“I swear to God I will ask nothing more of you, Deirdre—until you love me.”
“And you will take me away from Africa?”
“The minute I can break loose from my billet in the Chartered Company.”
That is how I bartered myself away in marriage to Maurice Stair.
He was of my religion though he had never been what is called “a good Catholic.” All that was going to be altered now he told me, but I did not think very deeply about it. My faith required that I should marry a Catholic, but I had never cared for religious men, being content if those I closely knew were just clean-hearted and generous-minded gentlemen—“steel—true and blade-straight!”
We were married by one of the Jesuit fathers on a May morning a year and ten months after my first coming to Mashonaland. The thought of being married in May did not irk my superstitious soul as once it might have done. It was unlucky every one said: but I knew that luck and I had parted company. She had done her worst, and thrown me over. I laughed with a wry lip when even Judy did not fail to repeat to me the old rhyme:
“Marry in May
You’ll rue the day,”
- just in case I might never have heard it before! I told her that rue had been my portion for such a good time now that I was used to the flavour, but it seemed to me the saying came with singular gracelessness from her lips, seeing how much she had to do with my choice of that—or any month in which to marry Maurice Stair.
It was to avoid seeing her marry John Courtfield, or in the alternative to prevent the scandal my absence from her wedding would cause, that I had let Maurice persuade me to be married at once instead of waiting for the end of June when his service as one of the Company’s officials would be at an end. So after all, I should be obliged to stay another month in Rhodesia—and that as Maurice Stair’s wife.