Mungo St John’s face was grave as a professor of philosophy considering the riddle of the universe as he made a gentle practice stroke that he arrested with the leather button at the tip of the long cue almost touching the white ivory ball. Then he drew back the cue deliberately to its full travel. At the instant that he launched the stroke the voice of a young woman cut through the bated silence of watching men.
‘General St John, you must come quickly.’
There were only one hundred white women in the entire vast land north of the Shashi and south of the Zambezi rivers, of which probably ninety were already married and most of the others spoken for. A voice with such lovely ringing tones could have turned every male head down both sides of the Champs-Elysées, but in the billiard saloon of the Grand Hotel of woman-starved Bulawayo, it had the effect of a close-range broadside of grapeshot. A waiter dropped a tray laden with schooners of beer, a heavy wooden bench toppled over backwards with a shattering crash as the six men seated upon it sprang to attention like guardsmen, an inebriated transport rider toppled backwards off the counter on top of the barman who instinctively swung a round-arm punch at him, missed and swept a row of whisky bottles off the shelf.
The sudden uproar in the deep silence would have unnerved a marble statue of Zeus, but Mungo St John completed his stroke with an almost creamy smoothness, his single yellow eye unblinking in the calm handsome face as it followed the flight of the ball from the tip of his cue. The white ball thumped crisply against the far cushion, doubled the table and the spin hooked it through the corner, striking the cushion at an angle that bled the speed off the ivory. It came trundling back and Mungo St John lifted his left hand to let it pass under his nose; it touched the other white ball with just sufficient force to deflect it a hair’s breadth and send it on to kiss the red ball like a lover. The contact robbed the cue ball of the last of its impetus, and it hovered on the edge of the corner pocket for a weary moment and then dropped soundlessly into the net.
It was a perfect cannon and losing hazard, nominated and executed, and a thousand pounds had been won and lost in those few seconds, but every man in the room except Mungo St John was staring at the doorway in a kind of mesmeric trance. Mungo St John lifted his cue ball from the net, and re-spotted it, then as he chalked his cue again, he murmured, ‘Victoria, my dear, there are times when even the prettiest young lady should remain silent.’ Once again he stooped over the table. ‘Pot red,’ he announced, and the company was so entranced by the tall coppery-haired girl in their midst, that no bet was offered nor accepted, but as Mungo St John took his cue back for the next stroke, Victoria spoke again.
‘General St John, my mother is dying.’
This time Mungo St John’s head flew up, his single eye wide with shock, and the white ball screwed off down the table in a violent miscue as he stared at Vicky. Mungo let the wooden cue drop with a clatter onto the floor and he ran from the bar room.
Vicky went on standing in the doorway of the bar room for a few seconds. Her hair was tangled into thick ropes on her shoulders by the wind, and her breathing was still so rough that her breasts heaved tantalizingly under her thin cotton blouse. Her eyes swept the sea of grinning, ingratiating faces, and then stopped when they reached the tall figure of Harry Mellow in his dark riding-boots and breeches and the faded blue shirt open at his throat to show a nest of crisp curls in the vee. Vicky flushed and turned to hurry back through the doorway.
Harry Mellow tossed his cue to the barman, and shoved his way through the disappointed crowd. By the time he reached the street, Mungo St John, still bareheaded and in shirtsleeves, was mounted on a big bay mare, but leaning from the saddle to talk urgently to Vicky, who stood at his stirrup.
Mungo looked up and saw Harry. ‘Mr Mellow,’ he called, ‘I would be obliged if you could see my stepdaughter safely out of town. I am needed at Khami.’ Then he put his heels into the mare’s flanks, and she jumped away at a dead run down the dusty street.
Vicky was climbing up onto the driving-seat of a rickety little cart drawn by two diminutive donkeys with drooping melancholy ears, and on the seat beside her sat the mountainous black figure of a Matabele woman.
‘Miss Codrington,’ Harry called urgently. ‘Please wait.’
He reached the wheel of the cart with a few long strides and looked up at Vicky.
‘I have wanted to see you again – so very much.’
