The Ashford Affair (32 page)

“No, for us.” Addie hadn’t the slightest idea what she was getting into, what she might find in the native encampment behind the house. Bea caught her cousin’s hands between her own, such small, square hands in their cheap gloves. “Darling, you don’t have to do this. We can send for Miss Platt or for that hideous Scotswoman on the next farm over.”

“It’s all right. I don’t mind at all.” Addie firmly but gently drew her hands away, leaving Bea feeling, somehow, bereft. “Will you show me the way?”

Bea shrugged, swinging her long legs out of the car. “It’s your funeral, darling.”

“Hopefully it won’t be anyone’s funeral.” Addie scrambled inelegantly out after her. “Who’s the boy who was hurt?”

“Hardly a boy. He must be at least twenty, although it’s hard to tell. They don’t reckon age from birth the way we do. It’s all done by circumcision year.”

Addie’s eyebrows rose. “Circumcision year?”

“When you ask how old a boy is, you’ll be told he was of the circumcision year of the locusts, or the year when all the rains failed. They’re all circumcised at puberty, boys and girls. They make a big ritual of it, feasts, dancing, slaying of cattle. Our cattle,” added Bea. “Somehow, the best beasts always seem to break a leg just on the eve of a festival. Quite the coincidence.”

She led Addie around the house, past the straggling acacia bushes planted by the previous owner. They’d been lucky—or so Frederick liked to tell her. Most of their peers had done a stint living in a grass hut, waiting for a house to be built. They’d got theirs already made, off a chap who had sold up to pursue a cattle-ranching proposition in Uganda. As houses went here, theirs wasn’t bad. It was solid stone, built in the bungalow style, long and low with a wide porch that ran along the front of the house and a courtyard in the middle. They had plumbing, such as it was, and electricity that ran as long as nothing bumped too hard against the generator. Opulence by Kenya’s standards, poverty compared to what they had left behind.

The previous owners had made some attempt at landscaping. There was a terrace at the back of the house and some overgrown rosebushes, but the scent of the roses couldn’t mask the other smells, smoke and sweat and goat.

They didn’t have far to get to Mbugwa’s encampment, an entire settlement of round, grass-roofed huts, each leaching its own haze of blue-gray smoke through the thatch. Maize grew in neat plots around the huts, tended by slender women in leather aprons whose anklets jingled as they hacked at the weeds with their pangas. They worked all but bare in the hot sun, their arms encircled by copper wire wound so tightly that the flesh bulged on either side. Some wore babies strapped to their backs in slings; older children played in the dust outside the huts as a chicken idly scratched at the dirt.

“These are the native
shambas—
farms,” Bea translated. “They squat on our land. Or we squat on their land, depending on how you look at it. It works out rather well all around. They work the coffee and we give them a place to herd their goats.”

“It sounds very feudal,” said Addie.

“It is.” Bea nodded towards one of the huts. “That’s Njombo’s hut.”

It was an easy guess, based on the number of people gathered around. They drew back as Bea and Addie approached, making way for them. Bea could see Addie try not to goggle at the men, dressed only in short blankets tied toga-style on one shoulder, or the women, with their shaved heads and bare breasts.

Bea had had an image of how Addie’s arrival was meant to be, the house servants lined up in their white robes, drinks on a tray, the lamps lit, everything sparkling and just a touch exotic. “This isn’t how I meant your visit to be.”

Addie looked up at her and smiled, as if they were ten again and at Ashford, the real Ashford. “I don’t mind. Did your headman say anything about the nature of the wound?”

“Gloom, doom, and general dismemberment. It usually is.” In this case, though, it actually might be. “It might be bad. He tried to hammer a detonator into an ornament.”

“Into a—?”

“Anything metal seems to be fair game,” said Bea. “We can’t keep nails; they turn them into anklets and earrings. The detonator must have looked suitably shiny. According to Mbugwa, Njombo took a rock and tried to beat the detonator into an anklet.”

Addie breathed in sharply through her nose. “He’s lucky to be alive.”

“Do you want me to see if Platt is back? They can’t have gone far.”

Addie shook her head. “I’ll do what I can.” She poked her head into the doorway, then turned her head, blinking. “The smoke—”

“It’s the cook fire,” said Bea. “They’re all like that.”

