he was deadly serious. His eyes were on the road, and I took the opportunity to study him a little more closely than I had the day before. He had tidied himself up a bit, even if his clothes were disreputable. His jaw was still rough with golden stubble, but his hands and face were clean. He had strong, steady hands, and I could tell from looking at them there was little he couldn’t do. Mossy always said you could tell everything you needed to know about a man from his hands. Some hands, she told me, were leaving hands. They were the wandering sort that slipped into places they shouldn’t, and they would wander right off again because those hands just couldn’t stay still. Some hands were worthless hands, fit only to hold a drink or flick ash from a cigar, and some were punishing hands that hit hard and didn’t leave a mark and those were the ones you never stayed to see twice.

But the best hands were knowing hands, Mossy told me with a slow smile. Knowing hands were capable; they could soothe a horse or a woman. They could take things apart—including your heart—and put them back together better than before. Knowing hands were rare, but if you found them, they were worth holding, at least for a little while. I looked at Ryder’s hands. They sat easily on the wheel and gearshift, coaxing instead of forcing, and I wondered how much they knew.

They had known pain; that much was certain from the scars that laced his left arm. He had been lucky. Whatever had dug itself into his arm hadn’t wanted to let go. They were long, raking white scars, like punctuation marks, dotted here and there with a full stop of knotted white scar tissue where whatever it was had hung on hard. Some men might have covered them up, rolled down their shirtsleeves and pretended it hadn’t happened. Others would have told the story as soon as you met, flaunting those scars for any Desdemona who might be impressed. But Ryder didn’t even seem conscious of his. He wore them as he did his bracelets—souvenirs of somewhere he had been. I could have asked him, but I didn’t. I liked not knowing his stories yet. He was a stranger, an impossible and uncouth one, but a stranger nonetheless. And there is nothing more interesting than a stranger.

I decided to let him keep his stories and give me only the mundane things that didn’t matter. “So, you were born in Canada. Whereabouts?”

“Quebec.”

I lifted a brow. “Really? You don’t sound Québécois.”

“Left when I was a year old. My father and I travelled up and down the Mississippi and then west to California. Ended up in the Klondike by the time I was six.”

“That’s quite a lot of travelling for a young boy. What did your father do?”

“As little as possible,” he answered with a wry twist of the lips.

“And what did your mother have to say about this? Did she like being dragged around at his whims or was she afflicted with wanderlust as well?”

“She died before we left Quebec.” He said the words easily. They were just words to him. We might have had the loss of a parent in common, but not what we had done with the emptiness. Not a day went by that I didn’t think of Pink and how different my life would have been if he’d lived.

“Were you raised without a female influence, then?”

“There was an Algonquin woman who travelled with us. She took care of me and my father, although I’m not sure I’d exactly call her female. Her mustache was thicker than his.”

“How did you end up in Africa?”

“My father got lucky. He struck gold, and he worked it until the claim played out. By then he said the Klondike was getting too crowded and too cold. Africa was empty and hot. We landed here when I was twelve. Been here mostly ever since.”

“And what do you do here?”

He shrugged one solid shoulder. “This and that—lately quite a bit of guiding. I lead safaris. I have a little place on the coast where I grow sugarcane, and I own a few
dukas.
”

“Dukas?”

“Shops—each one is a general store of sorts. The closest thing you’ll find to civilisation out here. The post gets delivered there and people will come for a drink and to catch up with the neighbours.”

“God, it’s the end of the earth, isn’t it?” I asked. Africa had seemed a great adventure when I was sitting in a Paris hotel room. Now the reality of it intruded, vast and unsettled, and I felt very, very small.

He flicked me a glance, his expression unreadable. “It won’t be so bad, princess. You’ll see.”

Suddenly, I sat bolt upright, staring out the windscreen, all thoughts of exile gone. Stretching before me was the most spectacular thing I had ever seen in my life, and even those words cannot do the memory of it justice. It was the Great Rift Valley, spanning the view from left to right, slashing the surface of the earth in a crater so vast no man could see from one end of it to the other. Deep in the heart of this great continental divide the grasses waved, an immense green carpet dotted with animals the likes of which I had seen only in picture books and travelogues. A tiny herd of elephants looked infinitesimal from our lofty height, and when Ryder stilled the engine, I heard nothing but the long rush of wind up from the valley floor. It carried with it every promise of Africa, that wind. It smelled of green water and red earth and the animals that roamed it. And there was something more, something old as the rocks. It might have been the smell of the Almighty himself, and I knew there were no words for this place. It was sacred, as no place I had ever been before.

“My God,” I breathed. “How big is it?”

“Four thousand miles from the upper reaches of Syria to the depths of Mozambique. The width varies, sixty miles wide in some places, but here it narrows. Just about twenty miles across.”

“It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.” I shoved Dodo, who roused herself to look, blinking hard.

“How high are we?” she croaked.