Far In The Wilds (4 page)

“It is not as good as Baudelaire, but I like it,” she said, slanting him a look.

“Mademoiselle Gautier, I think you are pulling my leg. Whitman is as fine a poet as any Frenchman who ever picked up a pen.”

“We must agree not to quarrel,” she said. They stared up at the stars, and after a moment, he felt the brush of her fingertip against his. “Freddie has no head for strong spirits. Anything more than champagne and he becomes quite silly. He will sleep heavily,” she murmured.

“So will I,” Ryder told her. He moved his hand away just enough to punctuate the message.

She arched a shapely brow at him. “And then I sleep alone. What a pity.”

She rose then, gathering the ends of her shawl about her like a winding sheet. “I will bid you all good-night and pleasant dreams.”

Mademoiselle left them then and as the fire burned down, the prince fell asleep with his head on Jude’s shoulder. She poked him with a pointed finger.

“Do you suppose he’s died?”

Ryder sighed. “No. I think he just can’t hold his liquor.”

He rose and hefted the prince over his shoulder. “I’ll put him to bed and then turn in. You sitting up?”

Jude, who had drunk as much as the prince, was wide-eyed and alert. She sat, stirring the embers with a stick.

“I’m going to watch the fire for awhile. You know, this may be your one chance to try it on with Mademoiselle since her lover’s out of commission.”

Ryder shot her a warning look. “Keep it up and I’ll send you home.”

Jude’s laugh followed him as he carried the prince into his tent and dumped him onto his cot. But when Ryder went to his own tent a moment later Jude was staring into the fire, silent tears slipping down her cheeks as she watched the flames. He started toward her but she put up a hand.

“Go to bed, Ryder. I need to lay my ghosts on my own.”

Chapter Five

The next morning Ryder had already risen and washed and hunted for bush meat for the porters before his clients emerged from their tents. The prince looked a little haggard, but Mademoiselle was fresh as the morning, dressed in crisp safari clothes and wearing her enormous hat, the veil thrown back as she breakfasted on fresh eggs and tomato juice and potatoes fried in duck
confit
.

“I think your African air agrees with me, Mr. White,” she announced. “I never eat so much at home. I shall be fat as a pig by the time we return to Europe.”

“I doubt that,” Ryder said mildly. He had learned long ago the best thing for a man’s sanity was never to be drawn into a conversation about a woman’s weight. The prince wasn’t so careful. He snorted as he looked Mademoiselle up and down with a proprietary gaze.

“Yes, you must be careful,” he said seriously. “I do not like my women to be fat.”

Jude looked up from her plate of eggs, fried bread, meat stew and fruit and glanced to the prince’s soft belly and rolled her eyes. “How are you feeling this morning, prince?” she asked sweetly.

The prince groaned a little and Jude mixed him up a hangover cure of tomato juice with a raw egg broken in, whipped to a bloody pink froth. He held his nose and drank it down in one go, heaving a little as he did. “Thank you, dear lady. How is it that you are unscathed by our evening and I feel as though I’d been run over by a herd of wildebeest?”

“Africans are hard drinkers,” she explained. “Not much else to do out here except drink and fornicate.”

“Jude.” Ryder’s voice was sharp, but Jude was in a malicious mood.

“Come now, Ryder. We’re all adults. Surely we can speak frankly. The prince has brought his friend to entertain him on the trip. It’s no different than what you get up to with half the wives in the colony.”

Mademoiselle stiffened but the prince looked slyly at Ryder. “Ha! We are men of the world, are we not?” But Ryder did not respond. He turned his attention to the fire instead.

If the moment had passed, the whole rest of that day, the whole rest of their lives might have been different. But the moment did not pass. Instead, Mademoiselle’s usual caution deserted her. At hearing the prince describe himself as a man of the world, her eyes went to his rounded belly, the pink gleam of his scalp, the fat fingers. And she laughed.

The laugh was short and brittle, bitten off as soon as she realized what she had done. She looked quickly down at her plate and Ryder hurried in with a remark about the weather being fine for the day’s hunting. But Jude was watching the prince. And she knew that Mademoiselle might be forgiven for pricking his vanity. It was probably not the first time it had happened, and it would not be the last. She would offend him and he would discard her. Once they returned to Europe, she would find herself gently released from her arrangement with him. He would move on to find himself a new reflection in another woman’s gaze. He would forget that Mademoiselle had thought him fat and charmless. But Ryder would not be forgiven. A man could forgive a woman who scorned him, but he could not forgive the man who bested him. Ryder was younger and stronger; his very competence stung the prince. And in some fashion, he would be made to pay for it.

