14.

Early the next day, while Vera was bidding her parents good-bye, Justin Tolliver was an hour away in Nairobi dealing with the doctor and Cranford, who stood at the foot of his bed. “Yes, doctor,” he said, “but I insist on being taken to the Scottish Hospital. Nurse Freemantle is the one who cured me the last time, and I feel she is the best person to help me now.”

At first, both the doctor and the district commissioner looked quite doubtful, but after half an hour of tedious conversation, Tolliver succeeded in convincing them that he could make the journey by train to Athi River, where Kwai Libazo would meet him and take him the rest of the way in a horse trap.

“Have you any news about the condition of Gichinga Mbura?” Tolliver asked Cranford, once the other matter had been settled and the doctor had left.

“Bad off,” Cranford said. “Evidently, being told he will be properly punished has done for him.” He spoke as a man completely satisfied with himself. “I must say again, this is the best of all possible outcomes. No need to make an airtight case against the savage. No worries about inquires from London, no excuses to give. We can say with perfect conviction that we justly detained the mumbo-jumbo man and he upped and died on us.”

“I couldn’t agree more.” Tolliver tried to look appropriately sad and sick.

“I’ll be off then.” D.C. Cranford took his hat from the chair in the corner.

“On your way out, sir, I wonder if you would mind having Kwai Libazo sent here so I can give him his orders.”

“Certainly, my boy.”

“And I wonder, sir, if I might take a bit of time to recover. I think I returned to duty too quickly last week.”

Cranford looked doubtful.

“That new chap, Oliver Lovett, is coming along quite well, and he speaks Urdu, so he can communicate much better with the Indian clerks. Since the laws are Indian colonial, the Indian deputy inspectors run things on a day-to-day basis, really. And as they write everything in Urdu, Lovett will soon be completely up to snuff.”

The D.C.’s caterpillar eyebrows knit.

Tolliver shot his last salvo. “He served in the Indian Army, in Queen Victoria’s own corps.” This fact placed the new policeman in India’s most elite unit. Tolliver hoped it would be the icing on Lovett’s cake.

Cranford breathed a sigh. “I suppose, if you must. When is District Superintendent Jodrell returning?”

“He is due back in just over two weeks.”

“Very well, then.” Cranford picked up his sun helmet and squared his shoulders. “Now, buck up. I am sure everything will be shipshape and Bristol fashion before very long.” And he was gone.

Kwai Libazo arrived within seconds.

“How did you get here so fast?”

“I was waiting in the hall for news of you, sir? I was so afraid of Mbura’s curse.”

Tolliver laughed. “No such thing. I made it look as if I was ill on purpose.”

The flabbergasted look on Libazo’s face was the most emotional expression Tolliver had ever seen there. “You are not sick, B’wana?”

“No. It suddenly occurred to me that if Mbura could fake illness, so could I.”

“Why, sir?”

“So that we can go after Newland without the district commissioner knowing what we are doing.”

“How?”

Tolliver explained his plan for getting them to the Scottish Mission and setting off from there.

“Sir, how will we take enough men without the district commissioner missing them?”

“I doubt the D.C. knows the details of anything that happens here, nor cares when Jodrell is on duty. It’s only because the district superintendent is away that he is putting his nose in so deep.”

Libazo liked the way the English said things like that, drawing a funny picture of what people were doing. But he did not let himself smile. Tolliver’s deception worried him.

Tolliver got out of bed. He was wearing his uniform trousers with his nightshirt. “You will lead a squad out to the Scottish Mission. Take the same men who went with us to the Masonic Hotel two weeks ago. The new man, Inspector Lovett, will hold the fort here. He’s had as much training as I ever did when they left me to my own devices. And I daresay the D.C. will not be over here counting heads in the next little bit.”

“Will we hire a tracker?”

Tolliver was taken aback. He knew very well that the Nairobi station’s best tracker was out with District Superintendent Patterson from the Kiambu Station, hunting a man-eating lion at Tsavo.