‘Mr Mellow,’ Vicky lifted her chin haughtily, ‘the road to Khami Mission is clearly signposted, you could not possibly have lost your way.’
‘Your mother ordered me off the Mission Station – you know that damned well.’
‘Please do not use strong language in my presence, sir,’ said Vicky primly.
‘I apologize, but your mother does have a reputation. They say she fired both barrels at one unwanted visitor.’
‘Well,’ Vicky admitted, ‘that is true, but he was one of Mr Rhodes’ hirelings, and it was birdshot, and she did miss with one barrel.’
‘Well, I am one of Mr Rhodes’ hirelings, and she might have upped to buckshot, and the practice might have improved her shooting.’
‘I like a man of determination. A man who takes what he wants – and damn the consequences.’
‘That is strong language, Miss Codrington.’
‘Good day to you, Mr Mellow.’ Vicky shook up the donkeys, and they stumbled into a dejected trot.
The little cart reached the outskirts of the new town, where the dozen or so brick buildings gave way to grass huts and tattered dusty canvas shelters and where the wagons of the transport riders were parked wheel to wheel on both sides of the track, still laden with the bags, bolts and bales that they had carried up from the railhead. Vicky was sitting upright on the cart, looking straight ahead but anxiously she told Juba out of the side of her mouth, ‘Tell me if you see him coming, but don’t let him see you looking.’
‘He comes,’ Juba announced comfortably. ‘He comes like a cheetah after a gazelle.’
Vicky heard the beat of galloping hooves from behind, but she merely sat a little straighter.
‘Hau!’ Juba smiled with nostalgic sadness. ‘The passion of a man. My husband ran fifty miles without stopping to rest or drink, for in those days my beauty drove men mad.’
‘Don’t stare at him, Juba.’
‘He is so strong and impetuous, and he will make such fine sons in your belly.’
‘Juba!’ Vicky flushed scarlet. ‘That is a wicked thing for a Christian lady even to think. I shall probably send him back anyway.’
Juba shrugged and chuckled. ‘Ah! Then he will make those fine sons elsewhere. I saw him looking at Elizabeth when he came to Khami.’
Vicky’s blushes turned a deeper, angrier shade. ‘You are an evil woman, Juba—’ But before she could go on Harry Mellow reined in his rangey gelding beside the cart.
‘Your stepfather placed you in my care, Miss Codrington, and it is therefore my duty to see you home as swiftly as possible.’
He reached into the cart, and before she realized his intentions, he had whipped a long sinewy arm around her waist, and as she kicked and shrieked with surprise, he swung her up onto the horse’s rump behind his saddle.
‘Hold on!’ he ordered. ‘Tightly!’ And instinctively she threw both arms around his lean hard body. The way it felt shocked her so that she relaxed her grip and leaned back just as Harry urged the gelding forward and Vicky came so perilously close to flying backwards over his haunches into the dusty track that she snatched at Harry with renewed fervour, and tried to close her mind and shut off her body from these unfamiliar sensations. Her training warned her that anything that raised such a warmth in the base of her stomach, made the skin of her forearms prickle so, and rendered her breathless and deliriously lightheaded, must be unholy and wicked.
To distract herself she examined the fine hairs that grew down the back of his neck, and the soft silky skin behind his ears, and found yet another sensation rising in her throat, a k
ind of choking suffocating tenderness. She had an almost unbearable compulsion to press her face against the faded blue shirt and breathe in the virile smell of his body. It had the sharp odour of steel struck against flint, underlaid with a warmer scent like the first raindrops on sun-baked earth.
Her confusion was dispelled abruptly by the realization that the gelding was still in a flying gallop and at this pace the journey back to Khami would be brief indeed.
‘You are punishing your mount, sir.’ Her voice quavered and played her false, so Harry turned his head.
‘I cannot hear you.’
She leaned unnecessarily close so that her loose hair touched his cheek and her lips brushed his ear.
‘Not so fast,’ she repeated.
‘Your mother—’
‘ – is not that ill.’
‘But you told General St John—’
‘Do you think Juba and I would have left Khami if there was the least danger?’
‘St John?’
‘It was a fine excuse to get them together again. So romantic, we should allow them a little time alone.’
