10.

Early on the next day, Tolliver made for Kirk Buxton’s office at the Standard Bank of India. He needed to interview the bank manager, and he wanted to avoid any encounter with Lucy. As much as she drank, Tolliver imagined that she was not an early riser. As for himself, minding Nurse Freemantle’s warnings, he was taking his quinine water straight these days, though it tasted quite vile without the gin to sweeten it.

He found Buxton at his desk, reading the newspaper, and with but a halfhearted showing of polite chitchat, got directly to the point. “I am sure you understand that I must rule out any involvement of yours in the death of Josiah Pennyman. I am afraid I will have to know where you were and whom you were with on the evening of Wednesday and the wee hours of Thursday, a week ago.”

Buxton sighed, but did not object. He seemed such a lethargic, cynical man, it was hard to imagine him becoming worked up enough to kill a snake, much less a fellow human being. He lifted an appointments calendar on his desk and thumbed it back a page. “On Wednesday evening, I was involved in a bridge tournament at the Nairobi Club. That newcomer Baron Blixen was my partner. We won all of our rubbers until the final, when we were defeated by the team of Sir Percy Girouard and Mr. John Ainsworth.” Buxton said the names of the victors quite triumphantly, which made absolute sense, since Sir Percy was the Governor of the Protectorate, the highest authority in the land, and his partner one of its provincial commissioners.

“I see,” Justin managed to say. The answer prickled him. He did not want to have to accuse Buxton of murder, but he did not like to be stopped cold in his tracks in his pursuit of the truth. “At what time did the tournament end?”

Buxton looked even smugger. “At about two in the morning. And then the final foursome passed nearly an hour standing one another drinks in the bar before staggering home.”

Tolliver thanked Buxton as politely as he could and left. Since Pennyman had died sometime between midnight and three in the morning, according to the formidable Nurse Freemantle, Buxton had an alibi—if his story held.

Without permission from D.C. Cranford, Tolliver could hardly approach Sir Percy, given his exalted position. He could not just walk in and question Ainsworth either for that matter. Cranford would never allow it. “Protocol, my boy,” he would say. But Tolliver was determined to dot every “i” and cross every “t.” And there was nothing stopping him from getting corroborating evidence from Baron Blixen, who was barely an acquaintance, but was a fellow tennis player, who often took his luncheon in the club’s dining room. Dinners, rumor had it, he took with whichever of the socialites of the Protectorate wanted him on any particular evening. Tolliver had also had many such invitations when he arrived, when, being the son of the 7th Earl of Bilbrough and the great-grandson of Admiral Wentworth, hero of the Napoleonic Wars, gave him some cachet with the settlers. That soon wore off once he joined the police force, and when the recent influx of new settlers brought them bigger fish—like the Swede with a title in addition to the right bloodlines.

Tolliver found Bror Blixen just sitting down in the club dining room. He was a rather slope-shouldered man with thinning light brown hair, but a pleasant face and a ready smile. “I beg your pardon,” Tolliver said, extending his hand and introducing himself.

The baron, holding his napkin, rose half out of his chair and shook Justin’s hand with a warm, firm grip. “Of course. I have admired your skills at polo. You are a wonderful rider.”

“Thank you. I enjoy the sport. I wonder if I could trouble you to have a coffee with me after your meal?”

“Please,” Blixen said, indicating the chair opposite him. “Won’t you join me? I have yet to order.”

“If you don’t mind?”

“Not at all,” the baron said. “I will be glad of your company. There is a match on Sunday I believe.”

“Yes. I am looking forward to it, Baron.”

“Call me Blix. Everyone else does.”

They ordered their meal, and the conversation continued much as it had begun. Blix turned out to be a friendly and charming man. His accent made him sound decidedly German, which would not have put him in good stead in the Protectorate. The British had had, from the outset, a conflicted and uneasy relationship with German East Africa to its south. Many of the decisions Britain had made of how to comport itself in this part of Africa were based on that rivalry. But Bror Blixen had none of the arrogance Tolliver would have expected from a German. He was easy company and surprisingly full of wit for a man who was not speaking his native language.

“Now,” Blix said, as they were served cheese plates toward the end of the meal, “I imagine, by the way you first approached me, that you must have a question you wanted to ask.”

Tolliver asked him about the bridge tournament.

