by Isobel Chace
'Even if he were your brother, I can't see what good you thought you could do by coming out to Kenya on your own,' James Montgomery pointed out.
Annot sighed. 'My mother has more faith in my capabilities than you have,' she said.
`Ridiculous! What were you supposed to do?'
Annot studied his well-defined features with ill-concealed anxiety. 'Find him, I suppose.' She continued, 'I don't know how much you know about Jeremy—'
'More than you do, I daresay!'
The interruption added a note of steel to her voice. 'You don't seem to know very much about him,' she said. 'You don't even know where he is!'
'Nor do you!' he pointed out.
'No,' she admitted, 'but I do know what he's doing. And, until he comes back, I'm going to stay in his house and see what sort of a farmer he's turned out to be.'
'You're going to do what?'
The nervous quiver in her stomach spread upwards and she shivered. 'You can't stop me!' she dared him.
'I don't have to!' he retorted sharply. 'Great Scott, girl, don't you know anything about Jeremy at all? He hasn't got a farm! He's barely got a house. If he wants a bath, he comes over here to have one and for most of his meals
too, when he's here, which isn't often! '
Annot blenched. 'What happened to his farm?'
'He sold out.'
`To you?'
James Montgomery shook his head. 'I wouldn't have him within shouting distance of any farm of 'mine! No, he sold out to an African co-operative under the Africanisation of farmland scheme. He got a much better price than he deserved, too, considering the state of the land.' His contempt reached out across the room and chilled her.
'Jeremy didn't pretend to be a great farmer,' she defended her uncle.
'It would have been hard to be a worse one. It used to make my blood boil to see him lounging about while the place went td pieces all round him. People like him ought to have been cleared off the land long ago. Since he sold out the rate of production has gone up several hundred per cent.'
Annot countered, 'Perhaps he wasn't much interested in farming. He's always been a photographer first and a farmer second.'
Mr Montgomery made an impatient noise that demoralised her still further. 'He's bone idle! He spent every penny he got for the farm on a Range Rover and a new camera, and off he went into the blue. That was the last any of us saw of him!'
'Did you look for him?'
James Montgomery stared at her in silence for a long moment. 'Where do you suggest I should have begun the search?'
'I don't know.' She pulled herself together with difficulty. 'I shall have to start somewhere!'
He towered over her and she was very conscious of the sheer male strength of his physique. It did nothing for her immediate comfort.
'Don't be silly!' he said. 'You'd do better to go straight back to England. He'll turn up when he's good and ready.'
'He may do,' she conceded, 'but when? The magazine he's working for won't wait forever. That's the other reason
I'm here. Mother suggested I should finish his assignment for him if he didn't get back in time. The magazine was agreeable—just, and so here I am!
'Just like that?'
She nodded briefly. 'I can cope. I'm not asking for anything from anyone else! If you'll show me the way to Jeremy's house—'
'When I'm good and ready!' He was blazingly angry, but not it seemed any longer with her. 'You won't be able to stay there, but you may as well see it. I'll phone a hotel in Nairobi and drive you in before it gets dark—meanwhile I'll tell the cook you're staying on for a meal. Would you care to see the garden?'
Her heart knocked painfully against her ribs; it took more courage than she could easily summon up to defy him. 'I don't care what the house is like, Mr Montgomery, that's where I'm staying!'
His fingers closed round her arm. 'You'll do as you're told ! '
Forced to her feet, she stood stock still until he released her with a murmured apology. 'I'm sure Mrs Drummond likes the masterful touch,' she put in sourly.
'Annot, shut up!'
'I haven't said you could call me Annot!' she snapped, rubbing her arm.
`It's Scottish, isn't it?'
She gaped at him. No one had ever known the origin of her name before; she had thought of it as being all her own, that it had a rarity value that somehow brushed off on her. 'Yes, it is,' she said reluctantly.
`Are you Scottish, Miss Lindsay?'
