“But you understand, don’t you?” Without knowing how, Beryl was certain that Dos had lived someplace wild.
Dos nodded. “My father has a farm out by Thika. My mother and I joined him two years ago. I loved it out there. Coming here felt like going to jail.”
“Even my skin feels different here,” Beryl said. “I don’t know how I can last a whole year!”
Dos grabbed Beryl’s hand. After a moment’s hesitation, Beryl squeezed it back and said, “But you look like them. You talk like them. Dos, how do you do it?”
“My mother insisted that I be ladylike. She said someday I would go back to England, and she didn’t want me to shock society. What about your mother?”
“I don’t have one. Not really.” In the darkness, Beryl could feel Dos’ questioning look. “She’s in England. She left when I was little.”
“Oh.”
“Can you help me?” The unfamiliar words felt strange on Beryl’s tongue. “I promised my father I would go to school for a year, but I’m not sure I can last. If I get expelled, he’ll send me to England. Tell me how to get along here.”
Dos leaned back against a tree trunk to think. Finally she said, “Your main problem is Mary. She’s used to bossing everybody around. Take care of her, and the others will go where they’re led.”
“I don’t want to lead them!” Beryl cried. “Let Mary do that.”
“You don’t have a choice. Either lead them, or keep finding who knows what in your bed.”
Beryl nodded. She would use her Nandi skills. She would watch carefully and study the enemy. Then she would make her move.
LOCATION: Cape Breton, Nova Scotia
DATE: Midmorning, 5 September, 1936
I made it to North America. Not quite as far as New York, but at the moment, I’m quite happy to be on terra firma. I lift my foot out of the bog and it squelches. I could have used some more firming in my terra. I breathe deeply and savor the silence and fresh air.
Now, to more practical matters. How am I to get out of here? A quick glance tells me that my poor old Messenger won’t be flying me out. The propeller is buried in mud, and the engine has been ripped from the chassis. I feel much the same way.
No one knows to look for me, much less where. I’ll have to rescue myself. It won’t be the first time.
Easier said than done. I must have covered three miles, up to my waist in this nasty bog. The gash on my head has started to bleed again. Finally, I see a fisherman. He stares at me as though I’m that monster they found in Loch Ness.
“I’m Beryl Markham,” I say. “I’ve just flown in from England.”
He takes me to a godforsaken hut on a deserted stretch of coast. To my delight, there’s a telephone. I turn to ask how a phone came to be there, but the fisherman answers first. “To report shipwrecks. You’re the first plane crash.”
I’m not one for looking in a mirror, but I suspect the expression on my face can best be described as rueful.
Within a day, I’ve been cleaned up and supplied with new clothes. There’s a dashing bandage across my forehead. I’ll have another scar to add to my collection. A plane, a Beechcraft, comes to collect me. The pilot lets me take a turn at the controls. To my relief, he doesn’t say anything about the last plane I flew. I’m heading to New York City, where I’m told a crowd of well-wishers has been waiting for over a day. I’m being hailed as a great success.
Ha! If I had been successful, I’d be flying The Messenger out of here, instead of leaving her behind in a cold bog. At least I didn’t drown. I’m one up on Icarus.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
FOR THE NEXT WEEK, BERYL KEPT TO HERSELF AS SHE WATCHED the other students. Her first mistake, she decided, was trying to impress them at all. With the exception of Dos, she had never had any luck with girls. Everything she had ever learned from the Nandi was about being the best among the boys. She would start there.
She walked up to Sonny Bumpus on the makeshift cricket field marked with chalk lines. He was the most popular boy at school.
“I want to play, too,” she said. Her words fell like coconuts from the palm trees—with a thud. The last time she had heard such deafening silence was the day she asked Arap Maina to let her hunt lion.
“No,” Sonny said flatly. He was dressed in clothes that were slightly too small, and his pale complexion was pink and peeling from the sun. “You’re a girl.”
“I can bowl and hit as well as you can,” Beryl insisted.
“Not likely.” The other boys had gathered round. They laughed and congratulated Sonny as though he had said something clever.
Beryl took a deep breath. “If I can bowl, can I play?”
Sonny stared at her, then around the circle of boys. With their tacit approval, he said, “If you can stand at one end of the pitch and knock the bails off the other wicket, you can play.”
The boys nudged each other and whispered excitedly. Beryl could guess what they were saying—the distance between the wickets was more than twenty yards. But Beryl had not learned to throw a spear at a moving animal for nothing. A wicket that stayed in one place and couldn’t think for itself was an easy target.
“It’s a bet,” she said.
Beryl took up a bowling position at the wicket. She squinted into the sun to judge the distance to the other end of the field. Beryl tried to wiggle her toes in her tight shoes. It would be easier if she were barefoot, but she didn’t think the boys would wait for her to unlace them.
The boys stood on the edge of the field, making rude comments.
“I bet she’ll bend her elbow!”