Addie nodded and plunged into the smoke, shoulders hunched, keeping her head down below the worst of it.

“I’m here to help you,” Bea heard her say in the sort of cheerful voice nurses always used, the voice that made one want to thump them with a bedpan. And, “Where does it hurt?”

Bea stood by the doorway, twiddling her thumbs and feeling generally useless, as Addie crawled on her hands and knees, making soothing noises, comforting Njombo with a hand on the side of his head. Her skirt trailed dangerously near the fire at the center of the hut. Slipping inside, Bea pushed the fabric back.

“I don’t want you immolating yourself,” she said gruffly. “Not with Platt not back yet.”

Addie smiled her thanks. “Can you see if the water’s here yet? I can’t do much without it. The clotted blood needs to be sponged away before I can see how bad it is.”

“Of course it does,” murmured Bea. The smell in the hut was almost unbearably strong, sweat and blood and the peculiar pong of the monkey skins that were marks of status. “I’ll see what’s keeping them.”

She seized on the excuse to duck out again, hating herself for her weakness.

No one had warned her of any of this.
Come to East Africa,
they had said.
Fortunes to be made! Reputations to be repaired! More old Etonians than Mayfair!
But they hadn’t told her about this, about the very basic realities of living, about jiggers that burrowed under your toes or the flies that clustered around children’s eyes or strange pests and diseases that drove horses mad before they killed them.

She hated it here.

Bea twisted Marcus’ ring around on her finger. In those fairy stories Addie used to whisper to her when they were little that should summon a genie or some other spirit, and she’d be able to close her eyes and wish herself back to before, to Rivesdale House and the world before Bunny. Before Frederick. If she had known then … But wasn’t that always the rub? At the time, Marcus’ infidelity had seemed insurmountable, a slight that needed to be avenged. Now, she wished she had followed her mother’s advice and looked the other way. Bea had never thought, never imagined, that it might end like this.

Marcus and Bunny had married. Bea had seen the pictures in a six-month-old
Tatler,
the blushing bride with her bevy of attendants. He hadn’t wasted much time; they were engaged as soon as Bea was on the boat, married almost immediately after. They had two little boys, an heir and a spare.

Those were meant to be her children, her boys. It was unpardonably perverse of Fate to have got it so backward, to have expelled Marcus’ child from her womb while the other, the cuckoo in the nest, had clung so stubbornly to life.

Marjorie, Frederick had called the cuckoo, such an ugly name, like someone’s maiden aunt, but Bea had been beyond caring. She knew it wasn’t fair to blame the child for the circumstances of her birth, but Bea couldn’t seem to help it. She had looked at that red, squalling thing and knew it to be no part of her, this parasite who had lodged in her gut and cost her everything, her family, her home, her reputation, the man she had thought she loved.

Instead, he had married Bunny, and Bea had found herself in Kenya, a social outcast, married to a man who seemed more and more a stranger, a stranger who buried himself in agricultural journals and regarded her with thinly veiled disdain—that was, when he bothered to look at her at all.

Still, there were compensations. Idina’s parties. Safaris. Race Week at Muthaiga. Raoul, who swore he’d marry her, even if his Catholic family cut him off, an empty promise, but flattering nonetheless. It was nice to know that someone still wanted to marry her, even if her husband wished he hadn’t.

And, of course, Val. Val, who promised nothing, who cared about nothing. Val, who took her flying.

“Memsahib, memsahib!” It was a small boy, clothed only in a loincloth. One arm was hideously scarred, remnant of a fall into the fire in babyhood. So many of the children boasted similar injuries, scars and wounds that would have felled their counterparts back in England. “Bwana say bring.”

He hoisted the old leather bag that held their store of medical supplies. Bea hadn’t the foggiest notion what was in it. That was Platt’s province. Behind him followed Frederick with a large bucket of steaming water held in one hand, clean cloths hanging off his arm.

“Here you go,” he said. “Is there anything I can do?”

Bea stepped between Frederick and the door of the hut. “We have it in hand,” she said regally.

Frederick looked over at Addie, bent over Njombo, and then back at Bea. “Yes, I can see that you do.”

Bea bristled. There was certainly no magic to telling a boy to fetch water. It wasn’t as though Frederick were in there, sewing the man up. She’d yet to see Frederick apply a sticking plaster, and yet he had the gall to look down his nose at her, just because she hadn’t been taught something she’d never had the least idea she would have to know—and she wouldn’t have had to know it if he hadn’t blundered into her life at the worst possible time.