'My mother is. Her name is Annis. Annot is a variation of that, or Agnes. It's very unusual.'
'As unusual as its owner?'
She was annoyed he could read her so easily. 'I don't claim to be special in any way—'
'Don't you? A girl who's never bored, and who will throw herself into the breach for her uncle without a second thought? I'd say you were either very special or very stupid, Miss Lindsay.'
'It isn't much to come out to Kenya—'
'Not for a man,' he said dryly.
She dismissed that with a casual shrug. 'There wasn't a man available. And anyway, I don't see what he could have done that I can't do equally well!'
He gave her a slanting look. 'You'd better come and look at the garden before we quarrel again—'
'I'm not going to quarrel with you, Mr Montgomery, the whole thing is perfectly simple. I'm going to get on with what I came out here to do—and you can't stop me! Well, you can't, can you?'
'I think I might be able to,' he answered smoothly, 'How?' she demanded.
'Don't you really know, Miss Lindsay?'
She stirred uncomfortably. 'You'd better call me Annot after all,' she compromised, hoping to change the subject. 'Thank you. Will you call me James?'
He sounded so serious she knew he was mocking her. 'Yes,' she agreed. The strange thing was that she was flattered that he should ask her to use his first name, yet with most people she would never have thought of doing anything else. Was she so much in awe of him? she wondered, and came to the conclusion that perhaps she was, which was in itself a ridiculous state of affairs.
'It's quite an easy name to pronounce,' he assured her without a glimmer of a smile, 'but perhaps you don't care for it?'
'Yes, of course I do! I like it very much.'
'But not its owner?'
'I don't know you well enough to say,' she countered quickly, and stepped out on to the terrace before he could say anything further to embarrass her. He followed her, walking slowly by her side across the vividly green, springy lawn.
'It's incredible,' she said in her most social tone of voice, 'that you've been able to create such an oasis of beauty here when it's so dry all around. Have you a secret supply of water?'
`Not just a pretty face, Miss Lindsay? How do you come to know about our water problems out here?'
'We had a farm here ourselves when I was a child. Not in the Rift Valley, we grew sheep close to Molo. The land is much richer where we were.'
'The rainfall is much higher,' he agreed.
Before he could go on and say anything else, she lifted her head and looked him straight in the eyes. Molo is a long way from anywhere, but I never heard my mother complain of loneliness. We couldn't pop into Nairobi for the day from there!'
'In -those days you had more neighbours of your own kind,' he retorted. 'It might have been different if you had never seen a white face from one week's end to another.'
Her eyes fell. There was some truth in what he said, though she didn't believe for a moment that it would have made any difference to her mother of all people. She liked people, all people, and the only time Annot had seen her really, angry was when she had discovered by accident the appalling conditions some of the workers had been expected to live in on a neighbouring farm.
'Are you lonely for your own kind?' she asked.
'I haven't been so far.' He stopped beside a yellow-flowering sugar bush, touching the long leaves with gentle fingers. 'The farm is called after this plant,' he told her, 'the Masai c
all it Ol-Orte. They called the spring and the
stream that runs through the place after the flower, and I called the farm after that.'
`Ol-Orte,' she repeated, savouring the name on her tongue. 'What is Jeremy's place called?'
'He hasn't got a place:
'You said he has a house!'
'A shack. It's actually on my land. I let him have it rent free.'
She turned to him in surprise. 'Now why do you do that?' she wondered.
`He had nowhere else to go. Don't make too much of it, Annot, it wasn't much of a favour! Nor is he the only one who comes and goes on my land at will. The Masai have a manyatta over there which gets positively crowded when their cousins the Samburu come visiting. I've never turned anyone off my land yet, unless they bring diseased cattle with them, or try to run their beasts with mine.'
`Why not?' Annot inquired, genuinely interested.
'God gave us the land as he gave us the air above. We don't charge people rent for breathing.'
She digested that in silence. 'How long have you been living here?' she said at last.
