Strange Gods

by Annamaria Alfieri

  It was a question Tolliver knew was talked about. Policing was not the done thing for the son of an earl, not even for a second son. Men like Tolliver were meant to find their own way in the world. That had always been the case. But Delamere knew, as well as Justin Tolliver, that things had changed drastically in Britain since Tolliver’s birth. Landed families’ futures were no longer assured. Bankrolls for second sons had vanished from many families. Delamere himself had come here, as many of their class had, to try to preserve some sort of life they could call dignified.

  Tolliver had taken a commission in the army—perfectly normal for a nobleman. Once in Africa, his next step ought to have been to take land and become a farmer. But that required some capital, and Justin had not even that rather paltry amount. Still, even in his impecunious state, he had chosen to do something completely out of the ordinary. Men of his bloodlines and education were meant to ensure their futures by marrying women with money, not by becoming policemen. Tolliver delayed his response by accepting a glass of water and sipping it for a moment. “I had been here in East Africa once before you may remember, Lord Delamere.”

  Delamere chuckled. “I remember it well. You and your friend, what was his name?”

  “Granville Stokes.”

  Delamere laughed again. “I remember him well. You two cut a very wide swath through the available ladies as I recall.”

  Tolliver looked at the Turkish carpet and tried his best not to blush. “I wanted to come back here, but I had learned my lesson the first time. I am not suited to an idle life. I was not happy with myself on my first visit. I found myself at sixes and sevens, and too much taken up by distractions.”

  “So it wasn’t Lillian Gresham you came back to find.”

  “No, sir. After spending some time at home, I began to realize that I longed to be back in Africa. The main chance for chaps like me who settle here is to take a farm but I wanted a bit more adventure, a bit more of a challenge than trying to avoid bankruptcy. At least for a couple of years. Frankly, sir, I did not expect people’s attitudes to be so negative about my joining the police force. In South Africa there were many such as I serving as quasi-military policemen.” He realized how close he had come to insinuating that Delamere was one of the snobs. At least, he didn’t blush about it. “At any rate, I am very happy to be here in Africa.”

  Delamere smiled. “I understand very well how this place draws one. It gets into one’s blood.” A wistfulness had come into Lord Delamere’s ordinarily lively voice.

  “I chose the police service because it was desperate for staff, and I thought it would give me the chance to serve king and country and to be off in the wilderness from time to time when duty drew me there. I started out knowing almost nothing of the law or how a policeman is meant to do his work. I wish I could speak more of the local languages, but in the main I am not at all unhappy with my assignment.”

  “It suits you, I think,” Delamere said. “But you do have one failing at it.”

  “What is that, sir?” Tolliver was on edge now. Delamere’s expression turned mischievous.

  “You do not participate sufficiently in the local gossip, son. Half the clues you will ever find among the Europeans you will learn from gossip.”

  It was Tolliver’s turn to chuckle.

  “I am not being entirely facetious,” Delamere said. He raised his hand to the waiter in the corner and signaled for another cup of tea. “Many people come here with hopes that lead them into all sorts of unsavory activity, and I don’t mean merely of the sexual kind.” He hiked his chair closer to Tolliver’s and leaned toward him. “Let me tell you something worth knowing.” Delamere proceeded softly but clearly. “Shortly after Pennyman arrived, he took a leasehold on a farm. You know, I suppose, that any European can take a ninety-nine year lease at very good terms, but one cannot be awarded a land grant unless one can prove to the land officer that he has at least four hundred British pounds to spend to develop the property—build, plant, that sort of thing. Do you know all this?”

  Tolliver knew it very well. It was the discovery of these rules that had dashed his hopes of taking land for himself, given his practically nonexistent allowance from his father. “Yes, sir, I do.”

  Delamere picked up the tea, saucer and all, as soon as the waiter put it down.

  Tolliver’s mouth watered at the aroma. It would be two more days before he would have a cuppa.

  “At any rate,” Delamere said, “from what I heard, Pennyman was well-named. He barely had the five pounds to pay the application fee. He had lost his nest egg in some scandal in Edinburgh. The Church of Scotland paid his way here if he promised to work two years at the hospital.

  “But he applied for land?”

  “Yes. Maybe he thought his sister would stake him. She has an inheritance from their father. But his sister would not give him a sou. Yet, he somehow convinced Buxton to stake him a loan. The land officer will accept an assurance from a banker.”

  Tolliver was nonplussed. “I didn’t know one could borrow the money.” The sentence slipped unbidden off his tongue, revealing more about his own circumstances than he wanted to.

  “But when Pennyman went to Buxton for the cash, he was refused the funds because by then—”

  Tolliver heard the evidence coming. “By then Pennyman had taken up with Lucy.”

  Delamere’s cup rattled as he replaced it on the table. “The man was foolish, Tolliver, just foolish. Of all the willing women in the Protectorate, he went for the wife of the man whose approval he most needed to get on in this world.”

  “Because Buxton had found out.”

  “Everyone knew by then. My sister in Hampstead Heath knew. Our Lucy is not what anyone would call discreet.”

