Strange Gods

by Annamaria Alfieri

  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.”

  5.

  By the time Justin Tolliver had changed his clothes, he was called back to the police station. An Indian storekeeper was being held hostage at knifepoint by his brother-in-law over a business dispute. Tolliver much preferred a Hindu with a cutlass to facing the D.C. But soon the welcome distraction was settled and the brother-in-law disarmed and locked up until he cooled off. Evening had descended, in that sudden way it did in Africa. Tolliver knew he could no longer avoid reporting to Cranford, and he knew exactly where to find him at this hour.

  As soon as Tolliver entered the Nairobi Club, he found the district commissioner descending the broad central stairway.

  He approached. “Sir?”

  “My boy! What have you found out about that hideous business of Pennyman?”

  “I wonder, sir, if I might have a private word.”

  “Certainly. What are you drinking?”

  “Gin and quinine water, please, sir.”

  “Always good to take your quinine.” Cranford led Tolliver through the airy gentlemen’s bar and stopped to order drinks from Arjan, the red-turbaned majordomo.

  He took Tolliver into the small, dark-paneled library, which was blessedly empty. They drew leather armchairs into a pool of light under a standing hurricane lamp. It had a leather shade on which the big five game animals had been drawn in black. Other lamps were lighted in the corners.

  Cranford took out a pipe and silver pipe tool and began his ritual of reaming out the bowl. “Tell me then, do we know which bloody savage robbed the good doctor of his young life?” He dumped the contents of the pipe bowl into a marble ashtray on the square mahogany table between their chairs. “I’ll see him swing.” He rapped the pipe on the tray with a sharp tap as if it were the gavel of a judge pronouncing the death sentence.

  “Well, District Commissioner, I don’t think this will be the open-and-shut case we wish it were. The circumstances don’t lend themselves to an immediate conclusion.”

  Cranford paused to fill his pipe from his tobacco pouch. “We must have a quick conclusion. We can’t ruin the reputation of the whole country by allowing people to believe that an important European doctor can be slaughtered with impunity. Find the native who owns the spear and let’s get on with it, man.”

  A tall, slender servant in a white robe, brown brocade vest, and red fez entered. Tolliver and Cranford waited in silence while he drew a wide leather hassock in front of them and set the drinks tray on it.

  Tolliver took up his glass but did not drink. “You see, sir, the natives thereabouts around the mission are Kikuyu, but the doctor was killed with a Maasai spear. The only native in the area who had a motive to kill Dr. Pennyman is a Kikuyu witch doctor. There is considerable doubt that he would have used a Maasai weapon to do the deed.”

  The D.C. lit and puffed on his pipe. Fragrant blue-gray smoke swirled around his head. It matched the color of his hair and of his eyes, which at this second were wide with disbelief. “Why ever not?”

  Tolliver sat forward with his forearms on his knees, holding the cut crystal tumbler in both hands. “It seems his motive for the killing would have been a matter of honor. Evidently, he would never use the weapon of an enemy tribe to defend his honor.”

  “Poppycock! I know full well that a lot of those settlers down there in the Kikuyu territory ignore that tribe’s faults. They say they are scoundrels only on surface, that deep down they are one solid mass of virtues. I disagree, completely. If you told me that story about a Maasai, I might be inclined to accept it. Your Maasai are a violent bunch of beggars, but they are courageous and straightforward. But except for their fecundity and a certain amount of intelligence, the Kikuyu are a blight on our society. They lie, they steal, they poison, they conspire, they are intensely lazy and callously cruel.” He picked up his glass, drained the inch or so of whiskey in the bottom, and poured himself another from the decanter on the tray. He sat back and sighed. “No. Your murderer is the Kikuyu mumbo-jumbo man. You can be sure of it.”

  Tolliver kept his head down to hide his dismay. In a way, he tended to agree with Cranford that swift justice in such a case as this would be best. Local savages mustn’t be allowed to harm subjects of the crown with impunity, but faulty justice was no way to truly civilize the African people. “Certainly, your conclusions are likely to be justified, si
r, but hadn’t we better prove we have the right man to show the natives the fairness of His Majesty’s government?”

  Cranford did not hide his annoyance. “Curse it, Tolliver, who else could have done such a dastardly deed but some barbarian with vengeance on his mind?” He looked into his empty glass as if he wanted another refill, but he did not take one.

