The Winter Rose (82 page)

"Won't be sitting on our arses for much longer," Maggie sighed.
"Rains aren't far off now. And not before time. I'm sick of eating
dirt."

The dry season had turned the red earth of Thika into a fine dust
that drifted from the roads and fields into houses and barns, over
animals and people, giving everyone and everything a faint terra-cotta
hue, but now a breeze rippled through the long grass of the veldt, and
out on the horizon, north toward Mount Kenya, lightning flashed and
thunder rumbled, ominous and low.

"We'll be planting night and day soon. In about a week's time, I
should think." She took a swallow of her drink, looking out over her
land. "Seven hundred acres under coffee now. And another two hundred
plowed. I wouldn't believe it if I couldn't see it with my own eyes.
You're a devil of a worker, Bax."

"Because you're a devil of a boss."

Maggie flapped a hand at him and drained her glass. Margaret Carr was
Sid Baxter's employer and his friend. A coffee planter, she was
fifty-odd years old and five feet two inches high, but her voice, and
her temper, made up for her diminutive stature. A widow--she'd lost her
husband several years ago--and childless, she ran her farm
single-handedly, relying on hired hands to help with the planting and
harvesting.

She sat like a man, her feet up on the railing of Sid's small porch,
and swore like one, and worked like one. He'd seen her work from dawn
until dusk in her fields, setting plants in the rain, picking the red
coffee berries in the blazing sun. She wore a broad white topi on her
head when she worked, a man's shirt rolled at the sleeves, and trousers
held up with one of Mr. Carr's belts. She never wore skirts, not even
the split style favored by the settlers' wives, not even when she went
to town.

Sid had met her six years ago, shortly after the supply ship he'd
crewed on out of Gravesend, the Adelaide, had docked at Mombasa, an
ancient Arab trading port on the coast of British East Africa. He'd gone
ashore, intending to get back on the ship, which was headed next to
Ceylon, but he'd drunk too much, passed out in a brothel, and was robbed
blind. By the time he arrived at the dock--holding his trousers up with
his hands because his belt had been stolen, too--the Adelaide was only a
speck on the Indian Ocean.

He'd paced back and forth on the dock, swearing frantically--and
uselessly. A woman had been standing nearby, supervising the loading of a
ploughshare, four crates of chickens, and six cows. When they were
safely in her cart, she approached him.

"You all right?" she asked.

"Do I bloody look all right?" he yelled. He was desperate. The
Adelaide had made him forget. The work, stoking the boiler, was
crucifying. There were storms. He was often seasick. On the ship, it was
all he could do to survive. On land, he would have time to think. Time
to remember.

"What happened?" she asked.

He explained.

"Ever drive oxen?"

"No."

"Ever plant coffee?"

"No."

"Are you strong?"

"What's that to you, missus?"

"I need help. My husband's dead and my headman's a drunk. I can't pay
much, but you'll get plenty to eat, a bed, and your own hut. It's not
much, the hut, but the roof's sound and it has a porch."

"You want me to come with you?" Sid asked, astonished.

"I need a new headman and you need work, don't you?"

He thought about this. "I do," he finally said.

"I'm a coffee planter. I've twelve hundred acres at Thika, north of
Nairobi. The work's hard, I won't say it isn't, but it's better than
starving. Do you want the job or not?"

"Yes."

"Come on, then. Train leaves in half an hour." She led the way to the station, turning around once to ask, "What's your name?"

"Baxter. Sid Baxter."

The engineer on the Adelaide had asked him the same question. He
didn't dare use Malone, and Baxter--the name he'd used at Arden Street
with India--had come out of his mouth before he could stop it. He wished
he'd said Smith, Martin, anything but Baxter. He'd wanted to forget
India, forget what they'd had. Now he was reminded of her every day of
his life.

Maggie had neglected to tell him that she couldn't afford a passenger
ticket for him, so he'd had to sit in the baggage compartment on top of
the chicken crates. The train's wheels banged and bumped so hard over
the unballasted tracks that he was black and blue by the time they'd
reached Nairobi. Two young men, tall and ebony-skinned, dressed only in
short red tunics, met them with an ox cart.

