‘It is what we feared,’ Mungo said quietly, hopelessly.
The skirts of Robyn’s nightdress were rucked up high around her pale girlish thighs. They were sodden, as was the thin mattress beneath her, but it was not the sulphur yellow urine stain that they had hoped to see. Staring bleakly at the soiled bed clothes, Mungo recalled the piece of callous doggerel that he had heard the troopers of Jameson’s column sing:
‘Black as the angel
Black as the ace,
When the fever waters flow
They are as black as disgrace.
Soon we’ll lay him down below,
And chuck dirt in his face.’
The reeking stain was black, black as old congealing blood, the drainage from kidneys that were trying to purge the bloodstream of the wild-fire anaemia that was coursing through Robyn’s body, the destruction of the red corpuscles that was the cause of the dreadful pallor. For the malaria had been transmuted to something infinitely more evil and deadly.
As they both stared helplessly at it, there was a commotion on the veranda and the door burst open. Victoria stood at the threshold. She was transformed, glowing from within, charged with that strange fragile beauty of a young woman awakened for the first time to the wonder and mystery of love.
‘Where have you been, Vicky?’ Elizabeth asked. Then she saw the tall young man in the doorway behind her twin. She realized what Harry Mellow’s bemused yet proud expression meant. She felt no resentment, no envy, only a small quick pleasure for Vicky. Elizabeth had never wanted Harry Mellow; she had teased her sister by pretending interest but her own love was for a man she could never have, she had long ago resigned herself to that. She was happy for Vicky, but sad for herself, and Vicky misinterpreted her expression.
‘What is it?’ The glow faded from Vicky’s lovely face, and she lifted a hand to her bosom as though to stem the panic that rose within her. ‘What has happened, Lizzie? What is it?’
‘Blackwater,’ Elizabeth answered flatly. ‘Mother has blackwater fever.’
She did not have to elaborate. The twins had lived their lives on a hospital station. They knew that the disease was peculiarly selective. It attacked only white persons, and Robyn’s researches had linked that peculiarity to the use of quinine, which was restricted almost entirely to the whites. Robyn had treated fifty or more cases at the mission over the years. At first it had been the old ivory hunters and itinerant traders, then more recently the troopers of Jameson’s column and the new settlers and prospectors that were swarming across the Limpopo river.
The twins knew that of those fifty cases of blackwater, only three had survived. The rest of them lay in the little cemetery beyond the river. Their mother was under virtual sentence of death, and Vicky flew to the bedside and knelt beside her.
‘Oh, Mama,’ she whispered, stricken with guilt. ‘I should have been here.’
Juba heated rounded river stones in the open fire and wrapped them in blankets. They packed them around Robyn’s body, and then covered her with four karosses of wild fur. She fought weakly to throw off the covers, but Mungo held her down. Despite the internal heat of the fever and the external temperature of the hot stones trapped under the furs, her skin was burning dry and her eyes had the flat blind glitter of water-worn rock crystal.
Then as the sun touched the tree-tops and the light in the room turned to sombre orange, the fever broke and oozed from the pores of her marble pale skin like the juice of crushed sugar cane from the press. The sweat came up in fat shining beads across her forehead and chin, each drop joining with the others until they ran in thick oily snakes back into her hair, soaking it as though she had been held under water. It ran into her eyes, faster than Mungo could wipe it away. It poured down her neck and wetted and matted the fur of the kaross. It soaked through the thin mattress and pattered like rain on the hard dry floor below.
The temperature of her body plunged dramatically, and when the sweat had passed, Juba and the twins sponged her naked body. She had dehydrated and wasted, so that the rack of her ribs stood out starkly, and her pelvis formed a bony hollowed basin. They handled her with exaggerated care, for any rough movement might rupture the delicate damaged walls of the renal blood vessels and bring on the torrential haemorrhage which so often ended this disease.
When they had finished, they called Mungo back from where he was sitting with Harry Mellow on the stoep of the Mission. Robyn was comatose. Mungo set the lantern on the floor so that the feeble light would not trouble her.