* * *

The day was hot and still, with no wind to stir the long yellow grasses on the savannah. They left the campsite and truck behind with porters to guard both and walked over the plains, moving slowly so as to scare away snakes that might be winding quietly through the grasses. When the sun was very high and their shadows quite small, they came to a Masai village. It was enclosed by a
boma
of thorn bushes and populated with a cluster of mud huts. The young men were out with the cattle, but the women were busy around the cooking fires and goatherds, tending their simmering cookpots and their children.

“My God,” murmured Mademoiselle. “It’s like something out of the Bible.”

Jude flicked her a glance. “Don’t speak. If you offend them, Ryder will make sure you regret it.”

Mademoiselle sniffed but kept her mouth closed as one of the women came forward, her hands upraised. She greeted Ryder and Gideon warmly and gave Jude a wide, gap-toothed smile. She called instructions to her children, and in a very few minutes her daughters crowded around, bringing calabashes of tea with hot milk to the visitors as they squatted upon the ground.

“It tastes of smoke,” the prince said, but he smiled when he said it and Jude leaned over to explain.

“Their huts have little ventilation. The smoke from the fires inside make everything smell smoky. It’s an acquired taste, but not bad.”

“I like it,” he said stoutly. He made loud smacking noises as he drained his calabash, but Jude turned away to follow as much of the other conversation as she could.

“What are they saying?” the prince asked.

Jude shrugged. “I don’t speak much Maa, that’s the language of the Masai. I speak Swahili and most of them do as well, but Ryder always speaks Maa with them as a gesture of respect.”

The conversation lasted a long while with much gesticulating and several more calabashes of tea. Mademoiselle took off her large hat and slumped against a wall, fanning herself gently in the shade of a small, stunted thorn tree. Several of the children crept close to study her, and she eyed them warily.

“Don’t mind the staring,” Jude told her. “It’s just that they don’t see many white women. Particularly not white women with big hats.”

Mademoiselle gave her a faint smile. “I don’t mind being stared at. It’s the state of their noses I object to. It would be an act of charity to provide them with handkerchiefs.”

Jude suppressed a sigh. “That’s not a Masai thing, Mademoiselle Gautier. That’s a child thing.”

“I am afraid I would not know.” She eyed the prince where he was sitting close to Ryder, attempting to understand what was being said. “A lady in my position must be very, very careful of such things.”

“Oh,” Jude said quietly. “No souvenirs of your relationships then?”

Mademoiselle’s beautiful mouth was bitter. “You are coarse but perceptive.” She nodded towards the prince. “I made that mistake only once.”

“What happened?”

“He made me get rid of it.” She said the words as casually as if she were discussing the weather or the price of her shoes, but Jude could feel the pain beneath them.

“Bastard,” Jude said quietly.

Mademoiselle shrugged. “He’s no worse than I am. It was his idea, but I did it. Because I was afraid of being thrown out on the streets again. Because in my own pitiful way, I love him a little.” The hand holding the calabash shook. “You must think me monstrous.”

“I think women in your line of work don’t have many options,” Jude said evenly. “You never have.”

Mademoiselle laughed. “I like you. In spite of myself, I like you.”

“I wish I could return the favor.”

“Do not worry. Such things do not offend me. I have no women friends, as you can well imagine. But sometimes I feel the lack of them.” She looked about her, taking in the vast African sky and the plains that stretched endlessly beneath it. “And something about this place makes me hate the artifice of our lives, the pretense. For just a moment, I wanted to tell the truth and take a clean breath of air.”

Jude sipped at her tea. “And what now?”

Mademoiselle shrugged. “Now we go back to being acquaintances. We will be polite in my case, and in yours barely civil,” she said with a twitch of her mouth. “But when I leave Africa I will know I left one of my secrets behind.” She rose and dusted off her skirt. “Who knows? Perhaps I will travel more lightly because of it.”

* * *

The discussion of the leopard was concluded in the afternoon, and Ryder eased back on his heels to speak to the others.

“We have our leopard,” he announced. “It carried off an orphaned infant from this village a few days ago and it has been harassing the goats.” He paused with the splendid timing of a theatrical impresario, his expression stern as he looked at the prince. “But I’m not sure if this is the right one for you. It’s very big and very unique.”

“Unique? How?” the prince demanded.

“It’s black.”

“Black!” Mademoiselle’s eyes were wide. “I have never heard of such a thing.”

“It’s rare,” the prince said happily, “very, very rare. The most impressive of trophies.”

His eyes glazed over as he considered his prize. Mademoiselle slipped her arm through his and he began to describe his plans for mounting it as Ryder and Jude moved a little apart.

“You’re looking pleased with yourself,” Jude told him. She handed him a final calabash of tea and he drank it down.