  Tolliver steeled himself for the outburst his next revelation was likely to provoke. “There is another possibility, as it happens, sir, and if we are to be completely thorough we must consider it.” Tolliver took a deep breath and finished off his drink.

  “Out with it, man.”

  “Pennyman, it seems, was having an affair with Lucy Buxton. Perhaps—”

  “Now, just wait a minute.”

  Tolliver did just that, though the intervening silence made him want to say something, anything.

  “You have heard of Pandora’s box.”

  “Yes, sir, I have, but I—”

  “She is a beauty, that Lucy Buxton.”

  “Yes, sir, she is, and very, very sad at the moment.”

  “You saw her out there?” Cranford looked into the bowl of his pipe, which had gone out.

  “No, sir. I stopped by Buxton’s office for a moment when I came back to town, just to get an inkling of where he stood on this.”

  “And?”

  “Mrs. Buxton came in, and they had a row.”

  Cranford sucked on his pipe, and looked into the bowl again. He tapped out the dead ashes and put the pipe in the breast pocket of his jacket. He looked disappointedly into his empty glass and rose. “Have it your way if you must, but do it with the least amount of noise and trouble. Eliminate that business as quietly and quickly as you can and get the native bugger into custody. The sooner we hang him for this, the less damage it will do.”

  “Yes, sir,” Tolliver said with less enthusiasm than the D.C.’s exalted rank warranted.

  Passing through the lobby of the club on his way to his quarters, Tolliver was dismayed to be accosted by Lucy Buxton, herself, tipsy and teary.

  “I have to talk to you,” she said. Before he could say a word in response, she drew him into the deserted tearoom, lit only by one lamp that sat on a table near the door. She threw her arms around him and started to weep openly.

  He tried to pry her from around his neck. “Mrs. Buxton, please, may I get you some water? A coffee?”

  She held on so tightly that he was sure he would hurt her if he tried to drag her off him. “You saw my husband, what a plain old fat man he has become? He was beautiful when we met. He’s Irish, you know. He was handsome in that way that only Irish men can be.”

  She threw her head back and looked up at him. He had his hands on her forearms. Her eyes were bright, the shade of blue he saw in his own mirror when he shaved. “Let us try to find you a coffee, Mrs. Buxton.”

  “You are not Irish, are you?”

  “No.”

  “You are beautiful, though. You are very beautiful.” She lifted her knee and rubbed it up the inside of his thigh.

  He tightened his grip on her forearms.

  At that moment, D.C. Cranford and Lord Delamere came to the darkened doorway. “Why in God’s name are you doing that in here?” Delamere demanded.

  “Tolliver,” Cranford said with a smirk. “I will ask you to be in my office at eight in the morning. We will speak before we go to that confounded funeral.”

  6.

  Once he had extricated himself from the alternately weeping and seductive Lucy Buxton, Justin Tolliver spent the night composing explanations he might deliver to Cranford and to his superior in the Protectorate’s police chain of command, if it came to an inquiry that serious. He also had to fight off remembrances—which brought on desire—of his afternoons in the arms of Lillian, Lady Gresham, a woman not unlike Lucy in physique: fair and blond, statuesque, the type who would dress as Diana the huntress in a tableau. Just before dawn, his thoughts turned to Vera McIntosh, the antithesis of those hungry women—dark-haired, olive-skinned, slight, and graceful as a fairy forest creature.

  When Ndege, his manservant, woke him at seven, he thought matters through again and decided he’d best not open the conversation by defending himself to Cranford in the matter of Lucy Buxton. He would let the D.C. speak his disapproval and then counter with the facts. There was enough gossip in the town about Lucy’s drinking to make Cranford see sense.

  By the time Tolliver marched into Government House and to Cranford’s office on the cool and shaded south side of the building, he had changed his mind six or seven times on how to defend himself. Cranford gave him no time to further consider the topic. His grin when Tolliver entered soon turned to a chuckle, accompanied by dancing bushy gray eyebrows. “Bit enthusiastic, our Lucy girl, wouldn’t you say, Tolliver?” Uncharacteristically, he reached his hand across the desk, as if Justin were an equal and not someone who should salute on entering.

  Tolliver shook the D.C.’s hand and smiled, he hoped just a bit apologetically. Whatever else Delamere and Cranford’s “discovery” did, it seemed to have raised his reputation with the higher-ups in British East African society.

