Green City in the Sun (7 page)

     "Then where did all these women and children come from?"

     "Across the river." Valentine pointed, and Grace turned around. On the opposite bank, through cedars and olive trees, she could see clearings, small native plots with round thatched huts and vegetable gardens. "However," Valentine said, "that's our land, too. It extends quite a bit in that direction."

     "People are living on your land?"

     "They're squatters. It's a system the Colonial Office worked out. The Africans can have their shambas—that's their word for 'farm plot'—on our land if in return they work for us. We take care of them, settle their disputes, bring a doctor 'round if they need it, provide them with food and clothing, and they work the land for us."

     "It sounds very feudal."

     "As a matter of fact, that's exactly what it is."

     "But..." Grace frowned. "Weren't they already here before you bought the land?"

     "Nothing was stolen from them, if that's what you're thinking. The Crown made an offer to their headman that he couldn't refuse. It made him a chief—the Kikuyu don't have chiefs—and gave him all sorts of authority. In return, he sold the land for some beads and copper wire. It's all legal. He put his thumbprint to a deed of sale."

     "Do you suppose he understood what he was doing?"

     "Don't go 'noble savage' on me, old girl. These people are like children. Never even saw a wheel before. Those chaps down there were hauling logs on their heads. So I managed to lay hand on some wheelbarrows, and I explained that they were for the logs. Next day I saw them carrying the logs inside the wheelbarrows all right, with the wheelbarrows on their heads! And they have no notion of property, no notion of what they can do with land. It was going to waste. Someone had to step in and do something with it. If we British hadn't, then the Germans or the Arabs would have. Better us taking care of these people than the Hun or the Mohammedan slavers."

     He strode away from her toward Mount Kenya, with his hands on his hips, as if he were going to shout at the mountain. "Yes," he said in a deadly even tone, "I'm going to do something with this land." Valentine's black eyes blazed as the wind whipped his hair and cut through his shirt. He had a wild, challenging look, as if daring Africa to defeat him. Grace sensed something barely harnessed within her brother, an energy only just under control, an obsession and a madness that had to be kept under constant rein. It was a strange power that drove him, she knew, a force that had propelled him out of dull, old, law-burdened England and into this untamed, lawless Dark Continent. He had come to conquer; he was going to sweep his hand across this primordial Eden and leave his mark.

     "You see now, don't you?" he cried into the wind. "You understand now, don't you, Grace? Why I stayed here? Why I couldn't go back to England when I was discharged from the army?"

     His hands curled into fists.

     "Feudal" she had called it. Valentine liked that. Lord Treverton,
truly
an earl over a domain of his own creation, not like Bella Hill, where obsequious cap-lifting peasants lived on mediocre farms and looked up at the big house as if it were a Christmas pudding. Suffolk revolted him in its tiresome tradition and done things and eternal sameness, where men's imaginations stretched no farther than tea time. When Valentine had come to British East Africa to fight the Germans, he had suddenly come alive. He had looked around himself and had
seen:
what he had to do; where he belonged. Destiny filled him; purpose flooded his veins. It was as if Africa, a slumbering,
clumsy giant waiting to be wakened and prodded into productive life, had been waiting for him and for men like him.

     Valentine trembled in the wind, not with cold but with vision. He lifted his dark eyes to the ominous clouds and hoisted a mental saber. He felt as if he rode a warhorse and faced an army. He felt clad in armor and backed by a host of thousands. Ancient fighting blood was stirred from dormancy; ancestral Trevertons shouted silently in his brain.
Conquer
, they said.
Subjugate...

     He turned abruptly and looked at Grace as if having forgotten she was there. Then his face warmed into a smile, and he said, "Come, let me show you your small piece of Africa."

     A trail had been hacked through the forest from the hilltop to the ridge overlooking the river. Valentine brought his sister to the grassy edge, just a few yards from where her oxcarts were being unloaded, and pointed down to the flat banks of the Chania. "There's your land," he said, describing the boundaries with a sweep of his hand. "It begins up there, just beyond that clump of gum trees, and tumbles down here to the river. Thirty acres, set aside for you and God."

