‘Until Konrad’s twenty-fifth birthday …’
‘Yes, he will be the master then.’
When Solomons had gone, Athala went upstairs to the playroom where Gerhard was playing. She looked on him as a gift from God, an unexpected blessing whose birth had brought a rare moment of joy to a marriage long past rescuing. Gerhard had been conceived on the very last night that Athala and Otto had slept together. It had been a short, perfunctory coupling and he had been away with Fräulein von Wellberg on the night Gerhard was born. But that only made her baby all the more precious to Athala.
She wondered how she was going to explain to him that his father was dead. How did one tell a three-year-old that sort of thing? For now, she didn’t have the heart to interrupt Gerhard while he played with the wooden building bricks that were his favourite toy.
Athala always found her son fascinating to observe as he arranged the brightly coloured bricks. He had an instinctive grasp of symmetry. If he placed one brick of a certain colour or shape on one side of his latest castle, or house, or farm (Gerhard always knew exactly what he was building), then another, identical one had to go on the opposite side.
She leaned over and kissed his head. ‘My little architect,’ she murmured, and Gerhard beamed with pleasure, for that was his favourite of all her pet names for him.
I will tell him, Athala told herself, but not yet.
She gave the news to both her boys after Konrad had come home from school. He was only ten, but already regarded himself as the man of the house. As such, he made a point of not showing any sign of weakness when told that the father he took after so strongly was dead. Instead he wanted to know all the details of what had happened. Had his father been fighting the English? How many of them had he killed before they got him? When Athala had been unable to give him the answers he required, Konrad flew into a rage and said she was stupid.
‘Father was quite right not to love you,’ he sneered. ‘You were never good enough for him.’
On another day, Athala might have smacked him for that, but today she let it go. Then Konrad’s fury abated as fast as it had risen and he asked, ‘If Father is dead, does that mean that I am the Count now?’
‘Yes,’ said Athala. ‘You are Graf von Meerbach.’
Konrad gave a whoop of joy. ‘I’m the Count! I’m the Count!’ he chanted, marching around the playroom, like a stocky little red-headed guardsman. ‘I can do whatever I want and nobody can stop me!’
He came to a halt by Gerhard’s building, which had risen, brick by brick, until it was almost as tall as its maker.
‘Hey Gerdi, look at me!’
Gerhard looked up at his big brother, smiling innocently.
Konrad kicked Gerhard’s wonderful construction, scattering its bricks across the playroom floor. Then he kicked it again, and again until it was completely obliterated, and nothing remained but the colourful rubble carpeting the room.
Gerhard’s little face crumpled in despair and he ran sobbing to his mother.
As she wrapped her arms around her baby, she looked at the boy count now standing proudly over the destruction he had wreaked and she realized with bitter despair that she had been freed from her husband, only to be enslaved anew by her even more terrible son.
The skinny little girl wore a pair of jodhpurs that flapped around her thighs, for she lacked the flesh with which to fill them. Her short, black bobbed hair, which was normally unconstrained by bands or clips of any kind, had been pinned into a little bun, to be worn beneath her riding hat. Her freckled face was tanned a golden brown and her eyes were the clear, pure blue of the African skies that had looked down upon every day of her life.
All around her the grassy hills, garlanded with sparkling streams, stretched away to the horizon as if the Highlands of Scotland had been transported to the Garden of Eden: a magical land of limitless fertility, incomprehensible scale and thrilling, untamed wildness. Here leopards lounged in the branches of trees that were also home to chattering monkeys and snakes, like the shimmering, iridescent green mamba, or the shy but fatally poisonous boomslang. The head-high grass hid lions sharp in fang and claw and, even deadlier still, the buffalo, whose horns could cut deep into a man’s guts as easily as a sewing needle through fine linen.
The girl barely gave a thought to these hazards, for she knew no other world than this and besides, she had much more important things on her mind. She was stroking the velvet muzzle of her pony, a Somali-bred chestnut mare from which she had been inseparable ever since she had received it as her seventh-birthday present, eight months ago. The horse was called Kipipiri, which was both the Swahili word for ‘butterfly’ and the name of the mountain that stood tall on the eastern horizon, shimmering in the heat haze like a mirage.
‘Look, Kippy,’ the girl said, in a low, soothing murmur. ‘Look at all the nasty boys and their horrid stallions. Let’s show them what we can do!’
She stepped around to the side of the pony and, waving away the offer of a leg-up from her groom, put one foot into the nearest stirrup, pushed off it and sprang up into the saddle as nimbly as a jockey on Derby Day. Then she leaned forward along Kipipiri’s neck, stroking her mane, and whispered in her ear, ‘Fly, my darling, fly!’
Possessed by an exhilarating swirl of emotions in which pride, anticipation and giddy excitement clashed against nervousness, apprehension and a desperate longing not to make a fool of herself, the girl told herself to calm down. She had long since learned that her beloved Kippy could sense her emotions and be affected by them and the very last thing she needed was a nervous, skittish, over-excited mount. So she took a long deep breath, just as her mother had taught her, before letting the air out slowly and smoothly until she felt the tension ease from her shoulders. Then she sat up straight and kicked the pony into a walk, stirring up the dust from the peppery red earth as they moved towards the starting gate of the show-jumping ring that had been set up on one of the fields of the Wanjohi Valley Polo Club for its 1926 gymkhana.
The girl’s eyes were fixed on the fences scattered at apparently random points around the ring. And a single thought filled her mind: I am going to win!
A loudspeaker had been slung from one of the wooden rafters that held up the corrugated iron awning over the clubhouse veranda. The harsh, tinny sound of a man’s amplified voice burst from it, saying, ‘Now the final competitor in the twelve-and-under show jumping, Miss Saffron Courtney on Kipi-pipi-piri …’ Silence fell for a second and then the voice continued, ‘Awfully sorry, few too many pips there, I fear.’
‘And a few too many pink gins, eh, Chalky!’ a voice called out from among the spectators lounging on the wooden benches that were serving as spectator seating for the annual gymkhana the polo club laid on for its members’ children.
‘Too true, dear boy, too true,’ the announcer confessed, and then continued, ‘So far there’s only been one clear round, by Percy Toynton on Hotspur, which means that Saffron’s the only rider standing between him and victory. She’s much the youngest competitor in this event, so let’s give her a jolly big round of applause to send her on her way.’
A ripple of limp clapping could be heard from the fifty or so white settlers who had come to watch their children compete in the gymkhana, or who were simply grasping any opportunity to leave their farms and businesses and socialise with one another. They were drowsy with the warmth of the early afternoon sun and the thin air, for the polo fields lay at an altitude of almost eight thousand feet, which seemed to exaggerate the effect of their heroic consumption of alcohol. A few particularly jaded, decadent souls were further numbed by opium, while those who were exhibiting overt signs of energy or agitation had quite likely sniffed some