Strange Gods

by Annamaria Alfieri

  “I’ll take every care of her,” Tolliver said, hoping her father took that as a vow of honorable intentions.

  They went to fetch her horse, which waited in the shade between the stable and the hay shed. “My father gave her to me as a gift,” Vera said. “He named her Patience. He said he wanted to give me the gift of patience.” She chuckled at her own failings.

  With barely a boost from the groom she mounted, with that fairy grace of hers, as if she could fly if she set her mind to it. She sat the horse astride, as girls always rode here in Africa, not sidesaddle like proper women in England. Tolliver liked this better. In foxhunts at home, he always thought the ladies looked too precarious to take the jumps. He had seen men astride fall many times. He could not fathom how the ladies kept their seat. He did not have any such worry about Vera. He imagined that if her horse stumbled, she would just rise up a few feet and then come down gently on her toes.

  “Why are you smiling so?” she asked as they set out, with the picnic basket attached behind her saddle.

  He felt the confounded blush, which he was sure gave the lie to what he said, “Who could fail to smile on such a day as this, in such a place as this?”

  “Not I.” She turned her horse through the rows of the plantation, toward the river. Natives in their dark orange shukas sang as they worked between the phalanxes of plants. The blossoms were brown at the edges, their bittersweet scent muted. With Vera in the lead, they easily forded the narrow river at a shallow spot near the coffee processing shed.

  On the other side, the grassy plain stretched out like a great, vivid green sea, dotted here and there with acacias. The April growth was short and emerald, and it smelled of spice and moisture. Off to their left, a couple of hunting hawks circled in the blue, looking for their luncheon meal. In the distance, antelope he could not name moved in single file, silhouetted against the gray-blue hills. On a day such as this, the snow-covered peaks of Mount Kenya were visible, so high their white might have been clouds. Justin Tolliver gazed out for miles and miles and felt his heart swell, as if it were trying to take all of this vast landscape into itself. Vera looked back at him, and he was afraid that she saw he was on the verge of weeping from the beauty of it. “It’s wonderful,” he managed to say.

  “It makes me so happy that you can see that.”

  “How could anyone with a soul not see it?”

  She gave a little regretful grin. “Then there are many people who have no souls.” She looked around her again and back into his eyes. She pointed to an outcropping where a pair of trees huddled against a rocky spur. “That’s my favorite picnic spot,” she said. “At this season of year, there is a spring to water the horses. I want to show you the view from there.” She turned her mare and trotted off in that direction.

  The sun was on them, and he was grateful for the breeze of moving along at a pace. When they had climbed up and reached the shade of the trees, she alit, more like a butterfly than a person.

  They tied up the horses where they could drink from a little pool formed by water trickling down a rock. Tolliver soaked his neckerchief and cooled the back of his neck. Vera took off her hat and shook out her damp, dark curls. She put her hands in the cool water and patted some on her face. “Hot work, this picnicking,” she said with a laugh.

  She took the basket and spread a muslin cloth on the grass in the shade. She went and got her rifle from the holster on her saddle and laid it beside the tree trunk. Justin realized he would not have thought to do that, but he took his and did the same.

  She pointed behind Tolliver. “Look,” she said.

  He turned. From this angle, they could see back to the river that glittered like a silver ribbon, and beyond it, the plantation, the hospital, and the little mission chapel. Even those man-made things took on a majesty from their surroundings, a loveliness he never expected to find outside his own beautiful home in England. But this, this was greater even than that. That was all tamed and manicured; this was more thrilling. The things people put here gave a bit of contrast and emphasized the beauty of the purely wild.

  He pointed. “What animals are they? I can’t tell from here.”

  She looked up from setting out the food and shaded her eyes. “Hartebeests. They have a muzzle kind of like a horse’s. That large group farther on are Cape buffalo. You want to give them plenty of space. They don’t want to eat you, but they do not like intruders. Their horns are sharp and their hooves are deadly.”

