but will I?”
His only answer was a laugh and a crash of gears.
“You are the driver arranged for by that nice Mr. Bates from Government House, aren’t you? I should hate to be abducted and not know it.”
“You are my passengers. Paying passengers,” he added meaningfully.
Dodo opened her eyes and reached for her bag. I slapped her hand. “Don’t you dare. Not until he’s seen us safely to Fairlight. He might just dump us in the desert and then where would we be?”
He flicked me an amused glance. “The desert? Princess, where do you think you are? This isn’t the goddamn Sahara.”
With that he gunned the engine and we roared off, away from Nairobi and the last vestiges of civilisation.
* * *
We drove for a little while in silence as he negotiated the traffic out of Nairobi. It was surprisingly busy – donkey carts and rickshaws jostling with sleek new automobiles and pedestrians laden with bundles of fruits and firewood. He did point out a few of the local landmarks, including the Turf Club and Kilimani Prison and the Japanese brothel, but I didn’t ask questions and Dodo was too busy nursing her “cure.” I stared out the window, watching as the shabby little bungalows that dotted the outskirts of Nairobi fell away. The murram road stretched upwards now, carving its way through the wilderness, a wilderness that hadn’t changed since Eve went dancing in a fig-leaf skirt. The soil was as red as good Georgia clay, and here and there a flat-topped thorn tree shaded the high savannah grasses. As far as the eye could see there was nothing but land and more land, an emptiness so big not even God himself could fill it. The miles rolled away and so did my bad mood, and when the first giraffe strode gracefully into view, I gasped aloud.
Ryder stopped the vehicle and gestured. “She’s got a foal.” I peered into the brush behind the giraffe and noticed a tiny version, teetering on impossibly long legs as it emerged. The mother turned back with a graceful gesture of the head and gave the little thing a push of encouragement. They came closer to the truck and I saw it wasn’t tiny at all – it was frankly enormous, and Ryder eased down the road, slowly so as not to startle them.
“Why did we leave?” I demanded. “I would have liked to have watched them.”
“Second rule of the bush. Never get too close to anything that has offspring.”
“What’s the first rule?”
“Food runs. If you don’t want to be food, don’t run.”
I smiled, expecting him to laugh, but he was deadly serious. His eyes were on the road, and I took the opportunity to study him a little more closely than I had the day before. He had tidied himself up a bit, even if his clothes were disreputable. His jaw was still rough with golden stubble, but his hands and face were clean. He had strong, steady hands, and I could tell from looking at them there was little he couldn’t do. Mossy always said you could tell everything you needed to know about a man from his hands. Some hands, she told me, were leaving hands. They were the wandering sort that slipped into places they shouldn’t, and they would wander right off again because those hands just couldn’t stay still. Some hands were worthless hands, fit only to hold a drink or flick ash from a cigar, and some were punishing hands that hit hard and didn’t leave a mark and those were the ones you never stayed to see twice.
But the best hands were knowing hands, Mossy told me with a slow smile. Knowing hands were capable; they could soothe a horse or a woman. They could take things apart – including your heart – and put them back together better than before. Knowing hands were rare, but if you found them, they were worth holding, at least for a little while. I looked at Ryder’s hands. They sat easily on the wheel and gearshift, coaxing instead of forcing, and I wondered how much they knew.
They had known pain; that much was certain from the scars that laced his left arm. He had been lucky. Whatever had dug itself into his arm hadn’t wanted to let go. They were long, raking white scars, like punctuation marks, dotted here and there with a full stop of knotted white scar tissue where whatever it was had hung on hard. Some men might have covered them up, rolled down their shirtsleeves and pretended it hadn’t happened. Others would have told the story as soon as you met, flaunting those scars for any Desdemona who might be impressed. But Ryder didn’t even seem conscious of his. He wore them as he did his bracelets – souvenirs of somewhere he had been. I could have asked him, but I didn’t. I liked not knowing his stories yet. He was a stranger, an impossible and uncouth one, but a stranger nonetheless. And there is nothing more interesting than a stranger.
I decided to let him keep his stories and give me only the mundane things that didn’t matter. “So, you were born in Canada. Whereabouts?”
“Quebec.”
I lifted a brow. “Really? You don’t sound Québécois.”
“Left when I was a year old. My father and I travelled up and down the Mississippi and then west to California. Ended up in the Klondike by the time I was six.”
“That’s quite a lot of travelling for a young boy. What did your father do?”
“As little as possible,” he answered with a wry twist of the lips.
“And what did your mother have to say about this? Did she like being dragged around at his whims or was she afflicted with wanderlust as well?”
“She died before we left Quebec.” He said the words easily. They were just words to him. We might have had the loss of a parent in common, but not what we had done with the emptiness. Not a day went by that I didn’t think of Pink and how different my life would have been if he’d lived.
“Were you raised without a female influence, then?”
“There was an Algonquin woman who travelled with us. She took care of me and my father, although I’m not sure I’d exactly call her female. Her mustache was thicker than his.”
“How did you end up in Africa?”
“My father got lucky. He struck gold, and he worked it until the claim played out. By then he said the Klondike was getting too crowded and too cold. Africa was empty and hot. We landed here when I was twelve. Been here mostly ever since.”
“And what do you do here?”
He shrugged one solid shoulder. “This and that – lately quite a bit of guiding. I lead safaris. I have a little place on the coast where I grow sugarcane, and I own a few dukas.”
“Dukas?”
“Shops – each one is a general store of sorts. The closest thing you’ll find to civilisation out here. The post gets delivered there and people will come for a drink and to catch up with the neighbours.”
“God, it’s the end of the earth, isn’t it?” I asked. Africa had seemed a great adventure when I was sitting in a Paris hotel room. Now the reality of it intruded, vast and unsettled, and I felt very, very small.
He flicked me a glance, his expression unreadable. “It won’t be so bad, princess. You’ll see.”
Suddenly, I sat bolt upright, staring out the windscreen, all thoughts of exile gone. Stretching before me was the most spectacular thing I had ever seen in my life, and even those words cannot do the memory of it justice. It was
