The Angels Weep b-3

by Wilbur Smith

"Damn you, girl," Mungo shouted at her, "what has happened?" At his tone the tears that Elizabeth had been holding back broke with a sob and streamed down her cheeks. "She has changed it must be the girl's blood she is burning up with the girl's blood." "Pull yourself together." Mungo shook her again. "Come on, Lizzie, this isn't like you." Elizabeth gulped once, and then her voice steadied. "She injected blood from a fever patient into herself." "From a black girl?

  In God's name, why?" Mungo demanded, but did not wait for her reply.

  He left Elizabeth and ran up onto the veranda, and burst in through the door to Robyn's bedroom, but he stopped before he reached the bed.

  In the small closed room, the stink of fever was as rank as that of a sty, and the heat from the body in the narrow cot had condensed on the glass of the single window like steam from a kettle of boiling water. Crouched beside the cot like a puppy at its master's feet was Mungo's son. Robert looked up at his father with huge solemn eyes, and his mouth twisted in the thin pale face.

  "Son!" Mungo took another step towards the cot, but the child leaped to his feet and silently he darted for the door, ducking nimbly under Mungo's outstretched hand, and his bare feet slapped on the veranda as he raced away. For a moment Mungo yearned after him, and then he shook his head and instead he went to the cot. He stood over it and looked down at the still figure upon it.

  Robyn had wasted until the bones of her skull seemed to rise through the pale flesh of her cheeks and forehead. Her eyes were closed, and sunk into deep leaden-purple sockets. Her hair, laced with silver at the temples, seemed dry and brittle as the winter grasses of the parched veld, and as he leaned to touch her forehead, a paroxysm of shivering took her that rattled the iron bedstead and her teeth chattered so violently that it seemed they must shatter like porcelain.

  Under Mungo's fingers her skin was almost painfully hot to the touch, and he looked up sharply at Elizabeth who stood beside him with a stricken expression.

  "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 ammonia cal 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 Robin's nightdress were tucked 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 Jame son'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 intern
al 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 after a 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 Kharni 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 ri
pped 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.