“There wasn’t much call for this in Mayfair,” she said defensively.

“We’re not in Mayfair anymore.”

“Don’t you think I know it?”

“Sometimes?” Frederick raised his brows. “No.”

“Oh, hullo.” Addie stumbled out, her face smoke grimed, her eyes tearing. She braced one hand against the wall of the hut. “Do you have the water?”

“Water and medical kit,” said Frederick, handing over the bucket and snapping his fingers at the boy, who stepped smartly forward.

“Thank you.” Addie bundled the cloths over her arm. She glanced back over her shoulder into the hut. “It’s not as bad as it seems. He’s bled a great deal from a scalp wound. I can’t promise anything, but it looks as though most of the cuts are superficial. He seems to have got scraped up with the flying rock.”

“Most of the cuts?”

“He’s banged up his hand rather badly. One finger is dangling by a … well.” She pressed her lips together. “I can try to sew it together, but the odds of infection…”

“No one expects miracles,” said Frederick.

For some reason, that seemed to annoy her. Her back straightened and she gave him what Bea could only describe as a look. “That’s no reason to shirk.”

She disappeared back into the smoke, taking her spoils with her. Frederick watched as she knelt by Njombo, his expression abstracted. Addie had discarded her hideous hat. Her curly hair was in disarray, her face and arms streaked with soot and worse, and yet Bea felt a strange frisson of fear. It reminded her of the first time she had seen Marcus with Bunny, seen the way his eyes lingered on her.

Nonsense, of course. But still …

“You forgot something,” said Bea to her husband.

“What?” Frederick was too immersed in what Addie was doing to respond immediately. “Yes?”

“Our drinks,” said Bea, putting her chin up. “Make them strong.”

EIGHTEEN

New York, 1999

“You’re drunk,” said Mother to Aunt Anna.

Aunt Anna twisted away from Clemmie’s mother. “I may be drunk, but in the morning I’ll still be honest, and you’ll still be lying through your teeth. You spent your whole life sucking up to that bitch. What about
her
? What about our mother?”

The words hung there in the air between them.

Clemmie’s mother took a deep, deep breath. “Clementine, the caterers— See if they need anything.”

“In a moment,” said Clemmie. Someone needed to put Anna in a cab—or to bed. She was making no sense. Clemmie didn’t like the way her mother looked either. Now that Granny Addie was gone, it was as though the last buffer between Clemmie’s mother and mortality had been removed. She was seventy-eight and today she looked every year of it. “Aunt Anna, do you want—”

“No.” Aunt Anna’s long fingernails dug into Clemmie’s arm. “Come with me. There’s something you ought to see. You, too, Marjorie.”

“See what?” Clemmie rolled her eyes at her mother as her aunt tugged her along, through the study and down the back hall.

“I thought she’d destroyed them,” Aunt Anna said. “But, no, they were here all along.”

She shooed Clemmie into Granny Addie’s room, strangely empty now without Granny Addie in it. Aunt Anna went straight to the closet. As in so many pre-war apartments, it was an oddly shaped afterthought of a closet, a triangular bend in the wall. She came out bearing an album Clemmie had never seen before, longer and flatter than the albums Clemmie was accustomed to, with clips that held it together on one side and a cracked red leather cover.

Aunt Anna dumped it on the empty bureau. “I found this yesterday, at the back of the closet. Go on. Take a look.”

Clemmie cast a puzzled look at her mother. Her mother’s lips were pressed firmly together, her expression stoic.

Aunt Anna looked over her shoulder at Clemmie’s mother, raising her perfectly manicured eyebrows. “What do you think, Madge? Do you think Farve kept them? Or did Addie sit here and gloat over them?”

“I think,” said Clemmie’s mother sharply, “that you need new tranquilizers.”

Clemmie opened the album, half-expecting something to leap out and bite her. “They’re pictures from Kenya,” she said.

She recognized that much from the few pictures Granny Addie had had framed, the sepia images of men in mushroom-shaped hats and riding breeches and women in saggy tops and calf-length skirts. There was a curious sameness to them all, the men in their hats and suits, the women in their clothes that looked so dowdy now but were probably the height of fashion back then.