by Paula McLain
Karen was clearly taken with her new hound, which had rich grey eyes and a ruff of wiry whiskers around her long nose. “She’s delicious. You were a dear to think of me, especially since I’ve been lonely without Minerva.” Apparently, just the month before, the pretty house owl had flown into the wooden blinds and got tangled in the cords and strangled to death. “We shouldn’t care so much about animals,” she said. “It’s dangerous.”
“I can tell you the animals aren’t overconcerned about us,” Denys said, settling back into his chair.
“Of course they are,” she countered, reaching for the hound’s damp soft muzzle. “Minerva was awfully fond of me, and so are my dogs.”
“We ring the dinner gong and they run to us. That’s common sense, not love. Not loyalty, either.”
“He’s in one of his black moods,” she explained to us, as if he weren’t there.
“Where are you off to next?” I asked Denys, dying to change the subject.
“To Rejaf. I’m taking some clients down the Nile.”
“How exotic,” Mansfield said, drawing on his cigar. “It sounds like a Hollywood film.”
“The mosquitoes would tell you otherwise.”
“I’ve always wanted to see the Nile,” I said.
“It’s hardly a moving target,” he said, and then got up to see about something inside the house.
Karen raised her eyebrows at me. Black mood, her look said, but I felt slapped. I’d played out this encounter dozens of times on the ship back to Kenya, wondering how it would feel to see Denys again now that my situation had changed. I was married, and altered in other ways, too. I very much meant to be happy and wanted him to realize that—but he was behaving so oddly and being cold to everyone. Nothing was going as planned.
“You’re going to buy land then?” Karen asked us. Her voice sounded strained.
“Yes, perhaps up near Elburgon.”
“So far up-country?”
“The price is right, and there’s a beautiful garden. Mansfield loves a good garden.”
“That I do.” He smiled and got up to pour brandy for us from a crystal decanter, looking at home with Karen’s lovely things. “I’ll just go and see about Denys. He probably needs a drink.”
“You’re well situated now, aren’t you?” Karen said when he’d gone. I could feel something new in her gaze, maybe an unspoken question about whether my marriage to Mansfield was the real article or a sham. Whatever it meant, it made me uncomfortable. “You look awfully well.”
“It’s the pearls,” I said.
“You’ve worn pearls before.”
She meant when I’d been with Frank Greswolde, not that she would ever have had the bad taste to mention it. But surely she could see that Mansfield wasn’t just any man ready to pay my way. He wasn’t a sponsor—Cockie’s terrible word—but my husband.
The dog whimpered in a dream at Karen’s feet, flinching and twitching her paws. “We strike such dark bargains for love, don’t we?”
Do we? I thought as Karen settled the hound with one hand, like a mother and her babe. But I didn’t answer her.
One hundred and twenty miles north of Nairobi, Elburgon was cool in the morning, with sparkling, crisp skies and high, white flat-bottomed clouds. After a rain, mist settled in rifts along the hillsides, and I would take all of it in, walking to gallops in the early mornings, reminding myself that none of it was borrowed or tainted. That no one could try to ruin it for me, or take it away.
Our farm was called Melela, with a house that stood on stilts, dripping with blue bougainvillaea and flame vine. Purple passion fruit covered the back fence, and morning glories heaped over the veranda and arbour. Everywhere you looked there was a new splash of colour, and the air smelled alive. I had a heavy brass bell installed outside the main stable door, not long after we moved in, and Ruta rang it to wake the farm every morning before dawn, as our head groom, Wainina, had once done at Green Hills. Ruta and his family had a cottage near the stables, and he had his own office next to mine, though usually we found ourselves at the same desk, staring into the same ledger, side by side.
“What if we brought Clutt back from Cape Town to train for us?” I asked Mansfield in bed one night. I had been thinking about it for weeks, growing more excited by the idea and what it would mean. Money had kept my father away, and also the tarnishing of his reputation. But I was in a position to offer him a job and a prestigious place in the colony, one worthy of him and his talents.
