The blasphemers, p.18
The Blasphemers, page 18
The duke thought to hand the messenger a coin. The boy took it and ran off.
“You are as white as a sheet,” Constance declared.
Denys gently slipped the cable from her hands. “Let me help you with that,” he said quietly.
She gladly let it go. It felt as if he had removed a deadly snake from her hands.
Denys turned aside. She moved to stay near him. He opened the envelope, read its contents, and smiled at her. “It’s from Tolliver and it makes no sense at all,” he said.
She took it and read it and puzzled over it for several seconds. Denys was right. Was Justin drunk when he wrote—wait. She understood. He had not used Kwai’s name because Kwai was in some sort of trouble or danger.
She read and reread the words. Good lord! Kwai had left Naivasha and was headed to Aurala. She had to hide him because he was in trouble. For running away!
Her blood had run cold at the sight of the telegram. Now her breath stopped. Aurala was in danger from those brothers of hers. Justin had not mentioned them in his message, but she was sure of it. They had killed their other sister for dishonoring the family. Aurala had always said that they would come looking for her, that they would not rest until they killed her too. Kwai had somehow learned that they were here. She could not imagine how he could have found it out. But somehow he must have.
The conductor blew his whistle and shouted, “All aboard.”
The duke gave Constance and then Vera a hand up the steps to their compartment. When they were all inside, Denys locked the door just as the train started to move.
“What was that about?” Gian Lorenzo whispered to Denys.
“It could be something dreadful,” Vera said. She could hear the shrill tone of her own voice. Her heart was fluttering.
Denys gave Gian Lorenzo a warning look.
She looked Denys in the eye. They had been friends from his earliest days in the Protectorate. She did not want to speak her fear to him. It would make it too close, too real.
“Tell me,” Constance insisted. “Is my brother in some sort of mortal danger?” Her neck stiffened. “I insist on knowing it now!” Vera had never heard her speak with such authority.
“No,” Denys said. “The message is from him and concerns the constable who was his sergeant.”
Constance looked from him to Vera. “Then why are you so frightened? You are. Don’t deny it.”
Vera took a breath and spoke her fear, beginning with a palliative for Constance. “I don’t know exactly what is going on, but Justin is trying to protect Kwai Libazo—his sergeant who is father to Aurala Sagal’s baby.” Then she went on to explain that the previous year, Aurala’s Somali brothers had discovered that their runaway sisters were in Mombasa. To avenge their family’s honor, they had found and beheaded Aurala’s older sister.
Constance gasped.
Gian Lorenzo glared at Vera. “Really? Must we—”
Denys held up an open hand to the duke. “Lady Constance is not a child. All of us knowing what is afoot will make the situation safer for everyone.”
Vera went on. “From what Justin’s message said, I surmise that the brothers have somehow located Aurala. Justin’s plea to me was to make sure that Kwai is not discovered. I don’t know why he said that.”
“Mmm,” Gian Lorenzo said. “If this Kwai is part of a military unit and went off without permission, he will have put his life on the line.”
“The B.E.A. police force is comprised of officers seconded from the military,” Denys offered.
“Then they may view Kwai Libazo as a deserter.”
“He wouldn’t desert his post for any other reason,” Vera said. “But if Aurala is in danger, nothing would stop him.”
“We will do whatever we can to help,” Gian Lorenzo said.
“Absolutely,” Denys echoed.
Vera suddenly realized that the murderous brothers would be heading for her father’s Mission. And baby Will. Her breath quickened.
She could not reveal that. She was sure it would start Constance screaming. She was about to start screaming herself. She held it in and stared unseeing out at the vast plain that had been her home since birth. They had thought that the mere size of it would conceal Aurala. Now all that size meant only that it would take another hour before this train would arrive at the station. An eternity. All she wanted at this moment was to hold her baby in her arms and know that he was safe. How would she bear the wait?
