by Wilbur Smith
The excitement quickened her breathing. From the angle at which Clinton had stood, half-turned away from Mungo St John, she now believed that it was possible that the ball had followed a different path from that which she had assumed.
If the pistol had been undercharged with powder, and if the ball had struck the trigger guard, it was just possible that it had not had the velocity to penetrate the rib cage, it had been turned by the bone and ploughed along under the skin, skidding along the groove between two ribs following the track that she had just probed, and lodging at last in the thick bed of the latissimus dorsi and tenes major muscle.
She stood back from the bunk. She could be very wrong, she realized, but if she was he would die anyway, and that very soon.
‘I will cut for it,’ she decided, the decision direct and swift. She glanced up at the skylight in the roof of the cabin. There was only an hour or two of good daylight left.
‘Zouga!’ she called as she raced from the cabin. ‘Zouga! Come quickly!’
Robyn administered another five grams of laudanum before they moved Clinton. It was as large a dose as she dared, for he had taken nearly fifteen grams in the preceding thirty-six hours. She waited as long as she could in the failing light for the drug to begin taking effect. Then she passed the word to Lieutenant Denham to shorten sail, reduce engine revolutions and make the ship’s motion as easy as possible.
Zouga had chosen two seamen to assist them. One was the boatswain, a burly and greying sailor, the other was the officers’ steward who had impressed Robyn with his quiet, controlled manner.
Now as the three of them half-lifted Clinton and rolled him on to his side, the steward spread a sheet of fresh white canvas on the bunk under him to receive the spilled blood, then Zouga swiftly knotted the lengths of soft cotton rope around Clinton’s wrists and ankles. He had chosen cotton in preference to the coarse hemp which would tear the skin, and he made the bowline knots that would not slip under pressure.
The boatswain helped him to tie down the ends at the head and foot of the bunk, stretching out the almost naked white body so that for an instant it reminded Robyn of the painting of the crucifixion that stood in Uncle William’s study at King’s Lynn – the Roman legionaries spread-eagling Christ upon the cross before driving home the nails. She shook her head irritably, driving the memory from her mind, concentrating all her attention on the task ahead.
‘Wash your hands!’ she ordered Zouga, indicating the bucket of almost boiling water and yellow lye soap the steward had provided.
‘Why?’
‘Do it,’ she snapped, in no mood to argue. Her own hands were pink with the heat of the water and tingled with the harsh soap, as she wiped her instruments with the cloth dipped in a mug of the pungent ship’s rum, laying them out on the shelf above the bunk, and then with the same cloth swabbed the hot discoloured flesh at the base of Clinton’s shoulder blade. He jerked against his bonds and muttered an incoherent protest, but she ignored it and nodded to the boatswain.
He seized Clinton’s head, drawing it back slightly, and thrust a thick pad of felt, a piece of wadding for the main-deck cannon, between his teeth, holding it in place.
‘Zouga!’
He took Clinton’s shoulders and locked them in his powerful fingers, preventing Clinton from rolling on to his belly.
‘Good.’
Robyn took one of the razor-sharp scalpels from the shelf, and then with the forefinger of her other hand probed brutally down to where she had felt that hard foreign body.
Clinton’s back arched and he let out a shattering cry that was muffled by the wadding, but Robyn felt it clearly this time, hard and unyielding in the swollen flesh.
She cut swiftly, without hesitation, opening the skin cleanly, following the direction of the muscle fibre beneath, dissecting down through layer after layer of muscle, separating the bluish membrane capsules that covered each of the muscles with the hilt of the scalpel, probing deeper and deeper with her fingers towards that elusive lump in the flesh.
Clinton writhed and heaved at his bonds, his breathing rasping in the back of his throat, his teeth locked into the felt wadding in a fierce rictus so that cords of muscle stood out along his jawline and white spittle frothed upon his lips.
His wild lunges made her task that much more difficult, and her fingers were slippery with blood in his hot flesh, but she found the rubbery pulsing snake of the lateral thoracic artery and worked past it gently, pinching off the smaller spurting blood vessels with the forceps, and tying them with a loop of catgut, torn between the need for speed and the danger of doing greater damage.
Finally she had to use the blade again, and she reversed the scalpel and paused a moment to locate the lump with the tip of her forefinger.
She could feel the sweat sliding down her cheek, and she was aware of the strained tense faces of the men who held Clinton as they watched her work.
She guided the scalpel down into the open wound, and then cut down firmly and a sudden bright yellow fountain spouted up through her fingers, and the cloying stomach-twisting stench of corruption that filled the hot little cabin made her gasp.
That sharp rush of pus lasted only a second, and then there was something black and sodden blocking the wound. She picked it out with the forceps, releasing another lesser welling up of the thick custardy matter.
‘The wad,’ Zouga grunted with the effort of holding down the struggling naked body. They all stared at the soft rotten object in the teeth of her forceps.
