4.

Even in the highlands around Nairobi, far away from the torrid tropical climate of the coast, by noontime the heat became oppressive, so it was best to bury the dead quickly. The Kikuyu had no rituals connected with interment of a corpse. They ordinarily left bodies out in the bush; the hyenas cleaned up whatever remained of a tribesman after life was gone. The Christian converts at the mission, of course, learned to put their dead in the churchyard like any other believer in the one true God and in Jesus their savior, for they anticipated—one day—the resurrection of the body. The nonbelieving tribesmen thought such a hope ghoulish at best.

Barely eight hours after the discovery of his brother-in-law’s murder, Clement McIntosh was arranging rites for the next morning. Nurse Freemantle had dressed the body in Pennyman’s best frock coat and striped trousers, not worn since he had left Edinburgh. The mission boys were building a coffin and digging a grave.

Vera and her mother stayed close to one another, but mostly in silence. Her father was dismayed at the fact that his wife would not go to see her brother’s body. He worried that this decision meant she was having a great deal of trouble dealing with her grief, and that it would weigh on her for a long time. “I do not want to say good-bye to him,” was all Blanche would say in response to her husband’s pleas.

All the many novels and stories Vera had read told her that women were the softhearted sex, that they were the ones who would express their emotions, wanted love and tenderness, were vulnerable to hurt. In her family, however, it was not that way at all. It was her father who wept when he listened to the mission children singing carols at Christmastide, who touched her hair and fondly kissed her cheek when he said goodnight, who wrote to her almost daily during that six months when she went to stay with her grandmother in Glasgow when she was ten years old. It was her mother who had insisted that she go “home,” to her home, to be brought up a lady. And it was her father who responded to her pleading letters and decided to bring her back from that luxurious and intensely cold place, where the warmest beings were the dogs and the butler.

Vera sat on the veranda and did not grieve over her uncle. When he first arrived in the Protectorate, he had caused a stir in the country—a real Scottish doctor, someone to care for the colonists’ ills with up-to-date medicine, unlike the doctor in Nairobi who was drunk most of the time. Josiah Pennyman was handsome and exceedingly charming, tall and slender, with shining dark hair, very like Vera’s and her mother’s. Otis had taken after their father—red-haired, florid, and big-boned. Uncle Josiah had a beautiful voice, perfect teeth, and a joke and a smile for everyone—white or black, gentry or civil servant, attractive or plain. Everyone loved him. But he was not a good person, and Vera had learned that he used that magnetism of his not just to conquer the souls of the natives but also the hearts of other white men’s wives. Proper maidens were not meant to know such things, but not even Blanche McIntosh could shield Vera from knowing her uncle Josiah’s reputation. And that was not the only reason she had to think of him as other than a good man.

She wished she could ask her father if a man like her uncle could have gone to heaven. Her father seldom mentioned hell in his sermons. It was more the promise of eternal happiness that he used to motivate goodness in his children and his converts. Surely, though, a just God would not welcome a fornicator like Josiah Pennyman to his side.

Vera got up and walked across the mission compound to the huts of the natives between the back of the hospital and the roadway that led to the railroad stop at Athi River. She went to the only person, other than her father, whom she ever sought out when troubled: Wangari, the Kikuyu woman her mother called her governess and her father called her nanny. The Kikuyu had no word for such a relationship. Wangari called herself Vera and Otis’s nyukwa, their mother. Vera found the statuesque, vital woman outside her hut, peeling a pumpkin. Vera embraced her.

“You are sad, mwari,” Wangari said.

“Not as sad as I think I should be,” Vera said.

“That is sadder than just being sad.”

Vera smiled. She had come here, as she always had even after she was grown, whenever she needed comfort and wisdom, and, as ever, Wangari started to dole them out even before Vera had a chance to sit down. “I think I am supposed to feel a dreadful loss, but I hardly knew my uncle. When I was in Scotland with my granny, he was away living in Edinburgh. By the time he returned to Glasgow I was packed and ready to come home. Since he came here I have never really had a conversation with him—just overheard what he spoke of with my parents. My heart does not know which way to turn.”

With a quick stroke of her iron knife, Wangari split the pumpkin and began to scrape out the seeds. “What can I tell you that will help you choose your way?”

“The police investigator wants to think Gichinga Mbura killed my uncle.”

Wangari’s handsome brown face broke into a smile. “Is this the same English policeman who stirred up your blood by dancing with you?”

The very description stirred Vera’s blood again, in ways she was sure a ladylike missionary’s daughter was not meant to be stirred. “Yes, the same. Kwai Libazo told Captain Tolliver that Gichinga hated my uncle.”

“Yes. That is true. He cursed your uncle. He despises all of us who have taken the water of Christianity. He says we betray our own people by taking the white man’s God. But your uncle—” She broke off for a second and shook her head. She began to cut the pumpkin into large cubes, which she tossed into a clay cooking pot. “He says that your uncle robbed him.”

“Robbed him of what?”

“Think, my daughter. Before your uncle came here, the old Scottish doctor worked to heal the people, but he was not loved by many. Your uncle was like a warrior king. The people thought he could do anything. All came to your uncle for medicine and many took the baptism because he had healed them or their children. Your uncle took away the people’s fear and need for Gichinga Mbura.”

“Do you think Gichinga hated my uncle enough to kill him?”

Wangari took a jug of the salty water the Kikuyu made by charring certain plants. She poured a little into the pot with the pumpkin and placed the pot over the fire burning in a ring of stones on the bare ground. “I cannot say. Mbura must believe that he was fighting your uncle for his own life. He does not know anything but the power of a medicine man. He was losing his position in the world.”

“My uncle was killed with a Maasai spear. Do you think Gichinga Mbura would have used a Maasai spear to kill his worst enemy?”

“No,” Wangari said emphatically.

“Never?”

“Never. He would risk losing his own powers if he betrayed the Kikuyu way with such an act.”