A Spear of Summer Grass Read online

  Nigel sat forward in his chair, a kindly smile wreathing his gentle features. “My dear, you know you have always held a special place in my affections. You are the nearest thing to a daughter I have known.”

  I smiled back. Nigel had always been my favourite stepfather. His first wife had given him a pair of dull sons, and they had already been away at school when he married Mossy and we had gone to live at his country estate. He had enjoyed the novelty of having a girl about the place and never made himself a nuisance like some of the other stepfathers did. A few of them had actually tried on fatherhood for size, meddling in my schooling, torturing the governesses with questions about what I ate and how my French was coming along. Nigel just got on with things, letting me have the run of the library and kitchens as I pleased. Whenever he saw me, he always patted my head affectionately and asked how I was before pottering off to tend to his orchids. He taught me to shoot and to ride and how to back a winner at the races. I rather regretted it when Mossy left him, but it was typical of Nigel that he let her go without a fight. I was fifteen when we packed up, and on our last morning, when the cases were locked and stacked up in the hall and the house had already started to echo in a way I knew only too well, I asked him how he could just let her leave. He gave me his sad smile and told me they had struck a bargain when he proposed. He promised her that if she married him and later changed her mind, he wouldn’t stand in her way. He’d kept her for four years—two more than any of the others. I hoped that comforted him.

  Nigel continued. “We have discussed the matter at length, Delilah, and we all agree that it is best for you if you retire from public life for a bit. You’re looking thin and pale, my dear. I know that is the fashion for society beauties these days,” he added with a melancholy little twinkle, “but I should so like to see you with roses in your cheeks again.”

  To my horror, I felt tears prickling the backs of my eyes. I wondered if I was starting a cold. I blinked hard and looked away.

  “That’s very kind of you, Nigel.” It was kind, but that didn’t mean I was convinced. I turned back, stiffening my resolve. “Look, I’ve read the newspapers. The Borghaliev woman has done her worst already. She’s a petty, nasty creature and she is spreading petty, nasty gossip which only petty, nasty people will listen to.”

  “You’ve just described all of Paris society, dear,” Mossy put in. “And London. And New York.”

  I shrugged. “Other people’s opinions of me are none of my business.”

  Mossy threw up her hands and went to light another cigarette, but Quentin leaned forward, pitching his voice low. “I know that look, Delilah, that Snow Queen expression that means you think you’re above all this and none of it can really touch you. You had the same look when the society columnists fell over themselves talking about our divorce. But I’m afraid an attitude of noble suffering isn’t sufficient this time. There is some discussion of pressure being brought to bear on the authorities about a formal investigation.”

  I paused. That was a horse of a different colour. A formal investigation would be messy and time-consuming and the press would lap it up like a cat with fresh cream.

  Quentin carried on, his voice coaxing as he pressed his advantage. He always knew when he had me hooked. “The weather is vile and you know how you hate the cold. Why don’t you just go off and chase the sunshine and leave it with me? Your French lawyers and I can certainly persuade them to drop the matter, but it will take a little time. Why not spend it somewhere sunny?” he added in that same honeyed voice. His voice was his greatest asset as a solicitor and as a lover. It was how he had convinced me to go skinny-dipping in the Bishop of London’s garden pond the first night we met.

  But he flicked a significant sideways glance at Mossy and I caught the thinning of her lips, the white lines at her knuckles as she held her cigarette. She was worried, far more than she was letting on, but somehow Quentin had persuaded her to let him handle me. Her eyes were fixed on the black silk ribbon I’d tied at my wrist. I had started something of a fashion with it among the smart set. Other women might wear lace or satin to match their ensembles, but I wore only silk and only black, and Mossy didn’t take her eyes off that scrap of ribbon as I rubbed at it.

  I took another long drag off my cigarette and Mossy finally lost patience with me.

  “Stop fidgeting, Delilah.” Her voice was needle-sharp and even she heard it. She softened her tone, talking to me as though I were a horse that needed soothing. “Darling, I didn’t want to tell you this, but I’m afraid you don’t really have a choice in the matter. I’ve had a cable from your grandfather this morning. It seems the Countess Borghaliev’s gossip has spread a little further than just Paris cafés. It made The Picayune. He is put out with you just now.” That I could well imagine. My grandfather—Colonel Beauregard L’Hommedieu of the 9th Louisiana Confederate Cavalry—was as wild a Creole as New Orleans had ever seen, but he expected the women in his family to be better behaved. He hadn’t had much luck with Mossy or with me, but he had no trouble pulling purse strings like a puppeteer to get his way.

  “How put out?”

  “He said if you don’t go away quietly, he will put a stop to your allowance.”

  I ground out my cigarette, scattering ash on the white carpet. “But that’s extortion!”

  She shrugged. “It’s his money, darling. He can do with it precisely as he likes. Anything you get from your grandfather is at his pleasure and right now it is his pleasure to have a little discretion on your part.” She was right about that. The Colonel had already drawn up his will and Mossy and I were out. He had a sizeable estate—town houses in the French Quarter, commercial property on the Mississippi, cattle ranches and cotton fields, and his crown jewel, Reveille, the sugar plantation just outside of New Orleans. And every last acre and steer and cotton boll was going to his nephew. There was a price to being notorious and Mossy and I were certainly going to pay it when the Colonel died. In the meantime, he was generous enough with his allowances, but he never gave without expecting something back. The better behaved we were, the more we got. The year I divorced Quentin, I hadn’t gotten a thin red dime, but since then he had come through handsomely. Still, feeling the jerk of the leash from three thousand miles away was a bit tiresome.

  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 pro
testing 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 h
ad 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.