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.

Regine bowed low over my hand, but then placed it firmly in the crook of his or her arm.

“My heart weeps, dear mademoiselle! I hear that Paris is about to lose one of the brightest stars in her firmament.”

Such flowery language was par for the course with Regine. I smiled a little wistfully.

“Yes, I am banished to Africa. Apparently I’ve been too naughty to be allowed to stay in Paris.”

“The loss is entirely that of Paris. And do you travel alone to the pais sauvage?”

“No. My cousin is coming. Regine, have you met Dora? Dora, say hello to Regine.”

Dora murmured something polite, but Regine’s eyes had kindled upon seeing her long, lugubrious features. “Another great loss for Paris.”

Dora dropped her head and I peered at her. “Dodo, are you blushing?”

“Of course not,” she snapped. “The lights are red.”

Regine shrugged. “A necessary artifice. One must believe one is truly a tourist in Hell at the Club d’Enfer.” With that, Dora received a kiss to the hand and blushed some more before Regine disappeared to order more champagne and some delicious little nibbles for us.

Quentin shook his head. “I must admit I’m a bit worried for you, Delilah. Africa won’t be anything like Paris, you know. Or New York. Or St. Tropez. Or even New Orleans.”

I sipped at the champagne, letting the lovely golden bubbles rush to my head on a river of exhilaration. “I will manage, Quentin. Nigel has provided me with letters of introduction and very sweetly made me a present of his best gun. I am well prepared.”

“Not the Rigby!” Quentin put in faintly.

“Yes, the Rigby.” It was the second gun I learned to shoot and the first I learned to love. Nigel had commissioned it before travelling to Africa, and it was a beautiful monster of a firearm – eleven pounds and a calibre big enough to drop an elephant.

Quentin shook his head. “Only Nigel would be sentimental enough to think a .416 is a suitable gun for a woman. Can you even lift it?”

“Lift it and fire it better than either of his sons. That’s why he gave it to me instead of them. They’ll be furious when they realise it’s gone.” I grinned.

“I can’t say as I blame them. It must have cost him the better part of a thousand pounds. I suppose you remembered ammunition?”

“Of course I did! Darling, stop fussing. I will be perfectly fine. After all, I have Dora to look after me,” I said with a nod toward where she sat poking morosely at a truffled deviled egg.

“Poor Dora,” Quentin observed, perhaps with a genuine tinge of regret. Quentin had always been sweetly fond of Dora in the way one might be fond of a slightly incontinent lapdog. The fact that she bore a striking resemblance to a spaniel did not help. She was dutiful and dull and had two interests in life – God and gardens. We were distant cousins, second or third – the branches of the Drummond family tree were hopelessly knotted. But she was a poor relation to my father’s people, and as such, was at the family’s beck and call whenever I required a chaperone. She had dogged me halfway around the world already, and I wondered if she were growing as tired of me as I was of her.

She looked up from her egg and smiled at Quentin as I went on. “Dora’s going to have the worst of it, I’m afraid. My lady’s maid quit when I told her we were going to Africa, and it didn’t seem worth the trouble to train a new one just to have her drop dead of cholera or get herself bitten by a cobra. So Dora is going to maid me as well as lend me an air of respectability.” She made a little sound of protest, but I kept talking. “I started her off at the salon. I dragged her to LaFleur’s and made Monsieur teach her how to cut my hair.” I might have been heading to the wilds of Africa, but there was no excuse to look untidy. My sleek black bob required regular and very precise maintenance, and Dora had been the natural choice to take on the job. I told her to think of it as a type of pruning or hedge control.

Quentin laughed out loud, a sure sign that the champagne was getting to him.

I fixed him with my most winsome expression. “You can do a favour for me while I’m away.”

“Anything,” was the prompt reply.

“I have garaged my car in London.” I reached into my tiny beaded bag and pulled out the key. I flipped it into his champagne glass. “Take her out and drive her once in a while.”

He stared at the key as the bubbles foamed around it. “The Hispano-Suiza? But it’s brand new!”

It was indeed. I’d only taken possession of it two months before. I had cooled my heels for half a year waiting for them to get the colour just right. I had instructed them to paint it the same scarlet as my lipstick, which the dealer couldn’t seem to understand until I had left a crimson souvenir of my kiss on the wall of his office. I had ordered it upholstered in leopard, and whenever I drove it I felt savagely stylish, a modern-day Boadicea in her chariot.

“That’s why I want it driven,” I told Quentin. “She’s like any female. If she sits around doing nothing for a year, she’ll rust up. And something that pretty deserves to be taken out for a ride and shown off.”