He shook his head and looked crestfallen. “Buxton and I lost in the last rubber. I can tell you this,” he said with a chuckle. “If Sir Percy pursues the rights of the British crown in East Africa with half the determination and sangfroid with which he went after the Nairobi Club bridge championship, your king has nothing to fear.”

Tolliver smiled despite the seriousness of the questions in his mind. “Can you tell me what happened after the game was over?”

Blixen gave him a questioning look but answered readily. “I am afraid Sir Percy and John Ainsworth also won the drinks-buying contest in the bar afterward. I overindulged in the extreme. I had a terrible headache and a meeting with the land officer the next morning, to go out and inspect a farm I am hoping to take to grow coffee. I remember wishing that the coffee was already there for the drinking.”

Tolliver was sorry to have to spoil Blixen’s fun. “What time would you say the party broke up?”

Blix’s expression turned serious. He nodded knowingly. “I see. This is official business.” He held up a hand to stop Tolliver’s apology. “It was nearly three when I went to bed. Arjan, the majordomo, had to put Buxton in a rickshaw. He could barely walk when he left.”

*   *   *

Approaching her father’s study door, Vera heard her mother say, in a voice much louder than she usually used, “He could not have known until recently. Otherwise, why would he have come here,” she said. “He was a monster.”

Vera slowed her step, but her mother said nothing more. Her father said something, but so quietly she could not hear his words, so she knocked on the door.

“Come.” They spoke in unison. It was not the first time she had heard them do that.

“Come in, lass,” her father said as the door opened. “You might as well know about this.”

She took a seat on the ottoman near her father’s desk. “What is it, father?” There was a metal box open on the desk in front of him, and he held a sheaf of papers in his hand. He put them in the box, locked it, and put the key in his vest pocket.

“We have been going through your uncle’s effects,” her mother said, her voice even, carrying none of the emotion Vera had heard from the hallway. But something in her father’s expression made Vera wary.

“You have found something upsetting.”

A look that ought to have gone with a dropped gauntlet passed from her mother to her father.

He pulled his chair closer to Vera. “Your uncle has squandered every penny of his inheritance,” he said. “He was a brilliant doctor, but the rest of his conduct was not in the same league.”

“What does that matter to us?”

Her mother said, “I had had hopes for what he might do for Otis, since it seemed your uncle would never marry.”

“Why would he never marry? Women seemed to like him very much. He wasn’t so very old.”

“He was forty-four,” she said. And now Vera knew the answer to a question her mother would never give her. Her mother’s age—thirty-nine. She had told Vera she was five years younger than Josiah. That meant that her mother had been barely twenty when Vera was born. And it explained why she was so focused on Vera not becoming an old maid on her next birthday.

She wondered how her mother felt, having lost her only brother. She knew how bereft she would be if she ever lost Otis. She had adored him from the moment he was born, felt part sister, part mother to him, though he was less than six years younger than she. She wondered if her uncle had had similar feelings for his baby sister. Perhaps men did not have those instincts. No one ever spoke of male instincts as far as Vera knew. They spoke only of women’s, and then only of maternal ones. But she did not think her mother felt about her what she felt about Otis. She could not find a maternal instinct in her mother. When it came to Vera, anyway, Blanche McIntosh seemed more interested in having her always at her side to get things done. She was much more loving toward Otis, always bragging about how much he looked like his father. There was no doubt that her mother loved her father, practically revered him.

“What made you think my uncle would never marry?”

Blanche McIntosh looked away from her daughter. “He told me; that’s all. And I believed him.” Vera recognized that the lightness in her mother’s voice was forced and thought she really must have loved her brother and missed him. She went and sat on the floor beside the armchair at her mother’s feet. “I am so sorry for your loss, mama,” she said. She wished there was something she could say that would comfort her mother, but what that might be was completely beyond her.

Her mother did something she had never done before. She put her hand on Vera’s head and caressed her hair.

Vera looked up at her and smiled. “I have news I think you will like,” she said. “I know how happy you were that Captain Tolliver asked me to dance so often. Well, tomorrow he is coming to go picnicking with me on the Kikuyu Reserve. He particularly asked if we could go, just the two of us.” Behind her, her father stirred, but before he had a chance to speak, she looked imploringly into her mother’s face. “It will be alright, won’t it, Mother. You know you can trust him. He is such a gentleman. And perhaps he has something to say that he would want to say to me alone.”

Her father stood up quickly, but not before her mother had said, “Yes.”

