Strange Gods

by Annamaria Alfieri

He took a gold watch from the deep pocket of his khaki uniform trousers, looked at it, and said, “Yes, please.”

  When they were settled in the wicker chairs and she had served him a glass of water, she expected him to tell her about his progress in the investigation into her uncle’s death. Instead he said, “Tell me about your brother.”

  “Otis?” It was a silly question. She had only one brother. But it was such a surprising subject. “Surely you have met him.”

  “In a manner of speaking. I have seen him at the horse trials and cricket matches at the club. I have never really had a conversation with him.”

  “He’s like any other almost-fourteen-year-old boy, I imagine,” she said. Not that she knew very many British boys Otis’s age. They were all sent back to England to school by the time they reached ten years of age. “He went back home to attend Saint Andrews for a time, but he grew ill, in his lungs. The damp, my uncle said. Uncle Josiah brought him back to Africa when he came out last fall. He said Otis should not pass another winter in the wind and rain of the Scottish coast.” She looked into Tolliver’s blue eyes. “Why do you ask?”

  “Your father said he left on a safari two days before your uncle’s—” He didn’t seem to want to say the word “murder.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I wanted to go, too. I actually tried to run off with them early on the morning that he left. But my mother caught me and stopped me.” The blue eyes registered shock, but only for a second. “I suppose you think me wicked for trying to go against my mother’s wishes,” she said.

  “Not entirely. How is it that he was allowed to go and you were not?”

  “You don’t know my mother. She believes that women must be kept as busy as possible. She has me constantly working on things. She said that she could not spare me when I asked to go. It wasn’t true. She didn’t think it ladylike, is all.”

  She was aware that she sounded petulant. She was just happy that she had not revealed to him that her mother was trying to make her look properly marriageable before June when she would turn twenty and, if her mother were to be believed, shortly thereafter turn into an old maid.

  Tolliver didn’t respond, which Vera liked a great deal. Finch Hatton would have said something clever, at which she would have had to laugh, but she didn’t think this subject at all funny.

  Tolliver, on the other hand, made her feel comfortable, and when she thought he liked her, it seemed to be for things about her and not what she did or did not represent. “My mother believes that proper young British girls do not spend their time shooting buffaloes and rhinoceros.”

  Now he did laugh. “Oh, I think proper English girls might do so, if there were such animals on the Downs or lurking in the hedgerows.”

  She grinned. “Well here I am being dull. And Otis has gone off to have his adventure.” She picked a piece of lint off her skirt. “I am glad for him actually. He has been spared this sadness. Oh, he’ll have to hear of it when he returns, certainly, but the shock will have worn off the rest of us a bit by then.”

  “He’ll be gone at least a month, I imagine.”

  She nodded. “And it is better, under the circumstances, that I have stayed behind. To be here with my mother and father at this moment.”

  He put his hands together and squeezed them between his knees, leaning toward her. He smelled of lemons and leather. “I wonder,” he asked, “if you would like to come to watch the polo match next Sunday afternoon at the Gymkhana?”

  Her heart wobbled. Every ounce of her wanted to say yes. “I don’t think I can. I think my mother expects me to be in mourning.” She bit on her lip. She hated having to say that. He might take it as a criticism of himself.

  He blushed, something she had begun to find extremely endearing. “Oh, of course. How could I be so stupid?”

  “Not stupid. It was a lovely idea,” she said. “I do hope you will ask me again.” Her longing for his company got the better of her. “I would ask you to come for a visit here, instead of my coming to the club that day, but you will be playing in the match, I imagine.”

  “I will. By then I will be free of Nurse Fremantle’s dictums.”

  “If you are free on Saturday,” she said, desperately trying to sound matter-of-fact and only lightly interested, “perhaps you would like to come for a picnic on the Kikuyu reserve. It should be fine weather. We could ride out with a basket.” She did not say “just the two of us.”

  The look he gave her was analytical and made her apprehensive, but then he smiled and said, “That would be lovely. What time shall I come?”

