Deanna Raybourn - A Spear of Summer Grass

I felt the sulks coming back. “The Colonel’s money isn’t everything.”

“Very near,” Quentin murmured. It had taken him the better part of a year to untangle the mess of inheritances, annuities, alimonies and settlements that made up my portfolio and another year to explain exactly how I was spending far more than I got. With his help and a few clever investments, I had almost gotten myself into the black again. Most of my income still went to paying off the last of the creditors, and it would be a long time before I saw anything like a healthy return. The Colonel’s allowance kept me in Paris frocks and holidays in St. Tropez. Without it, I would have to economize – something I suspected I wouldn’t much enjoy.

I looked away again, staring out of the window, watching the rain hit the glass in great slashing ribbons. It was dismal out there, just as it had been in England. The last few months of 1922 had been gloomy and 1923 wasn’t off to much better of a start. Everywhere I went it was grey and bleak. As I watched, the raindrops turned to sleet, pelting the windows with a savage hissing sound. God, I thought miserably, why was I fighting to stay here?

“Fine. I’ll go away,” I said finally.

Mossy breathed an audible sigh of relief and even Weatherby looked marginally happier. I had cleared the first hurdle and the biggest; they had gotten me to agree to go. Now the only question was where to send me.

“America?” Quentin offered.

I slanted him a look. “Not bloody likely, darling.” Between the Volstead Act and the Sullivan Ordinance, I couldn’t drink or smoke in public in New York. It was getting harder and harder for a girl to have a good time. “I am protesting the intrusion of the federal government upon the rights of the individual.”

“Or are you protesting the lack of decent cocktails?” Quentin murmured.

“It’s true,” Mossy put in. “She won’t even travel on her American passport, only her British one.”

Quentin flicked a glance to Nigel. “I do think, Sir Nigel, perhaps your initial suggestion of Africa might be well worth revisiting.” So that’s what they’d been discussing when I had come in – Africa. At the mention of the word, Mossy started to kick up a fuss again and Nigel remonstrated gently with her. Mossy hated Africa. He’d taken her there for their honeymoon and she had very nearly divorced him over it. Something to do with snakes in the bed.

Nigel had gone to Africa as a young man, back in the days when it was a protectorate called British East Africa and nothing but a promise of what it might become someday. Then it was raw and young and the air was thick with possibilities. He had bought a tidy tract of land and built a house on the banks of Lake Wanyama. He called it Fairlight after the pink glow of the sunsets on the lake, and he had planned to spend the rest of his life there, raising cattle and painting. But his heart was bad, and on the advice of his doctors he left Fairlight, returning home with nothing but his thwarted plans and his diary. He never looked at it; he said it made him homesick for the place, which was strange since England was his home. But I used to go to his library and take it down sometimes, handling it with the same reverence a religious might show the Holy Grail. It was a mystical thing, that diary, bound with the skin of a crocodile Nigel had killed on his first safari. It was written in soft brown ink and full of sketches, laced with bones and beads and feathers and bits of eggshells – a living record of his time in Africa and of a dream that drew one good breath before it died.

The book itself wouldn’t shut, as if the covers weren’t big enough to hold the whole of Africa, and I used to sit for hours reading and tracing my finger along the slender blue line of the rivers, plunging my pinky into the sapphire pool of Lake Wanyama, rolling it up the high green slopes of Mt. Kenya. There were even little portraits of animals, some serene, some silly. There were monkeys gamboling over the pages, and in one exquisite drawing a leopard bowed before an elephant wearing a crown. There were tiny watercolour sketches of flowers so lush and colourful I could almost smell their fragrance on the page. Or perhaps it was from the tissue-thin petals, now crushed and brown, that Nigel had pressed between the pages. He conjured Africa for me in that book. I could see it all so clearly in my mind’s eye. I used to wish he would take us there, and I secretly hoped Mossy would change her mind and decide she loved Africa so I could see for myself whether the leopard would really bow down to the elephant.

But she never did, and soon after she packed us up and left Nigel and years passed and I forgot to dream of Africa. Until a sleety early April morning in Paris when I had had enough of newspapers and gossip and wagging tongues and wanted right away from everything. Africa. The very word conjured a spell for me, and I took a long drag from my cigarette, surprised to find my fingers trembling a little.

“All right,” I said slowly. “I’ll go to Africa.”

2

Quentin raised his glass of champagne. “A toast. To my brave and darling Delilah and all who go with her. Bon voyage!”

It was scarcely a fortnight later but all the arrangements had been made. Clothes had been ordered, trunks had been packed, papers procured. It sounds simple enough, but there had been endless trips to couturiers and outfitters and bookshops and stuffy offices for tickets and forms and permissions. By the end of it, I was exhausted, so naturally I chose to kick up my heels and make the most of my last evening in Paris. Quentin had guessed I would be feeling a little low and arranged to take me out. It had been a rather wretched day, all things considered. I had almost backed out of going to Africa a dozen times, but that morning Mossy appeared in my suite brandishing the latest copy of a scurrilous French newspaper that had somehow acquired photographs of Misha’s death scene. They dared not publish them, but the descriptions were gruesome enough, and they had taken lurid liberties with the prose as well.

“‘The Curse of the Drummonds,’” Mossy muttered. “How dare they! I’m no Drummond. I was married to Pink Drummond for about ten minutes sometime in 1891. I barely remember his face. If they want to talk about a curse on the women of our family, it ought to be the L’Hommedieu curse,” she finished, slamming the door behind her for emphasis.

With that I had given up all hope of avoiding exile and started pouring cocktails. I was only a little tight by the time Quentin picked me up, but he was lavish with the champagne, and when we reached the Club d’Enfer, I was well and truly lit.

I adored the Club d’Enfer. As one would expect from its name, it was modeled on Hell. The ceiling was hung with red satin cut into the shape of flames and crimson lights splashed everything with an unholy glow. A cunning little devil stood at the door greeting visitors by swishing his forked tail and poking at people’s bottoms with his pitchfork.

Quentin rubbed at his posterior. “I say, is that really necessary?”

“Oh, Quentin, don’t be wet,” I told him. “This place has swing.”

Behind us, my cousin Dora gave a little scream as the pitchfork prodded her derrière.

“Don’t bother,” I told the devil. “She’s English. You won’t find anything but bony disapproval there.”

“Delilah, really,” she protested, but I had stopped listening. A demonic waiter was waving us to a table near the stage, and Quentin ordered champagne before we were even seated.

Around us the music pulsed, a strange cacophonic melody that would have been grossly out of place anywhere else but suited the Club d’Enfer just fine.

As we sat, the proprietor approached. He – she? – was a curiously androgynous creature with the features of a woman but a man’s voice and perfectly-cut tuxedo. On the occasion of my first visit to the club, it had introduced itself as Regine and seemed to be neither male nor female. Or both. I had heard that Regine’s tastes ran to very hairy men or very horsey women, of which I was neither.