by Paula McLain
I felt heat prickle along the tops of my ears. “I don’t need a governess. I’ll do the lessons.”
“It’s already done. This is for the best—you’ll see.”
A horrible woman named Miss Le May was found for me, and then another when a dead black mamba happened to turn up in Miss Le May’s bed. All told, three governesses failed as well as a handful of tutors, and my father finally seemed to give up on the idea. No more tutors appeared on the horizon, and I began to believe I had won and felt pleased with myself for battling so well.
At the end of October, I turned twelve. Not long after, my father arranged for us to go away for a few days, just the two of us. Though the trip was for business and had nothing to do with me, I was glad to be invited along, since the alternative would have been to stay at home alone with Mrs. O.
We headed for Nairobi by train to settle some dealings my father had there with the bank. When we were finished in town, we went north to Kabete Station to visit my father’s friend Jim Elkington on his ranch at the edge of the Kikuyu Reserve. As we rode, I sang out bits of Swahili and Bantu tunes. Twende, twende kupigana, went one warrior’s song I loved. Let us go, let us go, to fight. When I tired of my own voice, I asked my father to tell me stories. In general, he was close-lipped, hoarding his words as if he were afraid someone would make off with them, but he was different when we rode. He seemed to like to talk then.
He would tell me the Greek myths he remembered from his time at school, the Titans and heroes and various gods, thrilling depictions of the underworld. At other times he spoke of the generations of tribal wars between the Masai and Kikuyu, fierce battles and cunning, night-time victories, or about how to hunt and to survive. To shoot a charging elephant, you stood your ground and aimed between its eyes. If you missed the brain, you wouldn’t live to attempt your shot again. For a puff adder, you backed away as soundlessly as possible, a few inches at a time, trying not to let your heart persuade you into panicking. For the deadlier black mamba, you ran flat out. A man could always outrun a mamba, but would never survive a fully landed strike.
The day we rode out to Kabete Station, my father’s mind was on lions. “A lion has more natural intelligence than most men,” he said, pushing his bush hat back off his forehead with a fingertip. He wore khakis for riding—a light cotton shirt, trousers the colour of sand, and boots that would have had a high polish in the English countryside but here were rinsed with layers of red silt. “He also has more courage than a man, and more determination. He’ll fight for what belongs to him, no matter the size or strength of his rival. If the rival has a drop of cowardice in him, he’s dead already.”
I wanted him to go on talking, all the way to the Elkingtons’ and even further. If I just listened hard enough, I thought I might one day know everything he did. “What if two equal lions battle for territory, or for a mate?”
“They’ll each size up the other, testing the odds. A lion is more cautious on equal footing, but even then he won’t back down. He has no fear, you see, not as we understand it. He can only be exactly what he is, what his nature dictates, and nothing else.”
“I wonder if this can be true of the Elkingtons’ lion,” said Bishon Singh, our Sikh groom. He had journeyed with us to care for the horses and rode just behind with my father’s man, Kimutai.
“That damned animal makes me nervous,” my father answered. “I don’t mind telling you. It’s unnatural for a wild creature to be kept like that.”
“I like Paddy,” I said, remembering how I’d once seen Jim Elkington rub him like a cat. “He’s a good lion.”
“Which only proves my point,” my father said, while behind us Bishon Singh clucked his agreement. “You can take a cub from the savannah as they have, and raise it like a pet if you like. In a cage, as some do, or running free like Paddy. You can feed it fresh meat so it never learns to hunt and brush its coat so it carries a human smell wherever it goes—but know that what you’ve done is twist something natural into something else. And you can never trust an unnatural thing. You don’t know what it is, and it’s baffled, too. Poor damned animal,” he said again, and blew air up towards his nose to clear away some of the dust.
—
The Elkingtons’ house had leaded-glass windows and a pretty veranda that backed onto absolute wilderness, a thousand miles or more of untamed Africa. There was a feeling, as you sat and ate your nice sandwich or had your tea, that you were on the slowly tipping edge of nothingness and might fall forward at any moment, and that if you did, it was possible that nothing would know you’d ever been there at all.
