Ghosts of Tsavo

by Vered Ehsani

It’s one thing to be born into poverty—I suppose you accustom yourself to your social status after a while—but it’s quite another matter when you fall into poverty.

  Of course, nothing quite so drastic occurred—for the second time in my life, I was saved from the fate of the homeless—but nonetheless, the news was quite grim: Mr. Steward’s investments had failed miserably.

  He revealed the bitter truth one morning over breakfast, a most inappropriate time of day to disclose tragic news. It was best to wait for afternoon tea so as not to interfere too terribly with everyone’s digestion.

  “My dears,” he said, his face stern but his chin quivering (no doubt in anticipation of his wife’s response), “a variety of factors have conspired against me and I am, to be blunt, in financial ruin.”

  His family stared at him with that half-smiling, half-frowning expression that people have upon hearing about an unexpected misfortune, as if caught between the previous happiness and the future sorrow. I continued buttering my toast, for I was no novice to bad, or even dreadful, news.

  He cleared his throat and pulled at his cravat as if it were on too tight. “Fortunately, while destitute, we aren’t without options. Or to be specific, one option. An associate of mine has some business interests in Her Majesty’s protectorate of East Africa…”

  “What? Are you quite serious, Papa?” Lilly, his eighteen-year-old daughter, asked as she toyed with her perfectly coiffed curls. She was no doubt worried more about her upcoming debut into London society than her father’s business.

  Her father attempted to smile. “Yes, my dear, I’m perfectly serious…”

  “Mr. Steward, there’s nothing perfect about this,” Mrs. Steward interrupted as she smacked down her cup. I noted the resulting chip and knew one of the servants would be blamed.

  “No, of course not, dear,” he said. “I just meant…”

  “It’s British East Africa,” young Bobby corrected his father.

  “Exactly,” Mr. Steward said, raising his voice slightly. “So my colleague has kindly offered me a position in the Empire’s project to build a railway connecting its various commercial and political interests.”

  “Railway?” Mrs. Steward said, her puffy eyes narrowing. “Sounds rather nasty of him. What do you know about railways?”

  “Well, I won’t be building the railway myself, just overseeing the accounts,” he said. He licked his lips and again tried to smile, which caused him to appear ill. “Isn’t that exciting? We’ll be part of history.”

  “Oh, you’ll be history all right,” I muttered to myself.

  “What about Aunt Phyllis?” Lilly cried out.

  Mrs. Steward harrumphed, and Mr. Steward shook his head and said no more of his eccentric, widowed aunt and her considerable estate. She had quite cleverly acquired her wealth through marriage to a far older and happily prosperous gentleman who, a few years after the wedding, had conveniently died.

  “Aunt Phyllis won’t part with a penny,” Mrs. Steward said with as much condemnation as could be infused into a voice.

  “And she’s old,” Bobby blurted out, although what her age had to do with her miserliness, I couldn’t grasp for the life of me.

  “The truth is,” Mr. Steward said, his eyes fixed on the basket of toast set before him, “we really have no option but to make our fortunes elsewhere.”

  “What do you mean by ‘we’?” Mrs. Steward asked.

  She might act flighty and foolish as per the social norm, but underneath all the powdered makeup and frilly dresses, there was a woman with some wit to her. Sadly, that woman was dormant most of the time, crushed by the weight of social expectations and nasty gossip.

  “Well, Mrs. Steward, I… You see…” Mr. Steward tugged at his cravat again, his forehead damp, his confidence crumbling under the scrutiny of his family. “It’s just that…” and he mumbled something.

  “What did he say?” Lilly asked Bobby, who shrugged his shoulders, having lost interest in the conversation since it didn’t revolve around him.

  “I’m sure I misheard him,” Mrs. Steward said as she daintily sipped at her teacup with the chip in it. “Your confused father didn’t really just say we can’t afford for any of us to stay here.”

  Mr. Steward gulped. “Ah… Well, I mean to say… Exactly.”

  A second chip joined the first as the cup slammed onto the plate with such a force that I was sure the whole set would crack and shatter into numerous, irreparable shards.

  Mr. Steward held up his hands as if he could placate his wife with such a useless gesture, when only a pot of gold to pay off all debts could suffice at that point.

  “My dear wife,” he pleaded, “I’m completely bankrupt and was forced to sell all our properties, including this very house, to cover the arrears. But don’t fear, we’ll be provided with housing and an adequate salary once in Nairobi.”

  In the ominously deep silence that followed, the silence before the great storm, I paused in my breakfasting and pondered the situation. I shuddered to think what sociable options we might find on the shores of that dark continent.