‘I will call you if there is any change.’ He sent the women away and sat on the stool beside the cot.
Robyn sank slowly during the night, as the disease destroyed her blood, and in the dawn light she looked as though she had been sucked by some monstrous vampire. He knew she was dying, and he took her hand, and she did not stir.
A soft rustle at the door made Mungo turn his head. Robert, his son, stood in the door. His nightshirt was threadbare and patched, too tight under the armpits and the skirts were up above his knees. His thick tangled curls flopped onto the broad pale forehead, and he stared at Mungo unblinkingly, owl-eyed from sleep.
Mungo sat very still, for he sensed that any movement would put the child to flight like a frightened wild animal. He waited a hundred beats of his own heart, and at last the child shifted his gaze to his mother’s face, and for the first time there was expression in his eyes. Slowly, a pace at a time, he crossed to the bed, and hesitantly reached out to touch his mother’s cheek. Robyn opened her eyes. Already they were glazed and sightless, looking beyond the dark frontiers which she had reached.
‘Mummy,’ said Robert. ‘Please don’t die, Mummy.’
Robyn’s eyes flickered from side to side, and then miraculously they focused on Robert’s face. She tried to lift her hand, but it merely twitched and then relaxed again.
‘Listen to me. If you die,’ Mungo said harshly, and her eyes swivelled to him, ‘if you die,’ he repeated deliberately, ‘the child will be mine.’
For the first time she recognized him. He could see it, and his words had reached her. He saw the anger come alive in her eyes, saw the enormous effort that she made to speak, but she could make no sound, only her lips formed a single word.
‘Never!’
‘Then live,’ he challenged her. ‘Live, damn you!’ And he saw her begin to fight again.
Robyn’s life-forces rose and sank to the dreadful tides of the disease, baking fever followed icy chills, and the long exhausted coma followed the bursting sweats. At times she raved in delirium, assailed by fantasies and demons from the past. Sometimes she looked at Mungo St John and saw him as he had been so long ago, on the quarter-deck of his beautiful Baltimore clipper Huron, when Robyn had been in her early twenties.
‘So handsome,’ she whispered. ‘So devilishly, impossibly handsome.’
Then she was lucid for brief periods, and the fever added strength to her anger.
‘You killed him – you killed him, and he was a saint,’ she whispered, her voice light but shaking with fury, and Mungo could not quieten her. ‘He was my husband, and you sent him across the river to where you knew the Matabele assegais waited. You killed my husband as surely as if you had driven the blade through his heart with your own hand.’
Then her mood changed again. ‘Please, will you never let me be at peace?’ she pleaded, her voice so weak that he had to lean over her to catch her words. ‘You know I cannot resist you, yet everything you stand for is an offence against me and my God, against me and the lost and leaderless people that have been given into my care.’
‘Drink,’ he ordered. ‘You must drink.’ And she struggled weakly as he held the jug to her lips.
Then the disease would tighten its grip upon her and sweep her away into the burning fever mists, where there was no sense and no reality. The days and nights swung past in a blur. Sometimes Mungo would start awake – to find it was past midnight, and one of the twins was sleeping in the chair on the other side
of the bed. He would rise, numbed with fatigue, to force Robyn to drink again.
‘Drink,’ he whispered to her. ‘Drink, or die.’
Then he sank back into his own chair, and when he awoke again it was dawn, and his son stood beside the chair, staring into his face. As he opened his eyes, the boy darted away again, and when he called after him, Robyn whispered fiercely from the cot:
‘You will never have him – never!’
Sometimes in the noonday, when Robyn was lying pale and silent, resting between the periodic onslaughts of the fever, Mungo could sleep for a few hours on the pallet set at the far end of the veranda, until Juba or one of the twins called him. ‘It has begun again.’ And he hurried to the cot and goaded and coaxed her from her lethargy and forced her to go on fighting.
