Promise the Night (15 page)

Arthur poked his head in to see what was happening. His eyes widened, but Beryl jerked her head toward the stables where Kibii was working. He got her message, and darted away before Miss Le May noticed him.

A few minutes later, Beryl saw Kibii’s head appear at the win-dow. He beckoned to her. Beryl nodded imperceptibly.

“Miss Le May, I think my father is returning.” She was gratified to see the blood run out of the governess’s face.

Miss Le May quickly put away the ruler and went to the door. Beryl was only waiting for her chance. The moment the governess’s back was turned, Beryl ran toward the window. With a leap, she was halfway over the sill. Kibii was there to grab her arms and pull her out. In an instant they were halfway across the yard, running hard.

Realizing she had been tricked, Miss Le May came running after them. She galumphed like a plow horse.

“Camiscan,” Beryl said to Kibii. They darted into Camiscan’s stall. Speaking calming words and patting his muzzle reassuringly, they stood with their backs against the wall and waited.

“Beryl! Beryl! Where are you?” They could hear Miss Le May shouting. Finally the redheaded teacher looked over the half door.

“There you are, you little brat. Get out ‘ere right now. We are still doing arithmetic.”

“Come and get me,” said Beryl.

“Fine. I will.” Miss Le May pulled open the stall door and strode in. She knew nothing about horses, not even enough to be afraid. Camiscan whinnied in warning and pawed the ground dangerously. Miss Le May screamed. The stallion reared as high as he could in his stall, his lips curled back from his teeth. Too terrified to move, Miss Le May stood screaming in the doorway. A stable lad rushed up and pulled her to safety, slamming the stall door shut.

“Get your filthy black hands off me,” Miss Le May snapped at the boy.

“Ungrateful,” Beryl whispered to Kibii in Swahili.

The governess smoothed her hair and rearranged her dress. “Beryl Clutterbuck, this isn’t finished. If you want war, you’ll get war.” As she turned, her foot slipped in a pile of manure. Beryl and Kibii howled with laughter, avoiding Camiscan’s hooves as he moved uneasily in his stall. Miss Le May wiped her boot clean and stalked away.

When Kibii finally stopped laughing, he turned suddenly solemn. “War?”

“Kita.”

“Oh. That is not good.”

“No, it’s not,” she said. “Look.” She proudly held out her bloody fingers for Kibii’s inspection.

“I know. Arthur told me. It was good that you did not cry. But she liked hurting you too much.”

“Thank you for helping me to escape. Luckily, Daddy doesn’t have glass in the windows yet.” Beryl flexed her fingers painfully. “She’s a witch, isn’t she?”

“With that red hair, it would not surprise me if she was a devil.” Kibii was only half joking.

“Perhaps she is.”

“You should tell your father,” Kibii said.

“Would you ask your father for help if Mehru bullied you?”

A wry smile appeared on his lips. “I would not need help with Mehru. He is a coward.”

“So is she.” She punched one hand into her palm and winced. “This fight is between her and me.”

LOCATION: Somewhere over the North Atlantic

DATE: 10:30 P.M. GMT, 4 September, 1936

I’m surrounded by a wall of fuel inside my little Messenger. I’ve no gauges, no way to know how much petrol I have. The tank sitting next me has a happy little sign: “This tank good for four hours.” But at what airspeed? What about the headwinds pushing me back, using up my precious fuel? When the main tank is through, I have to turn a valve to open the next one. I dare not waste a drop. So the trick is to wait until the engine stops completely before I switch tanks. I’m dreading that moment.

I open the window to get some relief from the smell of petrol. The driving rain spatters my face like buckshot. I pull out my chart of the Atlantic and a gust of wind blows it out of my hand. I see it floating down to the cold, dark ocean. Ah, well—there’s nothing on that chart but water. I almost want to turn back, but of course I can’t do that.

As a child, I learned you never give up. Never.

