by Paula McLain
When Mansfield left my room, I gathered the sheets and blankets around me, but couldn’t begin to feel warm. Our son might die. The very thought had me shaking again—lost and sick and utterly helpless.
In my Lakwet days, I was at the Kip shamba once when a maimed child was born. It had a small stump where one of the legs should have been, the skin pink and raw, puzzle-stitched. No one tried to shield any of this tragedy from Kibii or me. The child would either live or it wouldn’t—it was up to their god. That night the mother placed the babe just outside the door to her hut and slept, as the rest of the tribe did, without answering its cries. The theory went that if the oxen didn’t trample it, the child was meant to live. But that night, a predator came and took it away—probably a leopard or hyena. That was thought to be the god’s will, too.
Would Gervase make it through his surgery, or even his first night? Was some god going to punish me by taking him—or did everything that happened to us on earth come down to a blind roll of clicking dice, without any more reason or plan than chance? I wasn’t sure what I believed and had never learned to pray. I didn’t know how to surrender to fate, either—so I hummed an old African song under my breath as I waited, one full of thin courage…Kali kama Simba, sisi Askari wote ni hodari. Fierce like the lion are we, soldiers all are brave.
Astonishingly, Gervase survived his first precarious days of life. The doctors attached a strange sort of bag to his belly, and fed him through tiny snaking tubes in his nose. He gained an ounce, and then lost two. He came down with jaundice, and they put him under bright lamps. For the most part, we were kept from him because he couldn’t be exposed to even the faintest risk of germs. I saw him only twice as I recuperated in the nursing home, and both times I felt punched in the heart. He was so frail and defenceless—like a broken bird.
On the day before Gervase’s surgery, Mansfield came to my room looking pale and defeated. “I know it’s too soon to be talking about all of this, but if he makes it, I want Gervase to go to Swiftsden for his recovery. Mother can make sure he gets the very best care.”
“Of course, if the doctors approve it.” For myself, I hated Swiftsden, but Gervase came first.
“And what will you do?” he went on. “When you’re released from the hospital?”
“What do you mean? I want to be where Gervase is, obviously.”
“I assumed you’d want to go back home.”
“One day, yes. When we can all go together. What is this about, Mansfield?”
He turned and went to the window, pacing before it, his feet stitching the dark floorboards. The weather was still terrible, and all the panes were rimed over with greenish-looking ice that gave Mansfield’s skin a ghostly cast. He looked different to me now that we’d come to England—not just more pallid, but weaker in spirit, too—almost as if he were reverting to his boyhood self, that invalid who’d spent most of his youth in bed, poring over the Latin names of flowers.
“I’m not sure I’ll go back to Kenya,” he said. “It seems more and more clear…how different we are. I feel a little foolish about it.”
“Foolish to marry me? Why are you saying this now? We’ve made a life together. Do you mean to throw it away?”
“I wanted a new chance; I did. But maybe I was just playing a role. Or you were.”
I felt the room lurch. “I don’t understand. The farm is my whole life, and we have Gervase now. We’re bound to him.”
“I know that,” he said wearily. Then he went to talk to the doctor while everything we’d said—and hadn’t—hung in the room like a cold, crimped fog.
I could scarcely catch up. Mansfield and I had been at odds sometimes, and had never been an ideal match—but we’d wanted the same things and had been friends. Now any affection seemed to have dissolved as quickly as the sun had. It was a different season here, in more ways than one.
While I was still fretting over all of this, I heard a flurry of footsteps outside the door. I assumed Mansfield had returned with news from the doctor, but it was Prince Harry who’d come.
“You’re supposed to be on safari,” I said, taking in the shock of him. His fine grey suit looked as if it had been drawn onto his body. He didn’t belong in a nursing home on Gerald Road.
“Everything was postponed. I imagine you’ve been too caught up here to know, but my father developed a lung infection. It was a do-or-die situation, but he’s recovered. What of you? I didn’t even know you were expecting, and then there you were in The Times. One son born to one Markham, Beryl, at Gerald Road. You’re a wily one.”