  “The African air does make the ladies frisky. I rather enjoy that myself.” With a gesture, Cranford invited Tolliver to sit. He reached for the silver bell on his desk. “Shall I get us some tea?”

  “No thank you.” Tolliver left off the “sir.” “I have just breakfasted.”

  Glancing over Tolliver’s white dress uniform, Cranford got to the point. “You are going to the funeral, I see.”

  “Of course, sir. I am acquainted with the family.”

  “Take a squad with you to stand by until after the service,” Cranford said. The jolly tone had left his voice. “Whilst you are out there, I want you to arrest that witch doctor.”

  Tolliver squared his shoulders. “With all due respect, sir, we have not investigated enough to conclude that he is guilty. As I said yesterday, it would be best if we gathered enough evidence to convict him as we would any Englishman. Conciliatory treatment will keep the situation calm. If we stir up resentment—”

  Cranford shooed away his words. “The creature dresses up in feathers and dances around to drumbeats. What does he know of English justice? Confound it, man, the little barbarian killed our doctor. Does your conciliatory approach extend to letting them get away with murder?”

  Tolliver wished he had asked for the tea. Sipping it would give him precious seconds to think at this moment. “Please, sir, I am not saying we should not prosecute the villain. Only that we should be absolutely certain we have the right man before we hang him. We want to show the natives how much better off they will be if they adopt our way of life. Isn’t that right?”

  Cranford grimaced. “I’ll have none of these philosophical questions muddying up the waters, Tolliver. Strong measures backed by force are the only thing these treacherous bush dwellers understand. You must know that.”

  Tolliver knew he was on thin ice, but this was a point he could not concede. If he was not in his current line of work to make the world a better place, why was he here at all? He could have taken his father’s advice and gone to New York to woo an heiress. “If we destroy an important tribesman, we may find ourselves putting down a rebellion. I know I owe it to you to do as you say, but please, sir, am I then forbidden to consider other explanations for what might have happened before we destroy Gichinga Mbura’s life?”

  Cranford stood up. He was dressed in black for the funeral. It made him look like an executioner. “You can get your proof after he is in jail. Lock him up first and ask questions later. I state this as a direct order.”

  * * *

  Funerals were meant to be sad, Vera knew, but there was something about this one that made it extremely so. It surprised her what a great number of settlers had come to the service. Practically every British person for miles around, and a huge contingent from the town had journeyed out to the mission. The intensity of the grief they expressed took
her completely by surprise. Their sad faces contrasted with the surpassing beauty of the setting: with the flowering coffee fields, the delicate and deep greens of the hills and forests, luxuriant after the long rains. Everything around them was vibrant with life and fecundity, yet the mourners focused only on the wooden box, draped with the blue and white flag of the Church of Scotland and on her tragic-faced father, who could barely get out the words of the service.

  In the chapel, the Kikuyu Christians, whom Vera knew to be saddened and terribly frightened, had yielded their customary places to the European settlers who crowded in on this singular occasion. The natives, wrapped in their cloths of red or orange-brown, stood at the sides and the back of the chapel, a phalanx of color framing the black-clad white people. Vera bowed her head, ashamed of her own amusing thought that if the natives had dressed in white, her uncle’s funeral might have been attended by whites in black and blacks in white.

  Vera had taken her mother’s place at the organ. She pumped the bellows with her feet and played “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” without glancing at the notes in the hymnal that stood before her on the oak music stand. She wondered again, as she had over and over during the past twenty-four hours, whether her arrantly seductive uncle could possibly be nearer to any god whatsoever. A god who would welcome him would be nothing like the benign, but chaste one her father had taught her to love.

  At end of the prayers for the dead, the elders of the Scots community of Nairobi served as pallbearers. Her mother, silent tears running down her cheeks, followed the coffin out of the chapel to the tiny churchyard that separated the house of worship from the hospital. She stood beside Vera at the grave. As soon as her husband closed his prayer book, Blanche McIntosh took a handful of dirt, dropped it onto the coffin, and with only the briefest bow and no words at all for those who had come to comfort her in her grief, she left the assembled mourners and walked straight into her house without even a backward glance. That left Vera and her father to greet and console those who had, in theory, come to console them. The natives filed away to their circle of huts at the edge of the wood. The black-clad Europeans then stood about and whispered to one another.