miles is as far as any beast can carry me, but that would be as much as Elspeth could manage at a stretch in any event.
I dismissed the bewildered groom, and on we went at a good round trot. A small horse-herd ain't difficult to manage, if you've learned your trade in Afghanistan. My chief anxiety now was Elspeth. She'd ridden steady - and commendably silent - until now, but as we forged ahead into the empty downland, I could see the reaction at work; she was swaying in the saddle, eyes half-closed, fair hair tumbling over her face, and although I was in a sweat to push on I felt bound to swing off into a little wood to rest and eat. I lifted her out of the saddle beside a stream, and blow me if she didn't go straight off to sleep in my arms. For three hours she never stirred, while I kept a weather eye on the plain, but saw no sign of pursuit.
She was all demands and chatter again, though, when she awoke, and while we chewed our jaka, and I bathed her finger - which wasn't broke, but badly bruised - I tried to explain what had happened. D'you know, of all the astonishing things that had occurred since we'd left England, I still feel that that conversation was the most incredible of all. I mean, explaining anything to Elspeth is always middling tough - but there was something unreal, as I look back, about sitting opposite her, in a Madagascar wood, while she stared round-eyed in her torn, soiled evening dress with her finger in a splint, listening to me describing why we were fleeing for our lives from an unspeakable black despot whom I'd been plotting to depose. Not that I blame her for being sceptical, mind you; it was the form her scepticism took which had me clutching my head.
At first she just didn't believe a word of it; it was quite contrary, she said, to what she had seen of Madagascar, and to prove the point she produced, from the recesses of her under-clothing, a small and battered notebook from which she proceeded to read me her 'impressions' of the country - so help me, it was all about bloody butterflies and wild flowers and Malagassy curtain materials and what she'd had for dinner. It was at this point that it dawned on me that the conclusion I'd formed on my visits to her at Rakota's palace had been absolutely sound - she'd spent six months in the place without having any notion of what it was really like. Well, I knew she was mutton-headed, but this beat all, and so I told her.
'I cannot see that,' says she. 'The Prince and Princess were all politeness and consideration, and you assured me that all was well, so why should I think otherwise?'
I was still explaining, and being harangued, when we took the road again, and for the best part of the day, which took us to the eastern edge of the downs, near Angavo, where we camped in another wood. By that time I had finally got it into her head what a hell of a place Madagascar was, and what a hideous fate we were escaping; you'd have thought that would have reduced her to terrified silence, but then, you don't know my Elspeth.
She was shocked - not a bit scared, apparently, just plain indignant. It was deplorable, and ought not to be allowed, was how she saw it; why had we (by which I took it she meant Her Britannic Majesty) taken no steps to prevent such misgovernment, and what was the Church thinking about? It was quite disgusting - I just sat munching jaka, but I couldn't help, listening to her, being reminded of that old harridan Lady Sale, tapping her mittened fingers while the jezzail bullets whistled round her on the Kabul retreat, and demanding acidly why something was not done about it. Aye, it's comical in its way - and yet, when you've seen the memsahibs pursing their lips and raising indignant brows in the face of dangers and horrors that set their men-folk shaking, you begin to understand why there's all the pink on the map. It's vicarage morality, nursery discipline, and a thorough sense of propriety and sanitation that have done it - and when they've gone, and the memsahibs with them, why, the map won't be pink any longer.
The one thing Elspeth couldn't accept, though, was that the outrageous condition of Madagascar was Ranavalona's fault. Queens, in her conception of affairs, did not behave in that way at all; the mother of Prince Rakota ('a most genteel and obliging young man') would never have countenanced such things. No, it could only be that she was badly advised, and kept in ignorance, no doubt, by her ministers. She had been civil enough to me, surely? - this was asked in an artless way which I knew of old. I said, well, she was pretty plain and ill-natured from the little I'd seen of her, but of course I'd hardly exchanged a word with her (which, you'll note, was true; I said nothing of bathing and piano-playing). Elspeth sighed contentedly at this, and then after a moment said softly:
'Have you missed me, Harry?'
