tip too, and took her hand.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Dr Livingstone died near Shiwa, a little bit south. He even wrote down in his diaries that he had received his death sentence there! Because that was where his favourite dog had died.’
‘Oh, dear!’ she said. She paused. ‘What sort of dog?’
‘What sort of—?’ He thought. ‘A poodle, I believe.’
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘I had no idea that they had poodles in Africa. It died of…the heat?’
‘Chitane? No, he was eaten by a crocodile.’
Agnes laughed but Ronald was not joking.
‘They buried Chitane there,’ he said. ‘You can even hear his barking in the night.’
‘How dreadful!’ Agnes looked genuinely distraught, sweat bubbling on her upper lip, streaks of red across her forehead. ‘Wait. If he was eaten, what on earth did they bury?’
But Ronald had already moved on to the next great white man of Shiwa Ng’andu.
‘Sir Stewart Gore-Browne came to Africa in 1911 to trace the borders between the Congo, Tanzania and Rhodesia. He followed the maps and built tall wooden beacons to mark the borders. And after he finished parcelling the land, Gore-Browne travelled deep into…’
‘…the heart of darkness,’ Agnes inserted dreamily, bringing him up short.
‘Hrm? No!’ Ronald protested. ‘It is not so dark. There is bush, yes. But these hills have some pinkish rocks. And at times the sand, it can be white, like salt. Very bright.’
‘Oh, I just meant—’
‘Yes, it is true in a way, it was a voyage,’ he remarked. ‘Gore-Browne was tracing the footsteps of Dr Livingstone’s last journey. But he was also looking for land to settle.’
‘Why?’
‘Why does a man settle? Every man in this world must stake his claim!’
‘But why in Africa?’
Ronald paused. One rumour was that Gore-Browne hadn’t had enough money or clout to make it as a landowner in England, so he had decided, like many men of that generation, to go where pale skin and a small inheritance went a great deal further. Ronald decided to tell Agnes the other rumour.
‘They say he was heartbroken. There was a woman. Lorna.’
‘Ah,’ Agnes smiled knowingly, in all her twenty-year-old wisdom. ‘I see.’
‘At any rate, Shiwa Ng’andu was the most beautiful place Sir Stewart had ever seen. He saw it first at sunrise. There were animals on the shore – zebra, kudu, reedbuck – and the lake was shining. It was a paradise.’
‘Hmm, yes,’ Agnes murmured. ‘What’s that poem again?’
Moved by his own words, Ronald was now caught in a cascade of memories. He had spent his childhood on the shore of that lake, he and his friends dipping their amateur canoes in the water, more concerned about crocodiles and hippos than the view. His adolescence had transformed the castle up on the hill into a second home. He became the lucky student who could roam the dark corridors, pluck books from the shelves, eat fancy dinners served by men twice his age – his own uncle once – and gaze idly through a turret window at the two blues beyond: the sapphire lake under the turquoise sky…The car jolted forward and broke Ronald’s reverie.
‘On his first night by the lake, Sir Stewart received a sign. He saw a rhinoceros.’
‘Marvellous!’ Agnes crooned. ‘I’ve always loved the look of them. Pyramid on the face.’
‘Some people say the spirit of this lake, Ng’andu, it resembles this animal – a smooth dark body and one horn of ivory. But the black rhinoceros, it is very dangerous. Chipembele. It was the first one Sir Stewart had ever seen in Africa. Very big. He shot it—’
‘Oh no!’ The pulse in Agnes’s collarbone fluttered.
‘—brought him the big horn. That is why we call the old man Chipembele.’ Ronald cleared his throat, declining to mention the other reasons for the nickname.
‘Chee-pem-BERRY…Chee-PEM-bellay…’ Agnes was trying to pronounce the word.
‘Chipembele,’ he repeated. ‘So, Sir Stewart decided he must build a house above the lake. An English estate. And a place with a dairy, shops, school, tailor, post office, clock tower—’
‘Oh!’ Agnes laughed. ‘Like a village!’
‘Ah, yes,’ he smiled. ‘You see. We both have villages in our countries!’ He squeezed her hand. ‘After the First World War, he came back and bought the 2,300 acres from bee-sack.’
‘Berserk?’
‘No, bee sack,’ he said, then spelt out the acronym. ‘B-S-A-C. The British South Africa Company. That is who was selling the land at that time.’
‘Not the Crown?’
‘The Company,’ he said. ‘Cecil Rhodes’s company. Rhodes is the one who bought the land from our chiefs. Many of them did not understand these bargains. They gave away their mineral rights for