Promise the Night (24 page)

“What are you talking about?”

“Actually, it’s two days past independence day! My year was up the day before yesterday. It’s time for me to go home.” Beryl laughed at herself. “I was so busy trying not to think about how long I had to wait, I lost track of the date!”

“You’re leaving now?”

The other girls hung on Beryl’s every word.

“There’s not a moment to waste! The train station is just up the street, right?”

Dos nodded, but her face was full of concern. “You can’t just leave! Shouldn’t you wait for your father to come get you?”

“Ha!” Beryl exclaimed, silencing their corner of the busy dining room. “He wouldn’t bother. He knows that I’ll get home on my own. It’s been grand getting to know you. Come visit any time! Good-bye!”

She turned to leave, but Dos grabbed her wrist. “What about your things?” she asked.

“Keep them! Who wants all those scratchy dresses and tight shoes?” Beryl said happily. Then a thought struck her. “But there is one thing…”

“What?” Then Dos remembered the only possession that Beryl cared about. “The lion’s paw.”

“I have to go back to school to get it.” Beryl looked through her battered purse for change to pay for a rickshaw. “Oh, bother. I don’t have enough money. Can I borrow some?”

“I won’t let you take a rickshaw by yourself,” Dos said. “I’ll come, too.”

Beryl was unpinning her bun. She shook out her braids. “Dos, I’ve hunted lions and warthogs. I don’t need an escort.”

“I insist,” Dos said.

“Won’t you get in trouble?”

Grinning, Dos shook her head. “Not with you to blame, I won’t!”

Beryl shrugged. “Suit yourself. We’d better go before Miss Seccombe comes back.”

“Wait for us,” one of the other girls said.

“I don’t want to be here when Miss Seccombe realizes that Beryl has done it again!” said another.

Before Beryl could protest, the entire class, with the exception of Mary Russell, followed her out of the dining room. Glancing behind her, Beryl couldn’t help but compare the colorful procession of girls in fancy dresses wielding purses and parasols to a parade of Nandi warriors. Outside in the street, she commandeered enough rickshaws to carry them all back to the Nairobi School for European Children.

Dos sat with Beryl as their driver panted up the hill. “Mary must be having a fit,” Dos giggled. “I’m sure she’s told Miss Seccombe everything by now. They won’t be far behind us.”

“Let them!” Beryl said. “I won’t take long.”

The seven girls clattered up the wooden stairs and brushed past the confused servant who opened the front door. They hauled out Beryl’s trunk and began to pack it for her. Beryl grabbed her rucksack and went to Miss Seccombe’s office. The headmistress kept all the contraband locked in a desk drawer. Beryl wasted no time; she forced the lock with her knife. She burrowed through the confiscated items: liqueur-filled candy, love letters, and Parisian fashion magazines. Finally she found a cloth bundle she recognized. The paw! She tucked it away carefully in her rucksack.

As she returned to the dormitory, she stopped short. Miss Seccombe stood in the doorway, her face flushed and angry. Mary hovered behind her. The rest of the girls were standing against the wall as though they were facing a firing squad. Only Dos would meet Beryl’s eye; she winked.

“Beryl Clutterbuck, this is the last straw!” Miss Seccombe cried. “When I found the girls were gone, I knew it was you, even before Mary told me. Ever since you arrived, you’ve been nothing but trouble.” She extended one bony finger in blame. “It was you who backed up the drains! And set fire to the rubbish dump. And don’t deny that you put the beetles in my washbasin.”

“Yes, that’s right.” With her sentence up, Beryl had nothing to lose.

“If you think I’ll tolerate this sort of behavior at my school, you are sadly—”

“I quit!” Beryl interrupted.

“You are in my care. You cannot quit.”

Beryl stared at Miss Seccombe without troubling to conceal her loathing. “I’m leaving on the afternoon train, and you can’t stop me.”

“I shall, even if I have to physically restrain you!” Miss Seccombe slapped Beryl across the face. Dos and Beryl’s other friends gasped. Mary stepped back, out of reach.