“I wasn’t ready for anyone to know. Now the baby’s in trouble, too.” I felt my face crumpling and wondered if I were about to cry in front of royalty. Would that appear in The Times, too?
“I’m sorry. I heard. What can I do?”
“If you really want to help, you can make sure the surgeon is the very best. You must know who’s good around here, and who can be trusted. He’s still so small. Did you see him?”
Harry shook his head just as two nurses came in and pretended to busy themselves with linens. Obviously they were addled by having royalty in their midst and wanted a closer view.
“I’m happy to look into the surgeon,” he said, ignoring them. “And please don’t hesitate to ring me if you need anything else, anything at all.”
“Thank you. I’m so worried.”
“Of course you are.” He reached for my hand and squeezed it, and then leaned over and pressed his lips to the back of my wrist. It was a harmless gesture, meant only to show concern, but the nurses turned and gaped. Their square caps tipped towards us like flowers, or like megaphones.
Weak as he was, Gervase had the heart of a young moran. He made it through that first surgery, in the middle of March, and was a little more whole afterwards. They created an opening in him where there’d been only a blank expanse of skin. The next month he had another operation to form a rectum out of tissue from his colon, and then yet another, to bring it all together, like dots connecting in a child’s crude puzzle book. Each time we didn’t know if he’d survive the procedure or the anaesthesia. There was always the risk of sepsis afterwards, and haemorrhage, and shock.
The doctors had said no to Swiftsden for the moment. He remained in hospital, while Mansfield and I stayed at the Grosvenor, though in separate suites. We weren’t talking about the fate of our marriage for the moment. We were barely speaking at all.
One day Ginger Birkbeck came to visit me at the hotel. She and Ben were in London because she needed surgery for a benign tumour in some “female” region of her body she was far too delicate to name. But she didn’t want to talk about that anyway…but about Harry.
“Tongues are wagging all over town about you two,” she told me. “Word is that you’re at the Grosvenor because it’s across the road from Buckingham Palace, and that he comes and goes from your suite through a passageway along the basement.”
“That’s absurd. We’re only good friends, and he’s been awfully kind to me.”
“Even so, you should take care. It’s quite a serious thing. Forgive me for saying so, but your reputation hasn’t exactly been spotless. And the gossip columns always jump to the easiest conclusion.”
“Let them, then. I just don’t care any more.”
“So you are involved with Harry?”
“Whose bloody business is it if I am? Or if I’m not?” I paced the plush carpet—green tones and red tones all clashed together, in a muddle of Christmas and Sotheby’s. My God, but I was tired.
Ginger’s eyes widened. From her seat on my sofa, she asked, “You’re not planning to say either way then?”
“You’re missing the point! I’m trying to tell you it doesn’t matter. No one’s going to believe me if I deny the rumours anyway.”
“You could be ruined, Beryl,” she said. “Have you thought of that?”
I closed my eyes and opened them again. “Honestly, if I could have my life back and be left alone, I’m not sure I’
d mind that much.”
“I’m trying to help, you know. I only want what’s best for you.”
“Believe it or not, so do I.”
There were a series of raps on the door, and Harry walked in with his lovely haircut and sharp, piney cologne and his knife-pleated trousers. “Hello,” he said. “What’s happening here? How’s Gervase today?”
“Stronger by all accounts.”
“That’s excellent. Really excellent.” He crossed the room swiftly and gave me a squeeze, and then he kissed me on the forehead while Ginger’s cheeks went bright crimson.
—
Finally in early May the surgeons were poised to release Gervase to Swiftsden. Though I knew I was going to have a fight on my hands, I thought it was time to bring up Kenya, too.
“He would never survive the trip,” Mansfield said plainly to me in his brother Charles’s coldly lavish library in Connaught Square.
“Not now, obviously. But next year?”
“I’m not going back—not with the way things are. And Gervase will have a better life here.”
