For Loveness, Golide Gumede’s visit had presented a challenge. There needed to be additional movement – a third person in the house, one who was extremely trustworthy … and she knew exactly where to find such a person. The way forward was clear, but she was sure Spokes could not see it because of Daisy. Well, there was much that she, Loveness, would have to do about that.

Loveness remembered Daisy as a pretty woman who laughed easily and thoroughly appreciated the attention of men – the kind of woman a man went after with great zeal, the kind of woman who made a man believe he had received a prize in obtaining her, the kind of woman whose effortlessly obtained affections eventually made a man worry about the prize in his possession. Spokes, however, remembered Daisy as a grotesquely chopped-up body stuffed in a burlap sack and dumped in a river.

Loveness had liked Daisy and her easy ways well enough when S’jumba had brought her, already pregnant, to the village from the City of Kings. He had obviously meant for her to be far out of the reach of men who could lure her away from him, and had hoped that the ever-watchful eye of the people he was part of, the people he had grown up amongst, would make sure that no other man took his chances with her.

At first, there really was nothing for the villagers to see. Daisy was expecting after all, and it was taboo for any man to approach a pregnant woman with amorous or more nefarious intentions. And so the villagers had relaxed. But only three months after Loveness had helped Daisy deliver a daughter into the world, the shopkeeper at the newly built Idlazonke General Goods and Bottle Store, Jasper Mlangeni, gifted Daisy with a brand-new dress. He had excused his gift to a woman who was obviously attached to another man by stating the rather embarrassingly noticeable fact that Daisy only owned maternity clothes. Since Daisy accepted the dress without the qualms the villagers expected, there was very little they could do about it. They felt the same when Raftopoulos, the Greek travelling salesman, and the arithmetic teacher over at the mission school near Krum’s Place, started giving Daisy assorted knick-knacks here and there. Daisy (who would never divulge where she came from) accepted her gifts with grace, and since she was a foreigner in these parts, the villagers felt they could not force her to conform to their ways and customs.