She ought to pray. “Oh, please, dear God,” she silently began. But that was as far as her prayer would go. She just kept repeating it. “Oh, please, dear God. Oh, please, dear God,” to the rhythm of the wheels on the rails.
***
Kwai Libazo, making his way along the forest road between Nairobi to the Scottish Mission, would not have called what he was doing praying, but his thoughts were very like a prayer. He had descended from a third-class railway car on that same train that Vera and her companions had taken from Nakuru. Kwai knew that, during the train’s layover, he would make better time going to the Mission on foot. Besides, he could blend in with the crowds at Nairobi Station. If he waited to descend at Athi River, he would be noticed by whomever was at the station. Something he knew he must not allow.
Without his uniform, dressed in the ubiquitous dark orange shuka of a Kikuyu tribesman and carrying a Kikuyu spear, Kwai felt safely invisible to anyone looking for a runaway constable. Before he left Naivasha, he had done everything he could to make sure that it would be a good long while, if ever, before he was missed. A.D.S. Lovett, the lackadaisical man in charge of his unit, was far away in Nakuru and seeing to a potentially explosive relocation of the Maasai. He would not be asking for Sergeant Libazo. Kwai was not sure that Lovett even knew who he was.
The path Kwai followed went through a wilderness area where wild animals might lurk. He knew how to defend himself with the spear. Out on the open plain he had passed harmless creatures, like impala and kudu. As he entered the forest, he had to be on the lookout for their predators—lions, hyenas.
Kwai’s deepest fears had nothing to do with creatures with claws and teeth that might be watching him from behind that rain tree. His concerns were not at all for his own life. No. Only for Aurala Sagal and their unborn child. He would give up his own life without a thought to protect them.
A devout Muslim would say it was only through Allah that Kwai had discovered the danger to Aurala and the baby. He had been meeting the imam at the mosque in Naivasha, thinking he would surprise Aurala by converting to Islam. She had not asked him to do this, but he had nothing else to give her. He did not own one cow or even one goat. He could give her respect by becoming what she was.
The imam’s son had told him that two Somali men from the coast had asked in the town where they might find a British policeman named Bilazo. The boy rightly imagined that they must have meant Kwai.
Kwai knew at once that they could only be the Sagal brothers, looking for him so they could find their sister. Last year, when he had taken her from Mombasa to the Scottish Mission, he thought he had saved her from them forever.
He feared what they would do to her. And he hated them. He would never understand why they wanted to take their sisters’ lives because of what those poor girls had been forced to do.
Before Aurala met Kwai, her sister Leylo was the only person who had loved and cared for her. When Leylo was newly married, thieves had grabbed her on the street and dragged her away. Just thirteen, Aurala had donned a burka and followed far enough to find out where they had taken Leylo. Then she ran away to Mombasa to find her sister, her only friend. When she did find Leylo, in a brothel in the souk, Aurala herself had become a captive and been forced to work there.
Eventually their brothers discovered where they were and had come to Mombasa to kill them, to defend the honor of their family, they said. They caught Leylo. But not Aurala. Not yet. Never. He would strangle them with his bare hands.
As fast as he had been running, Kwai picked up his pace. He had been foolish to think Aurala was safe. It would have been easy for her brothers to find him if they learned their sister had taken up with a policeman. All they would have to do to find Kwai was ask casual questions of the policemen in Mombasa. They could pretend to know him, to owe him money, for instance. That was what Kwai himself would have said if he were trying to find a particular askari.
They could easily have learned that he had been posted to Naivasha, and so they had found him. He tried to convince himself that they still might have no idea where Aurala was. No one up in Naivasha knew anything about her. He had told no one, not even the imam.
But if they had found him, they might be clever enough to find her. If they learned he had worked with A.D.S. Tolliver, they would easily connect him with the Scottish Mission.
Wasn’t that extremely unlikely? Wasn’t he being overly cautious?
That did not matter.
He ran faster.
