Strange Gods

by Annamaria Alfieri

  “Not at all.” Finch Hatton’s charming smile was going full force and entirely lost on Tolliver. “I will organize Kinuthia, some supplies, and porters. You go down to Athi River looking ill. We will pick you up at the mission and set off. I imagine you will not want Vera and her family to know what we are doing.”

  Tolliver barely held his temper. An outburst might put Finch Hatton entirely off. If Tolliver alienated him, he was perfectly capable of taking off after Newland on his own and upstaging Tolliver completely. “Very well. I must set off at once for the hospital. When will you meet me there?”

  “In the morning.”

  Tolliver shook Finch Hatton’s hand, satisfied that he would, at the very least, be able to speak with Vera alone before she saw Finch Hatton again.

  “Tomorrow then,” Denys said with a hearty handshake.

  * * *

  While her up train was stopped for the normal long layover at Nairobi Station, Vera McIntosh, fearing being seen and having her ruse discovered, remained onboard, away from the windows that faced the platform, with her head bowed over a book. Had she gotten off the train, she would very likely have encountered Justin Tolliver being dramatically carried on a stretcher through the inelegant corrugated iron station. He was arranging to travel on the down train toward Athi River and Vera’s home.

  As it was, in that quarter hour they passed very near each other completely unnoticed.

  When Tolliver descended at Athi Station in midafternoon, Kwai Libazo was there with a wagon to take him over the bumpy roads to the hospital. Nurse Freemantle, having been forewarned, had a bed ready for him when he arrived. It took her only moments of examination to spot the deceit. Tolliver did not even bother to try to persuade her that he was ill. He needed her as an ally. He told her his plan to track the possible murderer of Josiah Pennyman without regard to his superior officer’s orders, and he asked for her help. He counted on two things to motivate her: his supposition, from the way she had cared for Pennyman’s corpse, that she had had a tender attachment to the doctor, and in addition his assumption that, like many women who nursed the casualties of the Boer War, she had little respect for officers and the officials of the realm. He must have been right because she immediately agreed to let him stay in hospital overnight in the cause of justice.

  “I would like to speak to Miss McIntosh this evening if at all possible,” he said. He did not add that Vera knew something about the murder weapon that he wanted to hear about, and he did not reveal that Richard Newland was his quarry. “Would you mind asking her to come visit me here? And would you leave us alone together for a few minutes when she does.”

  He had been afraid she would be shocked at the very idea of leaving the missionary’s daughter alone with him.

  But she shocked him instead. “Miss McIntosh is away. She went off this morning with a party of natives to go to Fort Hall for a stay with Frances Bowes, the colonel’s daughter.” The nurse marched away.

  Fear and admiration warred for dominance in Tolliver’s heart. He knew in three blinks of his eyes that Vera had gone on the quest he himself was planning. If ever a girl had the pluck to do such a thing on her own it was Vera. Find her, protect her, his heart shouted at him. He wanted to leap out of bed and speed after her, but he knew that was impossible on his own. He must wait for Finch Hatton and his tracker and their guns and ammunition. But then, when he found Vera, when he could be sure nothing dreadful had happened to her, Denys would be there, too. He could not imagine anything that could rankle him more.

  As Tolliver lay in bed, pretending to the hospital helpers to be weak, inactivity got the better of him. Soon every drop of his blood was alive with anxiety and confusion. His feelings were already at fever pitch, both his admiration for Vera’s courage and his concern for her danger. But soon, a pesky voice joined in, one that came into his head sounding like his father’s. It warned him about his deepening regard for Vera and asked, in the pater’s gruff tones, what kind of girl she was who would lie to her parents and go off on her own on an ill-advised journey into the wilderness. Before long, he could not tell if he should idolize or abhor her. His parents would certainly say this was not the behavior of any girl he should consider as a wife. And a vexing thought kept coming back to him that she had betrayed him by not coming to him with the information she had about the murder weapon. Evidently she had taken Finch Hatton to see the blacksmith. Why had she not taken him? He was, after all, the person in charge of the investigation.