  “It will be getting dark by six, and the ride out to the nicest spot will take nearly an hour. Shall we say you arrive around noon?”

  “I shall.”

  She could not resist a tiny tease. “And no overdoing tennis early in the day and having a relapse.”

  He appraised her again. “Will your father let us go alone, just the two of us?”

  10.

  Early on the next day, Tolliver made for Kirk Buxton’s office at the Standard Bank of India. He needed to interview the bank manager, and he wanted to avoid any encounter with Lucy. As much as she drank, Tolliver imagined that she was not an early riser. As for himself, minding Nurse Freemantle’s warnings, he was taking his quinine water straight these days, though it tasted quite vile without the gin to sweeten it.

  He found Buxton at his desk, reading the newspaper, and with but a halfhearted showing of polite chitchat, got directly to the point. “I am sure you understand that I must rule out any involvement of yours in the death of Josiah Pennyman. I am afraid I will have to know where you were and whom you were with on the evening of Wednesday and the wee hours of Thursday, a week ago.”

  Buxton sighed, but did not object. He seemed such a lethargic, cynical man, it was hard to imagine him becoming worked up enough to kill a snake, much less a fellow human being. He lifted an appointments calendar on his desk and thumbed it back a page. “On Wednesday evening, I was involved in a bridge tournament at the Nairobi Club. That newcomer Baron Blixen was my partner. We won all of our rubbers until the final, when we were defeated by the team of Sir Percy Girouard and Mr. John Ainsworth.” Buxton said the names of the victors quite triumphantly, which made absolute sense, since Sir Percy was the Governor of the Protectorate, the highest authority in the land, and his partner one of its provincial commissioners.

  “I see,” Justin managed to say. The answer prickled him. He did not want to have to accuse Buxton of murder, but he did not like to be stopped cold in his tracks in his pursuit of the truth. “At what time did the tournament end?”

  Buxton looked even smugger. “At about two in the morning. And then the final foursome passed nearly an hour standing one another drinks in the bar before staggering home.”

  Tolliver thanked Buxton as politely as he could and left. Since Pennyman had died sometime between midnight and three in the morning, according to the formidable Nurse Freemantle, Buxton had an alibi—if his story held.

  Without permission from D.C. Cranford, Tolliver could hardly approach Sir Percy, given his exalted position. He could not just walk in and question Ainsworth either for that matter. Cranford would never allow it. “Protocol, my boy,” he would say. But Tolliver was determined to dot every “i” and cross every “t.” And there was nothing stopping him from getting corroborating evidence from Baron Blixen, who was barely an acquaintance, but was a fellow tennis player, who often took his luncheon in the club’s dining room. Dinners, rumor had it, he took with whichever of the socialites of the Protectorate wanted him on any particular evening. Tolliver had also had many such invitations when he arrived, when, being the son of the 7th Earl of Bilbrough and the great-grandson of Admiral Wentworth, hero of the Napoleonic Wars, gave him some cachet with the settlers. That soon wore off once he joined the police force, and when the recent influx of new settlers brought them bigger fish—like the Swede with a title in addition to the right bloodlines.

  Tolliver found Bror Bli
xen just sitting down in the club dining room. He was a rather slope-shouldered man with thinning light brown hair, but a pleasant face and a ready smile. “I beg your pardon,” Tolliver said, extending his hand and introducing himself.

  The baron, holding his napkin, rose half out of his chair and shook Justin’s hand with a warm, firm grip. “Of course. I have admired your skills at polo. You are a wonderful rider.”

  “Thank you. I enjoy the sport. I wonder if I could trouble you to have a coffee with me after your meal?”

  “Please,” Blixen said, indicating the chair opposite him. “Won’t you join me? I have yet to order.”

  “If you don’t mind?”

  “Not at all,” the baron said. “I will be glad of your company. There is a match on Sunday I believe.”

  “Yes. I am looking forward to it, Baron.”