“Would he consider an offer?”
“I think so. If it was sweet enough.”
“With two Clutterbucks in one stable, I don’t think the rest of Kenya could touch us.”
“You don’t know how happy that would make me, how right this feels.”
I sent off a cable immediately, and before two months passed, I had my father back. He’d aged, and his hair had grown grey and thin, his face more careworn—but the very sight of him seemed to heal something in me. I had been so young when he left, hopelessly overwhelmed by my marriage, and the terrible loss of the farm. Nearly eight years had passed, and more heartbreak than I could properly chart for him, or even myself. But there wasn’t any need to tell him my sad stories, or even the happy ones. I only wanted to stand by him at the paddock gate and watch one of our stallions run for all he was worth. To work by his side for a common goal. To be his daughter again—yes, that would do it.
Emma looked older, too, of course, and she seemed subdued if not any softer. But I found she didn’t unsettle me as she used to. I’d become the mistress of a household. She was our guest at Melela, so what did it matter if she found me too coarse or headstrong now? Her opinion didn’t mean as much as my own, or Mansfield’s.
As it turned out, Mansfield and Emma got on well. They both liked gardening and soon could be seen kneeling together in domed sun hats, talking about root fungus or leaf blight, while I escaped to the stable where I belonged.
“What was Cape Town like?” I asked my father on one of the first mornings he was back. We leaned against the fencing along our gallops, watching one of our grooms exercise Clemency, a pretty new filly.
“Hot.” He kicked dust from his boots, squinting into the flaring sun. “Competitive, too. The wins didn’t come often.”
“If we hadn’t asked you back, would you have stayed?”
“I suppose so. I’m glad to be here, though. This is grand.”
As ever my father hoarded his words and his feelings, but I didn’t care. I knew he was proud of me and how far I’d come. I could feel it as we stood side by side, looking out over the green bowl of the spreading valley.
“It’s the same view that we had at Njoro,” I told him. “A little further north, but everything else is the same.”
“I suppose it is,” he said. “You’ve done well for yourself.”
“After a fashion. It hasn’t always been easy.”
“I know.” In his look were all the years we’d spent apart, the decisions we’d made, the difficult past we didn’t need to name—all of it rolled up and pushed away like a heavy stone as he sighed once and said, “Shall we get to work then?”
—
In short order, the name Mrs. Beryl Markham began to appear in the racing columns, as a trainer and as an owner, too. That was utterly new. Clutt and I planned and schemed, building our operation by buying up the progeny of horses from the old farm at Njoro, animals that he’d overseen the beginnings of. It was a wonderful feeling to reclaim and realize seeds sown way back. There was a rightness, too, to the evenings when all our heads would cluster over the thick black studbook, dreaming of greatness, daring to predict the future: Clutt’s and Ruta’s and Mansfield’s and mine.
Every morning, even before the gallops started, I rode Messenger Boy. I went off alone with him, though this made Mansfield nervous. Messenger Boy wasn’t just any animal. He didn’t trust me yet. Anyone could see that in the bold swing of his head and in the way he glared at the grooms who dared to tou
ch him. He knew he was a king. Who were we?
One morning, I was only across the yard before Messenger Boy spooked. Whatever it was, I never saw it, only felt the muscular tremor as he bucked, twisting sharply sideways. Even startled, I sat him, but he wouldn’t settle. I weathered three more violent twists before he sheered along the cedar-wood fencing and peeled me off forcibly. Thankfully I landed on the other side of the fence. Otherwise, he might have stamped me to death without even trying. It took four grooms to restrain him. My nose and chin streamed blood, so I left the grooms to care for him and went into the house to rinse and bandage myself. My hip ached, and I knew I’d have a massive bruise there, but it was Mansfield I really needed to worry about.
“My God, Beryl,” he said the moment he caught sight of me. “What if he’d killed you?”
“It wasn’t that bad. Really. I’ve fallen off horses all my life.”