Sometimes, sitting beside the cot, his own bony features now gaunt and haggard, he wondered at himself. He had possessed a hundred women more beautiful than this in his lifetime. He was well aware of the strange attraction he could still wield over any woman, and yet he had chosen this one, this one whom he could never possess. The one who hated him as fiercely as she loved him; who had conceived his son in a soul-consuming passion, and yet kept him from the child with all her determination. She was the one who had demanded that Mungo marry her, yet vehemently denied him the duty of a wife, who would not allow him in her presence except now when she was too weak to resist, or on those rare occasions when her lust for him overcame her conscience and her revulsion.
He remembered one of those occasions only a month or so previously, when he had wakened in the backroom of his mud-brick hut on the outskirts of Bulawayo. There was a candle burning, and Robyn stood beside the camp-bed that was the only item of furniture in his room. She must have ridden through the darkness and the wilderness to reach him.
‘God forgive me!’ she had whispered, and fallen upon him in a frenzy of desire.
In the first light she had left him exhausted and stunned, and when he had followed her out to Khami Mission the next day, she had met him on the veranda armed with a shotgun and he had known instinctively that if he tried to mount the steps to touch her, she would have killed him. He had never seen such loathing as there was in her eyes, for herself as much as for him.
Endlessly she had written to the newspapers, at home and in the Cape, denouncing almost every proclamation he made as Chief Native Commissioner of Matabeleland. She had attacked his conscripted labour policy which provided the ranchers and the miners with the black men they desperately needed to ensure the continuance and the prosperity of this new land. She had condemned the levy of his native police force he used to keep order over the tribe. Once she had even stormed into an indaba he was holding with the tribal indunas and harangued them in fluent Sindebele in his presence, calling the indunas ‘old women’ and ‘cowards’ for submitting to the authority of Mungo and the British South Africa Company. Then not an hour later, she had waited beside the path, in thick bush near the ford of the river, and had waylaid him as he rode back from the indaba. Naked as wild animals, they had made love upon her saddle blanket in the veld, and the fury of it came so close to mutual destruction that it left him shaken and appalled.
‘I hate you, oh God, how I hate you,’ she had whispered, her eyes full of tears, as she mounted her horse again and galloped away, heedless of the thorns that ripped at her skirts.
Her exhortations to the indunas were blatant incitement to rebellion and bloody revolution, while in her book Trooper Hackett of Matabeleland, in which she mentioned Mungo by name, the words she put into his mouth and the actions she ascribed to him were a most virulent slander. Mr Rhodes and other directors of the BSA Company had urged Mungo to take legal action against her.
‘Against my own wife, sir?’ He had slanted his single eye and smiled ruefully. ‘What a fool I would appear.’
She was the most implacable and remorseless adversary he had ever known, and yet the thought of her dead desolated him, so that each time she sank back towards the abyss, so he sank with her, and when she rallied, so his spirits soared to match her.
Yet the play of emotion and the way in which he drained his own reserves to sustain her wearied him to the very core of his soul, and it went on and on, without respite, day after day – until finally Elizabeth broke in on the few hours of deathlike sleep which he allowed himself. He heard the emotion that shook her voice and saw the tears in her eyes.
‘It’s over, General St John,’ she said, and he flinched as though she had struck him across the face, and staggered groggily to his feet. He felt his own tears sting the rims of his eyes.
‘I cannot believe it.’ Then he realized that Elizabeth was smiling through her tears, and she was proffering the enamelled pot she held in both hands.
It stank of ammonia and the peculiar rotting odour of the disease, but the colour of the fluid had changed, from the deadly black of Guinness stout to the light golden of Pilsner beer.
‘It’s over,’ Elizabeth repeated. ‘Her water has cleared. She’s safe. Thank God, she’s safe.’
By that afternoon Robyn was well enough once more to order Mungo St John to leave Khami Mission, and the following morning she tried to rise from the cot to enforce that order.
‘I cannot allow my son to come under your evil influences for another day.’
‘Madam—’ he started, but she swept his protest aside.
‘So far I have resolved not to tell the child about you. He does not know that his father once commanded the most notorious slaving fleet that ever made the middle passage. He does not know of the thousands of damned souls, innocent children of Africa, whom you carried away to a far continent. He does not yet understand that it was you, and your ilk, that waged bloody and unprovoked war upon Lobengula and the Matabele nation, nor that you are the instrument of cruel oppression over them – but unless you leave, I shall change that resolve.’ Her voice crackled with some of its old force, and Juba had to hold her by the shoulders. ‘I order you to leave Khami immediately.’