Beryl stood motionless. She touched her cheek. Then, as though her hand had a mind of its own, her fingers found the back of Miss Seccombe’s cotton dress. She lifted the headmistress a few inches off the ground and shook her hard, like a terrier shaking a rat. Miss Seccombe’s tight hair came undone in bunches. When Beryl dropped her, she sank to the ground.

As if a mouse was squeaking, Beryl heard Miss Seccombe’s voice repeating, “You’re expelled. You’re expelled.”

“You can’t expel me; I’ve already quit,” shouted Beryl. “Good-bye, Dos!” Abandoning every possession except her rucksack, Beryl stalked out and headed for the train station.

Beryl was alone on the train whose whistle had haunted her dreams for the past year. With a sharp, metallic jerk, it began the climb out of Nairobi toward the highlands.

Pressing her face against the smeared glass, Beryl stared out at the dusty plains rolling slowly by. Giraffes and herds of antelope were visible in the distance. A rough hand on her shoulder startled
her. She banged her forehead on the glass. She whirled to see the conductor, Nelson. As long as she could remember, he had patrolled the length of the train with his rolling gait.

He pushed his face down toward hers and in a hoarse voice he asked, “So, where’s your father, Miss Beryl?” His voice rasped from decades of escorting the dusty and smoky train.

“I’m to meet him in Nakuru. But it’s fine, Nelson; he’ll pay for my return ticket,” Beryl said, leaning back, away from his tobacco and whiskey breath.

“Oh we don’t worry about tickets overmuch with our old friends,” he said. “School’s not out yet, is it?”

“Not exactly, I’m…I’m just…”

“Running away, are you?” he asked with a knowing grin.

“Oh, no,” Beryl reassured him virtuously. “I tried that before, but they knew I would go for the train and they caught me at the station. This time, I was expelled.”

Nelson burst out laughing. The sound traveled up and down the car, causing the other passengers look up to hear the joke. “Your father will have something to say about that. The Captain doesn’t tolerate people who go against his plans. I remember that time the lad watered the horses too much on the journey down. Unfit to race, they were. I thought the Captain was going to thrash him right there in the horse car.”

“He’ll understand,” Beryl said. “I hope.” She thought about the deal she had made with her father. With a shake of her head, she pulled down the window to look out, but she drew back when sparks flew by her face.

“Miss Beryl, if you are going to stick your head out, you had better wear these.” Nelson handed her a set of goggles. “I’d wager
those sparks are from your own father’s forest. He supplies the railroad with the wood for the steam engines. We used to have to carry enough wood up to the highlands to make the return trip. But now we just pick it up from him at Nakuru.”

The train began to climb a steep incline—not as steep as Beryl knew it would be later—and the engine whined in protest.

“That fool engineer didn’t get enough speed to climb the hill. So we’ve…run out of steam.”

Beryl chuckled politely, although she had heard Nelson’s joke many times. She knew exactly what would happen next. The engineer would back up, let the engine cool, and try again.

With a shudder felt through the train, the engine began to reverse. With a relieved hiss, the train began slipping backward down the incline.

Nelson sat down beside her. “We’ll be waiting for a bit. Did I ever tell you about how I helped build the Lunatic Express?”

“Lunatic Express?” Beryl had heard the train called many things, most of them uncomplimentary, but never that.

“That’s what they called this train. To settle British East Africa, the Crown sold the land cheap. Folks like Lord Delamere and your father were the first to come up. But they needed the train to take their crops back down. The line cost millions of pounds and the lives of hundreds of men.”

As long as Beryl could remember, the train to Nairobi had been a fact of life—as much taken for granted as the rains in spring. Without it, there were no settlements. She wondered what would Africa be like without the British. If you soared over it like a bird, there would be no roads, no ugly scars of train tracks, no gas-powered lights to cloud the sky and block the stars. Arap Maina probably
remembered how it was. But that would be an Africa that had no place for Beryl Clutterbuck.