“You will have to be our tracker.” Tolliver heard the doubt that had crept into his own voice.

Libazo now looked frightened. “Sir, I cannot. I have no idea how to do that.”

“You grew up here. You must know this area like the back of your hand,” Tolliver insisted.

“No, sir. I do not. I have never gone toward Mount Kenya in my life.”

“Bugger all. Well, whom can we get? You must know someone who would be able to show us the way. We need a first-class tracker.”

“I know Kinuthia, sir. He is like me, half Maasai, half Kikuyu. He knows all about traveling through the bush.”

“Perfect. Get him. He will be our guide.”

“I am not sure I can. He serves an Englishman.”

“Which one?”

“The one called Finch Hatton, that the Kikuyu call Bird-with-a-hat-on.”

“Good God!” Tolliver had been trying until that moment to keep his voice low, so that anyone passing in the hall would imagine he was too weak to go about his duties. He had to bite his lip to keep from continuing to shout. “There must be someone else.”

“There are only the men who work for the safari outfitting companies,” Libazo said. “The ones who work for Hilton’s or Tarlton’s. If we wanted one of them we would have to hire him from the outfitters and pay their price.”

Tolliver could not hide his annoyance. And it only got worse when Libazo revealed the gossip the natives were passing about him and Finch Hatton.

“Kinuthia says that you and B’wana Finch Hatton were enemies in your country, sir.”

“What nonsense is that?”

“He said that your schools had a contest every year and that you and B’wana Finch Hatton were in the same contest.”

Tolliver shook his head. It was absurd that anyone this far away should have heard of something that happened that long ago. It was a cricket match at Lord’s nearly ten years ago—Finch Hatton had played for Eton, Tolliver for Harrow. The spectators on both sides had been taken with Finch Hatton’s grace and style, though he had not been the top scorer. There was another chap who had claimed that honor. “Yes, well my school won,” Tolliver said. The more he thought about Denys Finch Hatton—the hero of one and all wherever he went—the more annoying he found him. He told himself that this was separate from his upset over Finch Hatton’s attentions to Vera, though he knew full well he would not care a fig for any of the other differences, if it hadn’t been for Vera.

“Kwai,” he said. “I have to stay in bed or my ruse will be found out. I need you to take a message to Finch Hatton for me. He is in town, is he not?”

“I saw Kinuthia yesterday. B’wana Finch Hatton does not go about without him.”

Tolliver took a paper and pen and scribbled a quick note. “Take this to Finch Hatton right away. I want to see him here in town before I go to the Scottish Mission.” Tolliver would not be an excuse for Finch Hatton going anywhere near Vera McIntosh.

*   *   *

It would have been hard for either Justin Tolliver or Vera McIntosh to imagine how they might have reacted to the events of those days had they known what the other was doing and thinking at that moment. Many days later, Clement McIntosh said, in retrospect, that it was not in the Creator’s plan for those two young people to know. Sometimes it was very difficult for the missionary to accept what he thought to be his God’s will.

As it was, by the time Tolliver sent for Finch Hatton, Vera had already set off with a retinue: five bearers, including Wangari’s brother and also Wangari’s youngest daughter, Muiri, for female company.

Neither the Reverend nor Mrs. McIntosh had the slightest inkling that their daughter was heading northwest, not east as they had given her permission to do. She traveled with money enough to cover what they thought she was going to do. Vera had estimated what her real costs would be and prayed she had enough.

As soon as she had traveled a few kilometers from her parents’ house, she told her Kikuyu companions of her plan. The way toward Fort Hall would have taken her in approximately the same direction as the Athi River Station. If her parents had followed her progress they would have seen no deviation until she detoured to the railroad, bought a second-class ticket for herself and third class for her followers, and space for the bundles the bearers carried.

The 10:21 up train, with a long layover at the Nairobi Station, would take until nearly five in the afternoon to reach Naivasha Station. There she would find Wangari’s uncle, the legendary tracker Ngethe Meru, who had gone with the American president Theodore Roosevelt on his journey into the interior.