Green City in the Sun (58 page)

     Njeri followed her mistress downstairs and found her in the library—a musty, rarely used room that was all leather and brass and lined from floor to ceiling with books.

     "It must be in here!" Rose said as she frantically searched the shelves. "Help me, Njeri! It's this big and this thick," she said, outlining an invisible book with her hands. "The cover is made of paper, not leather. And it's—it's—" She moved along the shelves, rapidly scanning the spines. "It's a green book, Njeri. Hurry!"

     Bewildered, the African girl, who had never learned to read, went to one wall and slowly searched the leather and gold books for one made of green paper. Behind her she heard her mistress exclaim, "Oh, we
must
have a copy! Surely Grace gave one to us!"

     Rose flew along the bookcases, rising onto her toes, then dropping to search the lower shelves. There were so many books, so very many....

     "Memsaab?" Njeri said.

     Rose turned. When she saw the manual in the brown hands, she cried, "Yes, that's it! Grace's book! Bring it over here, into the light."

     It was the fourth edition of
When
You
Must Be the Doctor
, published back in 1936, still crisp from having never been looked through, and yellowed and dusty from neglect. Rose ran her finger down the table of contents. "Here," she said, tapping the page. " 'Wound Infections.' 'Fevers.' 'How To Take Care of a Seriously Ill Person.'"

     She pulled a pad of paper and a pen from the drawer and began writing.

     NJERI TREMBLED WITH fear as a short while later she and her mistress stood on the threshold of the kitchen door, facing the darkness. Like most Kikuyu, the girl had an instinctive fear of the night.

     This time their arms were loaded with carefully packed bundles, made up from a list gotten from the manual. Rose had found a thermometer and aspirin in her bathroom cabinet, and sugar, baking soda, and salt in the kitchen, to which she had added Vaseline, cotton balls, a watch with a second hand, three thermoses of boiled water, and two flashlights—all recommended in Grace's manual.

     Looking across the garden at the black wall of forest, where the kitchen light ended, Rose was overcome with dread. Then she thought of General Nobili lying on the cold stone floor of the greenhouse, and her resolve came back.

     "Let's go," she whispered, and started down the steps.

     She looked back. Njeri stood frozen.

     "I said come along!"

     The girl stayed close behind her mistress as they hurried down the path. "Pray that he is still alive, Njeri," Rose whispered as they plunged into the trees. "Pray that we are not too late."

     They ran through the forest, with unseen ghosts and imagined ani-mals
snapping at their heels, and arrived at the greenhouse shaking with fear and cold. Rose went straight to the general and found that he was still alive.

     While Njeri held the flashlight, which trembled in her hands so that its beam quivered over the unconscious man, Rose opened the manual to the page headed "How to Examine a Sick Person" and went through a methodical check of his vital signs.

     Because his pulse was weak and thready, and his skin damp, indicating that he was in shock, Rose turned him onto his side and elevated his feet with bricks. His respirations were a reassuring sixteen per minute, and when she lifted his eyelids and shone a light in them, she found his pupils equal in size and reactive to the light—good indications, according to Grace's book. But his temperature was too high.

     So Rose, following the instructions in the book, turned to the page headed "Very High Fevers" and read: "Brain damage can result if a high fever is not brought down immediately."

     She pulled the blanket off him, as the book instructed, so that the night air could cool his body; then she poured a cup of water and dissolved two aspirin tablets in it. Lifting the general's head in the crook of her arm, she put the cup to his lips. He didn't drink. She tried again. The aspirin was necessary to bring the fever down.

     She turned to the book for help and read in bold print: "NEVER GIVE ANYTHING BY MOUTH TO AN UNCONSCIOUS PERSON."

     Rose set the cup aside and settled the general's head back on the pillow. She continued to read. Under the heading "Danger Signals" she found "A day without drinking liquids—see page 89." She turned to that page and read, in the unsteady beam of Njeri's flashlight, about the dangers of dehydration.

     Rose looked at her watch. She estimated that he had been unconscious for twelve hours. "He must have fluids soon," she murmured, "or he will die of dehydration. But what can I do? I can't get him to drink. He needs the water, and he needs the aspirin to bring the fever down. It's a vicious circle!"

     She gazed down at the face bathed in the glow of the flashlight. She wondered how old he was, where he came from, if he had a family who was worrying about him.

     Njeri's teeth began to chatter.

     "Go back to the house," Rose said. "I'll stay with him."

     But Njeri crossed her legs and sat down on the floor, the flashlight cradled in her skirt.

     "If I send for medical help," Rose said softly, "then he will be returned to the camp. But if I try to take care of him by myself, he might die. What shall I do?"

     She felt his forehead again. It seemed cooler and drier than before. She searched for his pulse and thought that it had slowed a little, felt stronger. His breathing, too, appeared to be easier now.