  “Call me Blix. Everyone else does.”

  They ordered their meal, and the conversation continued much as it had begun. Blix turned out to be a friendly and charming man. His accent made him sound decidedly German, which would not have put him in good stead in the Protectorate. The British had had, from the outset, a conflicted and uneasy relationship with German East Africa to its south. Many of the decisions Britain had made of how to comport itself in this part of Africa were based on that rivalry. But Bror Blixen had none of the arrogance Tolliver would have expected from a German. He was easy company and surprisingly full of wit for a man who was not speaking his native language.

  “Now,” Blix said, as they were served cheese plates toward the end of the meal, “I imagine, by the way you first approached me, that you must have a question you wanted to ask.”

  Tolliver asked him about the bridge tournament.

  He shook his head and looked crestfallen. “Buxton and I lost in the last rubber. I can tell you this,” he said with a chuckle. “If Sir Percy pursues the rights of the British crown in East Africa with half the determination and sangfroid with which he went after the Nairobi Club bridge championship, your king has nothing to fear.”

  Tolliver smiled despite the seriousness of the questions in his mind. “Can you tell me what happened after the game was over?”

  Blixen gave him a questioning look but answered readily. “I am afraid Sir Percy and John Ainsworth also won the drinks-buying contest in the bar afterward. I overindulged in the extreme. I had a terrible headache and a meeting with the land officer the next morning, to go out and inspect a farm I am hoping to take to grow coffee. I remember wishing that the coffee was already there for the drinking.”

  Tolliver was sorry to have to spoil Blixen’s fun. “What time would you say the party broke up?”

  Blix’s expression turned serious. He nodded knowingly. “I see. This is official business.” He held up a hand to stop Tolliver’s apology. “It was nearly three when I went to bed. Arjan, the majordomo, had to put Buxton in a rickshaw. He could barely walk when he left.”

  * * *

  Approaching her father’s study door, Vera heard her mother say, in a voice much louder than she usually used, “He could not have known until recently. Otherwise, why would he have come here,” she said. “He was a monster.”

  Vera slowed her step, but her mother said nothing more. Her father said something, but so quietly she could not hear his words, so she knocked on the door.

  “Come.” They spoke in unison. It was not the first time she had heard them do that.

  “Come in, lass,” her father said as the door opened. “You might as well know about this.”

  She took a seat on the ottoman near her father’s desk. “What is it, father?” There was a metal box open on the desk in front of him, and he held a sheaf of papers in his hand. He put them in the box, locked it, and put the key in his vest pocket.

  “We have been going through your uncle’s effects,” her mother said, her voice even, carrying none of the emotion Vera had heard from the hallway. But something in her father’s expression made Vera wary.

  “You have found something upsetting.”

  A look that ought to have gone with a dropped gauntlet passed from her mother to her father.

  He pulled his chair closer to Vera. “Your uncle has squandered every penny of his inheritance,” he said. “He was a brilliant doctor, but the rest of his conduct was not in the same league.”

  “What does that matter to us?”

  Her mother said, “I had had hopes for what he might do for Otis, since it seemed your uncle would never marry.”

  “Why would he never marry? Women seemed to like him very much. He wasn’t so very old.”

  “He was forty-four,” she said. And now Vera knew the answer to a question her mother would never give her. Her mother’s age—thirty-nine. She had told Vera she was five years younger than Josiah. That meant that her mother had been barely twenty when Vera was born. And it explained why she was so focused on Vera not becoming an old maid on her next birthday.

  She wondered how her mother felt, having lost her only brother. She knew how bereft she would be if she ever lost Otis. She had adored him from the moment he was born, felt part sister, part mother to him, though he was less than six years younger than she. She wondered if her uncle had had similar feelings for his baby sister. Perhaps men did not have those instincts. No one ever spoke of male instincts as far as Vera knew. They spoke only of women’s, and then only of maternal ones. But she did not think her mother felt about her what she felt about Otis. She could not find a maternal instinct in her mother. When it came to Vera, anyway, Blanche McIntosh seemed more interested in having her always at her side to get things done. She was much more loving toward Otis, always bragging about how much he looked like his father. There was no doubt that her mother loved her father, practically revered him.