*   *   *

The coffee blossoms were beginning to fade, but the view of the Scottish Mission still lifted Justin Tolliver’s heart. He felt this panorama would thrill him for the rest of his life no matter how many times he saw it. And today he would ride out into it with Vera McIntosh, which also lifted his heart. He had desired other women’s bodies, but with her he also desired her company. She held opinions with which he could never agree, and she amazed him by frankly expressing them, despite his disagreement. Her complete lack of self-consciousness about this made him like her more and more. He could see that she might yield her body to him in the right circumstances, but never her mind. That made her more interesting than a girl who would always agree because she saw being agreeable as the quickest way to win him. Even Lillian Gresham had pretended to think that everything he said was biblically important. Vera was genuine.

He picked his way down the horse trail from the top of the hill to the veranda of her house. She was already sitting there with a colorful Kikuyu basket next to her chair.

Vera watched him approach and let her heart revel in the fact that she would be alone with him for hours. She wanted him to try to kiss her. She wanted him to want her, and she was afraid he might not.

“Just be yourself,” her mother had advised. And Wangari had taken the advice one step further. “In Africa, we do not have this kind of love that you talk about,” she had said. “We want to know how a husband and wife will work together for their family. You want him to think of you as a woman who will be useful. Your mother is right. You must be with him the girl you will always be. If he thinks you are someone else besides yourself, and he marries the woman you show him to attract him, you will have to spend the rest of your life trying to be that person.” That all sounded very wise indeed, but Vera thought that she absolutely wanted to spend the rest of her life being the girl Justin Tolliver desired.

“It is a beautiful day, as I promised you it would be,” she said and smiled up at him as he slid off his horse. She handed him a tumbler of water without his having to ask. He polished it off in three gulps.

Her father came out of the house. It occurred to Justin that perhaps, later in the day, he would tell the Reverend McIntosh about his investigation, but he would not spoil Vera’s fun in the meanwhile.

“Good afternoon, my lad,” the missionary said. He looked at Tolliver’s horse. “Good, you have a rifle,” he said.

“A must,” Tolliver replied. “The shortest way here, as you know, passes through some pretty dense woods.”

McIntosh nodded. “Vera, girl, you take a rifle, too. Better to be safe than sorry in case you run into anything out there that’s hungry for something larger than a sandwich.”

“It’s already on my saddle on Patience, Father. Here we go then.” She took back the glass and handed Tolliver the basket.

Her father put a hand on Tolliver’s shoulder and said more with one glance into the younger man’s eyes than he could have with a month of Sunday sermons.

“I’ll take every care of her,” Tolliver said, hoping her father took that as a vow of honorable intentions.

They went to fetch her horse, which waited in the shade between the stable and the hay shed. “My father gave her to me as a gift,” Vera said. “He named her Patience. He said he wanted to give me the gift of patience.” She chuckled at her own failings.

With barely a boost from the groom she mounted, with that fairy grace of hers, as if she could fly if she set her mind to it. She sat the horse astride, as girls always rode here in Africa, not sidesaddle like proper women in England. Tolliver liked this better. In foxhunts at home, he always thought the ladies looked too precarious to take the jumps. He had seen men astride fall many times. He could not fathom how the ladies kept their seat. He did not have any such worry about Vera. He imagined that if her horse stumbled, she would just rise up a few feet and then come down gently on her toes.

“Why are you smiling so?” she asked as they set out, with the picnic basket attached behind her saddle.

He felt the confounded blush, which he was sure gave the lie to what he said, “Who could fail to smile on such a day as this, in such a place as this?”

“Not I.” She turned her horse through the rows of the plantation, toward the river. Natives in their dark orange shukas sang as they worked between the phalanxes of plants. The blossoms were brown at the edges, their bittersweet scent muted. With Vera in the lead, they easily forded the narrow river at a shallow spot near the coffee processing shed.

On the other side, the grassy plain stretched out like a great, vivid green sea, dotted here and there with acacias. The April growth was short and emerald, and it smelled of spice and moisture. Off to their left, a couple of hunting hawks circled in the blue, looking for their luncheon meal. In the distance, antelope he could not name moved in single file, silhouetted against the gray-blue hills. On a day such as this, the snow-covered peaks of Mount Kenya were visible, so high their white might have been clouds. Justin Tolliver gazed out for miles and miles and felt his heart swell, as if it were trying to take all of this vast landscape into itself. Vera looked back at him, and he was afraid that she saw he was on the verge of weeping from the beauty of it. “It’s wonderful,” he managed to say.

