War Cry. Wilbur Smith

Leon could reply the driver’s door swung open. A car like this was usually driven by a uniformed chauffeur, but what emerged instead was a woman so striking that Saffron stopped dead in her tracks and simply gazed at her in wonder.

      ‘Is … is that Cousin Centaine?’ she gasped.

      ‘It is indeed,’ Leon replied.

      With just one look, Saffron was lost in admiration for Centaine. She was as beautiful as a queen in one of Saffron’s old books of illustrated fairy tales, as slender as a wand, with impeccably bobbed black hair and eyes so mesmerizingly dark that they seemed almost black too. But it wasn’t just her beauty that made Centaine regal. It was the way she carried herself and the fierce determination in the line of her jaw.

      Saffron had spent almost half her life without a female role model, but now, looking at Centaine, she was gripped by an emotion that she did not quite recognize at first, though she knew somehow that she had felt it before. And then she realized that this was just like seeing her equally beautiful, stylish mother when she was a very little girl: that same sense of awe in the presence of feminine beauty and grace and the same longing that maybe, just maybe, she might look a little like that herself one day.

      Leon strode over to say hello and as he approached, Centaine smiled and suddenly revealed the other side to her personality: charming, flirtatious, deliciously female in the presence of a man.

      What a couple they’d make, Saffron thought, looking at her tall, strong, handsome father beside this ravishing woman. Taken aback by this entirely unexpected idea she chided herself. Don’t be so silly!

      Then another figure emerged from the car. And suddenly Saffron had something much more important to think about.

      Shasa Courtney had not been keen on being dragged out to the aerodrome to meet his cousin from Kenya. She was being sent to Roedean, for a start, and everyone knew that Roedean girls were plain, spotty swots who all wore glasses and did nothing but read books. They weren’t interested in boys. They just wanted to go off to university and get jobs that were meant for men. Plus, this Saffron girl was only thirteen, whereas he was only a few months from his sixteenth birthday and was just about to go back to his school, Bishops, as Head Boy. Clearly she could not possibly be of any interest to him.

      Then he saw a girl get off the plane. And that had to be Saffron because there was only one other female emerging from the Atalanta and she was a silver-haired granny on the arm of an equally elderly man. But on the other hand, that girl – the one with the shiny, dark chocolate coloured hair blowing against the breeze, wearing a skirt that the wind was pushing against her long legs so that he could see the shape of her slender thighs and her flat tummy and the wicked, tantalizing, infinitely mysterious bit in the middle – that girl, who had now spotted him, he could tell, and was looking at him, staring at him in fact, so that he felt as though she could see right through him … that girl couldn’t be Saffron Courtney. Could it?

      Centaine! How splendid to see you again,’ Leon said.

      ‘And you Leon,’ she replied, kissing his cheeks with the elegant affection of a born and bred Frenchwoman.

      He stepped back and gave her an appraising up-and-down. ‘You look …’ he was about to give her appearance a conventionally flattering compliment when the warmth of her smile and the way it lit up her eyes made him change his mind. ‘D’you know, you look extraordinarily happy. Good news?’

      ‘Yes!’ she said.

      ‘May I ask what it involves?’

      ‘Later.’ She took his arm and turned back towards her car. ‘Your daughter is quite ravishing, Leon. It will not be long before she is driving men wild. Perhaps you should forget school and send her off to a convent!’

      ‘Steady on, old girl,’ Leon replied. Like any doting father, he had always taken it for granted that his daughter was the prettiest little girl in the world. But the thought of her as a sexual creature, even as a hypothetical, far-distant possibility, had never occurred to him. But now he followed Centaine’s eyes and watched as Saffron and Shasa approached one another.

      ‘By God, you really can see the family resemblance,’ he said.

      ‘Mmm …’ Centaine murmured in agreement, for it was true that the two youngsters were so similar as to look more like siblings than cousins. Shasa’s eyes were an even darker blue than Saffron’s, perhaps, but they both shared the same dark hair and slim, limber build. He was only just growing out of an almost girlish beauty, but was not yet a man. She still possessed the last vestiges of her tomboy days, though faint traces of approaching womanhood were beginning to appear in the slight broadening and rounding of her hips and the first traces of her breasts.

      ‘Look at them, sizing one another up,’ Centaine said.

      ‘Like young lions.’

      ‘I wonder how long it will take them to realize that they share a sadness: Shasa without a father, Saffron without a mother. Both of them so rich in one way, and so deprived in another.’ She snapped herself out of her reverie. ‘Come! You must be exhausted after your journey. I must drive you back to Weltevreden.’

      ‘Have you had to let the chauffeur go? So many people one knows have done that,’ Leon asked, hoping that his tone was sufficiently sympathetic that the remark did not seem tactless.

      Centaine laughed. ‘Heavens no! I don’t believe in having chauffeurs. I refuse to be controlled by any man. Even if he’s just driving my car!’

      Saffron and Shasa spent the journey from the aerodrome to his mother’s estate talking about his school and speculating about hers. Each was forced to conclude that their prejudices were, perhaps, unfounded. As Centaine had anticipated, they soon established that they had each lost a parent. Neither of them wanted to talk about the experience, but a mutual understanding had been established: they had both been through a similar ordeal and it gave them a bond that did not need to be expressed.

      Saffron was charmed by Weltevreden. Like Lusima it was set among hills, but this country was not so newly claimed from Mother Nature. Europeans had lived in the countryside around Cape Town for centuries and they had somehow softened the edges of the landscape; the earth seemed richer, the Kikuyu grass greener. Weltevreden even had its own vineyard, and pretty whitewashed cottages were dotted about the place.

      ‘Oh look, Daddy, a polo field!’ Saffron exclaimed.

      ‘Yah,’ said Shasa, coolly, ‘we run a team here, the Weltevreden Invitation. We won the junior league here a couple of weeks ago, actually. I scored the winning goal.’

      ‘I love polo!’ sighed Saffron.

      ‘A lot of girls do,’ Shasa said. ‘I think it’s a bit like the olden days. You know, medieval maidens watching all the knights jousting and stuff.’

      ‘’No, I don’t mean watching polo. I suppose that’s all right. But it’s not half as much fun as playing polo.’

      ‘But you can’t play polo!’ Shasa protested. ‘You’re … well, you’re a girl!’

      Neither of the two youngsters saw Leon roll his eyes as he contemplated the terrible mistake the lad had just made, or noticed Centaine’s smile as she found her unswerving loyalty to her son being trumped by her support for a fellow female.

      ‘I do so!’ Saffron protested. ‘And I’ll prove it, too!’

      Before the argument could go any further, Centaine was calling out, ‘We’re there.’

      White-jacketed male staff and housemaids in smart black uniforms were waiting to greet them as they stepped out of the Daimler.

      ‘Welcome to Weltevreden,’ Centaine said.

      Saffron looked around in wonder at a full-sized reproduction of a French château that made her home at Lusima look like a tumbledown farmhouse. She was led into a cool, quiet hallway lined with paintings.

      ‘I love your pictures,