suppose it was because he loved me. And it had been a very long time since anybody looked at me like I was the most important thing in the world.”
“My husband died in the war, too,” I told her. I turned away and put aside my buffer. She blew out the lamp and we lay in the dark, watching the sliver of moonlit shadow move over the ceiling.
“My husband didn’t die in the war.” Jude’s voice was small in the darkness. “I think he’s still alive somewhere. Only he doesn’t know how to find his way home again.”
“I thought he had been declared dead.”
I felt her shoulders shrug into the mattress. “That’s the courts. Just because the law says it’s so, doesn’t make it true.”
“What if you were right? What if he did come home and he found you married to Tony?”
“I was his first,” she said dreamily. “I will always belong to him. That’s how I know he isn’t really dead. Tusker knew it, too. She used to go out searching for him, and when I had him declared dead and married Tony, she was furious with me. She still doesn’t talk to me if she can help it. I’m glad. When she’s silent, it makes it easier for me to be silent, too.”
I did not know what to say. Silence and sorrow mingled in that house, and I suddenly felt a thrust of pity for Anthony. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live with these two women who both pined for a ghost who might still be among the living.
“I shouldn’t have married Tony,” she went on. “I know that now. I was angry and tired and I had been waiting for so long. I just wanted to be loved again.”
She turned away, the mattress creaking under her, and I knew the conversation was over. She might have cried. I heard a brief snuffling, and then felt a shudder as she relaxed into sleep. I lay awake, watching for ghosts, but whether I expected to see hers or mine, I couldn’t have said. I thought about my Granny Miette and I wished she and Teenie and Angele had been there to cast a circle with black salt and holy water to keep the spirits at bay. I couldn’t remember the protective incantations she had taught me, and I didn’t have a gris-gris bag or a white candle. All I had was a prayer to Our Lady of Prompt Succour whispered into the darkness that shifted and sighed around me.
I slept deeply and late and by the time I awoke, breakfast was almost over and the garden was teeming with porters. Gideon pointed out the differences between the Kikuyu and Turkana and Swahili and Samburu.
“The Samburu are most like the Masai, and they, too, speak Maa, but they plant crops and this is unlike the Masai,” he explained. I could see the resemblance. Both tribes were tall and slender, although no one who had seen the two could reasonably mistake one for the other. The Masai might have been the poorest, but they carried themselves like kings.
He went on. “You see there, the fierceness of the Turkana? The rest of us carry the panga, but the knife of the Turkana is different.” What I had taken to be a peculiar sort of bracelet was in fact nothing of the sort. The Turkana bent blades to wear as bracelets, the sharp edge facing out and protected by a slim piece of leather. “The Turkana are quick to fight,” Gideon warned me. “And they bargain very hard. The Swahili come from the coast and are smaller men, but they carry heavy loads.”
Sixty pounds was the limit for each porter’s load by law, but a good headman would insist upon the porters carrying very near to it. Tusker had already explained that the porters would not respect a white hunter who paid well and expected too little. In return, they demanded two things: a leader who would stand his ground and who could shoot well. Failure in either respect could cause a fatal loss of respect among the men, and it was not unheard of for disenchanted bearers to simply walk away from a hunter they did not like, leaving him to make his way back—if he could find it.
“Of course, that won’t be an issue with Ryder. They fight like cats to be chosen,” she added, nodding toward the squabbling porters. Ryder waded into the fray and they