     Grace filled her eyes with the sight of the cedar trees, the brightly blooming snapdragons, the mauve and yellow orchids. It was paradise. And it was hers.

     I've come at last, Jeremy, whispered the secret voice of her heart. The place we dreamed of. I shall build it exactly as we planned, and I shall never leave it because, God willing, if you are still alive, you might find me here one day.

     "Is that down there yours, too, Val?" she asked, pointing to the area a hundred feet below her.

     "Yes, and wait till you hear the plans I have for it!"

     "But ... someone is living there." Grace counted seven little huts standing around an old fig tree.

     "They'll move. That's Chief Mathenge's family. His three wives and grandmother live there. They don't belong on this side of the river actually. You see, this whole area was set up as a buffer zone between the Masai and the Kikuyu in an effort to get them to stop fighting. It's sort of a no-man's-land. Neither tribe is allowed here."

     "But the white man is?"

     "Well, of course. Now those down there—it seems that some years back there was an epidemic of some sort across the river where the main tribe lives. This group broke off and came here to get away from the evil spirits or some such. Mathenge's promised me he'll herd them back across.

     Valentine turned to look at Rose. He saw her back on the hill, where she stood like a statue in the middle of the cleared land as if calmly waiting for her house to be built up around her. He walked toward her.

     "Valentine tells me that's your land."

     Grace looked up. Sir James had joined her. He had removed his pith helmet, and his dark brown hair was rumpled in the wind, glistening in places from occasional raindrops. "Yes," she said. "I'm going to build a hospital."

     "And bring the Word of God to the heathen?"

     She smiled. "Minister to the body, Sir James, and the spirit will follow."

     "Please, just James. We're in Africa now."

     
Yes
, she thought.
Africa. Where gentlemen shake hands with ladies and an earl goes about with his shirt unbuttoned.

     "You've carved a big slice of work for yourself," Sir James was saying as he stood close to her, looking down into the wide ravine. "These people are plagued with malaria and influenza, yaws and parasites, and a host of diseases we don't even have names for!"

     "I shall do my best. I've brought medical books with me, and plenty of supplies."

     "I must warn you, they have their own medicine people, and they don't like the
wazungu
to interfere."

     
"Wazungu?"

     "White folks. That family down there, for instance, in those huts 'round the fig tree. They're the family of a very powerful medicine woman who practically runs the clan that lives across the river."

     "I thought they had a chief."

     "They do, but it's his wife's grandmother, Wachera, who is the real power in these parts."

     "Thank you for telling me." Grace looked up into his attractive face. "Val told me about you in his letters. He said your ranch is eight miles north of here. I trust we shall become friends."

     "I've no doubt of it."

     A draft suddenly blew up from the river and swept Grace's sun helmet off her head. Sir James caught it, and as he handed it to her, he saw the glint of gold on her left hand. "Your brother didn't tell me you were engaged to be married."

     She looked down at the school ring that had been given to her by Jeremy the night before the ship was torpedoed. She had been rescued from the freezing waters and had wakened after a bout of pneumonia to find herself in a military hospital in Cairo. Lieutenant Junior Grade Jeremy Manning, she had been informed, was listed as missing.

     She would never give up the hope of someday finding him. Their shipboard love had been brief but intense, the sort of romance that war creates, compressing years into minutes. And she refused to believe he was dead. No one, not even Valentine or Rose, knew of the messages Grace had left for Jeremy in the past year, starting in Egypt when she had entrusted a letter with the Colonial Office. She had left subsequent notes in Italy, France, the length of England. Coming to Africa, she had left word of her whereabouts at Port Said, Suez, Mombasa, and, lastly, the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi. She dropped the letters like a trail of breadcrumbs, hoping that Jeremy had somehow survived, had been rescued, and was alive at this moment, searching for her....

     "My fiancé was lost at sea during the war," she said quietly.