He smiled slowly. long enough to understand something of how the natives think,' he responded. 'Was that what you wanted to know?'
She nodded. 'I suppose it was. Why did you write to Mother about Jeremy?'
'He wasn't well when he left here—he gets recurring bouts of malaria and he won't do anything about it. I thought the whole expedition ill-judged and ill-planned.' He hesitated. 'I suppose it was another way of washing my hands of him. He can be a tiresome neighbour and I didn't want his fate on my conscience.'
`You don't like him,' she accused him.
`No, Annot, I don't. You'd do much better to forget all
about him and go back to England. If he's in any trouble, it will have been entirely of his own making. Why should you risk your neck for him?'
'I'm his niece,' she pointed out. 'Besides, I don't believe there's any danger in finishing his assignment and having a look round for him. What on earth could happen to me?'
'In Africa you never know—'
'Oh, come on! I've lived here too, you know!' she reminded him.
'Under rather different circumstances. You'll understand better, perhaps, when I show you where he lives.'
'Where I'm going to live.'
'Not on my land, you're not!'
She set her chin at a belligerent angle. 'I shan't do anything to your cattle!' she defied him, then her curiosity got the better of her determination. 'What kind of cattle do you run?' she asked him.
'The native cattle, the humped Boran. It's a bit dry here for anything else, and the rainfall isn't enough to grow any crops. The Boran isn't a bad beef producer, though, it lives on next to nothing and it butchers well. When I first came here, I thought of crossing them with a European breed, but I came to the conclusion that they wouldn't do half so well here. Like their people, they're much more demanding than the indigenous breed!'
'Is that a hit at Jeremy—and me?' she demanded.
He moved on nonchalantly to where some bougainvillea spilled over a frame to make a shady walk underneath. 'If the cap fits—'
'Because I haven't asked you for anything!' she denied violently.
He turned round so quickly that she collided with him
'Oh, yes, you have] You've been asking for trouble ever since I first set eyes on you, Miss Annot Lindsay! And you know it ! '
`I don't know what you mean, and I don't think I want to know!' she told him.
`No?' He raised a hand to her face and traced the curves of her lips with his finger. 'Girls were made to love and kiss, not to go rushing off on harebrained adventures by themselves!'
She took a step backwards. 'You're very old-fashioned— and not very kind,' she protested.
`Kind?' He looked amused. `Do you want me to be kind to you, Annot?'
'I'd like you to leave me alone!'
The smile reached his eyes. 'Would you? I doubt it.' He bent his head and touched his lips to her cheek. 'Isn't that what you want?'
She considered slapping his face, but knew even as she did so that she had already left it too late for such an action to be spontaneous. The next best thing, she thought, was to pass it off as coolly as she suspected Judith Drummond would do.
'What I want, Mr Montgomery—'
'James.'
`Oh, all right then, James! What I want is to be allowed to settle into Jeremy's shack in peace. He'll have left the details of his assignment somewhere around and I need to think about that too, all by myself!'
James straightened up, shrugging his shoulders. 'As you like,' he murmured. 'I suppose you've been ballooning before?' he added on a throwaway note. 'It's a bit frightening at first—or so I'm told.'
`Ballooning?'
'Didn't you know?' He raised an eyebrow at her. 'Perhaps that'll make you change your mind about takingon where Jeremy left off?'
Annot made a play of admiring an hibiscus vitifolius while she gave herself time to recover. The flowers were
yellow, with dark centres, something like an enormous black-eyed Susan, and she had always liked it. The Masai and the Kipsigis make their arrow-shafts from the stems of the shrub—she remembered being told that as a child. She touched the enormous stamens and brushed the pollen off her fingers on the green grass.
'I seldom change my mind—about anything,' she said aloud. 'Even Father allows that I have a very determined nature.'
'Determined, or stubborn?' James asked her. 'You have a stubborn set to your chin.'
'Only when people try to stop me from doing what I have to,' she replied, squinting up at him. 'One has to do what one has to do, even you must admit that?'