  “I’ll remember that,” he said, though he already knew the warning from the hunting safaris he had taken.

  She took his hand to lead him to the picnic spread. It startled him when she touched him.

  She drew her hand away quickly. “I am sorry. I— I—”

  “Don’t be,” he said.

  “I’ll never be a proper British lady,” she said. She sat down on a little hummock at the base of the tree where she had spread the cloth. He sat upon the ground across from her. She was flustered, fussing now with bread rolls and little dishes.

  He reached across and put his fingers on the back of her right hand. “Please,” he said, “you mustn’t worry about me, about that sort of thing with me, I mean.”

  “My mother is always warning me,” she said with a tinge of exasperation in her voice. She handed him a plate with four little sandwiches. “They are chicken. Is that alright?”

  “Yes, thank you.” He also accepted a glass of lemonade.

  “Good. I brought lots. That’s one of the things Mother says. That I am always too hungry, like a boy. I suppose boys are ordinarily the hungry ones.” She could hear herself prattling on and sounding foolish. This was nothing like the conversation she had been daydreaming about for the past two days. “Mother means well.”

  He finished chewing and swallowed the buttery bite in his mouth. It was really quite delicious. “Mothers usually do,” he said, “but that does not mean that they are always right.”

  “Mine wants me to think like a girl who was born and bred in the Scottish upper classes, which was how she was raised.” She gestured out to the panorama below them. “But I was born here. I have spent but five months in Scotland on two visits, and I hated it there. Everything was cold, the weather, the beds, even my granny and her friends.”

  “You feel a part of this then?” He gestured, too. The sun was past its zenith, and the scene below them was bathed in a golden light. The shadows of a few puffy clouds fell here and there in the green expanse. At some point, a herd of impala had come out of the woods to graze between them and the river.

  “Not only feel a part of it. I am a part of it,” she said. Her eyes followed his as he took it all in. She wanted to ask him if that made her as desirable as the land before him, but even she knew one didn’t ask such a question.

  “You are part of it. And that is lovely.” There was a sincerity in his eyes that made her heart ache.

  “Actually, I do feel a part of it, but not entirely,” she said. And then words poured out of her: all her fears about who she was and who she wasn’t. “The Africans have their tribes. They know where they belong. The white people all have their cliques, the civil servants, businessmen, and bankers; the farmers, settlers, and safari men. Each group has its little circle. Even the missionaries, I suppose, but they all call Scotland or England home. I want to call this home. I do call it home, but the European farmers and gentry don’t think much of the missionaries, so they don’t want me. I don’t feel a part of them. I often feel as if I don’t belong anywhere.”

  He reached for another sandwich, but the plate was empty. He had eaten them up while she was talking.

  She laughed and reached into the basket for another plateful. “I brought tons.” She passed them to him and then took one for herself. “I am afraid I have been boring you.”

  “Not in the least. Actually, I feel very much the same,” he said.

  “You? That cannot be. You are—” She was going to say “perfect,” but she stopped herself just in
time. She was sure if she went in that direction more than just her feelings about herself would come pouring out of her, things she would never have the courage to say to him, about how much she wanted him. She ate her sandwich instead. There was something so beautiful about the nape of his neck that she ached to kiss it. She loved him. Another thing she could never say to him.

  He stretched out beside the picnic cloth with his head propped up on his hand. “What were you going to say I am?” A prig, he thought. Or a stuffed shirt.

  “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just that you’d fit in anywhere.”

  “Which means I really don’t belong anywhere,” he said. “Like you. Oh, I have all the right bloodlines, but I spoiled it all by deciding to come here and serve in my present capacity. If I had acquired land, that sort of thing, they would have thought nothing of it. I would have been one of a group very like me in background. But I am not…” He stumbled over what to reveal. “I am not ready for that yet.” He didn’t say that he wanted to be married before he settled into a life like that, as he sometimes said to his male friends. He needed to get to know her better before he started that sort of talk. And he would never say how poverty stricken he was.

