A Spear of Summer Grass - By Deanna Raybourn Page 0,109
you haven’t looked closely.”
“You mean the women?” He shrugged again.
“Stop doing that. A shrug isn’t an answer.”
He looked me in the eye. “Fine. You want an answer? I loved a girl a long time ago. I married her and she was going to have a child. I was the happiest man on earth.”
“What happened?”
“What happened is that I was a goddamned idiot. She was three months pregnant with my best friend’s child when I married her and I was stupid enough to believe her when she said she had miscalculated the birth.”
“My God,” I murmured.
“It gets better. She was still in love with him. And the only reason she married me was because he left her to marry Jude. I was an afterthought, a fallback plan.”
“Did Jude know?”
“Not at first. But when my wife was giving birth it became apparent that this was no premature delivery. There were complications and she confessed everything to Tusker who told Jude and me. Tusker thought it was better the truth came out.”
“And then she died?”
He gave a harsh laugh. “Not quite. She gave birth to a healthy ten-pound baby boy with my name and my best friend’s eyes. Last I heard she had fallen on hard times and was running a brothel in Cairo.”
“She broke your heart,” I said softly.
“That she did. Put your ear to my chest and you could probably still hear the pieces rattling around.”
I lifted my cup. “A toast to the broken ones, then.”
He clinked his cup to mine and we drank. He said nothing for a minute but he was watching me closely.
“What is it, Ryder? Your silences are loud.”
“I’m just wondering what your plans are.”
“I don’t have plans. I’m going home just as soon as I can.”
“Not if you bring a case against Gates,” he pointed out. “You’ll have to stay for a trial to give evidence. Don’t you want justice done?”
“That isn’t fair,” I argued, but the fight had gone out of me. “I’m tired, Ryder. I want to go home.”
I looked out over the watering hole washed with new, pink light. “It seems a little odd for a grown man to have a tree house.”
“It’s where I sleep when the mosquitoes are bad.” He said it simply, dropping the words like small stones into a pond. But I felt the heft of them. He had to avoid the mosquitoes because they could kill him. It was the closest he had come to telling me about the blackwater fever, and I waited, wondering if he would strip himself bare, throwing confidences like shed garments into my lap.
But the moment passed and he rose, putting out his hand. “Come on, Delilah. I’ll take you home.”
As he dropped me at the gate to Fairlight, he leaned across me to open my door. “I called in to the village before I came to get you. Moses is conscious and the babu says he will be fine.”
“It isn’t his time to go,” I said, echoing Gideon with a small smile.
“It isn’t yours either. Think about it.”
* * *
The next morning Gideon came to tell me that Moses was markedly better, and I told him to make arrangements to come with me to Nairobi. He would serve as my witness for the incidents with Gates. He argued, as politely as Gideon would ever argue, but in the end I won. Omar packed us a basket of food and we set off in Ryder’s appalling old truck. I managed to navigate the treacherous road to Nairobi with a little trouble and a great deal of flair. The result was that we arrived in record time, both of us covered in red dust. I had planned to take a room at the Norfolk to freshen up, but as soon as they sniffily told “my man” to wait outside, I turned on my heel and went straight to Government House. I could have gone to the police, but I thought more might be done if I initiated an investigation from the top down. Colonial police were most likely ill-equipped and underpaid and a case that would take them out into the bush would probably get shoved aside in favour of something easier. But they couldn’t ignore a directive straight from Government House, and I wasn’t about to take a refusal from a lowly clerk. That was a lesson I learned from my grandfather—never take a no from someone who doesn’t have the authority to give you a yes.