that he is out of gaol. Bloody firebombs! They set a car on fire with a white woman and her children inside!’
There was a silence as they stared at the fire, imagining a car with three bodies inside it.
‘At least the children survived,’ Ronald said softly. ‘And before she died, did she not ask that the European settlers seek peace rather than revenge?’
‘That utopian nonsense is what led to Mau Mau! Violence is in their blood,’ Vyvant growled then glanced around. ‘No offence meant to those present,’ he mumbled into his cognac.
‘Yes, you never know,’ Sir Stewart laughed, his monocle blank in the firelight. ‘African politics is a risky business. Do not sleep too deeply, my dear friends. They may just slit your throat in the night.’
* * *
‘I should have known,’ Ronald fumed. He and Agnes were lying in her bed. It had irked him to have to sneak into her room. It wasn’t hard to find – he knew the corridors of this manor like the lines of his palm – but he’d had to traverse too many of them to reach her. His own room was alarmingly close to the servants’ quarters, where the bowing and scraping muntus lived, with their hats like upside-down buckets and their shirts like folded serviettes, those dogs standing on their hind legs, those fools who waited in a line every night for their measly glass of port. It was all so excruciating. When he thought of what Sir Stewart had said at the end of the evening in front of that racist muzungu and that jabbering muntu – ‘Tell us about this charming patron of yours. Agnes?’ – Ronald felt the humiliation might swallow him whole.
‘Why do they say we can’t marry here?’ Agnes warbled tearily.
‘Of course we can,’ he grumbled. ‘Not officially, no. But that is just a matter of time.’
‘It was – awful – Ronnie,’ she said, the words coming out in wet bursts. ‘The girl – Miss Higgins – I thought – we might – be friends. But then—’
‘We will find other friends, darling. We do not need these…these hypocrites!’
‘But why did you say you were my protégé? Are you ashamed of us?’
‘Never!’ he said angrily. ‘I told you. I wrote Sir Stewart a letter announcing our engagement. They were expecting our arrival today, so my letter must have come. Bloody Henry Mulenga! He’s the one who receives the mail now and reads it to the old man. He’s become very free with his position. He must have changed my words! It’s plagiarism!’
‘Libel,’ she corrected miserably.
‘I should have known,’ he said again. ‘Ba Golo speaks with two tongues.’
‘But you said he was a kind man. You said—’
‘Kind? Ha!’
Now he told her the other reason the workers had given Sir Stewart the nickname Chipembele, The Rhino – how often Ronald himself had seen the bwana marching around the estate, shouting furiously, beating the workers with his big black stick, choking them. In the old days, he had even smashed their heads against trees. Chipembele abutabele abamkombo mkwa, they called him. The rhinoceros who comes and destroys everything when you’re away hunting.
‘He seemed so forward-thinking,’ she murmured.
‘Do you not see how we were given separate rooms? Like a colour bar? We are not welcome here.’
‘But Ronnie, where will we go? If marriage isn’t legal, then we’re not safe here either.’
‘We will go to Lusaka. I have people there.’
‘Your family?’
‘Aggie. You are my family now.’
He ran his fingertip over her closed eyelids, purplish and smooth and quivering, like Lake Shiwa on a windless day. He kissed her forehead, then her lips. They made lonely and hushed – and therefore heated – love. Afterward, they fell asleep in her bed, their limbs entwined.
* * *
When Ronald woke up the first time that night, his elbow was strung with pins and needles.
‘Do you hear it?’ Agnes hissed.
‘What?’ he winced, pulling his arm out from underneath her and stretching his fingers.
‘Lorna’s violin! In the turret. I think—’
‘That’s just the hyenas,’ he mumbled and went back to sleep.
The second time he woke up, she said her leg was itching. He lit the kerosene lantern and examined her calf under its spooky light. It was covered in pink bumps with white centres like little eyes. He tucked the mosquito net around them more tightly and went back to sleep.
When he woke up the third time, she was gone. He checked the en suite, but she wasn’t there. The light in the bedroom was the colour of