  Tolliver looked back at the carpet. He hadn’t known. Delamere was right. He avoided gossip because he thought it trivial and because knowing others’ secrets made him uncomfortable. But if he wanted to be serious about his work, he would have to get used to knowing other people’s embarrassments.

  “In the end,” Delamere said, “Buxton reneged on the loan. Without the means to make improvements, Pennyman’s land had to be confiscated.” Delamere stood up. “So you see, Tolliver, Buxton is unlikely to be your man. He had already had his revenge. Under the circumstances, Pennyman was more likely to have wanted to kill Buxton than vice versa.”

  Tolliver didn’t know what to think of such a statement. Though he could not imagine it ever being a thought he could think about himself, he knew there were many of the gentlemanly class in England who cared more about their money interests than they did about who might be sleeping with their wives. Perhaps Buxton thought ruining Pennyman financially was adequate satisfaction for Pennyman’s seducing Lucy.

  At the moment, however, Delamere was looking very like a man who had had enough of this conversation, and Tolliver had another pressing question he wanted to ask. Not having the faintest idea how to couch it politely, he found himself blurting it out. “Lord Delamere, did Berkeley Cole also have an affair with Lucy Buxton?”

  Delamere looked puzzled for a second but then understood. “Ah, I see. You think my brother-in-law might have been jealous of Pennyman’s affair with Lucy. No such thing. Berkeley had finished with Lucy before Pennyman came on the scene. Cole is the most sought after social companion in the Protectorate. He would not need to pine away for the likes of Lucy. Besides, he doesn’t have a combative bone in his body. He shoots big game, but otherwise he wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Delamere guffawed at his own joke.

  Tolliver smiled though he did not feel at all amused by any of what Delamere had told him. And what Delamere said next sank his heart.

  “I don’t like to have to say this to you, Tolliver, but under the circumstances, I don’t think it at all right that you have been seen around the town in the company of Mrs. Buxton.” He trundled off in the direction of the club’s front door.

  * * *

  Kwai Libazo rode a pony for the third time in his life as h
e again followed behind A.D.S. Tolliver to the Scottish Mission. After months of running with the other native policemen whenever they went out on the Protectorate’s business, Libazo found himself in an enviable position. He had become Tolliver’s translator of choice. Tolliver had said it was because his English was the best of all the others in the native police corps. He had also complimented Kwai on his swift action when they arrested Gichinga Mbura, but Libazo knew it was more than just the words and his strength. Libazo was beginning to understand his English masters and their ways. Many of his fellow policemen still found them quite puzzling and were daunted by the need to translate, not just words, but ideas that did not make any sense to the tribal people. For instance, Libazo knew now that they were on their way to the Kikuyu village near the mission to look for proof.

  It had taken Kwai himself several months of working with Tolliver to really understand the concept of proof—that they needed to establish the person responsible for a crime by collecting facts. The words “proof” and “fact” did not exist in any tribal language that Libazo knew. He had never heard of such a need before he began the work he now enjoyed so much. The ideas that governed the British were hard to fathom, but Libazo was proud to say that he was better at understanding them than any of his rivals in the native corps. And for him it was enough of a reward that, because he was the best, Captain Tolliver also saw to it that Kwai rode this pony.

  The desire to ride horses was something he found very easy to understand about the British. It gave great joy to do it. And not just because it put a person up high where he could see so much better what he passed as he moved along. Also the feeling of speed when the horse ran and being one with the animal, and controlling the beast so much bigger and stronger than oneself. It was making his work wonderful to him. Then there was his learning about the people who had come to live here. To see how a foreign people thought was something one could learn when one acquired their language and tried to understand what they really meant when they spoke their words. That knowing was in itself a source of pleasure. The English were here, and they were not going to go away. They built buildings of stone. They expected to stay as long as those buildings would last, which was a very long while. Much longer than a person could live. Knowing how they thought would always be important.

  As he had the day they first rode here together, Captain Tolliver paused at the crest of the hill and studied the view: the coffee fields, the glistening river where eight or ten kudu were drinking, and the plain beyond where a herd of Cape buffalo grazed, the purple hills in the distance.

  “Can you still see the beauty of it?” Tolliver asked. “You have seen it all of your life. What does it look like to you, Kwai Libazo?”

  “It looks like home, sir.” When the British said the word “home,” they said it like a prayer. To them “home” meant England. But to Kwai Libazo, this was the place whose name should be a prayer.

  “Mmmm.” Tolliver made a sound like a very thirsty man drinking water. As if this scene looked like home to him, too. But Libazo knew that England did not look like this. He had seen pictures of it in the books in the English Mission where he had gone to learn to read and write as a young boy. Those pictures did not look at all like this.

  This day, they did not ride into the mission when they arrived. They went directly to the Kikuyu village where Libazo followed Tolliver’s orders and tried to get the people there to tell him if Gichinga Mbura had left the village during the afternoon or the night before the white doctor was found dead. Over and over, Libazo asked the question and got the same sort of response: one that showed that the person he was asking did not understand why he was asking this, did not know the answer, or would not say. Those same two old women laughed at him again for asking. In the end, Kwai did his best to try to explain to Tolliver that the people of the village would not be what Tolliver wanted them to be, people he would call “reliable witnesses.” It was not in their nature to remark upon or to speak clearly about such things.

