Men of Men

  Then she listened to his breathing as it eased, and found herself examining his face as she had not been able to while he was conscious. He was still a handsome man, despite the missing eye and marks of pain and of advancing age etched into his face. Louise St John had borrowed Clinton’s straight razor the previous day. Mungo St John was clean-shaven now, and suddenly she realized that the new lines in his face and the silver wings above his temples accentuated the power of the man, while at the same time the relaxation of his mouth gave him a childlike innocence which made the breath catch in her throat.

  Clinton looked across at her, and she turned her face away quickly before he could see her expression.

  ‘Are you ready, madam?’ Robyn made her voice cold and businesslike, and Louise nodded. She was very pale, the fine freckles standing out in sharp contrast on her cheeks and the bridge of her nose.

  Still Robyn hesitated. She knew that she was squandering the moments during which the chloroform was having its blessed effect, but she was seized by a terrible dread. For the first time in her life she was afraid to wield the knife, and a thought transfixed her.

  ‘If you once love a man, can you ever cease entirely to do so?’

  She dared not look again at Mungo St John’s sleeping face; she felt she must turn and run from the church.

  ‘Are you unwell, doctor?’ Louise St John’s concern steeled her. She would not let this woman suspect weakness in her.

  The leg was painted dark yellow brown with tincture of iodine. It looked like a rotten banana. She snipped her grandfather’s stitches and the wound fell open. She saw the depth of the ulceration, and knew from dreadful experience that a wound like this would never heal, even by second intention. Her main task was not to find the pistol ball but to repair this damage.

  She went in deeper, down past the thick pulsing snake of the femoral artery, down to the bone, the bared femur, and again she felt her spirits quail. The bone was malformed, yellow and cheesy.

  She guessed at the cause, this was where the pistol ball had struck and been deflected away. It had struck a long splinter of bone off the femur, and she picked something out of the dead stinking tissue with the forceps and held it up to the light from the window.

  It was a flake of black lead. She dropped it into the bucket under the table and bent once more over the open chasm in Mungo’s flesh. There was hardly any blood, a few drops only from the stitches, and the rest of it was slimy yellow matter smelling like a corpse.

  She knew the risks of attempting to remove this decomposing tissue surgically; she had tried it before – and killed in the process. It was drastic treatment which only a very strong man could survive, yet if she closed up, the macabre spectre of gangrene lurked close at hand.

  She took up the scraper and it rasped over the exposed bone of the femur. Stinking pus welled up from out of the bone itself. Osteomyelitis, the mortification of the bony tissue. She worked at it grimly, the scraper was the only sound in the room until Louise St John choked.

  ‘Madam, if you are going to throw up – please leave,’ Robyn told her, without looking up.

  ‘I shall be all right,’ Louise whispered.

  ‘Then use the swab as I instructed you,’ Robyn snapped.

  The rotten bone came away, curling off the blade in little yellow whorls like wood shavings from the carpenter’s plane, until Robyn reached the porous core – and at last clean bright blood came up through it like wine from a sea sponge that had been squeezed, and the bone around the hole was hard and white as china.

  Robyn sighed with relief, and at the same moment Mungo groaned and would have twitched the leg if Clinton had not been holding it at the ankle. Swiftly Robyn replaced the little bamboo basket over his nose and mouth then let a few drops of chloroform fall on the lint covering.

  She cut away the rotten ulcerations, working perilously close to the artery and the white cord of the femoral nerve. She found more pockets of sepsis around the sutures with which her grandfather had closed the blood vessels. She cleaned these out and carefully cut away dead tissue.

  There was blood now, plenty of it, but clean bright blood. Robyn had reached the most critical stage of the reparative surgery. She knew that there was still infection amongst the healthy tissue and as soon as she closed the wound it would blossom again.

  She had mixed the antiseptic the night before, one part of carbolic acid to one hundred parts of rainwater. With this she washed out the open pit in Mungo’s leg, and the astringent action of the mixture dried up the weeping blood from the vessels too small to tie off.

