Green City in the Sun (4 page)

     Grace had written angry replies, but both brother and sister-in-law had preferred to set aside common sense and act out their impractical dream.

     And so the two women had left England and Bella Hill, the ancestral mansion in Suffolk, with all their possessions and the company of six servants, to brave the safe postwar seas and come to the recently demilitarized, exotic, and alluring British East Africa Protectorate.

     Lady Rose leaned forward and fussed for a moment over her rosebushes. Although the five other servants and the family dogs rode behind in the second-class carriage, these rosebushes accompanied the countess as if they were children. Grace eyed them in annoyance; those plants had created
more than one episode of inconvenience since they had left England! And then she softened when she saw how her sister-in-law fretted over them.

     Soon now, Grace thought,
she will have the baby to center her life on.
The baby that Rose had so desperately wanted, even after the specialists in London had pronounced her incapable of childbearing. The baby, Grace reminded herself now, that she hoped would make her brother settle down.

     She sighed and gazed out the window. Valentine was a restless man; this untamed country suited him. Grace could see why he had been smitten by East Africa, could understand his decision to leave Bella Hill in the care of their younger brother and come here to carve a new empire out of the wilderness.

     
Perhaps this land will tame him
, Grace thought as the train rocked her to sleep.
Perhaps Valentine will be a new man....

     G
RACE WAS STILL THINKING OF MEN WHEN THE TRAIN PULLED INTO
Voi station and the passengers made a dash for the dining hut. She had dreamed of the hospital ship again, and of Jeremy.

     Because of her sister-in-law's condition, it was not proper for the two women to dine with the other passengers, and so a supper was brought into the private carriage and served by an elderly, respectable-looking African. Grace touched little of the boiled beef and cabbage as she looked out the window at the dining bungalow, brightly lit against the desert night. She watched the men inside, eating at tables covered with proper white tablecloths, using china and silver, being waited on by wine stewards and white-jacketed waiters. The night air was filled with the rumble of men's talk and laughter and with the smoke from their cigars. Grace envied them.

     Rose sipped claret out of a crystal stem glass and spoke quietly of her plans for the new house. "I shall plant my roses where I can always see them. And I shall have an At Home every Wednesday and shall invite all the suitable ladies from the neighborhood."

     Grace smiled indulgently at her sister-in-law. There was no need to disillusion Rose yet; she would learn soon enough the reality of her new life
when she saw the plantation and discovered that her nearest neighbor was miles away and that the "ladies" Rose spoke of were going to be hardworking farm wives with little time for afternoon teas.

     Something outside the window caught Grace's attention. It was the man who had earlier helped her up the carriage steps. He was overseeing the transfer of supplies from the train to some wagons, and the supplies, Grace saw, were guns and camping gear. So, she thought,
he is a hunter and is leaving the train here at Voi.

     Curious about him, Grace watched him. He looked very fetching in his khakis and pith helmet. When he turned suddenly and met her gaze, Grace's heart skipped a beat. He smiled, and then, as he swung himself up onto a horse, he saluted and rode away.

     As she watched him disappear into the night, she realized that this was the way it always was with Grace and men—and how it would always be. She confounded them, like those that afternoon who had not known how to act around her, or she brought out in them some inexplicable resentment, or she received their highest compliment, like the hunter's; that they regarded her as being as good as any man and therefore worth treating as a fellow.

     Grace recalled the men on the hospital ship, the wounded ones who were brought aboard each day. How wonderful they were with her at first, flirting, thinking she was a nurse. And then how abruptly their attitude changed when they discovered she was a doctor
and
an officer: the sudden deference and arch respect, the creation of an invisible barrier that she didn't know how to cross.

     The day she had been accepted into medical school, nine years ago, Grace had been counseled by an elderly woman doctor. "You will find that your new title will be a curse as well as a blessing to you, " Dr. Smythe had said. "Many male doctors will resent your intrusion into their jealously guarded fraternity, and many male patients will judge you incapable of practicing medicine. You will not have a normal social life because you will not fit into any of the accepted feminine roles. Some men will place you on a pedestal and make you unreachable to them. Others will see you as a curiosity, a freak. You will intimidate some, amuse others. You will be entering a man's world without being accepted as a full member, and you will receive few of the privileges of that world."

     Dr. Alice Smythe, in her sixties and never married, had spoken truly. Grace Treverton was now twenty-nine—and a spinster.

     She rested back in her seat and closed her eyes.

     This was the "price" she had been warned about years ago, when she had announced her intention to pursue the study of medicine. Her father, the old earl, had refused to support her, and her brothers had laughed, predicting she was going to give up her femininity. Something of their prophecy had come true. She had indeed made sacrifices. There was little prospect now of marriage and babies, and she was, at nearly thirty and despite two years at sea working among thousands of soldiers, still a virgin.

     But not all men were like her brothers or those rough men in the dining hut. There was the hunter who had noticed her, and back in Egypt, where she had been stationed during the war, Grace had encountered officers, cultured gentlemen who had respected the stripes of rank on her sleeve and the M.D. after her name.

     And there had been Jeremy.

     In truth, Dr. Smythe's forecast had seemed extreme when Jeremy had placed the engagement ring on Grace's left hand. But that dream had gone down with the torpedoed ship, and with Jeremy, in the cold dark waters of the Mediterranean.

     The supper dishes were cleared away, and the women were asked to stand on the carriage platform while their beds were made up. Grace supported her sister-in-law by the elbow as they stood at the rail, breathing in the fresh night air and marveling at the splendor of the stars. Soon the full moon would be rising over Mount Kilimanjaro.