     "Njeri, give me that basket." Rose mixed a rehydration drink according to the recipe in Grace's manual: sugar, salt, and baking soda into clean water. She tasted it to make sure it was "no saltier than tears," as Grace had written, then set it next to the cup with the dissolved aspirin, in readiness. If he regained consciousness, she would give him both to drink.

     But if the general did not regain consciousness by dawn, Rose decided, then she would go for help.

     SUNRISE BROKE OVER the top of the stone walls of the greenhouse, sending pinpoints of light through the overhanging eucalyptus branches. Rose stirred in her blanket, aching from having slept on the floor. She raised up and searched for Njeri in the milky light. It appeared that her maid, now that it was day, had left.

     Rose looked at the stranger. His eyes were open. He was staring at her. They watched each other for a long moment, Rose wrapped in her blanket, the general lying on his side facing her, his head on the pillow.

     Remembering the feel of the knife at her throat, the painful way he had twisted her arm, Rose was suddenly wary again.

     He opened his mouth. He tried to speak. But all he could do was make a dry, throaty sound.

     Rose picked up the rehydration drink and held the cup to his lips. He sipped at first. Then he drank it all down and let his head fall back to the pillow.

     "Are you in pain?" she asked gently.

     He nodded.

     She brought the second cup to his lips, the one containing aspirin, which must have been bitter, for he grimaced. But he drank all that, too, and when he rested back on the pillow, he seemed to breathe more easily. "Who—" he began.

     "I am Lady Rose Treverton. And I know that you are General Nobili."

     His dark eyes were fixed on her questioningly. Then he said, "Did I hurt you?"

     She shook her head. Her hair, having come down from its pins while she slept, tumbled over her shoulders.

     General Carlo Nobili stared at it almost in wonder. "I know who you are," he whispered. "You are one of God's angels."

     Rose smiled and laid her hand on his forehead. "Rest now. I'll bring you something to eat."

     "But where—?"

     "You're safe here. And you can trust me. I am going to take care of you and see that no harm comes to you ever again."

     The general closed his eyes, and his body relaxed.

T
HE EXPLOSION OCCURRED EXACTLY AT NOON, DURING THE
Muslim call to prayer. Extensive damage was done to the police fortress on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and five British soldiers were killed.

     "It's that bloody Menachem Begin," David Mathenge overheard his commanding officer, Geoffrey Donald, say.

     And thus began the intensive manhunt for the underground terrorist that brought David out of his cot in the middle of the night to muster with his regiment and wait in the cold and damp September night for orders from Captain Donald.

     It was coincidental that David was in Geoffrey Donald's African regiment in Palestine. When he had volunteered to join the British Army at the outbreak of war, he had not expected to be assigned to mere garrison duty but had hoped to be able to fight Hitler's racist Nazis. Nor had David expected to find himself under the command of a man he had despised for seven years.

     Ever since the day of his escape from the Nairobi jail and subsequent exile in Uganda, David Mathenge had carried a special hatred for the Trevertons and, because of his friendship with that family, also for Geoffrey Donald, a man whom David was now forced to salute.

     David had been in Palestine for four years and was by now familiar with its various fighting camps—Arab, Jewish, British. The terrorist bomb that went off in the British police fortress had to be the work of Menachem Begin's Irgun; it couldn't have been the work of the Haganah, the Zionists' secret army, David knew, because it always gave advance warnings so that people could escape. The fight was over whose homeland this mandated territory was. It seemed to David Mathenge, who, like all Kikuyu, was deeply tied to the land and understood territorial possession, that this was a
tribal
issue.

     There were the Arabs, who had lived here for centuries, being pushed off their ancestral lands by European refugees, Jews fleeing Hitler. The Jews claimed this land as their own by right of ancestral legacy. And in the middle sat the British, catering to both parties, making and breaking promises with both. It was no wonder, as far as David was concerned, that Menachem Begin, fed up with Churchill and his empty words, had turned his terrorist tactics not upon the Arabs, his natural enemy, but upon the British. That was why the police fortress outside Jerusalem had been targeted.

     David was utterly miserable.

     What had happened? Where had his life gone wrong? Four years ago, when the colonial government had launched a massive recruitment drive for the King's African Rifles, David Mathenge and thousands of other young Africans like him had eagerly joined up, believing that Hitler was going to invade Kenya and cart them away in chains. The young Africans, newly out of school, unemployed and anxious for action, had been convinced that they were marching off to fight a monstrous evil and that they were going to have the glorious opportunity to defend their country, freedom and democracy, and their way of life. Outfitted in a smart new uniform and a hat with the side brim turned up and fixed with a plume, David had paraded proudly before the eyes of his white officers, feeling like a warrior going into battle, and had left his homeland to discover that the world was a far, far bigger
place than he had ever dreamed. At the time he believed that joining the British Army was the smartest thing he had ever done.