  “At least you have your work,” she said. “That gives you a position in life.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And sport. I do fit in with the lads when I play cricket or polo.”

  She was rummaging in the basket, bringing out a tin of little cakes.

  “On the playing field is where I have always felt most at home,” he was saying and reaching for one of the sweets. “In sport the rules are clear and—”

  “Shh—” She patted the air in front of her with her palms.

  He sat up. One of the horses whinnied.

  She stood and reached for the rifles behind her. He stood, too. “Back up,” she said.

  The horses stomped and kicked, dragged on the reins that bound them to the tree that shaded them.

  She handed him his rifle. He moved in front of her. “Hyena,” she said very quietly and evenly. “Do you see it?”

  Just as she asked, he did: large and spotted, moving very quickly down the rock escarpment, making for them. He raised his rifle.

  “There’s another and another. Shoot,” she said and raised her rifle, too.

  He took the first shot, and the lead animal fell. A few feet off from the fallen hyena, the horses were in turmoil. He reloaded. She was ready but paused. The second animal turned tail and ran. A third, farther up, never came into full view but also made a hasty retreat. He kept his rifle aimed in their direction. She lowered hers and put her trigger hand on his shoulder. They stood perfectly still, as close together as they had been when they danced. “They are gone, I think,” he said.

  Her hand squeezed his upper arm. He heard her take in a deep breath. “I hate them. They are so ugly,” she said. “My father tells me they are God’s creatures, that they rarely attack people. The Kikuyu say they keep the land clean. But I have seen them take down a buffalo. One of them took the baby brother of a Kikuyu girl who was my playmate, when I was five years old. A sleeping infant.”

  He lowered the rifle. The danger had passed, but his thudding heart did not settle. It would take only the slightest movement for him to turn and take her in his arms. It took a great effort for him not to.

  She let go of his arm. “Perhaps we had better go before their relatives descend on us,” she said. Her voice, ordinarily low for a girl so slight, had turned husky.

  “Are you alright? You’ve had a scare.”

  She laughed, making a silvery sound. “Not for the first time. My home,” she said, “is quite a bit more beautiful, but also a lot more dangerous than the place my parents call by that name.”

  They wrapped up the picnic things in the cloth. Vera popped another sweet into Tolliver’s mouth. She did not seem to realize what a gesture of intimacy that was to him.

  They rode home with the sun lowering behind them and their shadows astride their horses side by side leading them along as they went. The way back seemed to take but a fraction of the time it had taken them to reach the picnic spot.

  “Thank you,” they said to each other simultaneously as they dismounted near the stable.

  He looked up at the sky. “I’ll have just enough light to make it home,” he said. He hoped she heard the regret in his voice.

  “Go on then,” she said. “You have your match tomorrow.”

  “Yes.” He wanted to linger but knew he could not.

  “For luck,” she said, and stood on tiptoe and gave him a swift kiss on the lips and ran away home.

  11.

  Both Justin Tolliver and Vera McIntosh thought often about that kiss over the next two days. If she had given it for luck, Tolliver made the most of it and saw to it that his team won the polo match on Sunday.

  At the celebratory dinner that followed, Lucy Buxton approached him.

  Tolliver had at that point completely abandoned Nurse Freemantle’s prohibitions and accepted more than one too many whiskeys offered him by his team’s supporters. In his cups, with his libido stimulated by his day with Vera but no hope of release there, he did not know how he would resist the lady’s advances, or if he wanted to. In fact the nearer she got to his corner of the ballroom, the more beautiful she looked in her blue beaded gown that clung so delicately to her curves, which drove away all thought of Lord Delamere’s warning about Lucy.