When he got to Aurala, he would never leave her side. Even if that meant he would never again be able to call himself Sergeant Kwai Libazo. Never again have the pleasure of thinking the way a policeman thought. It was the working out of things—what questions to ask, who to ask them of, what did not fit with the stories he was told—until he saw the answer. These were the things that pleased him so much about being a policeman. He loved the idea of justice, even if it was not always possible in the world of the British overlords.
He hated Aurala’s brothers all the more because they had robbed him of his work. They were clever, but he was more clever. He would not rest until they were dead.
As he neared the Mission, his pace slowed by the rise in the land, he needed to watch the undergrowth for predators. Though the sun had passed its zenith, the cats would likely still be sleeping, but one did not rely on the predictability of cats.
As he emerged into the clearing above the Mission, he saw the Reverend McIntosh leaving by the road to the Athi River Station. Kwai thought to hide—not to be seen by him until he could speak with him and explain his presence.
But the missionary saw Kwai and stood in the buggy to hail him. Kwai had no choice. He waved his open palms and went to speak to the reverend.
21
At two that afternoon, waiting at the Athi River Railway Station for a train an hour and a half behind schedule, the Reverend Clarence McIntosh did nothing but pray. He was a prayerful man. One who held in his soul the hope that the Almighty would grant solace if asked. Not always, certainly. But God would. Prayers were answered. Besides which, there was naught else he could do at the moment.
As a Scot he had been raised to believe that his fate in the afterlife had been predetermined at his birth. Not the sort of belief to make a man optimistic. But Clarence had studied at Magee College in Ulster in Ireland with ministers of the New Light. Their liberal approach to their religion matched more closely to his natural inclination to be a joyful Christian.
Joyful was not what he would call himself at the moment. Just as he was leaving his Mission to meet Vera’s train, he had encountered Kwai Libazo—dressed not in his constable’s uniform, but in the orange shuka of a Kikuyu tribesman. Kwai had told him the most horrifying news—that the lovely Aurala, heavy with child, was being hunted by her vengeful brothers.
More than the heat of the African sun, the terror of the situation weighed on Clarence. Then, halfway to the station, a messenger boy had found him and put into his hands an indecipherable telegram from Justin. It said only that Libazo was in trouble and had to be hidden. Nothing about the reason for such a request. Surely if Justin knew that Libazo was coming home, he knew why.
Justin was being cryptic in the extreme. He, who teased Clarence unmercifully about being too thrifty to pay for extra words in a cable. Clarence might have been brief, but his messages were clear. Justin was being terse—creating confusion by not saying enough.
He looked down at the orange envelope, took out Justin’s message, and reread it. There was no doubt that Justin was asking him to protect Kwai. At the Mission, not half an hour ago, Kwai had spoken only about protecting the girl. Why was Justin expressing no concern about her? The poor child was in dire straits.
Clarence’s prayers were only for her. Mark 13:17 kept running through his mind: “But woe to them that are with child and to them that give suck in those days!”
When the train finally pulled into view, he prepared himself to reveal the dangerous news to his beloved daughter. There would be no hiding from her that something was amiss. She would see it in a glance. From infancy, she had always matched his moods, even the sorry ones that he tried to hide from her. Especially the sorry ones he tried to hide from her.
When the train came to a stop and the compartment doors opened, that nice Italian leapt out and helped Vera descend. And as soon as Clarence saw her, he knew she had already been told. He could not imagine by whom.
Porters unloaded half a car of safari gear with astonishing alacrity. The Italian count or prince, whatever he was, conferred with his gun bearer. Denys Finch Hatton went to speak with his man Kinuthia.
More than twenty people had been waiting on the platform to take this train to Mombasa. The numbers traveling to and from this station had been increasing rapidly, but this crowd was surprisingly large.
The new down passengers pushed forward and climbed on, and soon the great iron beast was chugging east on its way to the coast.
