Traitors Gate - Anne Perry [83]
“Then what is it in Mr. Kreisler’s view that disturbs you?” Nobby asked with cutting frankness. “Naturally we would wish it to be Britain, not only for our benefit, quite selfishly, but more altruistically, because we believe we will do it better, instill better values, more honorable forms of government in place of what is there now, and certainly better than the slavery you mentioned.”
Susannah stared at her, her eyes troubled.
“Mr. Kreisler says that we will make the Africans subject peoples in their own land. We have backed Mr. Rhodes and let him put in most of the money, and all of the effort and risk. If he succeeds, and he probably will, we shall have no control over him. We will have made him into an emperor in the middle of Africa, with our blessing. Can he be right? Does he really know so much and see so clearly?”
“I think so,” Nobby said with a sad smile. “I think you have put it rather well.”
“And perhaps those thoughts should frighten anyone.”
Susannah twisted the handle of her parasol around and around between her fingers.
“Actually it was Sir Arthur Desmond who put it like that. Did you know him? He died about two weeks ago. He was one of the nicest men I ever knew. He used to work in the Foreign Office.”
“No, I didn’t know him. I’m very sorry.”
Susannah stared at the lupines. A bumblebee drifted from one colored spire to another. The gardener passed across the far end of the lawn with a barrow full of weeds and disappeared towards the kitchen garden.
“It is absurd to mourn someone I only saw half a dozen times a year,” Susannah went on with a sigh. “But I’m afraid that I do. I have an awful sadness come over me when I think that I shall not see him again. He was one of those people who always left one feeling better.” She looked at Nobby to see if she understood. “It was not exactly a cheerfulness, more a sense that he was ultimately sane, in a world which is so often cheap in its values, shallow in its judgment, too quick to be crushed, laughs at all the wrong things, and is never quite optimistic enough.”
“He was obviously a most remarkable man,” Nobby said gently. “I am not surprised you grieve for him, even if you saw him seldom. It is not the time you spend with someone, it is what happens in that time. I have known people for years, and yet never met the real person inside, if there is one. Others I have spoken with for only an hour or two, and yet what was said had meaning and honesty that will last forever.” She had not consciously thought of anyone in particular when she began to speak, and yet it was Kreisler’s face in the sunlight on the river that filled her mind.
“It was … very sudden.” Susannah touched one of the early roses with her fingertips. “Things can change so quickly, can’t they….”
“Indeed.” The same thought was filling Nobby’s mind; not only circumstances but also emotions. Yesterday had been cloudless; now she was unable to prevent the flickers of doubt that entered her mind. Susannah was obviously deeply troubled, torn in her loyalties between her husband’s plans and the questions that Kreisler had raised in her. She did not want to think he was right, and yet the fear was in her face, the angle of her body, the hand tight on the parasol, holding it as if it were a weapon, not an ornament.
Exactly what had he said to her, and perhaps more urgently than that, why? He was not naive, to have spoken carelessly. He knew who she was, and he knew Linus Chancellor’s part in raising the additional financing and the government backing for Cecil Rhodes. He knew Susannah’s relationship to Francis Standish and her own inheritance in the banking business. She had to have been familiar with at least some of the details. Was he seeking information from her? Or was he planting in her mind the seeds of disinformation, lies and half truths for her to take back to Linus Chancellor and the Colonial Office, ultimately the Prime Minister himself? Kreisler was a German name. Perhaps for all his outward Englishness, it was not Britain’s interests in Africa