Sid goggled at them until Maggie said, "Two of my workers. Kikuyu. Stunning, aren't they?"

Two days later they arrived at Thika, a handful of huts on a narrow
river, tired and footsore. From there it was another ten miles to
Maggie's farm. Maggie showed Sid his new home--a wooden shack raised on
four posts--then put him to work breaking ground. He'd told her he
wanted no wages--not right away--only whisky. She obliged him, giving
him a bottle, warning him to make it last.

At night he drank to forget and by day he worked to forget, driving
himself to the point of exhaustion. He worked until his clothes were
drenched with sweat and his hands bled. Until he vomited with heat
sickness. He worked until the sun went down, and then he kept working
until he collapsed on his bed and slept without dreaming.

After several weeks of this, Maggie came out of her house one night
and walked into her fields. There she watched him, hands on her hips, as
he attempted to dig out a tree stump by lamplight. She said nothing at
first, just looked at him, her eyes traveling over his burned and
blistered skin, his emaciated body.

Then she said, "I've had enough of this. You want to top yourself, do
it on someone else's farm, not mine." They'd stood there for a long
moment, glowering at each other. And then, in a softer tone, she'd said,
"Whatever you've done, or whatever's been done to you, working yourself
to death won't undo it. You'll have to live with it. Just like the rest
of us."

He'd thrown down his pickax and stalked off to his hut, angry that
Maggie had seen inside him. He found other ways to lose himself after
that. Other ways to forget. There were quiet times on the farm, times
when he wasn't planting and wasn't harvesting and wasn't needed. He
started riding out then, going off on safari by himself. He would wander
for days, sometimes weeks, traveling as far north as Mount Kenya, west
to the Mau Reserve, as far east as the Tana River.

He would take a tent with him, a flask and a rifle, shooting only to
eat, for he hated watching an animal die; he'd had his fill of pain. He
would cross plains and climb hills, seeing places no white man had seen
before, watching lions and elephants and rhinos, following the vast
black herds of wildebeest.

He would sleep beneath the stars in good weather, listening to the
night noises, half-hoping a lion would take him. During the day he would
walk under the endless African sky and talk to India. He would ask her
"Why?" and argue with her and accuse her. Sometimes he would rage and
shout at her. And once, years after he'd arrived in Africa, he'd taken
off his clothing in a storm and lain on the ground, weeping for her,
wishing the hard rain would pound the fiesh from his bones and dissolve
him into the dirt. But it didn't. And so he'd gotten up, muddy and cold,
and made his way back to Maggie's farm. By the time he'd arrived, he
was sick.

"You finished now?" she'd asked, sponging his brow with a cold cloth
and making him swallow quinine. He'd nodded. "Good," she said. "Because
whoever she is, she's not worth it."

"But that's the thing of it, Maggs, she is," he'd replied.

He'd stopped trying to kill himself after that, but he hadn't stopped
drinking. He spent almost everything he earned on whisky, wine, or
whatever could be bought from the merchant Jevanjee in Nairobi. He drank
with Maggie and her planter neighbors, and if they weren't available,
he drank alone.

"Looking forward to the next few weeks," Maggie said now. "It's a
lovely time, isn't it, when the coffee blooms? The white flowers look
like snow. And then the beans come, like holly berries against the green
leaves. Reminds me of England at Christmas."

"Without the bloody fruitcake," Sid said.

Maggie laughed. She nodded at the newspaper on top of his porch
table. She'd put it there earlier in the day. It was one of the London
papers, nearly two months out of date, but news traveled slowly to
Thika. Its headlines were trumpeting the Liberals' victory in the
British general election.

"Did you read it yet?" she asked.

"No," Sid said. He had no use for newspapers. They connected him with the world when all he wanted to do was withdraw from it.

"Well, you should. We've a new government," Maggie said. "And they're
transferring the entire African protectorate from the Foreign office to
the Colonial office. Lord Elgin's been made secretary of state for the
colonies. And rumor has it the governor's asked him to send his
undersecretary out for a visit."

Sid frowned. He preferred the topic of planting, but all the planters
loved talking politics. "It's nothing to do with me," he said. "I stay
away from politics. And politicians."

"I try, but they won't stay away from me. If London's thinking of sending a man out here, something's afoot. I guarantee it."