“Very. That leopard is a maneater. I would have been hunting it next week anyway. The prince is so hell-bent on a trophy, if it had been puny or pale, I think he would have kept me out here for a month looking for something better. But he won’t do better than this one. She said it’s the biggest leopard she’s seen in at least a dozen seasons, and the fact that it’s coal-black means there won’t be any danger of killing the wrong animal.” His eyes lit with a mischievous gleam. “Do you think I should charge him extra for finding him a black one?”

Jude punched his shoulder. “Just drink your tea. Where do we find this maneater?”

* * *

Later that afternoon, Gideon opened his ash bag to cast a handful of ash into the air, but it fell straight down again. He shook his head and Ryder’s expression was grim. They had been walking for hours, following the directions given by the Masai villagers. They had dropped into
luggas
, the dry riverbeds that were the leopards’ preferred haunt, and they had searched high in every tree for any trace of the cat.

“What is wrong?” demanded the prince. He took out a silken handkerchief to mop his face. He had never experienced safari in January before. He had gone in October, before the short rains, when the grasses are green and the birds began to fill the skies on their long trip south from the chilling days in the north. But now it was hot and dry, the red earth brittle underfoot.

Ryder turned as Gideon put away his ash bag. “No wind. It means we can’t stay downwind of any predators. They’ll smell us before we see them if we aren’t lucky.”

Mademoiselle lowered her veil against the sun and they walked on, tracking with Gideon’s help. The prince was in an expansive mood, putting himself at pains to be friendly. He insisted upon helping hunt for bush meat and asking a number of questions about the Masai. His good mood only faltered when they came to the rushing brown water of a small tributary. Ryder halted them on the bank and told them to watch the other side. A small herd of impala were standing on a low bluff, peering nervously at the water as they jostled one another.

“Why do they not drink?” the prince demanded.

“They’re afraid of crocs,” Ryder told him, keeping his voice low enough not to alarm the impala. As they watched, a lone bull giraffe strolled into view, picking his leisurely way down to the water’s edge. He sniffed the air then splayed his long legs, lowering his graceful neck to drink. After a moment the impala moved down the bluff, pushing each other in their rush to the water.

Mademoiselle threw back her veil, and Ryder could see her face was very still and white. He pointed to the herd and explained. “Some of the hooved animals will use giraffe as sentinels. They wait to see if crocs attack, and if they don’t, then they know it is safe to drink. I’ve watched them gather for hours on a riverbank, too scared to drink without something else bigger than they are to test the waters.”

“How clever,” Mademoiselle murmured.

Ryder shrugged. “Most animals are about as clever as they need to be out here.” He gave the signal to move across the water. “Move deliberately, single file, and don’t dawdle but don’t stir up the water any more than you have to,” he instructed.

The others crossed speedily, with Gideon’s tall form leading the way and Jude walking directly behind the prince for safety’s sake. At the edge, Mademoiselle stopped dead. Ryder turned and she looked at him, her face even whiter than before. “I cannot,” she said hoarsely.

From across the bank, the prince looked back in exasperation. “Come along, Liane. No one is going to carry you, you know. You’ve got far too fat for that.”

If Mademoiselle heard him, her face gave nothing away. She simply stood, waiting patiently for something to happen. At length, Ryder reached for her hand. “Mademoiselle? Walk with me. Just take my hand, and I will see you safely across. Don’t you trust me?”

Her hand was cold and still in his. He coaxed her far enough for the tips of her shoes to be washed with river water. Suddenly, she gave a small shriek, tightening her grip on his hand so hard he could feel his bones ache.

He reached down and scooped her up. “Put your arms around my neck and hold on. Not quite so tightly,” he told her. He kept up a running patter of idle remarks as they crossed. He told her about the go-away bird and the little warthogs with their tails carried aloft as they ran. He knew she didn’t hear a word of it. Her eyes were dilated with fright, but at least she didn’t fight him, and by the time he told her about the cheetah he had once nursed back to health, it was done. They were on the other side where the earth was dry and red and the prince was waiting.

“How silly you are!” he said coolly.

Mademoiselle pressed a handkerchief to her lips. “I am sorry, Freddie. I have never been good with rushing water, but the thought of those crocodiles made it quite impossible.”

The prince turned to Ryder. “You must be stronger than you look to have carried her so easily.” He turned and followed Jude into the bush.

Mademoiselle came close to Ryder. “I no longer bother to apologize for him,” she said softly. “He thinks it is quite alright to offend if he is paying. At least, he will make it up to you in your tip.”

Ryder’s eyes glinted. “Yes, but will he make it up to you?”

Her gaze was cool. “That is none of your concern.”

“No, it isn’t. I just wonder how you stand it. He humiliates you and you deserve better.”

She gave a short laugh. “I must congratulate you, Ryder White. Most people don’t surprise me. You do.”