Jim Elkington was round and red faced and even tempered. His wife wore a straw boater and white blouses she kept crisp and civilized looking, somehow, even with a rawhide whip tucked into her belt. The whip was for Paddy, who roamed about the property as if he owned it. In the clearest sort of way, he did. Who would challenge him, after all? He’d been like a puppy once, thick pawed, wrestling Jim on the lawn, but now he was full grown, his ruff of mane black tipped and glossy. The whip was only a prop.
The last time I had seen Paddy, Jim Elkington had fed him a string of skinned rabbits on a pike as we watched. The lion rested flat with his paws crossed, full shouldered and rust coloured with black lips and jowls. He had enormous golden eyes and seemed aware of the picture he made as he let the dainties come to him. There was a wrinkled place above his perfectly square nose, which made him look puzzled or even a little amused by us.
As we settled our horses, I didn’t see Paddy, but I could hear him off somewhere, maybe miles away, roaring. It was a tortured sound and also a little mournful, stiffening the fine hairs on the back of my neck. “He sounds lonely,” I said.
“Rot,” my father said. “More like a howling banshee.”
“I don’t hear it any more,” Mrs. Elkington said, and then led us to her tea: small, nice-smelling ginger cakes, dried fruit, potato dumplings in crisped skins that were eaten with your fingers, and good China tea in a pot. Jim had made a pitcher of cocktails with rye whisky and crushed lemons. He stirred the pitcher with a glass rod, rare ice tinkling like crystal teardrops.
The veranda was airless that day, and the conversation stultifying. I sighed and picked at a second ginger cake until my father finally gave me a look and a nod—Go on, then—as he and Jim rose to go towards the stables. Mrs. Elkington tried to ply me with a dice game, but I made off as quickly as I could, flinging my shoes and stockings into the grass and hurrying across the long yard.
I went out into the open country running fast, just to feel myself do it. Their land was much like ours, with dry grasses, dusty green and gold, and the rolling plain studded with thorn and flame trees or sometimes a single fat baobab. Away in the distance I could see the cloud-softened crags of Mount Kenya and thought of how wonderful it would be to run there, a hundred miles away. Of how proud my father would be when I returned, and how Kibii would be sick with jealousy.
Ahead of me there was a low hill with gooseberry bushes on top. I made a beeline for them, only half noticing a place in the grass where something large had slept recently, crushing the stems all around into a curved pressed-down mould. I had my eyes on the hill and didn’t think of anything else or know that I was being watched as I ran, stalked from behind like a young gazelle or kongoni.
I picked up speed, scrambling over the rise, and that’s when I felt a force of air push at me, hot and meaty. The blow was like a steel pipe aimed at the muscles of my back. I went down hard, face-first in the grass, my arms coming up instinctively to protect myself.
I didn’t know how long Paddy had been watching me. He’d smelled me first—possibly before I’d left the veranda. Maybe he’d only been curious about my girl-smell, or maybe he’d started hunting me then. It didn’t really matter, because he had already overpowered me.
Paddy’s jaw closed on my thigh above the knee. I felt his dagger teeth and his wet tongue. The strangely cool feel of his mouth. My head swam as I smelled my own bl
ood, and then he released me to bellow. It was everything I’d heard from the veranda and more—a vibrating black cave of noise that swallowed the earth and sky and swallowed me, too.
I closed my eyes and tried to scream, but only released a puff of air. I felt Paddy’s mouth again and knew I had no chance at all. He would eat me here or drag me off to a glade or valley only he knew of, a place from which I’d never return. The last thought I remember having was This is how it feels, then. This is what it means to be eaten by a lion.
When I came back to myself, Bishon Singh was carrying me in his arms, his face bent over mine. I didn’t want to ask about Paddy and where he’d gone, or to know how hurt I was. Blood dripped from a long gash along my leg onto Bishon Singh’s white cotton tunic.
My father had been with the horses, but when he came running he held me close, crushing me to his chest. It was like being rescued—rescued again, really, because that had happened already.