  He smiled broadly at her and made a halfhearted stab at rising to greet her when she reached his side. “Sorry, my lady,” he said, not too drunk to feel his grin to be lopsided. “I’m a little wobbly on my feet just now, but I would love to have you join me in my little corner of the world. Won’t you have a seat?”

  He watched her blue-beaded backside as she took the chair to his right. There were other things he was supposed to be thinking about, but he could not quite remember what they were. “What can I do for you?” he asked, though he was sure he knew the answer and was growing ever more enthusiastic about the prospect.

  Tolliver was nearly too drunk to see the truth when it came to him. “Fetching as you look with the whiskey stars in your eyes, oh hero of the polo field,” Lucy said with a laugh, “I have not come to you for that purpose.”

  Tolliver thought to answer her, but he was sure he would slur his words if he tried.

  Lucy went on. “I want you to invite me for breakfast tomorrow morning.”

  He shrugged, which she had the sense to interpret as a negative response.

  “Don’t worry, it needn’t be early. Why don’t we say at ten?” She stood. “Don’t get up. I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself.” She giggled. “I do think it’s time for you to find your pillow.”

  She looked quite wonderful from behind as she walked away, a fact Tolliver had quite forgotten by the time she approached him the following morning in the dining room at the club. His head hurt too much for sexual fantasies. Though quite debilitated, he had enough brainpower left to wonder at this, especially given his prolonged state of celibacy. He wondered if he was getting old. He’d have his twenty-fourth birthday this year. That could not possibly be too old. The randiest men he knew were quite a bit older than that. The thought made his head hurt more.

  When Ndege had wakened him at nine, he had only the vaguest recollection of having seen Lucy in the ballroom the night before, and none at all of having agreed to have breakfast with her. But a note from the lady had arrived that morning to remind him, and Tolliver had arrived at the club with but a few minutes to spare. He had barely taken his seat when she came toward him with her graceful strides and said, sotto voce, “I could see the headache pain in your eyes from halfway across the room. I’ll whisper, not to make it worse.”

  Tolliver had risen when she approached and wished she would hurry and sit down. “Please join me. What will you have?”

  “Just a coffee. I had breakfast ages ago.” She looked around the dining room, which was, happily, empty except for the two
of them and the waiter. The Monday morning business breakfast meetings had ended, and the important and self-important of Nairobi had gone off to their respective desks. It suddenly occurred to Tolliver that if Cranford saw him and Lucy together in the morning he might think they had spent the night together. That thought intensified the pain splitting his forehead. He reached for his coffee cup.

  “First of all,” Lucy said. “I want to apologize for my unladylike behavior toward you over the past several days. I was very drunk, and you are just too damned attractive.”

  Tolliver did not know where to look, much less what to say. “You need not have come here to apologize,” he said. “I think you were grieving, and it got the better of you.”

  She looked at him for longer than was comfortable for him before she spoke again. “When I agreed to marry Kirk he was every bit as gorgeous as you are now,” she said at last. “I could not have imagined that in fifteen years he would have turned into the slug he now is. I was twenty and he was thirty. If I had let myself go as he has…” She did not complete the thought. She did not need to.

  “As I said, Mrs.—um—Lucy, you need not apologize to me. Let us forget it ever happened. I have to go on with my investigation, and it would be best if you and I did not see anything of each other until that is over. To tell you the truth, I am late getting to work now. As you undoubtedly saw, I overdid the celebrating last evening.”

  The waiter approached, and Lucy Buxton ordered a coffee. She turned to Tolliver with an almost motherly concern in her eyes. “I can see you are not at your bright-eyed best. I will get to the point. I did not come just to apologize. I said all that first because I want you to understand the seriousness of what I say next. It is about your investigating my husband in the death of Josiah Pennyman.”

  Tolliver had barely opened his mouth, when she waved away his objection. “No. No. Don’t be shocked at how much I know. You must learn that everyone knows everything here. It is almost totally impossible for a person to have a conversation with anyone in a public place without it becoming common knowledge within a few hours.”