“How can you uproot all of us without even considering another way?”
“You can do whatever you like,” he said without emotion. “I’m only thinking of Gervase now. He’ll have constant care from nurses, nannies, and the best surgeons on hand. He’s never going to be a strong child. You heard the doctor.”
“I have, actually. I’ve heard everything the doctors have been saying.” I caught his eyes pointedly. “Do you know Gervase’s illness could have happened to anyone? That my riding had nothing whatever to do with it?”
A muscle in his jaw convulsed, and he looked away. “It doesn’t matter now, does it?”
“No. I don’t suppose it does.”
For weeks I had been tortured by guilt, thinking my actions had done Gervase harm—but in the end, placing blame on either side was pointless. His future would come down to power and resources. Mansfield’s mother had never liked me. She would push to shut me out of my son’s life, and Mansfield had grown so severe and closed to me. The door between us had become a wall, and Gervase was on the other side. “He’s my child, too. How is it I have no rights, no say?”
He shrugged, pursing his lips. “You’ve brought everything on yourself. Now there are rumours this child is the duke’s.”
“But that’s ludicrous. I was pregnant in June. Harry didn’t even arrive in Kenya until October, when I was months gone.”
“Harry? David? The rumours fly both ways. Honestly, Beryl. One prince wasn’t enough for you? You had to try for two?”
I would have slapped him if I’d had any strength left for outrage. “This gossip disgusts me.”
“So deny the claims.”
“I shouldn’t have to, especially not to you! And what does it matter what people think any more? Damn them all.”
We went on in this way while the servants crouched, no doubt, just outside the door, ready to reveal everything to the Tatler. Mansfield was trying to strong-arm me into making a clearing statement to The Times. His mother was very nearly beside herself over the scandal. “Think of her good name,” Mansfield implored. “Propriety means everything here.”
“I’m so sick of things done in the name of propriety, I could die,” I spat out. “I want to go home.”
“Don’t force my hand, Beryl. I can clear my own name by divorcing you and naming the duke as co-respondent. You’ll lose any penny you ever thought you might get from me. You’ll lose Gervase, too.”
“Can you honestly say you’re not planning to take him from me no matter what happens?”
He looked at me impassively. Tea things rattled just outside the door. I felt close to tears and also hollow, as if I’d lived all of this before, many times over, with different words laid out for the same horrible crimes, for being a woman, and daring to think I could be free. But now it wasn’t only my fate that lay in the balance.
“Come after me with all you have then,” I finally said. “Do your worst.”
—
What transpired next would be whispered and tattled about for decades to come, and mostly bungled in the retelling, like the nursery game of telephone operator where even the most banal message turns tangled and foreign and unrecognizable. Some said Markham stormed the palace with a bundle of love letters from the duke. Some insisted that his mother went, begging an audience at the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. Queen Mary’s solicitors were woken at daybreak, or perhaps it was Sir Ulick Alexander, Keeper of the Privy Purse. The old lady was outraged, terrified, dismissive, threatening. No one could cite a prince of the blood in a divorce petition, but she would pay to make sure it never happened all the same, ten thousand pounds or thirty thousand or fifty thousand in a capital sum that would generate an annuity for the rest of my life. If I would go the hell away.
Rumour and speculation took on a life of their own, and nothing that was ever said could begin to surprise me. I was too empty anyway. Gervase went to Swiftsden, as I’d always known he would, and he made progress there. His body healed. He babbled and cooed in his lovely cot, liking his own voice. Perhaps he would remember me standing over him, tracing the small crease of flesh beneath his chin. I hoped so. He had Mansfield’s eyes, while I saw nothing of myself in him. Nothing except the way he had fought to be here, alive.