  Until he had heard about Richard Newland’s relationship to the girl Pennyman had assaulted, he had no reason at all to suspect Newland. Had Vera known all this from the beginning? Did perhaps also her parents know of the Pennyman-Newland connection? Had they all been hiding evidence from him? If so, then why would her discovery that Newland had owned the murder weapon precipitate her trip? He could not imagine that her father would have approved of her going off after Newland on her own. He tried to convince himself that she really did go to Fort Hall to visit Frances Bowes.

  The more he lay inert in his bed, the more his mind raced from one possibility to another, and the more muddled he became. When Libazo showed up to tell him that the porters were secreted a mile or so off in the Kikuyu village, Tolliver sent him to talk to the mission natives to confirm what he had concluded about where Vera had gone. After less than half an hour, Kwai returned to say that Wangari, Vera’s nanny, readily told him the truth, on the absolute promise that he would reveal it only to Captain Tolliver. And that Captain Tolliver would not inform her parents.

  Once the fact that Vera was in danger had been confirmed, Tolliver could not concentrate on anything else. He tried to imagine playing Bach on his cello to quiet his thoughts, but imagining the music did not help. He needed to feel it in his body. And now he could not.

  By the time Nurse Freemantle came back to see him, accompanied by a native girl carrying a tray of food, he was in such a state of confusion he could barely formulate a coherent sentence.

  “I have not told the reverend that you are here,” the nurse said. “I was about to, but then I thought, given your true reason, perhaps you would not want him to know.” Her small, piercing dark eyes stared at him expectantly, as if she would read far too much into any answer he gave.

  “To be truthful, I do want to speak to him, but I am a bit tired. I wonder if you would tell him that I am here. Please do not reveal my real reason. And ask him to come to see me after he has had his dinner? Would that be alright?”

  She agreed readily. Tolliver tucked into the roasted meat and native pumpkin with honey dressing. Without being asked, Nurse Freemantle had taken pity on him and sent the girl back with a bottle of dark ale. He wished he had paper and pen to make some notes. Before talking to McIntosh, he needed to sort things through, put the questions that plagued him in proper order and perspective. He continued to wish for his cello and went over the entire chain of events in his mind.

  There were now three men who had very strong motives to have killed Josiah Pennyman. He thought about those motives. He moved the saltcellar to the near left-hand corner of the tray in his lap. Richard Newland was the salt of the earth.

  Tolliver fingered the saltcellar and put the pepper shaker beside it. Kirk Buxton: He had the weakest reason as far as Tolliver could think. Jealousy over Lucy’s liaison with Pennyman? Some men might kill to avenge their honor. But Kirk Buxton did not seem at all the type. Besides, what honor was there in stabbing a man in the back? Or worse yet, as Lucy suggested, hiring someone else to do it? From all Tolliver had heard, Lucy’s affairs were well known and documented before Pennyman even arrived in the Protectorate. Buxton might be peeved about it, but if the banker had ever cared about his wife’s adulteries, he did not seem to anymore.

  Lucy seemed convinced the murderer was her husband, but if Tolliver thought about it, she seemed all too anxious to come up with ways and means and motivations. It niggled at Tolliver that Lucy showed so much determination in the matter. When Tolliv
er didn’t swallow the hired assassin theory, she came up with that story about Buxton wanting to stop Pennyman revealing his underhanded financial dealings. That might have been less far-fetched, except that it was the lovely Lucy’s third try at getting Tolliver to suspect Kirk. If she had had all that information from the beginning, she should have revealed it all at once. Justin hated to think of any woman so coldhearted as to falsely accuse her own husband of murder, especially to slander him with the cowardly act of hiring an assassin.

  Even for a woman whose brain was as addled by drink as Lucy’s, it was a stretch for Tolliver to believe she was giving him anything useful. He wondered for a moment whether all of her attempts at seduction weren’t part of the whole picture, but he remembered full well seeing her down all that drink that day they had had luncheon with the Lord and Lady Delamere. Lucy was a desperate woman. And a pathetic one. Instinct and logic both pointed Tolliver to the conclusion that Buxton was not the killer.