  “What made you think my uncle would never marry?”

  Blanche McIntosh looked away from her daughter. “He told me; that’s all. And I believed him.” Vera recognized that the lightness in her mother’s voice was forced and thought she really must have loved her brother and missed him. She went and sat on the floor beside the armchair at her mother’s feet. “I am so sorry for your loss, mama,” she said. She wished there was something she could say that would comfort her mother, but what that might be was completely beyond her.

  Her mother did something she had never done before. She put her hand on Vera’s head and caressed her hair.

  Vera looked up at her and smiled. “I have news I think you will like,” she said. “I know how happy you were that Captain Tolliver asked me to dance so often. Well, tomorrow he is coming to go picnicking with me on the Kikuyu Reserve. He particularly asked if we could go, just the two of us.” Behind her, her father stirred, but before he had a chance to speak, she looked imploringly into her mother’s face. “It will be alright, won’t it, Mother. You know you can trust him. He is such a gentleman. And perhaps he has something to say that he would want to say to me alone.”

  Her father stood up quickly, but not before her mother had said, “Yes.”

  * * *

  The coffee blossoms were beginning to fade, but the view of the Scottish Mission still lifted Justin Tolliver’s heart. He felt this panorama would thrill him for the rest of his life no matter how many times he saw it. And today he would ride out into it with Vera McIntosh, which also lifted his heart. He had desired other women’s bodies, but with her he also desired her company. She held opinions with which he could never agree, and she amazed him by frankly expressing them, despite his disagreement. Her complete lack of self-consciousness about this made him like her more and more. He could see that she might yield her body to him in the right circumstances, but never her mind. That made her more interesting than a girl who would always agree because she saw being agreeable as the quickest way to win him. Even Lillian Gresham had pretended to think that everything he said was biblically important. Vera was genuine.

  He picked his way down the horse trail from the top of the hill to the veranda of her house. S
he was already sitting there with a colorful Kikuyu basket next to her chair.

  Vera watched him approach and let her heart revel in the fact that she would be alone with him for hours. She wanted him to try to kiss her. She wanted him to want her, and she was afraid he might not.

  “Just be yourself,” her mother had advised. And Wangari had taken the advice one step further. “In Africa, we do not have this kind of love that you talk about,” she had said. “We want to know how a husband and wife will work together for their family. You want him to think of you as a woman who will be useful. Your mother is right. You must be with him the girl you will always be. If he thinks you are someone else besides yourself, and he marries the woman you show him to attract him, you will have to spend the rest of your life trying to be that person.” That all sounded very wise indeed, but Vera thought that she absolutely wanted to spend the rest of her life being the girl Justin Tolliver desired.

  “It is a beautiful day, as I promised you it would be,” she said and smiled up at him as he slid off his horse. She handed him a tumbler of water without his having to ask. He polished it off in three gulps.

  Her father came out of the house. It occurred to Justin that perhaps, later in the day, he would tell the Reverend McIntosh about his investigation, but he would not spoil Vera’s fun in the meanwhile.

  “Good afternoon, my lad,” the missionary said. He looked at Tolliver’s horse. “Good, you have a rifle,” he said.

  “A must,” Tolliver replied. “The shortest way here, as you know, passes through some pretty dense woods.”

  McIntosh nodded. “Vera, girl, you take a rifle, too. Better to be safe than sorry in case you run into anything out there that’s hungry for something larger than a sandwich.”

  “It’s already on my saddle on Patience, Father. Here we go then.” She took back the glass and handed Tolliver the basket.

  Her father put a hand on Tolliver’s shoulder and said more with one glance into the younger man’s eyes than he could have with a month of Sunday sermons.