The effort left Robyn white and panting, and under Juba’s gentle chubby hands she sank back against the bolster, and Elizabeth whispered to Mungo:
‘She might have a relapse. Perhaps it would be best.’
The corner of Mungo’s mouth twisted up in that mocking grin that Robyn remembered so well, but in the golden depths of his single eye there was a shadow, a regret or a terrible loneliness, Robyn could not be sure.
‘Your servant, ma’am.’ He gave her an exaggerated bow, and strode from the sick room. Robyn listened to his footsteps crossing the veranda and going down the steps. Only then did she push Juba’s hands away and roll on her side to face the blank whitewashed wall.
At the crest, where the path ran through a saddle between the thickly forested hills, Mungo St John reined in his mare, and looked back. The veranda of the homestead was deserted and he sighed and picked up the reins again and faced ahead down the road into the north, but he did not shake up the mare. Instead he frowned, and lifted his chin to look into the heavens.
The northern sky was dark. It was as though a heavy curtain fell from the high heaven to the earth. It was not a cloud, for it had a peculiar density and body to it, like the poisonous plankton of the mysterious red tide which he had seen sweeping across the surface of the southern Atlantic, spreading death and desolation wherever it touched.
Yet Mungo had never seen anything like this. The magnitude of it challenged the imagination. It reached in a great arc around half the horizon, and even as he watched, it swept towards the sun which stood near its noon zenith.
Far north Mungo had seen the khamsin winds raise the mighty sandstorms over the Sahara, yet he realized there was not a sand desert within a thousand miles which could generate such a phenomenon. This was beyond his experience, and his puzzlement turned to alarm as he realized the speed at which this thing was bearing down upon him.
The fringes of the dark veil touched the rim of the sun and the white noon light altered. T
he mare fidgeted uncomfortably under Mungo, and a troop of guinea fowl, that had been chittering in the grass beside the track, fell silent. Swiftly the murky tide flooded the heavens, and the sun turned a sullen orange, like a disc of heated metal from the smithy’s forge, and a vast shadow fell upon the land.
A silence had fallen upon the world. The murmurous insect chorus from the forest was stilled, the tinking and cheeping of small birds in the scrub had died away, sounds that were the background song of Africa, unnoticed until they were gone.
Now the stillness was oppressive. The mare nodded her head and the tinkle of her curb chain sounded jarringly loud. The spreading curtain thickened and smothered the sky, the shadow deepened.
Now there was a sound. A faint and distant sibilance like the wind shifting the sugary white sands of the desert dunes. The sun glowed dully as the ashes of a dying camp-fire.
The faint hissing sound gathered strength, like the hollow echo in a seashell held to the ear, and the filtered sunlight was a weird purplish glow. Mungo shivered with a kind of religious awe, though the heat of noon seemed even more oppressive in the gloom.
The strange rustling sound mounted swiftly, became a deep humming flutter, and then the rush of high winds; and the sun was gone, blotted out completely. Out of the half-light he saw it coming low across the forest, sweeping towards him in twisting columns like some monstrous fog-bank.
With a low roar of millions upon millions of wings, it was upon him. It struck like a volley of grapeshot from a cannon, driving into his face, the impact of each horny-winged body striking with a numbing shock that broke his skin and drew blood.
He flung up his hands to protect his face, and the startled mare reared, and it was a miracle of horsemanship that he kept his seat. He was half-blinded and dazed by the rushing torrent of wings about his head, and he snatched at the air, and they were so thick that he caught one of the flying insects.
It was almost twice as long as his forefinger, wings a glaring orange slashed with intricate designs of black. The thorax was covered in horny armour, and from the helmeted head stared the bulging multiple eyes, yellow as polished topaz, and the long back legs were fanged with red-tipped thorns. It kicked convulsively in his hand, piercing the skin and leaving a fine line of blood droplets upon it.