Accordingly, when the princess arrived in Kilindini lagoon on board the
The princess cut a striking figure as she stepped into the sunshine. Leon had seen photographs of her but he was still unprepared for her in the flesh. His first impression was of her towering height and her contrastingly lean body. She was almost as tall as him, but he could easily have encircled her waist with his hands. Her bust was boyish and her carriage imperious. Her eye was steely, and as penetrating as a rapier, and her features were hard and as sharp as a whipsaw. She wore a green loden ankle-length riding habit of superb cut. The toes of her boots, which showed under the skirts, glowed with the lustre of expensive leather. Surprisingly she carried a 9mm Luger pistol in a holster on her belt, and a wide-brimmed safari hat in her left hand. Her ash-blonde hair was braided into two thick ropes and looped on top of her head. Leon knew from Penrod that she was fifty-two, but she looked thirty.
‘Your Royal Highness, I am your servant.’
She did not bother to acknowledge his bow but continued to regard him as though he had just let off a particularly obnoxious fart. At last she spoke, her tone icy. ‘You are very young.’
‘Your Royal Highness, this is a regrettable circumstance for which I must apologize. In time I hope to correct it.’
The Princess did not smile. ‘I said you were young. I did not say you were too young.’ She held out her right hand.
When he took it in his he found it as hard and cold as her expression. He kissed the air an inch short of her bony white knuckles. The crêpe of tiny wrinkles across the back tittle-tattled her age.
‘The governor of the territory of British East Africa has placed his private railway coach at your disposal for the journey to Nairobi,’ Leon told her.
‘
‘His excellency also begs your presence as guest of honour at a special dinner at Government House to be arranged at any time convenient to you, Princess.’
‘I did not come to Africa to eat in the company of junior civil servants. I came here to kill animals. Many animals.’
Leon bowed again. ‘Immediately, ma’am. Does Your Royal Highness have any particular preference for the animals she wishes to kill?’
‘Lions!’ she answered. ‘And pigs.’
‘How about a few elephants and buffalo?’
‘No! Only big lions and pigs with long tusks.’
Before they set off into the blue, the princess tried out every mount in the string of thoroughbreds that Leon had assembled for her. She rode astride like a man. As Leon watched her appraise the first horse with her disdainful expression, walking around it twice before she swung up gracefully into the saddle and bent the animal to her will, he realized that she was a superb horsewoman. In fact, he had seldom seen another woman who came close to her.
When they rode out from Tandala and were among the game herds, she forgot her original demand for lions and pigs and became a great deal less selective. She had a beautiful little 9.3 × 74 Mannlicher rifle made by Joseph Just of Ferlach, inlaid with gold by Wilhelm Röder with sylvan scenes of fauns and naked nymphs cavorting riotously together. When she bowled over three running Grant’s gazelle at a range of three hundred yards in three consecutive shots without dismounting, Leon decided she was probably the most deadly shot, man or woman, he had ever met.
‘Yes, I want to kill many animals,’ she remarked, as she reloaded the Mannlicher. She was smiling warmly for the first time since she had arrived in Africa.
When he took the princess up Lonsonyo Mountain to meet Lusima, Leon was unprepared for the way the two women reacted instantly to each other. Figuratively, they arched their backs and spat like two cats. ‘M’bogo, this is one with many deep, dark passions. No man will fathom her. She is as deadly as a mamba. She is not the one I promised you. Be on your guard,’ Lusima told Leon.
‘What did the black bitch say?’ the princess demanded. The hostility between the two women crackled in the air like static electricity.
‘That you are a lady of immense power, Princess.’
‘Tell the great cow not to forget that either.’
When it came to the ceremony of blessing the rifles under the council tree, Lusima emerged from her hut in her ceremonial finery, but when she was still ten paces from where the Mannlicher lay on the lionskin she stopped. Her face changed to the colour of dried mud.
‘What troubles you, Mama?’ Leon asked quietly.