Bishon Singh had seen me run past him as he tended our horses in the Elkingtons’ stable. When he came up the hill Paddy was already standing on my back, his mouth stretched wide, lips rimmed in black, teeth slick with saliva. He roared again, the sound nearly stopping Bishon Singh and the six or seven grooms that came running up behind him, all of them trying to make their bodies appear larger and their voices boom. Then came Bwana Elkington rolling his huge frame, flicking the long kiboko whip out in front of him like a cresting wave, the tip electrifying the air.
“The lion did not like being disturbed,” Bishon Singh said. “But bwana lashed the whip hard again. He rushed at Paddy and screamed, striking him with the whip over and over, and finally Paddy had had enough. He lunged at his master so quickly there was nothing for Bwana Elkington to do but race to the baobab. He flew up that tree and Paddy roared like Zeus himself. Then he was gone.”
The wound running from my calf muscle to the top of my thigh burned as if I were holding it over flames. I could feel each of the deep, raw claw marks from where Paddy had stood on my back, and the smaller punctures on my neck, under my blood-soaked hair. After the doctor was called, my father went into the other room and talked in sharp whispers to Jim and Mrs. Elkington about what should be done about Paddy. A little while later, a toto came running in from a nearby farm saying that Paddy had killed a neighbour’s horse and dragged it away.
Jim and my father loaded up their rifles, ordering the grooms to ready their hacks while I felt a swirl of emotions. Paddy was on the loose now. Part of me worried he could come back to the farm and attack someone—anyone. Another part of me felt awful for Paddy. He was a lion, and killing was what he’d been made to do.
The doctor gave me laudanum, and then stitched me up with a hooked needle and thick black thread. I lay on my stomach while Bishon Singh held one of my hands, his thin steel bangle rocking up and down his arm, his white turban wrapped around and around, who knew how many times, and the end tucked invisibly somewhere, like the fabled snake that swallows its own tail.
“The whip shouldn’t have been more than a gnat for Paddy,” Bishon Singh told me.
“What do you mean?”
“What is a whip to a lion? He must have been ready to let you go. Or perhaps you weren’t ever meant for him.”
I felt the tug of the needle, a pushing and pulling, as if just that part of my body were caught in a small current. His words were another kind of current. “What am I meant for then?”
“How wonderful that question is, Beru.” He smiled mysteriously. “And as you did not die on this day, you have more time in which to answer it.”
—
I stayed with the Elkingtons for several weeks, while Mrs. Elkington brought me nice food on a bamboo tray—candied ginger, devilled eggs, and chilled juices. She had her kitchen toto busy making me fresh cakes every day, as if that would somehow make up for what Paddy had done—and for the fact of him now, roaring sullenly and sometimes monstrously from a wooden pen behind the main paddock.
They’d finally caught him four days after he escaped and brought him back bound. When Mrs. Elkington told me he was behind bars, it was meant to reassure me, but it also turned my stomach. I had tempted Paddy by running in front of his nose, and now he was suffering for doing something that was natural for him. It was my fault—but there was also the matter, when I lay in my narrow bed at the Elkingtons’, of Paddy’s howling. I clamped my hands over my ears, relieved that he was locked away. Relieved and also sick about it. Safe and also guilty.
When I could finally travel by cart to Nairobi, and then home to Njoro by train, it was as though I’d finally been released from a prison of my own. One made of Paddy’s awful noises. But I didn’t truly stop thinking about Paddy or dreaming terrible dreams about him until I was able to tell Kibii what had happened. He and some of the other totos sat as still as posts while I drew every detail out, my story growing longer and more harrowing, and me growing braver, steelier, a hero or warrior instead of something that had been hunted and only narrowly rescued.