  The crime, the fact that Pennyman was stabbed in the back with a spear, seemed to be one of extreme anger. Not a way of avenging honor or silencing a man about to reveal a secret—as would be the case with Buxton. It was more the kind of thing a man would do to blot out evil.

  Tolliver moved his fork beside the salt and pepper. The simplest explanation, of course, was that Gichinga Mbura actually did kill Pennyman and that D.C. Cranford was right, that all Justin’s insisting on dotting the “i” and crossing the “t” in “justice” was a bloody waste of time.

  Tolliver shook off that doubt. He still believed that the letter of British law must be applied. In a sense it was more important in the case of a native accused of a heinous crime. It was the only way to accomplish the realm’s prime objective. The English were here to bring the Pax Britannica and civilization to the savages. His mind stopped at the word “savages.”

  Having considered the behaviors of Pennyman, Buxton, and Lucy, what right did he have to call the natives “savages”? True, they went about practically naked, but it seemed to him that, while their skin was dark, their souls were lighter than many of his countrymen’s.

  He picked up the fork and reversed its direction. The spear in question had belonged to Richard Newland. Newland had precisely the right kind of motive to make an outraged person thrust a weapon into a man, wherever he could stick it. If he was the murderer, Vera was heading toward him now. There was a vast open area between here and Berkeley Cole’s farm. She could be anywhere out there. And when people went on safari they could easily be gone a month or six weeks. They carried with them the wherewithal to live in the wilderness. A needle in a haystack in Yorkshire would be easier to find than even a large party of human beings who could be anywhere between the Scottish Mission and the slopes of Mount Kenya.

  Tolliver was toying with the idea of betraying Vera to her father when the native girl arrived to take his tray. “The reverend has asked me to say he is here to see you,” she said. She spoke her English with a native lilt and a touch of Scottish burr that was perfectly charming. “Tell him to please come in straightaway.”

  She took away the tray with the symbols of Tolliver’s suspects that had helped his thinking but also increased his fears for Vera. His conversation with the Reverend McIntosh revealed nothing new. He told Tolliver that Vera had gone to Fort Hall, and for all the world he acted as if he believed it. Tolliver did not disabuse him of the fact.

  16.

  Vera’s journey was delayed for an hour when it was discovered that the tracks had been undermined by digging animals for reasons no one could fathom. The crew onboard had had to make repairs before they could continue on their way toward Lake Victoria. By the time Vera and her motley group descended at Naivasha, it was dark.

  As they stood on the platform, the two engines pulled the train away into the primeval darkness, throwing up red sparks like a miniature fireworks display. Once the train’s headlight and lanterns had gone, the station and its surroundings were barely visible. Naivasha consisted of a sad collection of grass and wattle shacks and the boma of the local tax collector, which included some huts inhabited by his crew of ragtag Indian and native guards. No one had alighted other than Vera and her Kikuyu companions.

  The Indian stationmaster lit their way with a single oil lamp. Ngethe Meru’s village was three miles away, too far to travel by night. The collector, a Welshman in his cups, staggered out and offered Vera a place in his dwelling. Vera did not think it merited the name “house.” As politely as she could, she declined his hospitality. She went instead with her Kikuyu into the one-room station. The Indian asked again if she would not feel more comfortable with the B’wana Collector, but she assured him she preferred to stay in the station.

  He brought her and the others some roasted pumpkin, some lovely, chewy Indian bread, and for her alone a crockery bottle of lemonade and quinine water. He left her the oil lamp and went off to his own supper. She had Muiri unpack a camp bed for her and lay down fully dressed to wait for dawn.

  * * *

  The next morning while Vera was making her way to the nearby native village and the hut of Ngethe Meru, Justin Tolliver was sixty-five miles away, as the crow flies. In this case it would have been a pied crow of the horn of Africa, whose black-and-white markings nearly resembled the formal dinner dress favored by the British around well-set tables in Nairobi and Mombasa—as if the diners were in London or Bombay.

  Having passed a largely sleepless night, Tolliver was barely awake when Denys Finch Hatton arrived with his tracker and a miraculously well-equipped entourage of porters and gunbearers. Tolliver’s good luck in having such a crew would have overjoyed him if he had not immediately contrasted it with the paucity of comfort and safety that Vera was likely to be experiencing. He had to get to her as quickly as possible and still look as if he was pursuing Newland. If his luck held, it would all be one and the same thing.