He fished into the glass and withdrew the key, wearing an expression of such wonder you’d have thought I just dropped the crown jewels into his lap. He dried the key carefully on his handkerchief and tucked it into his pocket. Cornelia wouldn’t like it, but I didn’t care and neither did Quentin.

Just then the Negro orchestra struck up a dance tune, something sensual and throbbing, and Quentin stood, holding out his hand to me. “Dance?” I rose and he smiled at Dora. “We’ll have the next one, shall we?”

Dora waved him off and I went into his arms. Quentin was a heavenly dancer, and there was something deliciously familiar about our bodies moving together.

“I have missed this, you know,” he said, his lips brushing my ear.

“Don’t, darling,” I said lightly. “Your mustache is tickling me.”

“You never complained before.”

“I never had the chance. I always meant to make you shave it off when we’d been married for a year.”

His arm tightened. The drums grew more insistent. “Sometimes I think I was a very great fool to let you go.”

“Don’t get nostalgic,” I told him firmly. “You are far better off with Cornelia. And you have the twins.”

“The twins are dyspeptic and nearsighted. They take after their mother.”

I laughed as he spun me into a series of complicated steps then swung me back into his arms. He felt solid under my touch. There had never been anything of the soft Englishman about Quentin. He was far too fond of cricket and polo for that.

I ran a happy hand over the curve of his shoulder and felt him shudder.

“Delilah, unless you plan on inviting me up for the night—”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. We both knew I would. We’d spent more nights together since our divorce than we had during our marriage. Not when I was married to Misha, of course. That would have been entirely wrong. But it seemed very silly not to enjoy a quick roll in the hay when we both happened to be in the same city. After all, it wasn’t as though Cornelia had anything to fear from me. I had had him and I had let him go. I wasn’t about to take him back again. In fact, I rather thought I might be doing her a service. He was always jolly after a night with me; it must have made him easier to live with. Besides that, he was so lashed with guilt he invariably went home with an expensive present for Cornelia. I smiled up into Quentin’s eyes and wondered what she’d be getting this time. I had seen some divine little emerald clips in the Cartier window on the Rue de la Paix. I made a note to tell him about them.

We danced and the orchestra played on.

* * *

The next morning I waved goodbye to Paris through the haze of a modest hangover. Dora, who had restricted herself to two glasses of champagne, was appallingly chipper. Paris had dressed in her best to see us off. A warm spring sun peeked through the pearl-grey skirts of early morning fog, and a light breeze stirred the new leaves on the Champs-Élysées as if waving farewell.

“It might at least be bucketing down with rain,” I muttered irritably. I was further annoyed that Mossy had sent Weatherby to make certain I made the train to Marseilles. “Tell me, Mr. Weatherby, do you plan to come as far as Mombasa with us? Or do you trust us to navigate the Suez on our own?”

Weatherby wisely ignored the jibe. He handed over a thick morocco case stuffed with papers and bank notes. “Here are your travel documents, Miss Drummond, as well as a little travelling money from Sir Nigel in case you should meet with unexpected expenses. There are letters of introduction as well.”

I gave him a smile so thin and sharp I could have cut glass with it. “How perfectly Edwardian.”

Weatherby stiffened. “You might find it helpful to know certain people in Kenya. The governor, for instance.”

“Will I?”

He drew in a deep breath and seemed to make a grab for his patience. “Miss Drummond, I don’t think you fully comprehend the circumstances. Single women are not permitted to settle in Kenya. Sir Nigel took considerable pains to secure your entry. The governor himself issued permission.”

He brandished a piece of paper covered with official stamps. I peered at the signature. “Sir William Kendall.”

“As I say, the governor – and an old friend of your stepfather’s from his Kenya days. No doubt he will prove a useful connection in your new life in Kenya.”

I shoved the permit into the portfolio and handed it to Dora. “It’s very kind of Nigel to take so much trouble, but I don’t have a new life in Kenya, Mr. Weatherby. I am going for a short stay until everyone stops being so difficult about things. When the headlines have faded away, I’ll be back,” I told him. I would have said more, but just then there was a bit of a commotion on the platform. There was the sound of running footsteps, some jostling, and above it all, the baying of hounds hot on the scent.

“There she is!” It was the photographers, and before they could snap a decent picture, Weatherby had shoved me onto the train and slammed the door, very nearly stranding Dora on the platform. She fought her way onto the train, leaving the pack of reporters scrambling in her wake.

“Honestly,” Dora muttered. Her hat had somehow gotten crushed in the scrum and she was staring at it mournfully.

“Don’t bother trying to fix it, Dodo. It’s an improvement,” I told her. I moved to the window and let it down. Instantly, the photographers rushed the train, shouting and setting off flashbulbs. I gave them a mildly vulgar gesture and a wide smile. “Take all the pictures you want, boys. I’m headed to Africa!”

