The Angels Weep (15 page)

‘Subject: Caucasian female at present in good
health—’ she wrote in her firm neat hand, but she
looked up irritably with pen poised at Juba’s tragic tone
and mournful expression.

‘You swore on oath to the great King Lobengula that you
would care for his people after he was gone. How can you honour
that promise if you are dead, Nomusa?’ Juba asked in
Sindebele, using Robyn’s Matabele praise name ‘Nomusa
– Girl Child of Mercy’.

‘I am not going to die, Juba,’ Robyn snapped
irritably. ‘And for the love of all things holy, take that
look off your face.’

‘It is never wise to provoke the dark spirits,
Nomusa.’

‘Juba is right, Mama,’ Vicky supported her.
‘You have deliberately stopped taking quinine, not a single
tablet in six weeks, and your own observations have shown the
danger of blackwater fever is increased—’

‘Enough!’ Robyn slapped the table with the flat of
her hand. ‘I will listen to no more.’

‘All right,’ Elizabeth agreed. ‘We
won’t try and stop you again, but if you become dangerously
ill, should we ride into Bulawayo to fetch General St
John?’

Robyn threw her pen onto the open page so the ink splattered
and she leaped to her feet.

‘You will do no such thing, do you hear me, girl? You
will not go near that man.’

‘Mama, he is your husband,’ Vicky pointed out
reasonably.

‘And he is Bobby’s father,’ Elizabeth said
quickly.

‘And he loves you,’ Vicky gabbled it out before
Robyn could stop her.

Robyn was white-faced and shaking with anger and some other
emotion that prevented her speaking for a moment, and Elizabeth
took advantage of her uncharacteristic silence.

‘He is such a strong—’

‘Elizabeth!’ Robyn found her voice, and it rang
like steel from the scabbard. ‘You know I have forbidden
discussion of that man.’ She sat back at the desk, picked
up the pen and for a long minute the scratching of her nib was
the only sound in the room, but when she spoke again,
Robyn’s voice was level and businesslike. ‘While I am
incapacitated, Elizabeth will write up the journal – she
has the better handwriting. I want hourly entries, no matter how
grave the situation.’

‘Very well, Mama.’

‘Vicky, you will administer treatment, but not before
the cycle has been established beyond any chance of refutation. I
have prepared a written list of instructions for you to follow,
should I become insensible.’

‘Very well, Mama.’

‘And me, Nomusa?’ Juba asked softly. ‘What
must I do?’

Robyn’s expression softened then, and she laid her hand
on the other woman’s forearm.

‘Juba, you must understand that I am not reneguing on my
promise to take care of your people. What I will accomplish with
this work is a final understanding of a disease that has ravaged
the Matabele and all people of Africa since the beginning of
time. Trust me, dear friend, this is a long step towards freeing
your people and mine of this terrible scourge.’

‘I wish there was another way, Nomusa.’

‘There is not.’ Robyn shook her head. ‘You
asked what you should do to help; will you stay with me, Juba, to
give me comfort?’

‘You know I will,’ Juba whispered, and hugged
Robyn to her. Robyn seemed slim and girlish in that vast embrace,
and Juba’s sobs shook them both.

T
he black girl
lay on her sleeping-mat against the low wall of the ward. She was
of marriageable age, for when she cried out in delirium and threw
aside the fur kaross, her naked body was fully matured, with a
wide fertile spread of hips and hard-thrusting nipples to her
breasts, but the heat of fever was burning her up. Her skin
looked as brittle as parchment, her lips were grey and cracked,
and her eyes glittered with the unnatural brilliance of the fever
that was rushing down upon her.

Robyn pressed her hand into the girl’s armpit, and
exclaimed, ‘She is like a furnace, the poor child is at the
climax,’ and she pulled her hand away and covered her with
the thick soft kaross. ‘I think this is the moment. Juba,
take her shoulders. Vicky, hold her arm, and you, Elizabeth,
bring the bowl.’

The girl’s bare arm protruded from under the kaross, and
Vicky held her at the elbow while Robyn slipped a tourniquet of
whiplash leather over her forearm and twisted it up until the
blood vessels in the Matabele girl’s wrist swelled up,
purple black and hard as unripe grapes.

‘Come on, child,’ Robyn snapped at Elizabeth, and
she proferred the white enamel basin and drew back the cloth that
covered it. Her hand was trembling.

Robyn picked up the syringe. The barrel of brass had a narrow
glass inset running down its length. Robyn detached the hollow
needle from the nipple at the end, and at the same time with the
thumb of her free hand she pumped up the veins in the
girl’s wrist with a stroking motion, and then pierced the
skin with an angled stab of the thick needle. She found the vein
almost immediately, and a thin jet of dark red venous blood shot
from the open end of the needle and pattered onto the clay floor.
Robyn fitted the syringe nipple into the needle, and slowly
withdrew the plunger, watching intently as the fever-hot blood
flowed into the brass barrel and showed through the glass
inset.

‘I am taking two cubic centimetres,’ she murmured,
as the line of moving red reached the graduation stamped in the
brass, and she jerked the needle from the girl’s skin and
staunched the blood that followed it with the pressure of her
thumb, dropped the syringe back into the bowl, and released the
loop of the tourniquet.

‘Juba,’ she said, ‘give her the quinine now
and stay with her until she starts to sweat.’ Robyn rose
with a swirl of skirts, and the twins had to run to keep up with
her as she crossed to her laboratory.

As soon as they were in the circular room, Robyn slammed the
door.

‘We must be quick,’ she said, unbuttoning the cuff
of her leg-of-mutton sleeve, and rolling it high. ‘We must
not allow any organisms in the blood to deteriorate.’ And
she offered her arm to Vicky who looped the tourniquet around it
and began twisting it up tightly.