  He tried his best to rush Finch Hatton away before the interloper learned anything of Vera’s whereabouts, but he failed at that, too. Blanche McIntosh greeted Denys warmly and told him immediately how sorry Vera would have been to miss him, but that she was away visiting a friend at Fort Hall.

  And as soon as Mrs. McIntosh left them, Denys immediately guessed the truth of where Vera had actually gone.

  “What, if anything, do we know of the Newland party’s direction?” Finch Hatton asked.

  “They left from Nyeri,” Tolliver said, trying his best to sound as cooperative about it as he knew he had to be under the circumstances.

  Finch Hatton discussed the matter with Kinuthia in Maasai. Libazo whispered to Tolliver that the tracker was saying that if they trekked twelve hours a day, they would reach Nyeri in three days. Vera was a day ahead of them, so they would have to make at least eighteen hours a day if they were going to catch her up before she got anywhere near the Newland party.

  As it happened, at the same time, Vera was assessing her own possible speed and reaching a far less optimistic conclusion. Her guide, once she arrived in his village, turned out to be a disappointment. Ngethe Meru was still a legend, but he was now a man well past his prime. Vera worried that she would burst into tears when she saw that he was no longer the vital, powerful person she remembered. She had last seen him when she was fourteen. In the five years while she was blossoming into full womanhood, he had sunk all too quickly into old age.

  Africans revered the elderly for their wisdom and experience. She prayed those qualities would make up for the stamina he certainly would lack. Enthusiasm he had aplenty. He immediately agreed to go with her. He longed for an opportunity to return to his former life trekking through the wilderness, but he had few chances of it anymore because what safari parties there were looked for fitter men with keener eyes.

  Worst of all, Vera was astonished to find that the terrain around Naivasha was mountainous. All she knew of the route of the Newland party was that they had gone first to Nyeri and that they intended to end up at Berkeley Cole’s farm. But to get from where
she was to Nyeri in a straight line would take them over some very high hills and rough areas. Ngethe said they would have to skirt the highest peaks, which would mean a longer distance than Vera had anticipated from the map she had consulted. Ngethe estimated two or three days, which seemed an eternity to her. But Ngethe made ready very quickly and took with him seven stalwart warriors armed with swords and spears, and that made Vera feel a bit better.

  Their party proceeded. Their route took them through forested areas, largely in the shade, making it easier for them to keep moving through midday. But by around two in the afternoon, Ngethe was so tired that Vera wished she had a wagon for him to ride on. But that would have needed oxen. Impossible under the circumstances.

  With a sigh, she slowed her pace, walking along beside him. All she could do was pin her hopes on the fact that the Newland party was out to hunt, and therefore they would stop sometimes for days in the same place. In the meanwhile, she vowed to do her best and take in the scene around her. After all, travel through the wilderness was one of her greatest pleasures. The marvels here—the birds, the monkeys, even the ill-tempered baboons—would ordinarily be entertainment enough. She hung her binoculars around her neck and tried to welcome the stops where Ngethe had to nap in the shade for a while before he could go on. They gave her the chance to look about her at the scenery while she rested her own legs.

  * * *

  As it happened, Tolliver marched his party until night fell completely and darkness made movement inadvisable. The crescent moon was waxing, but it gave them insufficient light. Torches would not suffice. The starlight was beautiful, but with nothing else to light their way, the territory was treacherous.

  Tolliver was up at first light and pushing them to make tracks. Under these conditions, thirteen or fourteen hours would be their maximum. The loveliness of his surroundings warred with the turmoil of his thoughts. He comforted himself by imagining that one day he and Vera would enjoy peace and harmony in these places. But even those thoughts led to more and bitter imaginings. Was she rushing ahead of him to warn Newland that his guilt had been discovered? What he longed for was to take her in his arms and love her. But was he going to be forced to arrest her as an accessory to murder? That phantom kiss she had bestowed on him lingered in his thoughts and made him wish he could fly and find her.