IT WAS A STALEMATE UNTIL THE CAPTAIN AND EMMA WENT away to the horse sales in Nairobi a week later. The rainy season was beginning; the Captain could be spared from the farm. Emma decided to bring Arthur, but insisted that Beryl should not miss any schooling. Arap Maina had taken the boys to help him bring new cattle to the village. Beryl and Miss Le May were alone.

Beryl saw that the rules had changed as soon as she sat down at the table that afternoon. Even the room looked different. Although it was the middle of the day, the room was lit with a paraffin lantern. A table was pulled across the doorway to the hall. Emma’s new lacy curtains were drawn across the windows and tied down. Worst of all, Miss Le May looked pleased.

Beryl stared down at the bruises and half-healed cuts on her fingers. Her father and Emma hadn’t even noticed her injuries before they left.

“So, Beryl Clutterbuck,” Miss Le May said. “We are on our own for a fortnight.”

“Lovely,” Beryl muttered.

“Don’t mumble, dear. Let’s take out our notebook, shall we?” Miss Le May stood over Beryl, looking down at her.

Beryl opened her notebook, but didn’t pick up her pencil.

“Six plus six?” Miss Le May said sweetly.

“I don’t know,” Beryl answered.

With a smile as broad as her freckled forehead, Miss Le May asked, “And you don’t care?”

“No,” Beryl said warily.

Miss Le May gave a deep, theatrical sigh and said in a sad voice, “I was so afraid you would say that, my dear.” She walked over to the door and bolted it shut.

Beryl’s stomach contracted into a tight ball.

“Beryl, you’re so fond of the natives, I thought I would adopt one of their methods.” She reached into her satchel and pulled out a kiboko. “I’m told this is made from rhino hide. Your precious Nandi use it to discipline cattle.”

Beryl glowered from under her eyebrows. “Are you calling me a cow?”

“No, my dear. Just a discipline problem.” And with that, Miss Le May flicked the whip, cracking it across the room.

Beryl straightened up, her eyes darting around the room, looking for any way out. But Miss Le May had planned too carefully.

“Six plus six?”

“I don’t care.”

Crack!

The whip slashed across Beryl’s back. For an instant, the pain knocked the breath out of her. She bit down on her lip to keep any sound from escaping.

Miss Le May repeated her question.

Through her clenched jaw, Beryl muttered, “I don’t care.”

Crack!

Under her breath, Beryl repeated over and over, “Don’t flinch. Don’t be a coward. Don’t flinch.” The Nandi ritual helped a little. The pain receded a tiny bit. She sneaked a glance at Miss Le May. Her eyes were unfocused, and her mouth was parted as she panted with the effort of beating Beryl.

“Six plus six?”

After a moment, there was another crack.

Shuddering with waves of pain, Beryl deliberately closed her mouth tightly and refused to speak a word.

“Answer me!”

Beryl almost smiled at the desperation in Miss Le May’s voice.

“If you won’t talk, I’ll…I’ll…” The governess trailed off as she realized that Beryl had withstood her worst. She paced wildly about the room until she had an idea. She grabbed Beryl by the arm and dragged her to the door. Unbolting it, she checked to see that there were no servants around. Then she pulled Beryl to the rondavel and threw her onto the hard cow-dung floor.

“You can stay there until you find your voice, young lady. We’ll see ‘ow long you last without food or water. There won’t be any natives or ‘orses to help you this time.”

She shoved the door shut and barred it with a block of wood. Beryl’s windows had shutters, which she rarely used, but now Miss
Le May slammed them closed and pulled the bar to lock them from the outside. Beryl could hear her stomping away.

Huddled on the floor, Beryl tried not to think how much her back hurt. She reached behind her and fingered the tatters of her linen shirt.

“I hate her. I hate her. I hate her,” she chanted, her words throbbing in time with the slashes across her shoulders. “I wish she would fall into a pit filled with siafu.”