“How did you build it?” asked Beryl.

“With British ingenuity,” Nelson chuckled. “The engineers were from home, but we imported the labor from India. I was a young man then.” He sighed. Looking at his potbelly and thinning hair, Beryl found it difficult to believe he had ever been young. “Aye, I was a junior assistant surveyor. We would set up camp ahead of the line and then build the track behind us. Those were the days. If only the lions had left us alone.”

The images of Arap Maina’s clawed chest and her punctured leg rose in her mind.

The train reached a plateau and slowly came to a halt.

“Well, lass, that’s our cue. Do you want to step outside? We’ll be here for a bit while the engine cools down.”

Beryl followed the other passengers off the train. They had been traveling for only a few hours, but everyone was already sore and dusty from the journey. As she stretched, a movement in the distance caught her eye. “Is that a lion?”

“You’ve good eyes,” Nelson said with approval. “Like I was telling you—lions were a terrible problem when we were laying this track. They would hunt in pairs. More than one man was pulled from his bed. After a while, they stopped eating the men—just killed ‘em for the sport.”

“I’ve never heard of lions doing that,” said Beryl, her forehead crinkled in disbelief.

“I swear it’s true, Miss Beryl; those lions were fierce. They outnumbered us. We paid dearly for every mile of track.”

When the train finally started again, Beryl boarded in a thoughtful mood, considering for the first time the price her father and other settlers had paid for the right to settle in the highlands.

The train made its way upward. It was late morning when it finally gasped its way into Nakuru.

“Good-bye, Nelson, and thank you,” said Beryl as she hopped off the train before it even stopped.

“Miss Beryl, don’t you have any luggage?” he called after her.

“Don’t worry,” she shouted as she ran out of the car. “Have a good journey back.” She ran out of the station to prevent any more awkward questions.

As soon as she was out of sight, she began stripping off the awful clothes. The shoes were the first to go. Then the stockings. She sliced off the bottom of the full blue cotton skirt with her knife and wrapped it lengthwise around her body, securing it with a knot at her shoulder like a shuka. Her blouse and hat she left on the track for anyone foolish enough to want them. Her bare feet protesting at the unaccustomed sensation of stones and dirt, she ran all the way to the Nandi village.

The dogs and children greeted her joyfully, but she did not stop to talk. She wanted to see Kibii and Arap Maina. Arap Maina appeared at the doorway to his hut, smiling at the sight of her.

“I’m back, Arap Maina!” she announced. She wanted to hug him, but she knew his dignity would not permit it. She forced her arms to stay at her sides, contenting herself with a huge grin.

“Beru, welcome. Your father thought you would be back a few days ago.”

“I should have been,” Beryl said. She tried to look past Arap Maina into the hut. “Where is Kibii?” She had not seen her friend since he had left for his circumcision ritual, although she had thought of him often.

“Kibii is no more,” he said solemnly.

Beryl caught her breath, “You mean…”

“He is now Arap Ruta,” said Arap Maina with pride.

Relieved, Beryl nodded. Kibii was not dead; he had become a murani. His new name meant that he had passed his ritual and was now a man.

“I hoped he would be back by now,” said Beryl, hardly trying to conceal her disappointment.

“Beru, the warriors live by themselves in a separate camp. It is how they develop the bonds of brothers. He has taken his proper place with the tribe. It is what he was born to do.”

Blinking against the sudden tears in her eyes, Beryl started to turn away. Arap Maina touched her shoulder and said gently, “You have grown tall and strong while you were away. It is time for you to join your own people. Go home.”

“But this is my home, too,” protested Beryl.

“We shall always be friends. But you are the daughter of Cluttabucki, and he has plans for you. Go see him. Go now. It will not be as hard as you think.” Arap Maina disappeared into his hut.

Beryl trekked up the hill to the farm, thinking hard. Trapped in Nairobi, she had dreamed of the Nandi. And now the Nandi told her she belonged with the British. Was it truly time to choose?