* * *

My high spirits had evaporated by the time we boarded the ship at Marseilles. I was no stranger to travel. I liked to keep on the move, one step ahead of everybody, heading wherever my whims carried me. What I resented was being told that I had to go. It was quite hurtful, really. Mossy had weathered any number of scandalous stories in the press and she’d never been exiled. Of course, none of her husbands had ever died in mysterious circumstances. She’d divorced all except my father, poor Peregrine Drummond, known to all and sundry as Pink. He’d gone off to fight in the Boer War just after their honeymoon without even knowing I was on the way. He had died of dysentery before lifting his rifle – a sad footnote to what Mossy said had been a hell of a life. He had been adventuresome and charming and handsome as the devil, and no one could quite believe that he had died puking into a bucket. It was a distinctly mundane way to go.

Since Mossy might well have been carrying the heir to the Drummond title, she’d spent her pregnancy sitting around at the family estate, waiting to pup. As soon as she went into labour, my father’s five brothers descended upon Cherryvale from London, pacing outside Mossy’s room until the doctor emerged with the news that the eldest of them was now the undisputed heir to their father’s title. Mossy told me she could hear the champagne corks and hushed whoops through the door. They needn’t have bothered to keep it down. If she’d been mother to the heir she’d have been forced to stay at Cherryvale with her in-laws. Since I was a girl – and of no particular interest to anyone – she was free to go. The prospect of leaving thrilled her so much she would have happily bought them a round of champagne herself.

As it was, she packed me up as soon as she could walk and we decamped to a suite at the Savoy with Ingeborg and room service to look after us. Mossy never returned to Cherryvale, but I went back for school holidays while my grandparents were alive. They spent most of their time correcting my posture and my accent. I eventually stopped slouching thanks to enforced hours walking the long picture gallery at Cherryvale with a copy of Fordyce’s Sermons on my head, but the long Louisiana drawl that had made itself at home on my tongue never left. It got thicker every summer when I went back to Reveille, but mellowed each school term when the girls made fun of me and I tried to hide it. I never did get the hang of those flat English vowels, and I eventually realised it was just easier to pummel the first girl who mocked me. I was chucked out of four schools for fighting, and Mossy despaired of ever making a lady of me.

But I did master the social graces – most of them anyway – and I made my debut in London in 1911. Mossy had been barred from Court on account of her divorces and it was left to my Drummond aunt to bring me out properly. She did it with little grace and less enthusiasm, and I suspected some money might have changed hands. But I fixed my fancy Prince of Wales feathers to my hair and rode to the palace in a carriage and made my double curtsey to the king and queen. The next night I went to my first debutante ball and two days later I eloped with a black-haired boy from Devonshire whose family almost disowned him for marrying an American with nothing but scandal for a dowry.

Johnny didn’t care. All he wanted was me, and since all I wanted was him, it worked out just fine. The Colonel came through with a handsome present of cash and Johnny had a little family money. He wanted to write, so I bought him a typewriter as a wedding present and he would sit at our little kitchen table pecking away as I burned the chops. He read me his articles and bits of his novel every evening as I eventually figured out how not to scorch things, and by the time his book was finished, I had even learned to make a proper soufflé. We were proud of each other, and everything we did seemed new, as if it was the first time it had ever been done. Whether it was sex or prose or jam on toast, we invented it. There was something fine about our time together, and when I took the memories out to look at them, I peered hard to find a shadow somewhere. Did the mirror crack when I sat on the edge of the bathtub and watched him shave? Did I spill salt when I fixed his eggs? Did an owl come to roost in the rafters of the attic? I had been brought up on omens, nursed on portents. Not from Mossy. She was a new creation, a modern woman, although I had spied her telling her rosary when she didn’t think I saw.

But there were the others. The Colonel’s withered old mother, Granny Miette, her keeper Teenie, and Teenie’s daughter, Angele. They were the guardians of my childhood summers at Reveille, and they kept the old ways. They knew that not everything is as it seems and that if you look closely enough, you can see the shadows of what’s to come in the bright light of your own happiness. Time is slower in Louisiana, each minute dripping past like cold molasses. Plenty of time to see if you want to and you know where to look.

I never looked in those days with Johnny. When I opened a closet and something fluttered out of the corner of my eye, I told myself it was just moths and nothing more, and I hung lavender and cedar to drive them away. When I peered in a cupboard and saw a shadow scurry past, I said it was mice and bought a cat, the meanest mouser I could find. I sent to Reveille for golden strands of vetiver and carried the dry grass in a small bundle in my pocket. It was the scent of sunlight and home, pungent and earthy and cedar-green-smelling, and I sewed a handful of it in the uniform that Johnny put on in 1914.