  She could come out now, and sew up. She had left foreign bodies in before, and often they stabilized and became encysted, causing the patient little further discomfort, but instinct warned her not to do so this time.

  She glanced at Clinton’s big silver hunter watch, which he had placed beside her instrument case where she could see it readily. She had been in for twenty-five minutes, and experience had taught her that the longer she stayed in the greater the danger of primary or secondary collapse.

  She looked up at Louise St John. She was still very pale, but the sweat of nausea had dried on her forehead. She had grit, Robyn conceded grudgingly, and that was one thing she could admire – much more than her exotic beauty.

  ‘Madam, I am about to go after the ball now,’ she said. ‘I shall only have time for one attempt.’

  She knew from Lister’s writing and her own observation how risky it was to use her bare hands in a wound – but that risk was preferable to leading with a sharp instrument into the nest of veins, arteries and nerves in the groin.

  She had guessed the location of the ball by the restricted movement of the femur within its pelvic socket, and by the focus of intense pain when she had palpated the area while Mungo was conscious. She probed with her forefinger, boldly up into the tissue above the raw scraped area of the bone. The direction of the shot, from ahead and upwards, must be on this line.

  She met resistance and tried again, and then again. Suddenly her finger slid into a narrow canal in the hot meat of his thigh, right in to its full length, and then at the very limit of her reach she touched something hard. It could have been the head of the femur or the lower ridge of pelvic bone – but she took up the scalpel.

  A fine needle jet of blood from a severed blood vessel sprayed her cheek and forehead before she could twist it closed, and she could hear Louise gagging again, but her hands with the swab barely shook as she wiped away the blood so that Robyn could cut again – and there was a rush of thick creamy yellow matter out of the cut like a dam burst by muddy flood waters. In the flood were little chips and fragments of shattered metal, rotting threads of woollen cloth and other detritus.

  ‘Praise God!’ whispered Robyn, and brought her hand out, dripping with the reeking yellow discharge, but with the distorted, misshapen lump of bluish lead held firmly between thumb and forefinger.

  The twins had long ago discovered the literary treasure trove that Robyn kept in the locked cupboard against the far wall of her bedroom. Of course, they could only visit it when their parents and elder sisters were fully occupied elsewhere – for instance when King Ben had summoned them to GuBulawayo and Salina was cooking and Cathy was painting or reading.

  Then they could sneak into the bedroom and push the chair against the wall so that Vicky standing on Lizzie’s shoulders could reach the key.

  There were more than fifty books in the cupboard. The great majority unfortunately contained no illustrations. These had proved unrewarding, as the twins’ efforts at deciphering the text had been shipwrecked on too many rock-hard words; at other times, just when it was becoming intensely interesting, they would encounter a solid slab of foreign language which they suspected was either Latin or Greek.

  The twins avoided these tomes, but the ones with pictures were a forbidden delight, greatly enhanced by danger and guilt. There was even one that had drawings of the inside of women, with and without a baby in situ, and another of
the baby in the process of emerging.

  However, their perennial favourite was the one they called ‘The Devil Book’ – for there was an illustration on each facing page vivid, lifelike and explicit, of souls in torment and the devils who attended them. The artist who had interpreted this edition of Dante’s Inferno had dwelt ghoulishly on decapitation and disembowelment, on red-hot irons and hooks, lolling tongues and bulging eyes. Even the briefest stolen perusal of this masterpiece was enough to ensure that the twins would spend most of the following night clinging together in their bed, shivering with delicious terror.

  However, this particular visit to the forbidden cupboard was in the interest of scientific research, otherwise they would never have taken the risk while Robyn Ballantyne was actually at Khami Mission.

  They chose the time of morning clinic when Mama would certainly be in the church attending her patients, when Daddy would be mucking out the sties, and Salina and Cathy at their chores.

  The raid went with the precision of repeated rehearsal. They left their open readers on the dining-room table, and were down the verandah and had the key within the time it takes to draw a long breath.