Clarence went and embraced Vera. “You know then, my lass?” he whispered in her ear, not sure which of the others knew or should know.
Vera embraced him. “Yes, Papa. Will is…?”
“The wee one is just fine,” he said.
She sighed with relief. “As to the other matter,” she said, and smiled rather wanly, “we have brought reinforcements.”
Clarence could see she meant it in a cheering, joking way, but it fell flat for both of them. “We will be safe,” he said. “I have the buggy here, but it will take only four. Do they all know about the brothers?”
“Yes,” she said, and went to speak to Finch Hatton, who talked to the Italian. Constance seemed focused only on her beau. She turned and saw Clarence watching her. She blushed. “I am sorry, Reverend McIntosh,” she said. “I was distracted by all the activity. Thank you for coming to meet us.”
“Of course,” he said. The lass was so well trained to say the polite thing that it seemed to fall from her lips regardless of the circumstances.
The Italian came to them. He was carrying a rifle. “Denys will walk with the porters. I will come with you.”
“Just a minute,” Vera said. She went to Denys, who took off his hat and ran his hand through his hair in a gesture McIntosh had seen him make many times.
They took two more rifles. Vera returned carrying hers, and Finch Hatton handed one to Lady Constance. He held up his hand to the Italian. “In England,” he said, “it’s a sign of breeding for a lady to know how to shoot. Here it’s—well, you never know when you might meet a lion.”
“Too true,” Clarence said. He led them to where the buggy waited in the shade of a thorn tree. His own rifle was lying across the driver’s bench.
***
Vera tried her best not to show her anxiety to her father. He looked as if he was doing the same.
“The boy is extremely well,” he said, his voice strained despite the good news he was imparting.
Gian Lorenzo had taken the reins with Constance beside him, leaving Vera and her papa in the rear seat.
She took his hand and sat very close to him as they bumped along the rutted road. “How did Aurala take the news? Does she even know?”
“I dunna know. I was in the buggy on my way to meet your train when I saw Kwai Libazo coming into the compound on foot from the high road from Nairobi.”
She started. “He’s already here?” Her mind scrambled to imagine the events that might be taking place at the Mission. How had Kwai found out the brothers were coming? She had imagined that Kwai, leaving Naivasha, told Justin who then telegraphed her. If that were the case, how could Kwai have gotten here so soon? She knew too much and not enough about what was happening. She wanted to spirit her baby away. And Aurala too.
She felt as if she wanted to leap down and run faster than the horse could draw the buggy.
“I know that we must keep Kwai from being discovered,” her father said. “At least I think that’s what Justin’s cable meant.”
“Justin wrote to you?”
“Yes.” Her father reached into his inside breast pocket. “His message wasn’t very clear.”
She snatched the message from him. Then, scanning it, she drew Justin’s message to her from her own pocket and gave it to her father. “Justin doesn’t know about the brothers,” she said.
“Oh, he must.” Her father pointed to the message in her hand. “Otherwise, why would he have sent that to me?”
“It says only that Kwai wants to attend the birth. If Justin knew those monsters were on their way to you, he would have warned you. I believe that he knows only that Kwai has left his post to be with Aurala when the baby is born.”
“But a man in Kwai’s position takes a grave step by leaving his post,” her father said. “Justin must have known Kwai would not run off helter-skelter like that.”
“I wonder about that too,” Vera said. “I can only think that Justin has too much on his mind. There have been two murders in Nakuru.” She sketched out those events to her father’s increasing horror.
“Oh, my lass. Oh, my lass,” was all he seemed to be capable of saying, while squeezing her hand when she spoke of the circumcision of the girls. “I never wanted you to know about that.”
“I know, Father,” she said. “You were protecting me.”
They fell silent.
After a moment, Vera spoke. “At any rate, whatever is going on up there must have Justin so distracted that he isn’t thinking clearly about this business of Kwai running away.”
During the rest of the ride to the Mission grounds no one spoke at all.