“It makes me so happy that you can see that.”

“How could anyone with a soul not see it?”

She gave a little regretful grin. “Then there are many people who have no souls.” She looked around her again and back into his eyes. She pointed to an outcropping where a pair of trees huddled against a rocky spur. “That’s my favorite picnic spot,” she said. “At this season of year, there is a spring to water the horses. I want to show you the view from there.” She turned her mare and trotted off in that direction.

The sun was on them, and he was grateful for the breeze of moving along at a pace. When they had climbed up and reached the shade of the trees, she alit, more like a butterfly than a person.

They tied up the horses where they could drink from a little pool formed by water trickling down a rock. Tolliver soaked his neckerchief and cooled the back of his neck. Vera took off her hat and shook out her damp, dark curls. She put her hands in the cool water and patted some on her face. “Hot work, this picnicking,” she said with a laugh.

She took the basket and spread a muslin cloth on the grass in the shade. She went and got her rifle from the holster on her saddle and laid it beside the tree trunk. Justin realized he would not have thought to do that, but he took his and did the same.

She pointed behind Tolliver. “Look,” she said.

He turned. From this angle, they could see back to the river that glittered like a silver ribbon, and beyond it, the plantation, the hospital, and the little mission chapel. Even those man-made things took on a majesty from their surroundings, a loveliness he never expected to find outside his own beautiful home in England. But this, this was greater even than that. That was all tamed and manicured; this was more thrilling. The things people put here gave a bit of contrast and emphasized the beauty of the purely wild.

He pointed. “What animals are they? I can’t tell from here.”

She looked up from setting out the food and shaded her eyes. “Hartebeests. They have a muzzle kind of like a horse’s. That large group farther on are Cape buffalo. You want to give them plenty of space. They don’t want to eat you, but they do not like intruders. Their horns are sharp and their hooves are deadly.”

“I’ll remember that,” he said, though he already knew the warning from the hunting safaris he had taken.

She took his hand to lead him to the picnic spread. It startled him when she touched him.

She drew her hand away quickly. “I am sorry. I— I—”

“Don’t be,” he said.

“I’ll never be a proper British lady,” she said. She sat down on a little hummock at the base of the tree where she had spread the cloth. He sat upon the ground across from her. She was flustered, fussing now with bread rolls and little dishes.

He reached across and put his fingers on the back of her right hand. “Please,” he said, “you mustn’t worry about me, about that sort of thing with me, I mean.”

“My mother is always warning me,” she said with a tinge of exasperation in her voice. She handed him a plate with four little sandwiches. “They are chicken. Is that alright?”

“Yes, thank you.” He also accepted a glass of lemonade.

“Good. I brought lots. That’s one of the things Mother says. That I am always too hungry, like a boy. I suppose boys are ordinarily the hungry ones.” She could hear herself prattling on and sounding foolish. This was nothing like the conversation she had been daydreaming about for the past two days. “Mother means well.”

He finished chewing and swallowed the buttery bite in his mouth. It was really quite delicious. “Mothers usually do,” he said, “but that does not mean that they are always right.”

“Mine wants me to think like a girl who was born and bred in the Scottish upper classes, which was how she was raised.” She gestured out to the panorama below them. “But I was born here. I have spent but five months in Scotland on two visits, and I hated it there. Everything was cold, the weather, the beds, even my granny and her friends.”

“You feel a part of this then?” He gestured, too. The sun was past its zenith, and the scene below them was bathed in a golden light. The shadows of a few puffy clouds fell here and there in the green expanse. At some point, a herd of impala had come out of the woods to graze between them and the river.

“Not only feel a part of it. I am a part of it,” she said. Her eyes followed his as he took it all in. She wanted to ask him if that made her as desirable as the land before him, but even she knew one didn’t ask such a question.

“You are part of it. And that is lovely.” There was a sincerity in his eyes that made her heart ache.

“Actually, I do feel a part of it, but not entirely,” she said. And then words poured out of her: all her fears about who she was and who she wasn’t. “The Africans have their tribes. They know where they belong. The white people all have their cliques, the civil servants, businessmen, and bankers; the farmers, settlers, and safari men. Each group has its little circle. Even the missionaries, I suppose, but they all call Scotland or England home. I want to call this home. I do call it home, but the European farmers and gentry don’t think much of the missionaries, so they don’t want me. I don’t feel a part of them. I often feel as if I don’t belong anywhere.”