"That's wishful thinking, Maggs. Even if someone does come, what'll
he do? Shoot some lions, get his picture in the papers, then go home
again and forget all about Africa."

"He can't. Not anymore. Someone's going to have to answer a few
questions and soon. More settlers are coming all the time--where will
they go? And what of the tribes? The Masai aren't happy about being
pushed onto reserves. The Kikuyu aren't either. And the Nandi are
furious. They fought a bloody battle against us. They'll do it again.
The Land office is over-whelmed. So are the district commissioners. It's
going to turn ugly, Sid. You wait and see."

"What will you do if it does?"

Maggie heaved a long, trailing sigh. "Stay," she said. "I've no
choice, have I? My husband brought me here, then died and left me with a
farm, four hundred coffee plants, and no bloody money. Twenty years on,
and I'm only just starting to show a profit. How about you? What will
you do?"

Sid thought of his small, comfortable hut, of his friendship with
Maggie, of the rugged, beautiful, indifferent country he'd come to think
of as home. He thought of the fragile peace he'd found here. It was all
he had.

"As long as you stay, I'll stay," he said.

"You could apply for a land grant yourself."

Sid shook his head. He knew that if he applied for land, he'd get
it--six hundred acres in Kenya Province would be leased to him by the
British Foreign office for ninety-nine years at the rate of a halfpenny
per acre per year. Some would leap at the chance. He wanted no part of
it. He was finished with thieving.

"The British government takes land in Kenya from one set of people
and hands it out to another," he said. "Do that back home and it's
called robbery. Do it here, and it's called progress."

"Aye, well, call it whatever you like, lad," Maggie said wearily,
"but see that we get a good harvest this year. Otherwise you and I and
the cook and the toto and all the field hands are going to starve."

Maggie talked on, telling him to make sure to get a fence around the
north field, reminding him what the gazelles did to the bushes last
year. He said he didn't need reminding, thank you, the fence was almost
entirely up. He poured another round and they talked on about the milk
cow's recent bout of mastitis, the new litter of goats, and a cobra that
had been spotted near the henhouse. As dusk came down they could both
see the lights of the neighboring Thompson plantation winking in the
distance.

"When are you planning to go to Nairobi again?" Maggie asked.

"In a fortnight," Sid said. "Grain's running low. We need more
paraffin and a new bit for the horse, and Alice gave me a list of
kitchen supplies as long as my arm."

"While you're there," Maggie said, still gazing at the Thompson farm,
"why don't you bring back something nice for that lovely Lucy Thompson?
I hear she's set her cap for you."

Sid snorted. "She must be a damned desperate woman."

"Oh, rubbish. She's a pretty girl, you know. And the Thompsons have two thousand acres."

Sid sighed. Maggie had tried to matchmake for him before. He decided
to nip this particular round in the bud. "It's just not to be, Maggs,"
he said, affecting a heartbroken look. "There's only one woman for me,
but she's broken my heart. She won't have me."

Maggie sat up, her eyes bright with curiosity. "She has? Really?" she said. "Who is she?"

"You, luv. Will you marry me?"

"Oh, you sod, you!" she scolded, but a smile creased her weathered face.

"Come on, Maggs, let's make a go of it. You and me. What do you say?"

"I say, �No, thank you.' One man was plenty. I'm through with you lot. I like a quiet life, a book at night, a bed to myself."

"I do, too. Try to remember that the next time you start meddling."

Maggie narrowed her eyes. "I wonder sometimes about the woman who
made you a bachelor," she said. "It's not a natural state for a man.
You're all helpless as kittens without a woman. Every last one of you.
If a man's a bachelor, there has to be a reason. One day, Sid, I'm going
to find out what it is."

And with that Maggie rose heavily from her chair and bade him good
night. Sid watched her go, smiling, knowing that was one thing she would
never find out. She liked to play at prying, but she never pushed it
too far. He didn't like talking about his past. She didn't like talking
about hers, either. Each understood this about the other. It was one of
the reasons they got on so well. Maggie knew that he had come from
London and had no wife, no children. Sid knew that Maggie and her
husband had left Devon for Australia, then left Australia for Africa.
Nothing else.