“He’s too much of a loose cannon, that one. What if he really did hurt you? I know you want to be the one to tame him, but can that be worth the risk?”
“You think it’s pride keeping me on Messenger Boy?”
“Isn’t it?”
“This is what I’m best at. I know what he can be and how to get him there. I can see it, and I’ve no intention of giving up on him.”
“All right, but why does it have to be you? School one of the grooms, or even Ruta.”
“But it’s my work. I really can manage him, Mansfield, and I will.”
He stormed away unhappily while I finished tending to my wounds. When I returned to the barn, the grooms had Messenger Boy hobbled and tied between two thick posts. They’d hooded him and his eyes looked wild and murderous. You’ll never tame me is what they said.
I could have ordered the grooms to free him, but I did it myself instead, working to be quiet in all my movements while they looked on anxiously. My father didn’t challenge me and neither did Ruta, but they both trailed me at a distance while I returned Messenger Boy to his loose box. All the way there, the horse stamped warningly, and strained hard against the lead, and even when he was behind the stall door, he paced a tight line, whirling and glaring, challenging me. He seemed arrogant and full of hatred, but I guessed that beneath it all was sharp fear and self-protection. He didn’t want me to change him or make him something he wasn’t. He wouldn’t be coerced into giving himself away.
“You’re going to mount him again,” I heard Mansfield say. He’d been watching from the house and had come into the stable without my knowing it.
“Tomorrow I will. He’s still angry with me today.”
“Why aren’t you angry with him? Honestly, Beryl. It’s almost as if you want him to hurt you.”
“That’s absurd. I just don’t blame him for following his nature.”
“And my feelings don’t count?”
“Of course they do. But I have to get on with his training. This really is what farm life is about, Mansfield. It’s not all window dressing and pretty flowerpots.”
With that he stormed off again, and it was several days before I could convince him that I really wasn’t just being obstinate but following my nature, too—because I had to. Nothing else felt quite right.
“I didn’t think it would be so hard to watch you work,” he confessed after his mood had softened. “What about when we have children one day? Surely you’ll slow down then?”
“I don’t see why I should. It was good for me to grow up on a farm. It made me.”
“I suppose I’m more conventional than I thought,” he said.
“And more stubborn even than you warned me about.” Then I kissed him, wanting to make up.
—
In March, Mansfield and I went into Nairobi and found everyone at the club talking about Maia Carberry. Just two days before, JC’s beautiful young wife had been giving a flying lesson to a young student, Dudley Cowie, when her plane spun in at low altitude, crashing at the edge of the Ngong Road, near Nairobi’s Dagoretti Airfield. Dudley’s twin brother, Mervyn, had just finished his own lesson and saw everything, the impact and explosion, the wall of flames that left nothing identifiable of either victim. Dudley was only twenty-two. Maia was twenty-four and had left behind a three-year-old daughter, Juanita. JC was with the child now, at the Carberrys’ farm in Nyeri, apparently too heartsick to speak to anyone or even get out of bed.
When we ran into Denys and Karen at the club, they both seemed stunned. They were also worried about what could be done for the family.
“That poor girl will never know her mother,” Karen said. She tugged worriedly on the cotton shawl around her shoulders. “She won’t even remember her, will she?”
“That might be the biggest blessing,” Denys replied grimly. “It’s JC who’s in real trouble.”
“I’m surprised she wanted to fly when she had so much to live for, so many people counting on her,” Mansfield said, looking at me directly, as if I could possibly miss his meaning. But I wasn’t going to row with him on such a sad day. Our small tensions were hardly the point.
“Aeroplanes might be safer than automobiles,” Denys said. “I don’t think she saw flying as terribly rash.”
“Your views aren’t really the standard, Denys,” Mansfield answered flatly. “Tell me, are you off down the Nile again soon?”
“Not exactly,” Denys said.
“You haven’t heard then,” Karen said. “Elburgon is far north, isn’t it?”