Looking at her, sitting in the dusk with the green leaves behind her, in her dusty gown, with the tangled gold hair framing that lovely face, so serene in its stupidity, I suddenly realized there was only one sensible way to answer her. What with the shock and haste and fear of our flight it absolutely hadn't occurred to me until that moment. And afterwards, lying in the grass, while she stroked my cheek, it seemed the most natural thing - as if this wasn't Madagascar at all, with dreadful danger behind and unknown hardship before - in that blissful moment I dreamed of the very first time, under the trees by the Clyde, on just such a golden evening, and when I spoke of it she began to cry at last, and clung to me.
'You will bring us there again - home,' says she. 'You are so brave and strong and good, and keep me safe. Do you know,' she wiped her eyes, looking solemn, 'I never saw you fight before? Oh, I knew, to be sure, from the newspapers, and what everyone said - that you were a hero, I mean - but I did not know how it was. Women cannot, you know. Now I have seen you, sword in hand - you are rather terrible, you know, Harry - and so quick!' She gave a little shiver. 'Not many women are lucky enough to see how brave their husbands are - and I have the bravest, best man in the whole world.' She kissed me on the forehead, her cheek against mine.
I thought of her finger, under that crushing boot, of the way she'd stood up in the bushes and walked straight out, of the bruising ride from Antan', of all she'd endured since Singapore - and I didn't feel ashamed, exactly, because you know it ain't my line. But I felt my eyes sting, and I lifted her chin with my hand.
'Old girl,' says I, 'you're a trump.'
'Oh, no!' says she, wide-eyed. 'I am very silly, and weak, and … and not a trump at all! Feckless, Papa says. But I love to be your `old girl' '— she snuggled her head down on my chest —'and to think that you like me a little, too … better than you like the horrid Queen of Madagascar, or Mrs Leo Lade, or those Chinese ladies we saw in Singapore, or Kitty Stevens, or - my dearest, whatever is the matter?'
'Who the hell,' roars I, 'is Kitty Stevens?'
'Oh, do you not remember? That slim, dark girl with the poor complexion and soulful eyes she thinks so becoming - although how she supposes that mere staring will make her attractive I cannot think - you danced with her twice at the Cavalry Ball, and assisted her to negus at the buffet …
We were off again before dawn, crossing the Angavo Pass which leads to the upland Ankay Plain, going warily because I knew the Hova Guard regiment which I'd sent out couldn't be far away. I kept casting north, and we must have outflanked them, for we saw not a soul until the Mangaro ford, where the villagers turned out in force to stare at us as we crossed the river with our little herd. It was level going then until the jungle closed in and the mountains began, but we were making slower time than I'd hoped for; it began to look like a five-day trek instead of four, but I wasn't much concerned. All that mattered was that we should keep ahead of pursuit; the frigate would still be there. I was sure of this because it was bound to wait for an answer to the protest which, according to Laborde, had only reached the Queen a couple of days ago. Her answer, even if she'd sent it at once, would take more than a week to reach Tamitave, so if we kept up our pace we'd be there with time in hand.
I kept telling myself this on the third day, when our rate slowed to a walk with the long, twisting climb up the red rutted track that led into the great mountains. Here we were walled in by forest on either hand, with only that tortuous path for a guide. I knew it because I'd been flogged over it in the slave-coffle, and I had to gulp down my fears as we approached each bend - suppose we met someone, in this place where we couldn't take to our heels, where to stray ten yards from the path would be certain death by wandering starvation? Suppose the path petered out, or had been overgrown? Suppose swift Hova runners overtook us?
I was in a fever of anxiety - not made any easier by the childish pleasure Elspeth seemed to be taking in our journey. She was forever clapping her hands and exclaiming at the saucer-eyed white monkeys who peered at us, or the lace-plumed birds that fluttered among the creepers; even the hideous water-snakes which cruised the streams, with their heads poking out, excited her - she barred the spiders, though, great marbled monsters as big as my hand, scuttling on webs the size of blankets. And once she fled in terror from a sight which had our horses neighing and bucking in the narrow way - a troop of great apes, bounding across the path in leaps of incredible length, both feet together.43 We watched them crash into the under-growth, and not for the first time I cursed the luck that I hadn't even a clasp-knife with me for defence, for God knew what else might be lurking in that dark, cavernous forest. Elspeth wished she had her sketch-book.
There's forty miles of that forest, but thanks to good Queen Ranavalona we didn't have to cross it all, as you would today. The jungle track runs clear across towards Andevoranto, whence you travel up the coast to Tamitave,
