“It seems we are not expected,” I told Dora. “I suppose Mr. Fraser’s insistence on my departing Nairobi so suddenly has caught the staff on the hop. We weren’t scheduled to arrive for almost a week yet,” I reminded her. I turned back to the fellow in the turban. “May we go inside at least instead of standing out here getting devoured by insects?”
I swatted at the various things trying to suck my blood and the fellow understood me at once. He gestured for us to follow and we entered Fairlight at last. I gave a sigh of relief. It wasn’t as bad as I had feared based on the outside. Of course, candlelight makes everything look nicer, and I realised Fairlight was not wired for electricity. There were candles and paraffin lamps instead.
“How very nineteenth-century,” I murmured. “Is there food?” I mimed eating.
He nodded and waved us through. The entry hall, panelled in some very nice tropical woods, gave onto a pleasant drawing room with a broad fireplace with a mossy velvet fender. The dusty parquet floors were scattered with moth-eaten hides of various animals, and trophy heads hung on the walls, staring with blank, glassy eyes. Feathers were spilling out of the armchairs, but at least they looked comfortable, and I sank into one with an audible sigh.
He disappeared down a service passage and reappeared a few minutes later with a tray.
“Soup,” he said, pointing to the tray. There was no soup to be found, but there was a mixed rice dish with bits of unidentifiable meat and curry spices, some roasted potatoes, flatbreads and more boiled eggs.
“By the time we leave Africa, I’m going to be clucking,” I told Dora.
“Don’t complain. At least you know a boiled egg can’t poison you,” she said, peering suspiciously at the meat.
I was too ravenous to care. I forked in the food as fast as I could, and I was happy to find there was a rice pudding for dessert and happier still to find the supply of booze. I poured us each a nightcap and we stretched out by the fire.
“I’m so tired I don’t think I can get up to go to bed,” Dora said at last.
“I know.” I eyed the oozing sofa with distaste. “You realise we will have to do something about this place. If we’re going to be in exile for months, we cannot live like savages.”
“Hush,” she said, her eyes closed. “They’ll hear you.”
“No, they won’t. And they don’t think of themselves as savages. Besides, I wasn’t talking about them. It’s one thing to live in a hut with a leopard skin for a blanket because you don’t know better. It’s entirely different to live in these conditions and do nothing to improve them,” I told her, plucking a loose feather out of the upholstery.
“Tomorrow,” she promised, her voice drowsy. She began to murmur her prayers, but I kept talking.
“We’ll make a list,” I said, warming to the idea. “It will be nice to have a project. And Nigel will be very happy to know the place is being spruced up. Materials might be an issue, but labour should be cheap.”
Dora’s only reply was a snore, and I lay awake, watching the shadows on the ceiling. We never did get up and go to bed. My first night at Fairlight was spent drinking on a mouldering sofa in a house that wasn’t mine, listening to the sounds of a darkness that was darker than any I had ever known.
The next morning I awoke to find Dora poking me in the shoulder and an assemblage of various native fellows standing in a line, staring at me curiously.
“What the devil is their problem?”
I tried to roll over, but Dora stopped me. “Well, you do look a bit of a fright.”
I sat up and took inventory. Crumpled silk dress stained with red dust and Ryder’s fingerprints on the sleeve. Shoes caked in mud and buffalo blood. Empty flask on my lap, and I knew without even looking in a mirror that yesterday’s maquillage would be smeared everywhere.
“Say no more. Is there hot water?” I croaked.
“After a fashion,” she said. She pushed a cup of hot coffee into my hands. I detested coffee and she knew it, but it did the trick. I drank it down and lurched to my feet.
She showed me to the bathroom and I turned back to face her. “Is this a joke? Dodo, I count seven different kinds of insects, including a spider that may well be poisonous.”
“Spiders are arachnids,” she corrected.
I slammed the door in her face and applied my bloody shoe to the lurkers in the bathtub, eradicating all, except one little scorpion that dodged behind the toilet. I flung myself into the hot water and scrubbed, grateful that she had unpacked my French-milled soaps and a proper washcloth. After I was clean and dry and had washed my hair, I felt a pinch better.
Dodo had laid out a particularly fetching frock of green-and-black figured silk with green suede shoes, and as I put them on I wondered if they’d make it through the day. This country was hard on shoes, I thought ruefully. The white suede pair covered in Anthony Wickenden’s blood had been burned by the Norfolk staff, and the white silk ones soaked in buffalo blood would be next. I could have cried.
I emerged from my room looking vastly improved and feeling famished. Dora had found the dining room and there was toast, proper toast, with oranges and boiled eggs and some sort of meat that fought back when I poked it with a fork.
“Make a list, Dodo. First order of business – find a cook.”
Mercifully, she remembered the untouched picnic hamper from the previous day and we fell on it like Mongols, tearing into the parcels only to find flatbreads hardened to the consistency of rocks and some fruit that lay limp and apologetic in the bottom of the basket. There was a clutch of boiled eggs there as well, and some sort of potted meat I wouldn’t have touched if you’d offered me a palace on the moon.
When the meager meal was finished, we took a tour of the house led by the turbaned fellow whose name, as unlikely as it seemed, was Pierre.
“Surely that can’t be right,” I murmured to Dodo. But the name gave me an idea, and I turned to him. “Parlez-vous français?”
His face lit up. “Oui!” And then he burst into a volley of rapid and fairly grammatical French. In a very few minutes I learned everything I needed to know about him and about the situation at Fairlight. Dora, whose French limped along at its most athletic, had been left far behind. She waited for me to translate.
“Pierre was educated at a mission school not far from here. French Benedictine nuns who taught him their own language and a smattering of Latin, but no English.”
“Latin?”
“That’s what the man says. He remembers Nigel quite well, although he was merely the houseboy at the time. Since then he’s grown and married. Two wives, although he hopes to add a third soon.”
“Goodness,” Dora said faintly, but I noticed she was looking at Pierre with heightened interest. His features were arresting, more akin to those painted on an Egyptian tomb than what one would expect to find in sub-Saharan Africa. His nose was sharp and beaky and his skin the colour of polished walnuts. He was tall and stately and moved with such peculiar grace, he would have put any Paris mannequin to shame.
“He’s Somali and Christian – good for us because it means that, unlike a Mohammedan majordomo, he’ll touch pork and alcohol.”
“Well, that covers your nutritional requirements,” she put in.
She wasn’t wrong. I related the rest of what Pierre had told me. “There’s a farm manager, a fellow called Gates. He has a wife and a pair of children, but they’re away for a few days. There’s a cottage down the road that Fairlight lets to an artist from New York, and farther on is the boma where Ryder lives. They are our nearest neighbours. He said we should expect people coming from farther