The Angels Weep (17 page)

‘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 been 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.’

‘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:

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.’

J
uba 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.

R
obyn’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.