  Lizzie took guard at the window from where she could cover kitchen, the church and the pigsties – while Vicky got the cupboard open and the ‘Devil Book’ out and open at the correct page.

  ‘See!’ she whispered. ‘I told you so.’

  There he was – Satan, Lucifer, King of the Underworld – and Vicky had been right. He did not have horns. All the lesser demons had horns, but not the Devil, not the very Devil himself. What he did have was a tail, a magnificent tail with a point like the blade of a Matabele assegai upon the end of it.

  ‘He’s got a beard in this picture,’ Lizzie pointed out, reluctant to abandon her position.

  ‘He probably shaved it off – to fool us,’ Vicky told her. ‘Now look!’ She took a pin out of her hair and used the black round tip to cover one of Lucifer’s eyes. Immediately the resemblance was undeniable, the thick dark curls, the broad forehead, the beaked nose and the piercing eye under arched brow, and the smile, the same satanically mocking smile.

  Lizzie shuddered luxuriously. Vicky was right, it was him all right.

  ‘Kitty Cat!’ Vicky hissed a warning. Salina was coming out of the kitchen, and they had the book back on its shelf, the cupboard locked, the key back in its hiding-place, and were once more seated at the table poring over their readers by the time that Salina had crossed the yard and looked in upon them.

  ‘Good.’ She smiled at them tenderly, they were such an angelic pair – sometimes. ‘Good girls,’ she said, and went back towards the kitchen.

  ‘Where does he put it?’ Lizzie asked softly, without looking up from her reader.

  ‘What?’

  ‘His tail.’

  ‘Watch!’ Vicky ordered. ‘And I’ll show you.’

  Napoleon, the aged yellow mongrel, was sleeping in the patch of sunlight on the verandah. He had a ridge down his back, and grey hair around his muzzle. Every few minutes a dream of rabbits and guineafowl made his back legs gallop spasmodically and he would puff off an evil-smelling fart of excitement.

  ‘Bad dog!’ Vicky said loudly. ‘Napoleon, you are a bad, bad dog!’

  Napoleon sprang to his feet, appalled by this unjust accusation, and wriggled his entire body ingratiatingly, while his upper lip lifted in a simpering sycophantic grin. At the same time his long whippy tail disappeared between his legs and curled up under his belly.

  ‘That’s how he tucks it away. Just like Napoleon,’ Vicky announced.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘If you look carefully, you can see the bulge where it comes out in front of him.’

  They worked on distractedly for a few seconds, then Lizzie could not restrain herself further.

  ‘Do you think we could see his tail?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘What if we—’ Halfway through propounding her scheme, Lizzie faltered. Even she realized that it would be impossible to modify the latrine, drilling a peephole through the back wall, without being apprehended; and their motives could never be convincingly explained, especially not to Mama.

  ‘Anyway,’ Vicky quashed the plan effectively, ‘Devils are probably like fairies, they just don’t go.’

  Silence fell again. Obviously relieved that nobody had followed up the original accusation, Napoleon re-composed himself to his dreams, and it seemed the project was abandoned – until Vicky looked up with a determined gleam in her eyes.

  ‘We are going to ask him.’

  ‘But,’ stammered Lizzie, ‘but Mama forbade us to talk to him—’ She knew her protest to be unavailing; that gleam in Vicky’s eye was familiar.

  Ten days after she had removed the pistol ball, Robyn came down to the guest-house with a crutch carved from mopani wood.

  ‘My husband made it for you,’ she told Mungo St John. ‘And you are going to use it every day from now on.’

  The first day Mungo managed one halting circuit of the yard, and at the end of it he was pale and sweating. Robyn checked the leg and the stitches had all held, but the muscles of the thigh had withered and contracted, pulling the leg an inch shorter than the other. The next morning she was there to watch him at exercise. He moved more easily.