  Not that I had so many options in London, mind you.

  With no title, property, or inheritance to my name and only a humble savings, dependent on the charity of my relatives and widowed to boot, I could hardly claim to have so many options in the world.

  As if to prove the point, the exact moment Mr. Steward was pronouncing our sentence, Bloody Mary floated through the kitchen wall. I detested when phantoms did that. As I always reminded my dead husband, “Just because your body dies doesn’t mean your manners have to die as well.”

  Needless to say, I was distracted by the sight of her and missed some of the drama unfolding around the table. I’d seldom seen Bloody Mary up close before, despite my tragic past. The gossipy specter liked to appear as a premonition of bad news, although she usually went to Prof. Runal.

  But there she was, floating in front of me, her head bobbing about precariously, it having been partially severed from her neck at the time of her death.

  “You’re aware of what they’re saying in the papers?” Mrs. Steward demanded as she grabbed up the newspaper and slapped it against the table. “There’s a war raging on that continent. A war! They call it the…” And she paused to scan the page. “The Boer War. Our valiant British troops are being slaughtered by those heathens in Africa. Slaughtered, Mr. Steward!”

  She calmed herself enough to add with a sniff, “Not that I have any doubt our brave soldiers will root them out. But will you really condemn us to live on a battlefield?”

  Mr. Steward cleared his throat. “That’s in South Africa, dear. We’re going to East Africa. That’s a good distance away. We should be adequately safe.”

  “Should be?” Mrs. Steward raised her voice further.

  Meanwhile, Bloody Mary pointed a thoroughly unclean finger at me—really, how rude could she be?—and grimaced.

  “Oh dear,” I murmured.

  “Exactly,” Mrs. Steward said. “Even Bee agrees with me.”

  I stared at the finger. It was Bloody Mary’s way of telling the world (or those who could see her) that trouble was in my near future, and it was of the deadly kind.

  Being in the company of humans who were devoid of the capacity to see the supernatural, I couldn’t tell her to float off. So I turned away from her as there was really nothing I could do to avoid whatever fate awaited me.

  Mr. Steward was still valiantly trying to explain the intricacies of the situation. Only later did I conclude that on that fateful day he not only lost his business, but his confidence too, not to mention his precarious position of authority in the family.

  Speaking of the family, no one was particularly interested in the poor man’s business.

  For her part, Mrs. Steward resorted to a near faint and couldn’t be fully revived for the remainder of the day. This wasn’t as disastrous as it sounds, for at least we had a bit of quiet, if not peace, in which to meditate on our misfortunes.r />
  Lilly bemoaned her plight with the statement, “I’m almost eighteen. My grand debut is in a few months. If we go to that God-forsaken place, I shall die a spinster. That is, if a lion doesn’t eat me first.” She made it abundantly and loudly clear that death by lion was the preferred option before dashing away to her room.

  Twelve-year-old Robert Junior was the only one genuinely thrilled with the prospect. “Shall we hunt lions?” he demanded of Mr. Steward.

  “Well, Nairobi is expected to become a transit point for big game hunters,” Mr. Steward said, avoiding a direct answer and thus another possible confrontation. “It’s viewed as a perfect base from which to go on safaris and game hunts.”

  “Hip hip!” Bobby shouted. “I’m going to hunt elephants and lions and tigers.”

  I was fairly certain there were no tigers in Africa, but I didn’t bother to point that out. He was too excited about the prospect of butchering unarmed animals. The little monster.

  I don’t mean that literally, of course. I wasn’t sure I could tolerate a member of my family being a monster. With respect to Bobby, I meant the term more as a description of character, rather than of biology.

  On the bright side, I thought as I contentedly sipped at my third cup of tea, I should be free of smelly werewolves. For surely werewolves were only to be found in northern climes where wolves naturally roamed.

  As far as I knew, Africa was inhabited mainly by lions and elephants, which were bad enough but at least had the manners to stay in the wild and not move into the house down the street.

  I didn’t consider myself a prejudiced person, but wolf-type creatures were at the top of my list of Least Favorite Beasties. When I was a child, one large and nasty dog bit me quite viciously and almost tore my right ear off, confirming in me a distinct distrust and dislike for all things canine.

  At the thought of the bite, I checked that a thick lock of hair was still placed strategically over the ear.

  Back to the point: no more smelly werewolves, which just goes to prove that there’s always some good even in the grimmest of news.

  Or so I firmly believed.

  Chapter 4