Harry reined the gelding down to a more sedate pace, but instead of relaxing her grip Vicky wriggled a little closer.
‘My mother does not recognize her own feelings,’ she explained. ‘Sometimes Lizzie and I have to take things into our own hands.’
Even as she said it, Vicky regretted having mentioned her twin’s name. She had also noticed Harry Mellow look at Elizabeth on his only visit to Khami Mission, and she had seen Elizabeth look straight back. After Harry had left Khami in some haste with her mother’s ultimate farewells ringing in his ears, Vicky had attempted to negotiate with her sister an agreement that Elizabeth would not encourage further smouldering glances from Mr Mellow. In reply Elizabeth had smiled in that infuriating way she had. ‘Don’t you think we should let Mr Mellow decide on that?’
If Harry Mellow had been attractive before, Elizabeth’s unreasonable tenacity had made him irresistible now, and instinctively Vicky tightened her grip around his waist. At the same time she saw the wooden kopjes that marked Khami Mission Station looming ahead above the low scrubby bush, and she felt a sinking dread. Soon Harry would be confronted with Elizabeth’s honey-brown eyes and that soft dark flood of hair pierced with russet stars of light.
This was the only time in her entire life that Vicky could remember being free from surveillance, without her mother or Juba or, particularly, her twin being within earshot or touching distance. It was an exhilarating sensation added to all the other unfamiliar and clamorous sensations which assailed her, and the last restraints of her strict religious upbringing were swept away in this sudden reckless rebellious mood. She realized with an unerring woman’s instinct that she could have what she so dearly wanted, but only if she took direct bold action, and took it immediately.
‘It is a sad and bitter thing that a woman should be alone, when she loves somebody so.’
Her voice had sunk to a low purr, and it affected Harry so that he brought the horse down to a walk.
‘God did not mean a woman to be alone,’ she murmured, and saw the blood come up under the soft skin behind his ears, ‘nor a man either,’ she went on, and slowly he turned his head and looked into her green eyes.
‘It is so hot in the sun,’ Vicky whispered, holding his gaze. ‘I should like to rest for a few minutes in the shade.’
He lifted her down from the saddle, and she stood close to him still, without averting her eyes from his face.
‘The wagon dust has covered everything and left us no clean place to sit,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we should try further from the road?’
And she took his hand, and quite naturally led him through the soft pale knee-high grass towards one of the mimosa trees. Beneath its spreading feathery branches they would be out of sight of any chance traveller upon the road.
Mungo St John’s mare was lathered in dark streaks down her shoulders and his riding-boots were splattered with blown froth from her gaping jaws as he drove her over the top of the neck between the kopjes, and without pause pushed her down towards the white Mission buildings. The mare’s hoof beats rang against the hills and echoed from the mission walls, and Elizabeth’s slim skirted figure appeared on the wide veranda of the homestead. She shaded her eyes to peer up the slope at Mungo, and when she recognized him, hurried down the steps into the sunlight.
‘General St John, oh, thank God you have come.’ She ran to take the mare’s head.
‘How is she?’ There was a wild, driven look upon Mungo’s bony features. He kicked his feet from the stirrups and jumped down to seize Elizabeth by the shoulders and shake her in his anxiety.
‘It started as a game, Vicky and I wanted you to come to Mama because she needs you – she wasn’t bad, just a little go of fever.’
‘Damn you, girl,’ Mungo shouted at her, ‘what has happened?’
At his tone the tears that Elizabeth had been holding back broke with a sob and streamed down her cheeks. ‘She has changed – it must be the girl’s blood – she is burning up with the girl’s blood.’
‘Pull yourself together.’ Mungo shook her again. ‘Come on, Lizzie, this isn’t like you.’
Elizabeth gulped once, and then her voice steadied. ‘She injected blood from a fever patient into herself.’
‘From a black girl? In God’s name, why?’ Mungo demanded, but did not wait for her reply. He left Elizabeth and ran up onto the veranda, and burst in through the door to Robyn’s bedroom, but he stopped before he reached the bed.
