Lil studied his face for a moment, then picked up the handwritten sheet of cheap notepaper from the tea tray and glanced down the list and the figures.
'Nine hundred pounds for oxen?'
'A full span of the biggest and best animals,' Ralph explained. 'The road to the Shashi river is sand veld, heavy going. I want to be able to haul a full load, eight thousand pounds weight.'
'Trade goods, fifteen thousand.' She looked up at him again.
'Guns, powder, brandy, beads and limbo cloth.'
'What type of guns?'
'Tower muskets. Five pounds ten shillings each.'
Lil shook her head. 'They have seen the breech-loaders. Your muskets won't have much pull.'
'I can't afford breech-loaders, and I wouldn't know where to find a load.'
'Ralph dearie, I could hire a bunch of Whitechapel hags to run my dressmakers' shop and I could get them cheap.
But I don't. I pick them young and fresh and pretty. If you think small, your profits are small. Don't be cheap, Ralph darling, never be cheap.' She poured a little gin from the silver flask into the empty teacup before she went on. 'I can get Martini-Henry rifles but they will cost us fifteen hundred more.' Lil reached across and dipped her pen in the ink-well, then scratched out and re-wrote the figure.
'Brandy?'
'Cape Smoke in twenty-gallon casks.'
'I have heard that Lobengula likes Courvoisier cognac, and his sister Ningi drinks only Piper-Heidsieck champagne.'
'Another five hundred pounds, at least,' Ralph mourned.
'Three hundred,' Lil corrected the list. 'I can get it at wholesale prices. Now, ammunition, ten thousand rounds?'
'I'll need at least a thousand for my own account, and the rest to trade with the rifles.'
'If Lobengula gives you permission to hunt elephant,' Lil corrected.
'My grandfather is one of his oldest friends; my Aunty Robyn and her husband have been at Kharni River Mission for almost twenty years.'
'Yes, I know that you have friends at court, Lil pursed her lips approvingly. 'But I have heard that the elephant have been shot out across the whole of Matabeleland., 'The herds have been driven into the fly belt on the Zambezi.'
'You cannot take horses into the fly and hunting elephant on foot in the fly is not work for a white man.'
'My father hunted on foot, and anyway I cannot afford a horse.'
'All right,' she agreed reluctantly, and made a tick on the sheet.
They worked on for an hour longer, going down the list item by item, and then starting again at the head and going over it all once more, Lil ticking and scratching with the pen, fining it down by ten pounds here and a hundred there, until at last she tossed the pen onto the tea tray, and then poured a little more gin into her tea cup and sipped it with a genteel flourish, her little finger raised, the spirit slurping softly through the gap in the front of her teeth.
All right,' she said again.
'Does that mean you will lend me the money?'
'Yes.'
'I don't know what to say.' He leaned towards her, young and glowing and eager. 'Lil, I just don't,'
'Then don't say anything until you have heard my terms.' She smiled thinly, without lifting her upper lip.
'Twenty percent per annum. interest on the loan.'
'Twenty percent!' he gasped. 'In God's name, that's usury, Lily!'
'Exactly,' she told him primly. 'But let me finish.
Twenty percent interest and half the profits.'
'And half, Lil, that's not usury, that's highway robbery.'
'Right again,' she agreed. 'At least you are bright enough to recognize it.'
'Can't we just -' he started desperately.
'No, we cannot. Those are my terms.' And Ralph remembered Scipio, his falcon, with her beautiful pouting breast and fierce cold eyes.
'I accept,' he said, and though she did not smile with her lips, her eyes were suddenly soft and merry.
'Partners,' she murmured, and placed her plump white hand on his forearm. His muscles were lean and sinewy, the skin brick-coloured from the sun. She stroked it slowly, sensually.
It only remains to seal our bargain,' she told Ralph.
'Come!' She slid her hand down his arm and twined her fingers into his.