What she meant, we soon learned, was that a royal visit was in the making. The heir to the throne, Edward, Prince of Wales, was set to visit Kenya in late September with his brother, Henry, Duke of Gloucester. Denys had been charged to take them hunting.
“A royal safari?” I asked.
“A royal fiasco, most likely. You’ve no idea the number of preparations.”
“It’s the opportunity of a lifetime,” Karen said sharply. Her shawl was crimson and deep blue with threads in a pattern that overlapped. She held it firmly in front of her chest like a shield. “If you really don’t want the work, give it to Bror instead.”
Mansfield plucked at an invisible bit of lint on his trousers, still clearly disturbed by the news about Maia Carberry. Denys had his mouth set. Karen was feeling spurned in some way I could only guess at until Mansfield and Denys went inside to book us a table for lunch.
“It’s one of the most significant moments in our history, and he won’t take it seriously.”
“He’s never liked fuss or pomp,” I said. “I’m guessing there are ten different committees or subcommittees who’ll want to sort every detail down to the commode.”
“It’s not just the safari that matters. It’s the social event of the decade. Perhaps the century.”
“You know he’s never going to care about parties.” But I’d missed the larger point.
“Bror is newly remarried. I always worried there would be another Baroness Blixen, and it’s happening at the direst moment. Divorced women aren’t going to be welcome at Government House for the principal fêting. You see how impossible it all is.” She clenched and unclenched her hands. Her knuckles were white.
“You want Denys to marry you,” I said quietly, finally putting it all together.
“He refuses.” She laughed icily, a terrible sound. “If he won’t now, for this, for me, he never will.”
For the next several months, I tried to think only about our horses—particularly Messenger Boy, who seemed to be resisting me a little less each day. No one would have called him tame, but some mornings when I rode him I felt something in the rounded smoothness of his back that felt very nearly like forbearance. He might not have liked me yet or even accepted me, but I was beginning to think he understood what I wanted from him, and that he might soon begin to want those things for himself.
One morning I had just handed Messenger Boy to his groom for cooling down when I met Emma in a sun hat as wide as a parasol. “Are you feeling well?” she asked, a strange look on her face. So like Emma. She hadn’t even sa
id good morning.
“Of course,” I told her, but that night, when Mansfield was away in town on errands, I felt a rocking wave of nausea and barely made it out of bed before I vomited. When Mansfield came home, he found me bent in two on the floor, too weak to stand.
“Should we go and see the doctor in town?” he fretted.
“No. It’s just a touch of something I ate. I only need to lie down.”
He got me back to bed, draped cool cloths over my forehead, and pulled the curtains closed so I could rest. But after he planted a sweet kiss in my palm and backed out of the room, I stared at the wall for a long time, thinking. I was pregnant, of course. The feeling was the same as it had been before, in London. Somehow Emma had suspected before I had come to the truth myself.
I knew I needed to tell Mansfield, but after the business with Messenger Boy and the way he’d reacted to Maia Carberry’s death, I was terrified to bring it up. The pregnancy would only intensify his concerns about me. That was clear. What if he wanted not just to swaddle me but to curb me? What then?
While I was still stuck in a cycle of worry and doubt, Mansfield finally guessed. “Aren’t you happy, darling?” He clasped my hands and gazed into my eyes.
“We’re just getting started here,” I tried to explain. “There’s so much to do to make a farm run smoothly and get the horses in line.”
“How terrible would it really be to take a little time off? When you’re ready to get back to it, the horses will be here.”
We were lying in our bed in the dark. His white pyjama shirt seemed to float and jump in front of my eyes. “I don’t want to stop working, Mansfield. Please don’t ask me to.”
“Surely you’ll stop riding…at least until the baby is born. You have to take care of yourself.”
“This is how I take care of myself, don’t you see? If we have this baby, I’ll need to do my work just as before. I don’t know any other way to live.”
“If we have this baby?” He pulled back and his eyes hardened. “Surely there’s no question.”