“Who does she think she is? Jack Hobbs?”
And most infuriating of all, “Girls can’t play cricket.”
Beryl took the ball Sonny handed her. She examined it closely. Arap Maina had taught her to respect the special properties of a spear. Surely the ball deserved the same treatment. She weighed it in her hand, feeling the rough leather and the raised stitching. Holding the ball lightly by her fingertips, she swung her arm back in a windmill motion, without bending her elbow, and let it fly at the opposite wicket.
The ball sailed through the air and knocked off both bails on the distant wicket with a satisfying thump.
Beryl turned triumphantly to the boys as the ball bounced back toward the center of the pitch. “So, which team am I on?” she asked. Her smile faded when she saw the dismay in their faces.
Shoved forward by the others, Sonny spoke for all of them. “That didn’t count. You—you…stepped outside the creases.”
“I did no such thing!” Beryl narrowed her eyes and stomped over to him. “Sonny Bumpus, you made a deal. Are you welshing?”
There were few more insulting things to say to an Englishman, but to Beryl’s mind, she had nothing to lose.
“Who are you calling a bloody Welshman?” Sonny said indig-nantly, his face turning brick red. But he wouldn’t meet her accusing eyes. “You didn’t do it right. How could you? Girls don’t have the brain capacity to learn cricket.” And with that, he turned his back to her.
“You can keep your stupid ball,” she growled, throwing the ball into the dirt and walking away. Skip rope and cricket had been disastrous. It was time to play her own game.
Beryl waited for a day when it was raining too hard for outdoor recess. Finally, after a week, the moment was right. After Miss Seccombe left to take her tea, Beryl grabbed Dos by the arm. “Keep them here!” she whispered fiercely.
Puzzled but curious, Dos kept the other girls from leaving.
“What does she want now?” asked Mary.
“I don’t know, but I’m not afraid to find out,” Dos shot back. “Are you?”
Mary grimaced, but she stayed.
Beryl deliberately stood by the window, her tall figure framed by the gray light outside. “What do you know about steeple chasing?” she asked the group.
The girls murmured among themselves, confused.
“Isn’t that when the horses jump the fences?
” Doris asked.
“It’s when the jockey races the horses over fences,” corrected Beryl. “I do it all the time.”
Mary couldn’t stay silent. She strode over to confront Beryl. She stared into Beryl’s blue eyes and accused, “You’re lying again. Girls don’t ride, and they don’t race.”
Beryl held onto her temper and said, “Girls ride on my father’s farm. Or, at least, I do. I train the chasers for my father.”
Mary drew in her breath, ready to denounce Beryl again, but Beryl interrupted, as though the idea had just occurred to her, “Why don’t we do a steeplechase here?”
The girls looked at her blankly.
Dos began to giggle. “How? We have no horses.”
“We race each other. We’ll use the desks as fences.” Beryl grabbed the nearest desk and started to drag it to the edge of the room.
“Why bother?” asked Mary. “It’s so muggy.” She twisted a limp curl around her finger.
“Is there anything better to do?” dared Beryl. No one had an answer to that. “Right then. Let’s bring the next one over.”
Caught up in Beryl’s enthusiasm, Dos and the other girls began building a steeplechase course with ten desks around the edge of the classroom. One of the girls fetched the boys from their side of the school. Sonny Bumpus watched Beryl curiously, rocking back on his heels with his thumbs hitched in his trouser pockets.
Beryl stood in the center of the room and dictated the rules of the race. “Five times around will be the course. You must clear the desks. Touching the desk is all right, but if you knock over the inkwell, you’re disqualified. Who’ll be in the first heat?”
At first there were no takers. Beryl stared at each one of them, challenging them in the way Kibii had taught her. Finally, Sonny stepped forward and two other boys followed his lead.
“Excellent. Dos, you’re the starting gun.” Beryl hiked up her skirt so she could jump properly. The girls giggled at the sight of her knickers and the boys looked a little too closely, but Beryl didn’t care.
“Ready, set, go!” shouted Dos.
The race began. Despite her tight shoes, as soon as Beryl began to leap the wide desks, her awkwardness melted away. Every part of her body worked perfectly. In a few seconds, the two other racers gave up to watch her.
Sonny did his best to keep up. He was a fast runner, but he couldn’t jump as high as Beryl could. At the third desk, he knocked over an inkwell, spattering black ink across the whitewashed wall. Dos rushed to scrub the stain with her handkerchief.
Beryl ignored the mess and soared over the desks as though she were flying. After two circuits, Sonny finally gave up and stood gasping in the corner. Beryl ran with only one thought: to win. She did not notice she was the only one still racing.
Finally she came to a halt. The girls gaped at her and the boys shuffled their feet. “Did I win?” she asked, forcing herself to breathe through her nose. It wouldn’t do to seem winded.
“Of course you did,” said Dos. “How did you learn to jump like that?”