     Sir James saw the awkward flutter of her hands, the attempt to cover, protect the ring, and he checked the impulse to offer her a comforting arm. "My sister's a doctor," Valentine had told him. "But she's not as mannish as some." James was incredulous. Surely this soft-spoken woman with gentle, pleasing features and an endearing smile was not the same one who had written such large and brave letters to her brother. The plans Grace had described for her hospital had been painted in bold, sweeping strokes; she had sounded almost Amazonian. Sir James had not quite known what to expect, but certainly not this attractive young woman with enchanting eyes.

     Back on the hilltop, buffeted by the rising wind, Lord Treverton strode toward his wife with a searching look. Why the devil didn't she answer him?

     "Rose?" he said again, louder.

     She was staring in the direction of an unusual cluster of gum trees down
the rear slope of the hill. They were incongruous with the surrounding forest of chestnuts and cedars; there appeared to be a clearing in the heart of them, a protected glade perhaps, a place where one could be safe.

     This new world frightened Rose. It was so wild, so primitive. Where were the ladies who would be calling on her? Where were the other houses? Valentine had written that the Donald ranch was eight miles away. Rose had pictured a country lane and pleasant Sunday drives. But there was no road, just a dirt track cutting through a land of naked savages and dangerous beasts. Rose was afraid of the Africans. She had never met a person of color before. On the train she had shied away from the smiling stewards; in Nairobi she had left Grace to deal with the native staff.

     But Lady Rose did so want to be useful in this new land. She desperately wanted to make Valentine proud of her. She despised her own frailty, her inability to charge into life as her sister-in-law did. During the war Rose had timidly suggested she might join the Volunteer Aid Detachment and nurse wounded soldiers. But Valentine would not hear of it. So instead, she had rolled bandages in her parlor and had knitted scarves for the men in the trenches.

     She had come to the Dark Continent in the hope that African life would make her more substantial, that the demands of settler life would erect a steel framework within her soft shell. She had once thought that marrying Valentine would color in her transparent places, but instead, she seemed only to fade beside the brilliance of his glory. And then she had thought.
Pioneering woman.
Rose liked the sound of that; it tolled like a cast-iron bell. It meant a woman who brought civilization to the bush, a woman who set standards and who led the way. Rose had also placed her hopes in
motherhood
, which sounded so firm, so important. She would be solid at last, in British East Africa, and people would no longer look through her.

     "Rose?" Valentine said, drawing near.

     Valentine, I love you so! I wish I could make you proud of me. I'm sorry the baby wasn't a boy.

     "Darling? Are you all right?"

     He would try again for a son, and the thought of it made Rose shudder. Their love for each other was so beautiful, why did Valentine have to spoil
it with that messy bedroom business? "Those gum trees," she murmured. "Don't cut them down, please, dearest."

     "Why not?"

     "They feel ... special somehow."

     "Very well, they're yours."

     He studied her. Rose was so pale and thin she looked as if the wind would carry her away. Then he remembered her ordeal on the train. "Darling," he said, stepping close to her to shield her with his body, "you're not well yet. You need to get your strength back. Wait till you see the camp. We have a proper cook, and we always dress for dinner. And the house will be wonderful, you'll see. Just as soon as the seedlings have been transplanted, we'll start building."

     He laid a hand on her shoulder and felt her stiffen.

     So, he thought darkly. It was going to begin again. His nights alone in bed, when he was driven mad by desire for his own wife, and then his taking her, closing his eyes to the look on her face. Rose would lie there afterward like a wounded deer, silently reproaching him with her violated body, driving him to undeserved feelings of guilt. He had thought she would come around in time, that she would learn to enjoy their lovemaking; instead, she seemed to grow to dislike it more each time, and he had no idea what to do.

     "Come along, darling," he said. "Let's join the others."

     Rose went first to Mrs. Pembroke and took the baby from her. Cradling Mona between her ermine muff and the soft fur of her coat, Rose followed her husband to the grassy slope where the others stood talking.