She remembered the dead hare and the ants marching toward her hut. In the dim light, she imagined the tramping of thousands of insect feet homing in on her blood-soaked back. She scrambled up on her bed and huddled under her blanket and finally gave way to the sobs she had held back since the first crack of the whip. She called for her father, for Kibii, for Arap Maina. Even Emma would offer a gentle hand on her aching back. Her tears exhausted, she finally fell asleep.

She awoke to the thunder of rain on her thatch roof. Through the gaps in the shutters’ slats, she could see twilight had fallen. It was still raining. The hunger in her belly was a distraction to the stinging of her back. She had missed lunch and dinner.

“I won’t stay here like a prisoner,” she announced to the empty room. Swinging her feet to the floor, she winced at the burning in her back and shoulders. She shoved against the door, but Miss Le May had blocked it well. The window, too. Beryl lit her paraffin lantern and looked around her hut at every wall, every crack. She was used to thinking of it as a refuge, not as a prison.

She held the lantern up and noticed a wet stain on the back wall near the corner. The wall was buckling from the rain, and a narrow
crack had appeared in the hardened mud. She pulled out her knife and began scraping frantically. After what seemed like hours, the crack was bigger; big enough to let the rain pour in, but not quite big enough to let Beryl escape.

She dug through her belongings under the bed and found her elephant tusk. Using its sharp end, she dug into the dampened wall. The warm rain made the ivory slippery in her muddy hands. Finally, the crack was big enough for her thin body. She forced herself through, sparing her back as well as she could. Outside, the water felt cool on her bare skin, soothing the smarting cuts.

A sound behind her alerted her that she wasn’t alone. It was Buller. The poor old dog was waiting for her. She fondled his ears.

“Hey, boy. Want to come with me? I could use the company.”

Although Buller had recovered from his injuries, he had never been the same after the leopard attack. These days he preferred to sit on the porch and watch life on the farm. With a whimper, he pressed his nose against her hand, then went to lie under the thatch hanging off her hut.

“Fair-weather friend,” Beryl muttered. Without a backward glance, she ran into the forest. Its nighttime noises were stilled by the cool rain. She needed to find shelter before nightfall. She considered going to the Nandi, but then shook her head. “It’s the first place she’ll look,” she said to herself.

Then Beryl remembered the day she hunted warthog. The warthog’s hole would be empty now. She began running toward the meadow where they had hunted. The hole was still there, a narrow slit in the hill. She found a long stick and poked it through the entrance. The last thing she needed today was another battle.
The cave seemed empty. Streaming with water, her bare feet covered with mud, Beryl gratefully crawled backward into the warthog’s hole.

Beryl lived rough for another two days, eating roots and berries. On the third night, worried that her cuts might get infected, she went to the Nandi village. She arrived at sunset, to be greeted by the tribe’s pack of dogs. She walked straight to Arap Maina’s hut.

“Beru! Where have you been? We have been worried. Come in and have something to eat.” Naipende was as welcoming as Beryl could have hoped. She would never admit it, but she had been lonely in her exile.

She slipped off her filthy shirt and turned her back to Kibii’s mother. Naipende’s sharply indrawn breath told Beryl that the wounds were as ugly as they felt. “Your father will not like this, Beru,” she said as she hurried off to find a balm made from tree sap to coat the welts.

“No, he won’t,” Beryl said with satisfaction.

Beryl stayed with the Nandi for almost two weeks. Her friends reported that Miss Le May was frantic with worry. She wasn’t sleeping, and even her hearty appetite had been affected. The governess couldn’t understand why no one was concerned. But the servants, who knew exactly where Beryl was, thought it was a good joke.

The day before her father was due to return, Beryl went back and reported for her reading lesson as though nothing had happened.

“Where ‘ave you been?” Miss Le May was flabbergasted. “We thought a lion ‘ad eaten you. Wait until I tell your father.”

Beryl drew herself up tall until her eyes were on level with Miss Le May’s freckled, pitted face. “Tell him what? That you beat me so badly I bled? That you locked me in my hut? That I escaped in fear
for my life? That I have been missing for two weeks? What do you think my father will say?”