“The Nandi on our farm. They trained me to jump higher than my head. A desk is nothing.”
“I don’t believe you,” Mary said scornfully. “You’re lying again.” And Sonny said, “Show us. I dare you.”
“I beat you all at your own games, and mine, too. I don’t need to prove anything else,” Beryl cried.
“Of course, you would say that,” said Mary spitefully, tossing her curls over her shoulder.
Beryl’s back stiffened and her fists clenched by themselves. “Mary, if you call me a liar one more time, I’ll…”
At that moment, Miss Seccombe returned. Her eyes darted from the rearranged desks, the ink spatter on the wall, and, worst of all, boys in the girls’ classroom. “Boys, what are you doing in here?” she spluttered. “What’s been going on?”
The room was silent.
“If no one answers, you will all lose recess.”
Beryl pressed her lips tightly together and glared at the rest, daring them to tell.
“It was Beryl, Miss Seccombe,” Mary said. “She wanted to do a steeplechase with the desks. I told her it was against the rules.”
Beryl wanted to crush Mary’s simpering face with her fist.
Miss Seccombe dismissed the other students, leaving Mary and Beryl standing in front of her. “Mary, thank you, dear, for your truthfulness. I know it’s not easy to inform on a classmate.”
She turned to Beryl. “Miss Clutterbuck, you will miss recess for one week. If there’s another incident, you will not be permitted to be Alice in the play. Now clean up this mess.” She walked out of the room.
Beryl marveled that Miss Seccombe, who understood her so little, could devise such a galling punishment. Being trapped inside for a week would be unbearable.
She glared at Mary. “I won’t forget this, Mary Russell.”
To her surprise, Mary was nearly in tears. “I can’t understand it. I thought for sure she would take Alice away.”
“You turned me in for a part in the stupid play?” Beryl asked incredulously.
“It’s my part!” Mary cried.
“Alice is a sissy girl who doesn’t have enough sense to get out of a bad dream.” Beryl had finally read the book. She liked the shrinking and expanding, and thought the Cheshire Cat had possibilities, but she considered Alice a poor excuse for a heroine.
“She’s a proper young lady. An English lady. She wears a pinafore and behaves herself. You could never play her!”
“Take the part—I don’t care,” Beryl protested.
“It’s Miss Seccombe who decides—if she knew what a liar you were, she’d give Alice back to me.”
Beryl had had enough. With her flat palm, she shoved Mary against the wall. “I have never lied,” she growled. “Not once.”
“Take your hands off me,” said Mary.
“Not until you apologize.”
Mary suddenly kicked Beryl in the shin with one of her pointy-toed boots.
Beryl’s eyes watered with the pain. Without thinking, her right hand went to Mary’s throat and started to squeeze. Mary gasped and swung her arms out wildly. She yanked a handful of Beryl’s hair. A tangle of strands came away from the scalp. With her left hand, Beryl pulled up her skirt and grabbed the small dagger she now kept in the top of her stocking. She whipped it up under Mary’s chin.
Mary began to cry.
Beryl glanced from Mary’s scared face to the knife in her own hand. She heard Arap Maina’s voice clearly in her head. “Beru, be kind to those who are afraid.”
Not meeting Mary’s eyes, Beryl stepped back and put away her knife. This was not the way to solve her problem with Mary. She walked to the window and said, “You are a stupid girl. But I won’t stain my blade with your blood.”
Now that there was some distance between them, Mary looked braver. Between her sobs, she cried, “You are a savage who doesn’t belong here. The others may believe your lies, but I know better.” She ran out howling.
Beryl sank down to the floor and held her head in her hands. How was it that Mary was the witch, but it was Beryl who felt ashamed?
A week later, they began rehearsing Alice in Wonderland. Beryl reluctantly put on her costume of a red dress covered with a white pinafore and tied a ribbon in her blond hair. Looking in the mirror in the dormitory, she had to admit she looked just like the illustrations in Mr. Carroll’s book.
She tucked her latest letter from Arthur in the wide pocket of her skirt. It was short and contained many misspellings, but he wrote of horses and home. He was most excited about how high he could jump now. She smiled as she thought of him bouncing up and down.
Taking a last look at the demure stranger in the mirror, she laughed out loud. She was finished with good behavior. She was about to introduce the real Beryl to Miss Seccombe and the Nairobi School for European Children.
The children were assembled in the yard for a cast photo. As the tallest, Beryl stood in the back. Mary, who play
ed the Red Queen, was seated on a low throne in front of her. Mary had primped for an hour to be ready. While the photographer readied his plates, Beryl was preparing, too.
“Stop fidgeting, Beryl,” scolded Miss Seccombe.
“Everyone look at me,” the photographer said. He held up a large magnesium flashbulb. There was a flash that left them all blinded.
“Miss Seccombe, that hurt my eyes,” Mary complained.
“I’ll take one more,” the photographer said.
Promise the Night Page 18