'That's a man's philosophy,' he answered. 'If you were a man I'd probably admire you for it, but no one expects a girl to prove herself by trying to achieve the impossible. The very idea of going up in a balloon frightens you to death, doesn't it? Be sensible, Annot! Nobody is going to think any less of you if you leave Jeremy to his own devices, certainly not I!'
'But I should.' Her voice quavered despite herself. 'I should feel a pig if I didn't do what I set out to do, finish his assignment, and find him too—if I can. I'll do it too, you see if I don't!'
He sighed. 'I knew you were going to be a perishing nuisance,' he said, 'I could feel it in my bones the moment I saw you lying in my bed asleep. You're more than a nuisance, you're the most tiresome wench I ever came across! If you must know, I hate to be made uncomfortable, and I can see we're both going to be thoroughly uncomfortable before we're through. Especially me, because you're not going to sleep in Jeremy's shack, I am!'
Annot stood up with a bounce. 'But I don't mind—' He put his hands on her shoulders and looked deep into
her eyes. 'Don't press your luck, little one,' he advised. `One of the advantages of being female is that the male gives up the best he has for you. There are other advantages, but you'll have time to learn about them later on. The one advantage the man has is to run things his way, and that's something you'd better learn straight away, because this time I'm telling you. Next time, I won't tell you anything —I'll bring it home to you not in words, but in actions. Okay?'
`You mean you're coming with me?' she demanded.
'No, I. don't. I mean' that you're coming with me—providing you behave yourself and don't get in my way.' He shook her with surprising gentleness. `What else can I do, Annot Lindsay? I can't let you go by yourself, can I?'
`Can't you?' she asked.
`No, I can't! And you know as well as I do why not!'
CHAPTER THREE
ANNOT stood in the doorway of the hut, her mind in a whirl. How could anyone live in such a pigsty? Especially, how could any relative of hers live there? What had happened to Jeremy since she had last seen him, that he should be so unaware of his surroundings? The place smelt of dung far more than the nearby Masai enclosure which was built of it, and the roof badly needed re-thatching. She suspected there were bats lurking in the
shadows too, but she had not stopped to investigate the interior further. More than anything else, however, she was glad that she had not had to spend a night there by herself. She had more reason to be grateful to James Montgomery than she had known.
Her eyes swept the distant horizon, marvelling at the miles and miles that were spread out before her. Close by were the thorn bushes, the wind whistling through their holed seed-cases, rivalling the many insect noises of the bush. A lizard in magnificent array of reds and blues was sunning himself on a nearby flat-topped stone, his less brilliant females darting in and out of the crevices. Beyond the stone was a group of umbrella trees casting little pools of shadow on the rust-coloured earth. In one of these pools stood a Samburu moran, a warrior of his tribe, his scarlet loincloth a flash of brightness against the sun-bleached background. He was leaning on his spear, one foot tucked up against his thigh and his head thrown back, his long hair, dressed with a mixture of pulverised mud and fat, reaching down almost to his shoulder-blades. It was a typically African scene, such as could be seen nowhere else, and she had not known how much she had missed it. It
made her heart ache within her see the blues and purples of the distant hills and the ever-present puffs of clouds round the edges of the sky.
There was a movement behind her and she stirred reluctantly, moving away from the doorway. James Montgomery ducked his head and came out into the sunshine, standing beside her in silence for a few minutes.
'I'm sorry,' she said at last, 'I didn't know. I'll get myself a room in Nairobi—'
'I've slept in worse places. Don't fuss, Annot!'
'I'm not fussing,' she denied, 'only I didn't know what it was like. I wouldn't ask a dog to sleep in such a hovel!'
'Jeremy's dog certainly agrees with you about that! He thinks he was made for better things!'
'I daresay he does,' Annot said dryly. 'But you shouldn't allow him to sleep on your bed, all the same. What he needs is a firm hand.'
James grinned. 'Like somebody else I can think of! I gather you lost the battle?'