  After fifteen days she removed the last catgut stitches, and though the scar was raised and thickened, a livid purplish red, yet there was no indication of mortification. It looked as though it had healed by first intention – the drastic use of strong antiseptic on living tissue seemed to have been justified.

  After five weeks, Mungo abandoned the crutch in favour of a stout stick, and took the footpath that girded the kopje behind the Khami Mission.

  Each day he walked farther and stayed out longer. It was a relief to be away from the bitter arguments with Louise which punctuated the long periods of her icy withdrawal.

  He had found a viewpoint beyond the sharp northern ridge of the kopje, a natural platform and bench of dark serpentine rock under the spreading branches of a lovely old leadwood tree, where he could sit and brood out over the gently undulating grassland to the far blue silhouette of hills that marked the site of Lobengula’s kraal.

  His instinct warned him that there was an opportunity there. It was the instinct and the awareness of the cruising shark which could detect the presence of prey at distances and depths beyond the range of other senses. His instinct had seldom failed him, and there had been a time when he had seized every opportunity with boldness, with the ruthless application of all his skills and all his strength.

  Sitting under the leadwood, his hands upon the head of the cane and his chin upon his hands, he cast his mind back to his triumphs: to the great ships that he had won and sailed to the ends of the oceans and brought back laden with treasures, with tea and coffee and spices or holds filled with black slaves. He remembered the rich fertile lands to which he had held title, and the sweet smell of sugar-cane fields when the harvest was being cut. He remembered piles of gold coins, carriages and beautiful horses – and women.

  So many women, too many women perhaps; for they were the cause of his present low condition.

  He let himself think of Louise at last. She had been a fire in his blood, which grew fiercer the more often he tried to slake it, and she had weakened him, distracted him, diverted him from his ruthless purpose of old.

  She had been the daughter of one of his overseers on Fairfields, his vast Louisiana estate. When she was sixteen years of age he had allowed her to exercise his wife’s Palamino horses; when she was seventeen he arranged for her to move into the big house as companion and maid to his wife and when she was eighteen he had raped her.

  His wife was in the next-door bedroom, suffering from one of her black headaches, and he had torn Louise’s clothes off her body, possessed by a madness that he had never known before. She had fought him with the savagery of one of her Blackfoot Indian ancestors, but in some perverse fashion her resistance maddened
him as much as the glimpses of her hard young flesh, as it was revealed a gleaming flash at a time.

  She had clawed red lines down his chest, and bitten him until he bled, but through it all she had not uttered a word or a sound, although a single scream would have brought her mistress or the house servants running.

  In the end, he had borne her down onto the thick white pelt of a polar bear in the middle of the floor, naked except for the tatters of her petticoats hanging from her long fine legs, and with his full weight he had spread her and entered her.

  Only then had she made any sound, she had gripped him with the same atavistic savagery, legs and arms encircling him, and she had whispered hoarsely, brokenly. ‘I love you, I have always loved you, I shall always love you.’

  When the armies of the North had marched against them, and his wife had fled with the children to her native France, Louise had stayed with him. When she could she had been in the field with him, and when she could not she had waited for him, filling in the days and most of the nights nursing the wounded at the Confederate Hospital in Galveston, and there she had nursed him when he was brought in half-blinded and terribly hurt from the battlefield.

  She had been with him when he went back to Fairfields for the last time, and shared his desolation at the burnt fields and ruined buildings, and she had been at his side ever since. Perhaps if she had not, things would have been different now, for she had weakened him; she had dulled the edge of his resolve.

  So many times he had smelled out the opportunities – the chances for the coup which would restore it all, and each time she had caused him to waver.

  ‘I could never respect you again,’ she had said once. ‘Not if you did that.’

  ‘I never suspected you were capable of that, Mungo. It’s wrong, morally wrong.’

  Gradually it had changed, until sometimes, after another abortive attempt to restore his fortunes, she would look at him with a coldness – a kind of icy contempt.

  ‘Why do you not leave me?’ he had challenged her then.