‘Make a note of the time,’ Robyn ordered.

‘Seventeen minutes past six,’ said Elizabeth,
standing beside her and holding the enamel basin, while she
stared with a controlled horror at the blue veins under the pale
skin of her mother’s arm.

‘We will use the basilic vein,’ Robyn said in a
matter-of-fact tone, and took a fresh needle from the case on the
desk.

Robyn bit her lip at the prick, but went on probing gently
down towards her own swollen vein until suddenly there was an
eruption of blood from the open end of the needle, and Robyn
grunted with satisfaction and reached for the charged
syringe.

‘Oh Mama!’ cried Vicky, unable to restrain herself
longer.

‘Do be quiet, Victoria.’

Robyn fitted the syringe into the needle, and without any
dramatic pause or portentous words, expelled the still hot blood
from the fever-struck Matabele girl into her own vein.

She withdrew the needle, and rolled down her sleeve in
businesslike fashion.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘If I am right
– and I am – we can expect the first paroxysm in
forty-eight hours.’

T
he full-sized
billiard table was the only one in Africa north of the Kimberley
Club, and south of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo. It had been
transported in sections three hundred miles from the railhead,
and Ralph Ballantyne’s bill for cartage had been
£112. However, the proprietor of the Grand Hotel had
recouped his costs a dozen times over since he had set up the
massive slate top on its squat teak legs in the centre of his
saloon bar.

The table was a source of pride to every citizen of Bulawayo.
Somehow it seemed to symbolize the transition from barbarism to
civilization, that subjects of Queen Victoria should be striking
the ivory balls across the green baize on the same spot where a
few short years previously a pagan black king had conducted his
grisly ‘smelling-out’ ceremonies and gruesome
executions.

The crowd of spectators in the bar room, that lined all the
walls and even stood on the long barcounter for a better view of
the game, were nearly all men of substance, for they had won
their grants and gold claims by riding into this land in Doctor
Jim’s conquering column. They each owned three thousand
acres of the sweet-pastured veld, and their share of the herds of
Lobengula’s captured cattle grazed upon them. Many of them
had already driven their claim pegs into the rich surface reefs
in which visible gold gleamed in the white Matabeleland
sunlight.

Of course some of the reefs were unpayable stringers, yet
already Ed Pearson had pegged an ancient working between the Hwe
Hwe and Tshibgiwe rivers that had panned samples at five ounces
the ton. He called it the ‘Globe and Phoenix’, and
Harry Mellow, acting on Mr Rhodes’ instructions, had
surveyed the reef and estimated that there were 2 million tons of
reserves, making it the richest gold mine in existence, except
possibly for Ralph Ballantyne’s Harkness Mine further south
with its estimated 5 million tons of reserves at an incredible
twenty ounces to the ton.

There was rich red gold and the good Lord alone knew what
other treasure buried in this earth, and the mood was optimistic
and boisterous. Bulawayo was a boom town and the spectators
encouraged the two billiard players with raucous banter and
extravagant wagers.

General Mungo St John chalked his cue carefully and then wiped
the blue dust from his fingers with a silk handkerchief. He was a
tall man with wide shoulders and narrow hips, but as he moved
around the green table he favoured one long powerful leg, an old
gunshot injury, an affliction that no man dared mention in his
presence.

He was coatless, with gold expanders holding his white linen
shirtsleeves above the elbows, and his waistcoat was embroidered
with silver and gold metallic thread. On a lesser man, such
theatrical dress would have looked ostentatious, but on Mungo St
John it was correct as an emperor’s ermine and purple.

He paused at the corner of the table and surveyed the lie of
the ivory balls. His single eye had a predatory gleam to it,
tawny yellow and strangely flecked, like the eye of an eagle. The
empty socket of the other eye was covered with a black cloth
patch and it gave him the air of a genteel pirate as he smiled
across the table at his opponent.

‘Cannon and losing hazard off red,’ Mungo St John
announced calmly, and there was a roar of comment in which a
dozen voices were offering odds of five to one and better against
the play, and Harry Mellow grinned boyishly, and tipped his head
in reluctant admiration of the big man’s audacity.

The game they were playing was ‘Zambezi nominated three
cushion’, which is as far from ordinary billiards as the
little gecko lizards on the bar room rafters were from the big
gnarled twenty-foot mugger crocodiles of the Zambezi pools. It
was a local variation of the game, combining the most difficult
elements of English and French billiards. The player’s cue
ball had to strike three cushions of the table before completing
a scoring coup, but in addition to this monstrous condition, the
player had to announce beforehand exactly how he intended
scoring. This prevented him executing a fluke score, and if he
did make an unannounced and therefore unintended winning stroke,
he was penalized the points he should have won. It was a tough
game. The stakes between the players were £5 a point, but
naturally the players and the spectators were free to offer side
bets for or against the players making their nominated coup. With
players of the calibre of Harry Mellow and Mungo St John on the
table, there was £1,000 or more riding on each stroke, and
the voices that shouted the odds and those that accepted them
were hoarse with tension.

Mungo St John replaced the long black cheroot between his
teeth and he made a little tripod with the fingers of his left
hand, then he laid the polished maplewood cue into the notch of
his thumb and forefinger. There was a final flurry of bets, and
then a silence fell over the crowded room. The air was blue with
tobacco smoke, and the faces that strained forward were flushed
and sweating. Mungo St John lined up his white cue ball with his
single bright eye, and across the table Harry Mellow took a slow
breath and held it. If Mungo succeeded with the cannon, it scored
two points, and another three points for the hazard off red, but
that was not all that was at stake, for Harry had placed a side
bet of £50 against the score. He stood to lose or win over
100 guineas.

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.