Through the years I would return to Swiftsden to visit him, always watched over by Mansfield’s mother and various nannies, as if they were afraid I’d run off with him to Africa. I had certainly thought about it, if only so that he would know the colours of that place—the lion-gold grass and the snow-glazed summit of Kilimanjaro—and also more truly know me. Instead, I told him stories about Njoro—about Kibii and Buller and Wee MacGregor. Leopard nights, elephant nights, the flat forever sky. When I left I always said the same thing: “One day, we’ll go there. I’ll show you everything.”
I stayed in England for the remainder of 1929, often going out to the Aero Club in Piccadilly. There was something soothing and even healing in watching aeroplanes stitch through the vacant blue over Shellbeach, glinting silver needles pulling thread. It was there that I ran into Denys, on a sheer October day. He had on a snug leather jacket and an aviator’s scarf around his neck and was walking towards me across the terrace café, near one of the great hangars. I could scarcely believe it for a moment—as if I’d dreamed him. Then we rushed towards one another without any thought or awkwardness, like two people who had found each other at the end of the world.
“My God, it’s good to see you.” I gripped his hand, unable to let it go. “How are you here?”
“To get my flying hours in. The royal fiasco netted me the funds to finally buy the aeroplane I’ve always wanted. She’s a lovely gold Gipsy Moth. I’ll ship her back to Mombasa if we’re both still standing in six months.” He meant him and the plane. After Maia’s tragedy, I was surprised to hear him be so bold, but that was Denys.
“They’re beautiful machines.” I looked up to where a bright de Havilland waggled and straightened again. “They make me think of grace.”
“You’ve been through the wringer, I know.”
“You never liked Mansfield, did you?” I ventured. “You were always chilly near us.”
“I wanted you to be happy…. I’ve always wanted that. But it surprised me when you married him. Honestly, I always thought you were too much of a free spirit for any sort of confinement. That we were alike in that way.”
“Maybe that’s what botched up things from the beginning. Who can say? But everything’s tipped over now. I don’t know what will happen to the farm or my horses, or even what to care about saving.”
“You should learn to fly.”
“Me?” I asked. “Does it feel as open up there as it looks from here?”
“Even more.”
“Sounds like heaven then,” I told him. “Save some of it for me.”
—
Over the next few weeks, until I left for home, Denys and I met every da
y for lunch at the aerodrome, in sun or rain. I was as drawn to him as I’d ever been, and though part of me was longing to kiss and hold him near, it also felt wrong to have these desires when Gervase was still so vulnerable, and the wreckage of my marriage smoked in pieces around me. But Denys was my friend, too, and I needed one. He told me everything he was learning in the air, and I fell on each detail, happy to have something new to think about.
“It does seem like pure freedom,” I told him. “If you can forget about the risk, that is.”
“The fear never completely goes away. It makes everything sharper.”
I nodded, understanding exactly what he meant. Even as a child I’d had it in me to test and challenge myself. Though I had sometimes forgotten that girl, she came back clearly when I looked into the sky, so sharp and blue it was a sort of window. Maybe I would fly, too. Maybe that’s why Denys and I had had these days together at the aerodrome, and why I had begun to feel less low and desperate. The idea of it—of a future with wings—made the truest sort of sense, and began to cure me. Denys did, too. Just sitting near him helped me remember who I was in better times, stronger and surer, ready to look ahead, to face what came next without fear.
“Have you ever imagined us together,” I asked him one day. “A time or place…a world, even, where we could be together? Simply, I mean, without trying to ruin one another, or wanting more than the other could give?”
His smile came slowly. His hazel eyes, when I looked into them, were bottomless. “What about this place? This moment?” He reached for my hand and we sat like that, side by side, for a few more precious minutes, while over our heads a silver Moth glinted like star fire and dipped its wings sideways, and passed behind a cloud.
At the end of March 1930 I sailed home. I went briefly to Melela, to see my father and Ruta and our horses. It was harder than I ever imagined to find words to explain that Gervase was still in England, that they might never even meet him. My father wanted to go after Mansfield, as if we could spar across an ocean and change anything. Ruta was quieter, and also terribly sad for me, I knew. He seemed to guess immediately that the farm had lost its bloom.