Every Kipsigis moran in training had to hunt and kill a lion in order to earn his spear. If he failed, he would live in shame. If he succeeded, nothing could be more magnificent. Beautiful women would sing his name, and his deed would pass into history, in verses his own children would learn and act out in games. I had always been wildly jealous that Kibii could look forward to so much daring and glory, and couldn’t help but feel a little satisfied, now, that I had survived something he hadn’t yet faced. And the truth was, no matter how I embellished or shaped the story of what had happened with Paddy, it had happened, and I had lived to tell the tale. That alone had a powerful effect on me. I felt slightly invincible, that I could come through nearly anything my world might throw at me, but of course I had no idea what lay in store.
—
“Emma and I think you should go to school in Nairobi,” my father said a few weeks after I had returned home from the Elkingtons’. His tented fingers rested on the dinner table.
I jerked up to look at him. “Why not another governess?”
“You can’t run wild for ever. You need schooling.”
“I can learn here at the farm. I won’t fight any more, I promise.”
“It’s not safe here for you, don’t you see?” Mrs. O said from her chair. Her untouched tableware gleamed, mirroring back chips of red light from the hurricane lamp, and it struck me all at once that all of this was happening because I had never found a way to properly best her. I had grown used to her ways. I’d been distracted by foals and gallops and hunting games with Kibii. But she hadn’t grown used to me.
“If you mean Paddy, that should never have happened.”
“Of course it shouldn’t have!” Her violet eyes narrowed. “But it did. You seem to think you’re invulnerable, running around half naked with those boys, out in the bush where anything could get you. Anything. You’re a child, though no one around here seems to know it.”
I clenched my fists and brought them down hard on the edge of the table. I yelled all sorts of things and pushed away my plate and sent my tableware clattering to the floor. “You can’t force me to go,” I finally cried, my throat hoarse, my face hot and swollen feeling.
“It’s not up to you,” my father said, his mouth stern and unyielding.
—
The next morning I woke at first light and rode to Equator Ranch to see Lady D. She was the kindest and most reasonable person I knew. She would have some sort of solution, I believed. She would know what to do.
“Daddy seems set,” I began to rant before I was halfway through the door, “but he’s only going along with Mrs. O. She told him that I’m going to be torn to ribbons by another lion if I keep going like this, but she doesn’t really care. I’m in her way. That’s really what it is.”
Lady D led me to a comfortable place on her carpet and let me spit out everything without stopping for breath. Finally, when I had settled down a little, she said, “I don’t know Emma’s reasons, or Clutt’s, but I fo
r one will be proud to see you come back a young lady.”
“I can learn what I need to learn here!”
She nodded. She had a way of doing that, warmly, even when she disagreed with every word you said. “Not everything. One day you’ll think differently about education and be glad for it.” She reached for one of my hands, gently pried it from my lap, and turned it over in hers. “Proper learning isn’t just useful in society, Beryl. It can be wonderfully yours, a thing to have and keep just for you.”
I probably scowled at her or at the wall because she gave me a look flooded with incredible patience. “I know this feels like the end of the world,” she went on, “but it isn’t. So much will happen to you. So much, and it’s all out in the world ahead of you.” Her fingertips moved in slow circles in the centre of my palm, lulling me. Before I quite knew it, I began to nod off, tucking in beside her, my head on her lap. When I woke a bit later, she got up and asked the houseboy to bring us tea. Then we sat at her table, thumbing through the giant atlas I loved, the page falling open to a broad map of England, green as a jewel.
“Do you think I’ll ever go there?” I asked.
“Why wouldn’t you? It’s still your home.”
Running my fingertips over the page, I traced the names of towns that were both foreign and familiar, Ipswich and Newquay, Oxford, Manchester, Leeds.
“Does your mother ever write to you from London?” she asked.
“No,” I said, feeling a little disorientated. No one ever mentioned my mother, and life was so much easier that way.
“I could tell you things about her if you ever want to know.”
I shook my head. “She doesn’t matter now. Only the farm does.”
Lady D looked at me for a long moment, seeming to mull this over. “I’m sorry. It’s not my place to pry.”
A short while later, D blustered in, kicking off dust and talking to himself. “My favourite girls,” he cheered.
“Beryl’s had a bit of a day,” Lady D warned him. “She’s going to go off to school soon, in Nairobi.”