     England seemed a galaxy away now, almost as if it had never existed. How long ago it seemed, the departure from Southampton. And then the three weeks' steaming eastward, each day taking one farther from familiar sights and deeper into the unknown. Port Said had seemed strange to Grace now that the war was over and tourists were beginning to come back. Peasants had come aboard the ship with their trinkets and "guaranteed" ancient artifacts; vendors had circulated with food and strong Egyptian wine. Then there had been the Suez Canal, surrounded by harsh, barren desert, and Port Sudan with its stately trains of camels and Arabs in burnooses. From Aden, that
bleak oasis in the wilderness, the steamer had carried them along the exotic Somali coast into the sultry Indian Ocean, where sunsets streaked the sky in crimson and gold. Finally Mombasa, the coast of British East Africa, with its bleached white buildings, coconut palms, mango trees, brilliant flowering shrubs, and Arabs hawking everything anyone could desire. Where were the mist of Suffolk, the dignified old stones of Bella Hill, the Elizabethan pubs along country lanes? They belonged to another world and in another time.

     Grace stared at the men sitting on the veranda of the dining hut, with brandy and cigars, waiting for their berths to be made up and for the journey to resume. What dreams had brought them to this wild and virgin territory? Which ones would survive; which, fail? What lay ahead for each of them at the end of this train ride? Nearly a whole day must be spent on the rails before Nairobi could be reached. After that, for Countess Treverton and her retinue, there would be many days yet in an oxcart, on the dirt track to Nyeri in the north.

     Grace trembled to think of it. Her dream, the dream she had shared with Jeremy during their cruelly brief time together, lay at the end of that savage road. It was Jeremy who had spun the glorious vision in her head, of a haven of hope and mercy in the wilderness; he had planned to come to Africa after the war and bring the Word of God to the heathen. They were going to work together, Jeremy healing the spirit and Grace, the body. They had filled their shipboard nights with talk of the mission they were going to establish in British East Africa, and now the moment was close at hand. Grace was going to build that hospital, for Jeremy; she was going to carry his beautiful light into the African darkness.

     "Dear me," said Lady Rose, leaning against her sister-in-law, "I believe I must lie down."

     Grace was startled when she looked at her; Lady Rose's face had gone as white as her muslin dress. "Rose? Are you in pain?" "No ..."

     Grace struggled with indecision. To continue on or to stay here? But this desert station was no place for a woman about to have a baby, and Nairobi lay only a day away.

     Grant us time, Lord, Grace prayed as she and Fanny put Rose to bed. Don't let it happen here. I have no chloroform, no hot water.

     There was no sign of distress on Rose's face; her expression was dreamy, as if she were far away. "Are my roses all right?" was all she said.

     After waiting for her sister-in-law to drift off to sleep, Grace removed her navy suit, brushed it out, and hung it up. Many women doctors were accused of adopting masculine traits, and Grace's continuing to wear her uniform, despite the fact that she had been discharged from the navy a year ago, was looked upon with suspicion. Which was nonsense. Grace was simply a pragmatic woman. The suit was good quality; the stripes had been removed from the sleeve; there was no reason it could not be worn for years to come.

     "Our little sailoress" Valentine had called her. Even though their father had fought in the Crimean War, and even though Valentine had enlisted to fight the Germans in East Africa and had served as a regimental officer, Grace's joining the navy had been met with great disapproval. But Grace had the Treverton stubborn streak and had followed the dictates of her conscience. Just as she was following it now, here in Africa, determined to fulfill a dream that had been born on a warship in the Mediterranean.

     Valentine didn't approve of her plan to build a hospital in the bush, bearing as he did a deep-rooted contempt for missionaries in general, and he had informed his sister that in no way was he going to assist in such a folly. But Grace did not need Valentine's help; she had a small income from her inheritance, a little support from local churches back in Suffolk, and she was possessed of a backbone as stiff as any man's.

     A moan came from Lady Rose's berth. Grace turned sharply. Her fragile sister-in-law lay breathing deeply with her hands on her abdomen.

     "Are you all right?" Grace asked.

     Rose smiled. "We are fine."

     Grace smiled back, comfortingly, to mask her fear. So many miles, so many
days
to go yet—and the worst of the journey still ahead!

     "Is he kicking?" she asked, and Rose nodded.

     It had been decided that the baby would be named Arthur, for the younger brother who had been killed in France in the first year of the war. The Honorable Arthur Currie Treverton, one of the first brave boys to sign up when England went to war.

     The whistle blew, and the train began to roll. Grace looked out the window and saw the reassuring lights of Voi station fall behind; then there was night all around. The train chuffed across a bleak and sterile landscape, following an old slave route to Lake Victoria. This modern year of 1919 was but an eye's blink from the days of Arab caravans, when chained Africans had trudged this way to the slave ships on the coast and thus to their doom. The policing of this route, to stop illegal slaving, had been part of the way the British government's propaganda had explained the embarrassment of a railway that had cost so much and seemed to go nowhere. As golden sparks from the engine flew past her window, Grace imagined the camps of those slavers, squatting under the stars, their prisoners moaning in chains, bewildered. What had it been like for those innocent Africans to be taken away on terrible ships and forced to serve masters on the other side of the world?

     Grace made sure the windows were tightly closed. She had heard stories of man-eating lions that pulled people from train windows. This was a wild and uncivilized country, the night more treacherous than the day. Never had she felt so vulnerable, so isolated. There was no communication between the first-class carriages; they were like a string of little boxes hurtling through the night with no way to contact the passengers in the next cars, no way to stop the train. Grace prayed that they would make it to Nairobi in time.