in refugee camps, laboring to repatriate displaced Africans, and when repatriation was out of the question, she helped them emigrate to whatever countries would take them in. She had sponsored scholarships for poor Kenyan children, served with the Red Cross in Rwanda, and had a genius for getting grant money. Now she was lending her expertise, her time, and some of her money to International People’s Aid.
Fitzhugh wasn’t sure how much time or expertise she had, but when he and Malachy got to her place, it was apparent that she didn’t lack for money. Two askaris opened a steel gate, admitting them to a world as remote from grimy, crumbling Nairobi as the land of her ladyship’s forebears. Acres of grass and garden, shaded by tamarind and eucalyptus; a rambling main house with white stucco walls, a clay-tile roof, and a veranda upon which wicker chairs practically begged you to sit down with a drink; a guest cottage; a carriage house with a Mercedes sedan and a Toyota Land Cruiser parked beside it; a small stable, an exercise ring. It was February, the beginning of the dry season, and the air at the foot of the Ngong hills was crisp and clear, scented by frangipani, hibiscus, mimosa. Fitzhugh recalled that perfume, and how it went immediately to his head, like good gin.
While a servant went to summon Diana, the two men waited in the foyer of the main house. Fitzhugh looked at Malachy and raised his eyebrows.
“Ah, now then, Fitz, I know your feelings about upper-crust do-gooders. Believe me, she’s different.”
“Different how?”
Malachy answered that her mind wasn’t the usual hatchery of idiotic schemes to uplift the dark-skinned downtrodden. Diana was practical, hard-headed. She knew what would work in Africa and what would not because she was as African as any Kikuyu, her family having been in Kenya for three generations.
Fitzhugh pointed at the sepia photographs on the foyer walls: brutal sahibs standing over lions they had shot, memsahibs wearing white muslin dresses and severe expressions—you could almost hear them ordering houseboys beaten for trying to clean tarnished silver plate by rubbing it with gravel.
“Atoning for her ancestors’ sins with all her charity work?”
“It isn’t charity,” replied Malachy. “And as for why she does what she does, well now, what difference does that make, so long as she does the right thing?”
“Apoloreng! You are late!”
Her tone was cheerfully scolding: a hostess greeting a habitually tardy but always welcome guest.
Malachy made a pretense of looking at his watch and pleaded heavy traffic. The bloody traffic in Nairobi got worse by the day.
“Everything in this country gets worse by the day,” she said, embraced him, and gave him each of her cheeks to kiss.
Malachy made the introductions. Diana Briggs took a half-step backward and extended her hand as she looked Fitzhugh up and down with the bluest eyes he had ever seen.
“I’d heard you were a footballer, and I must say, you look the part.”
Her smile fell on him like a gift, and her accent, thankfully, lacked the marbles-in-the-mouth mutter of the British upper classes. She spoke with the precision of a BBC news reader.
Fitzhugh was something of a sexist. To his mind, beauty forgave almost everything in a woman. Not that Diana Briggs was exceptionally beautiful; she only seemed so in comparison with the picture he had formed of a stout matron, Malachy having told him that she was in her early fifties. The body that suggested itself under a black cotton blouse and a pair of linen trousers, while it wasn’t slender, was a long way from matronly. If there was any gray in her blond hair, it had been artfully disguised. Only the cat’s whiskers at the corners of her eyes and the crescent furrows at the corners of her mouth betrayed her age, and you had to be within an arm’s length of her to see them; otherwise, you would have sworn she wasn’t beyond thirty-five. All this and the smashing smile made it impossible for Fitzhugh to dislike her, as he’d been prepared to do.
He couldn’t resist complimenting her looks. She responded with a toss of her head and a short, self-deprecatory laugh before telling the servant, in flawless Swahili, to bring in a fresh pot of tea.
They followed her through a hall decorated with ancestral memorabilia—crossed elephant tusks, the hide of a leopard that appeared to have been slain back in the days when Denys Finch-Hatton and Isak Dinesen were loving it up. Diana’s loose trousers flowed