  Tolliver became more and more frustrated by this and kept insisting for more than an hour past the time he should have given up. It was not the first time, while working with Tolliver, that Kwai Libazo thought that it must not be a pleasure for a British man, as it was for him, to learn and understand how a foreign people thought.

  In the end, Tolliver had no choice but to stop asking.

  As they walked with their horses along the path to the mission, Kwai asked Tolliver, “Do you think that the medicine man did kill the Scottish doctor?”

  “I am not sure,” Tolliver said, “and in order to accuse him, I have to be sure.”

  “You must have proof,” Libazo said.

  “Exactly so.” Tolliver gave him a look of mild surprise mixed with respect.

  “Then why must you try so hard to find out where he did not go?”

  Tolliver stopped in a shady spot along the path. He dropped his horse’s reins and the animal immediately began to eat the bright green grasses that grew along the edge of the path. Kwai Libazo did the same with his reins, and his pony also followed suit. He felt a little anxious that it would run off if he did not hold on to it or tie it to a tree, but it did not. Perhaps the pony was like him and would stay at his work, though it might be hard. It must find its work difficult. It was not as large as A.D.S. Tolliver’s stallion, and Kwai was only a bit more slender than the captain. Perhaps like Kwai, the pony found enjoyment doing his job.

  “We have this word in English,” Captain Tolliver said in the voice he always used when he was teaching Libazo something. Not like the way he spoke when he gave an order or asked a question. “The word is ‘alibi.’ It means that the person who might have committed a crime can show that he could not have done it because he could prove he was elsewhere when the crime was committed.”

  “So this is why you asked if the villagers had seen Mbura leave or were with him. If he had been with them the whole time, you would know that he could not have been the murderer.”

  “Precisely.” Tolliver gave Kwai one of his approving nods.

  “So we are trying to see if he can prove himself innocent, even though the law says that we have to believe he is innocent unless we can prove him guilty.” This was one of those times that Libazo found it very difficult to tell what the English really meant with their words.

  Tolliver looked as if he wanted to take back that approving nod. “Well, we do have to prove him guilty, but if he had an alibi that we believed in, we would not try to do so.”

  “And the alibi would be that the others in the village say that he was with them?”

  Tolliver smiled but did not nod.

  “But if the villagers knew this and they wanted to save him, they would say what you want to hear, whether it was true or not. They certainly would.”

  “That is why I asked you to talk to so many of them. If some said no, he had never left, and others said yes, he did, we would not trust the ones who said no. We would know that they were not all telling the truth, that some were trying to save him.”

  “But suppose some of them hated him because he had helped their enemies put a curse on them. Then they would say that he had left, when he hadn’t. What then?”

  Tolliver reached for his horse’s reins and started to walk again. “This is what I find so exasperating,” he said. “It is almost impossible with you people to get at the truth.”

  Kwai took his pony and followed. “Exasperating” was a word he liked very much. It helped him understand how he himself felt when this sort of thing happened. The British talked about respect for the “truth” but they did not always tell it themselves. Otherwise, why would their laws spend so much time trying to find out who was lying and who was not? Tolliver found it “exasperating” that the tribal people did not always tell “the truth.” The tribal people knew that the truth was different things to different people. At least that was what Kwai Libazo, who was not a member of any tribe really, knew to be the case.

  * * * />
  Vera McIntosh watched Justin Tolliver as he approached her veranda across the packed earth center of the mission compound. His face carried that same expression as when he discovered her deep in conversation with Denys Finch Hatton.

  She had read enough novels to know that his disapproval of her conversations with Finch Hatton could be based on jealousy, which pleased her in a way. If he was jealous, that would mean he cared for her. Which gave her hope. On the other hand, when she was in town visiting him with Nurse Freemantle, she had heard gossip about him and Lucy Buxton, whom her mother called a hussy. So maybe she should be the one who was jealous. What she could not fathom was how Tolliver could think that Denys Finch Hatton, who by all reports could have had almost any girl in the Protectorate or, for that matter, in all of England, would want her. Men like Finch Hatton did not marry missionary’s daughters, not even ones like her who had a decent pedigree. Men like him married girls with a great deal of money, even if their fathers were in trade.

  Besides, as attractive as everyone thought the desirable Denys, she preferred Tolliver, thought him handsomer, much handsomer, even if not so easy in his manners.

  “Good morning, Captain Tolliver,” she said, getting up and meeting him at the low privet hedge that surrounded their lawn and garden.

  He handed the reins of his horse to his lieutenant, Kwai Libazo. She saw him take notice of the nod and smile that passed between her and Libazo. “Take the horses back to the stable and get them some water.”

  “Njui will give you something for yourself,” Vera said to Libazo. She wondered if Tolliver knew his policeman had come to talk to her privately. She rather thought not.

  Tolliver indicated the chairs on her veranda with a hand that still held a riding crop. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” he asked.

  Ask me to marry you, she thought. Make love to me not that hussy Lucy. She smiled and said, “Certainly. May I tell my mother that you will stay to luncheon?”