He reached for another sandwich, but the plate was empty. He had eaten them up while she was talking.

She laughed and reached into the basket for another plateful. “I brought tons.” She passed them to him and then took one for herself. “I am afraid I have been boring you.”

“Not in the least. Actually, I feel very much the same,” he said.

“You? That cannot be. You are—” She was going to say “perfect,” but she stopped herself just in time. She was sure if she went in that direction more than just her feelings about herself would come pouring out of her, things she would never have the courage to say to him, about how much she wanted him. She ate her sandwich instead. There was something so beautiful about the nape of his neck that she ached to kiss it. She loved him. Another thing she could never say to him.

He stretched out beside the picnic cloth with his head propped up on his hand. “What were you going to say I am?” A prig, he thought. Or a stuffed shirt.

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just that you’d fit in anywhere.”

“Which means I really don’t belong anywhere,” he said. “Like you. Oh, I have all the right bloodlines, but I spoiled it all by deciding to come here and serve in my present capacity. If I had acquired land, that sort of thing, they would have thought nothing of it. I would have been one of a group very like me in background. But I am not…” He stumbled over what to reveal. “I am not ready for that yet.” He didn’t say that he wanted to be married before he settled into a life like that, as he sometimes said to his male friends. He needed to get to know her better before he started that sort of talk. And he would never say how poverty stricken he was.

“At least you have your work,” she said. “That gives you a position in life.”

“Yes,” he said. “And sport. I do fit in with the lads when I play cricket or polo.”

She was rummaging in the basket, bringing out a tin of little cakes.

“On the playing field is where I have always felt most at home,” he was saying and reaching for one of the sweets. “In sport the rules are clear and—”

“Shh—” She patted the air in front of her with her palms.

He sat up. One of the horses whinnied.

She stood and reached for the rifles behind her. He stood, too. “Back up,” she said.

The horses stomped and kicked, dragged on the reins that bound them to the tree that shaded them.

She handed him his rifle. He moved in front of her. “Hyena,” she said very quietly and evenly. “Do you see it?”

Just as she asked, he did: large and spotted, moving very quickly down the rock escarpment, making for them. He raised his rifle.

“There’s another and another. Shoot,” she said and raised her rifle, too.

He took the first shot, and the lead animal fell. A few feet off from the fallen hyena, the horses were in turmoil. He reloaded. She was ready but paused. The second animal turned tail and ran. A third, farther up, never came into full view but also made a hasty retreat. He kept his rifle aimed in their direction. She lowered hers and put her trigger hand on his shoulder. They stood perfectly still, as close together as they had been when they danced. “They are gone, I think,” he said.

Her hand squeezed his upper arm. He heard her take in a deep breath. “I hate them. They are so ugly,” she said. “My father tells me they are God’s creatures, that they rarely attack people. The Kikuyu say they keep the land clean. But I have seen them take down a buffalo. One of them took the baby brother of a Kikuyu girl who was my playmate, when I was five years old. A sleeping infant.”

He lowered the rifle. The danger had passed, but his thudding heart did not settle. It would take only the slightest movement for him to turn and take her in his arms. It took a great effort for him not to.

She let go of his arm. “Perhaps we had better go before their relatives descend on us,” she said. Her voice, ordinarily low for a girl so slight, had turned husky.

“Are you alright? You’ve had a scare.”

She laughed, making a silvery sound. “Not for the first time. My home,” she said, “is quite a bit more beautiful, but also a lot more dangerous than the place my parents call by that name.”

They wrapped up the picnic things in the cloth. Vera popped another sweet into Tolliver’s mouth. She did not seem to realize what a gesture of intimacy that was to him.

They rode home with the sun lowering behind them and their shadows astride their horses side by side leading them along as they went. The way back seemed to take but a fraction of the time it had taken them to reach the picnic spot.

“Thank you,” they said to each other simultaneously as they dismounted near the stable.

He looked up at the sky. “I’ll have just enough light to make it home,” he said. He hoped she heard the regret in his voice.

“Go on then,” she said. “You have your match tomorrow.”

“Yes.” He wanted to linger but knew he could not.

“For luck,” she said, and stood on tiptoe and gave him a swift kiss on the lips and ran away home.