In the small closed room, the stink of fever was as rank as that of a sty, and the heat from the body in the narrow cot had condensed on the glass of the single window like steam from a kettle of boiling water. Crouched beside the cot like a puppy at its master’s feet was Mungo’s son. Robert looked up at his father with huge solemn eyes, and his mouth twisted in the thin pale face.
‘Son!’ Mungo took another step towards the cot, but the child leaped to his feet and silently he darted for the door, ducking nimbly under Mungo’s outstretched hand, and his bare feet slapped on the veranda as he raced away. For a moment Mungo yearned after him, and then he shook his head and instead he went to the cot. He stood over it and looked down at the still figure upon it.
Robyn had wasted until the bones of her skull seemed to rise through the pale flesh of her cheeks and forehead. Her eyes were closed, and sunk into deep leaden-purple sockets. Her hair, laced with silver at the temples, seemed dry and brittle as the winter grasses of the parched veld, and as he leaned to touch her forehead, a paroxysm of shivering took her that rattled the iron bedstead and her teeth chattered so violently that it seemed they must shatter like porcelain. Under Mungo’s fingers her skin was almost painfully hot to the touch, and he looked up sharply at Elizabeth who stood beside him with a stricken expression.
‘Quinine?’ he demanded.
‘I have given her more than I should, a hundred grains since this morning, but there is no response.’ Elizabeth broke off, reluctant to tell him the worst.
‘Yes, what is it?’
‘Before this, Mama had not taken quinine for six weeks. She wanted to give the fever a chance to strike, and to prove her theory.’
Mungo stared at her aghast. ‘But, her own studies—’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘She has shown herself, that abstinence followed by massive doses—’ He could not go on, as though the words might conjure up the spectre he feared most.
Elizabeth had anticipated his fears. ‘Her pallor,’ she whispered, ‘the total lack of response to the quinine – I am so afraid.’
Instinctively Mungo put his arm around Elizabeth’s shoulders, and for a few seconds she shrank against him. Mungo had always enjoyed a special relationship with the twins, they had always been his willing accomplices and secret allies at Khami Mission, from the first day that he had arrived, dying of the suppurating gunshot wound in his leg. Though they had been barely pubescent at that time, the twins had not b
een proof against the strange mesmeric effect he had on women of all ages.
‘Vicky and I tempted fate by telling you that Mama was dying.’
‘That’s enough.’ He shook her gently. ‘Has she passed water?’ And then, roughly, to cover the embarrassment between them, ‘Has she urinated?’
‘Not since last night.’ Elizabeth shook her head miserably, and he pushed her towards the door.
‘We must force her to take liquid. There is a bottle of Cognac in my saddlebag. Get lemons from the garden, a bowl of sugar and a big jug of boiling water.’
Mungo held Robyn’s head, while Elizabeth forced small sips of the steaming liquid between her white lips, and Robyn fought them in her delirium, hounded and driven by the terrible phantoms of malarial fever.
Then, as they worked, the icy chills that had racked Robyn’s body gave way abruptly to a baking heat that desiccated her, and though she did not recognize either Mungo or Elizabeth, she drank thirstily from their hands, gulping and choking in her eagerness, even though she was so weak that when she tried to lift her head, it lolled and rolled to one side, so that Mungo had to steady her. His hands, powerful and brutal-looking, were strangely tender and gentle as he cupped her chin and wiped away the drops that dribbled from her lips.
‘How much has she taken?’ he asked.
‘Over four pints,’ Elizabeth answered, checking the level in the jug.
The light in the room altered as evening began to fall, and Elizabeth stood up and held her back as she went to the door and looked across the veranda at the road that led down from the neck.
‘Vicky and Juba should have been home before now,’ she said, but her mother cried out again, and she closed the door and hurried back to the cot.
Suddenly, as she knelt beside Mungo, she became aware of the sharp ammoniacal odour that pervaded the room. She averted her eyes and said softly, ‘I must change her.’
But Mungo did not rise. ‘She is my wife,’ he said. ‘Neither Vicky nor Juba is here, and you will need help.’
Elizabeth nodded and drew down the bedclothes, and then whispered huskily, ‘Oh sweet God.’