Mr. Bates stopped and indicated the vacant chair. “Wait here, please, Miss Drummond.”
He disappeared inside the closed door and I heard voices from within. I seated myself as instructed and immediately applied myself to a study of my companion. He looked out of place in the polished rectitude of the Government House, with his scuffed boots and unshaven chin. I noticed that his earlobes had been pierced, and through each hole he had threaded a small gold hoop. Pirate indeed. His hat sat on his knee while his hands rested loosely on his thighs – big, capable hands mapped with scars and calluses. His hair was a disgrace, tangled and in desperate need of a shampoo and a cut. In a gentler climate it might have been a soft brown, but the African sun had burnished it to gold, the same colour as the stubble at his jaw, and his face was weathered bronze, a web of tiny wrinkles around his eyes from squinting at horizons too hard for too many years. On one tanned wrist he wore an odd collection of bracelets, some beaded, some braided, and one slender leather thong strung with what looked like an assortment of teeth and claws. Underneath the bracelets I could see scars marring his left arm, long thin whips of white stretching from his wrist to disappear under the rolled cuff of his shirt. I shuddered lightly and looked away. Everything about the man told a story if someone cared to listen. I picked up a magazine from the table and pretended to read.
While I had been studying him, he had been returning the favour, letting his gaze run slowly from my feet to my hair and back again. “Sorry about your shoes,” he said. His voice was low and a little rough, but his vowels were tidy and his accent was not English but not quite American either.
I peered down at the snowy suede, now indelibly marked with bright crimson souvenirs of the beating. I turned my ankle, looking at my foot from different angles.
“Oh, I don’t know. I might start a new fashion,” I told him.
“You’re awfully calm about the whole thing,” he remarked.
I shrugged. “Didn’t he have it coming?”
He laughed, a short, almost mirthless sound, and leveled his gaze directly at me. His eyes were strikingly blue, like pieces of open sky on a clear, clear day. He looked through them with an expression of perfect frankness, and the beauty of those eyes combined with that cool detachment was powerful. I wondered if he knew it.
“He did. He beat his wife.”
“And the lady is a friend of yours?”
A slow smile touched his mouth. It was an expressive mouth, and he used it well, even when he didn’t speak.
“You could say that,” he said.
I lifted a brow to indicate disapproval, and he laughed again, this time a real laugh. The sound of it was startling in that small space, and I felt the rumble of it in my chest just as I had the crack of his whip.
“Don’t look so disapproving, Miss Drummond. I would have thought the notion of a friendship between the sexes would be the last thing to shock you.”
“I see my reputation has preceded me,” I said, smoothing my skirt primly over my knees.
“You’ve already made the betting book at the club,” he told me, holding me fast with those remarkable eyes.
“Have I, indeed? And what are the terms?”
“Fifty pounds to whoever names the man who beds you first,” he stated flatly.
Before I could respond, the door opened and Bates reappeared.
“Miss Drummond, if you please, the lieutenant governor will see you now.”
I rose and went to the door, turning back just as I reached it. I gave him a slow, purposeful look, taking him in from battered boots to filthy, unkempt hair.
“Tell me, who did you put your money on?”
He stretched his legs out to cross them at the ankle. He folded his arms behind his head and gave me a slow grin. “Why, myself, of course.”
4
Inside the office, a squirrelly fellow with coppery hair – the lieutenant governor, I imagined – was scribbling on some papers and pursing his lips thoughtfully. No doubt he was keeping me waiting to impress upon me the significance of his position, so I looked around and waited for him to get tired of his own importance. After a few minutes he glanced up, peering thoughtfully through a pair of spectacles that needed polishing.
“Miss Delilah Drummond? I am Oswell Fraser, Lieutenant Governor of the Kenya colony.”
I smiled widely to show there were no hard feelings for his less-than-polite welcome, but he continued to scowl at me.
“Now, I understand your stepfather has pulled a few strings with the governor on your behalf.”
I shrugged. “Well, I wouldn’t say—”
“I would,” he cut in sharply. “And I want you to know that it won’t do you any good. Not now. Sir William has found it necessary to return to England and expects to be there for some weeks. In his absence, I am acting governor.” He finished this with a little preen of his mustache.
“How nice for you,” I began, but he lifted a hand.
“I have no wish to spend any more time upon this matter than necessary, so permit me to press on. I am well aware of your reputation, Miss Drummond, and I have no doubt you expect to have as grand a time here in Kenya as you have around the rest of the world. But let me speak with perfect frankness. I will not have it.”
He was so earnest I smothered a laugh and put on my best expression of wide-eyed innocence. I even batted my lashes a few times, but he was entirely immune.
“I am quite serious, Miss Drummond. There are circumstances afoot just now which make it imperative that the colonists here conduct themselves with decorum and respectability. This includes you.”
I gave him a winsome smile. “Mr. Fraser, really, I cannot imagine how you have come to have such a terrible opinion of me, but I assure you I have no intention of misbehaving.”
“Misbehaving?” He reached for the sheet of paper and began to read from it. “Arrested for stealing a car outside a Harlem nightclub and driving it into the Hudson River. Caught in flagrante with a judge’s eighteen-year-old son in Dallas. Fined for swimming nude in the Seine. Need I continue?”
“Those incidents were taken entirely out of context, I assure you.”
“I doubt it,” he returned primly. He put the sheet aside, letting it drop from his fingertips as if he could not bear to touch it. “They, and the other incidents chronicled in this report, speak to a lifetime of poor decisions and irresponsible, sometimes criminal, behavior. And if this were not enough, I happen to be married to a former schoolmate of yours. Annabel has been extremely forthright about your antics in Switzerland.”
“Oh, dear Annabel!” I said faintly. I remembered her well. A mousy girl with forgettable features and thick ankles. She had taken immense pleasure in carrying tales to the headmistress and then gloating over my punishments. “How is she? Please pass along my regards.”
He refused to thaw even at this little bit of polite flummery. “Remember what I said, Miss Drummond. These are significant times for this colony. I will not have your behavior or anyone else’s coming between us and our ultimate independence from London.”
“Is that why the governor has returned to