The patch of cloth had been carried deeply into the flesh by the passage of the ball, and Robyn felt a surging lift of relief – she had been right.
Quickly she went back to work, running her finger into the tunnel cut by the ball until she felt it with her fingertip.
‘There it is!’ She spoke for the first time since she had cut, but the metal pellet was slippery and heavy, she could not prise it loose and she had to cut again and then lock the teeth of the pair of bone forceps over it. It came out with reluctant suck of clinging tissue, and she dropped it impatiently on the shelf. It made a heavy clunk against the wood. There was a temptation to come out immediately, to sew up and bind up – but she resisted it and took an extra ten seconds to probe the wound thoroughly. She was almost immediately justified, there was another rotting and stinking tatter of cloth in the wound track.
‘A piece of the shirt.’ She identified the white shreds, and Zouga’s face mirrored his disgust. ‘Now we can come out,’ Robyn went on complacently.
She left a bristle in the wound to allow the remaining pus to drain off. It stuck out stiffly between the stitches with which she closed up.
When she stood back at last she was smugly satisfied with her work. There had been nobody at St Matthew’s who could lay down stitches so neatly and regularly, not even the senior surgeons could match her.
Clinton had collapsed with the shock of deep surgery. His body was wet and slick with his sweat, and the skin at his wrists and ankles had been smeared away where he had fought against his bonds.
‘Let him loose,’ she said softly. She felt a vast pride, almost of ownership, in him now, as though he were her special creation, for she had dragged him back almost bodily from the abyss. Pride was a sin, she knew, but it did not make the sensation any the less agreeable, and in the circumstances, she decided, she had earned the pleasure of a little sin.
Clinton’s recovery was almost miraculous. By the next morning he was fully conscious, and the fever had abated to leave him pale and shaky, with just enough strength to argue bitterly when she had him carried up into the sunshine and laid behind the canvas wind shelter that the carpenter had rigged under the poop.
‘Cold air is bad for gunshot wounds, everybody knows that.’
‘And I suppose I should bleed you before closing you up in that hot little hell hole you call a cabin,’ Robyn asked tartly.
‘A navy surgeon would do so,’ he muttered.
‘Then thank your Maker that I am
not one.’
On the second day he was sitting up unaided and eating voraciously, by the third he was managing the ship from his litter, and on the fourth day he was on his quarterdeck once more, although his arm was in a sling and he was still pale and gaunt where the fever had wasted away the flesh from his face, but strong enough to keep on his feet for an hour at a time before resorting to the rope chair the carpenter had rigged at the rail. That day Robyn withdrew the bristle from the wound and was relieved at the tiny quantity of benign pus that followed it out. They watched the little town of Port Natal come up ahead of them, the primitive buildings huddled under the whale-backed mountain they called the Bluff like chickens under the wing of the hen. Black Joke did not call, even though this was the furthest outpost of the British Empire on this coast, but steamed on briskly into the north, each day becoming perceptively warmer with the sun standing higher at noon and the sea changing to the darker azure of the tropics beneath Black Joke’s bows, and once again the flying fish sported ahead of them on filmy silver wings.
The evening before they reached the Portuguese settlement of Lourenc¸o Marques on the deep bight of Delagoa Bay, Robyn dressed the stitches in Clinton’s side, making small cooing and clucking sounds of satisfaction and approval as she saw how cleanly they were healing.
When she helped him into his shirt and then buttoned it for him, like a mother dressing her child, he told her gravely, ‘I am aware you have saved my life.’
‘Even though you do not approve of my methods?’ she asked with a twinkle of a smile.
‘I ask your forgiveness for my impertinence.’ He dropped his eyes. ‘You have proved yourself to be a brilliant physician.’
She made a modest murmur of denial, but when he insisted, ‘No, I truly mean that. I think you are gifted,’ Robyn protested no further, but moved slightly to make it easier for him to reach her with his good arm, but his declaration of faith in her skills seemed to have exhausted his courage for the moment.
That evening she vented some of her frustration by confiding to her journal that, ‘Captain Codrington is clearly a man that can be trusted by a woman, in any circumstances – though a little more boldness would make him a great deal more attractive.’
She was about to close the journal and lock it away in her chest, when another thought occurred to her, and she thumbed back through the preceding pages each crammed with her small neat script, until she reached the single sheet that had become a milestone in her life. The entry for the day before Huron reached Cape Town she had left blank. What words were there to describe it? Each moment of it would be engraved for ever on her memory. She stared for many minutes at the empty sheet, and then she made a silent calculation, subtracting one date from another. When she had the answer she felt a chill of foreboding, and went over the calculation again, reaching the same answer.
She closed the journal slowly and stared at the lantern flame.
She had missed her lunar courses by almost a week, and with a prickle of dread lilting the fine hair at the nape of her neck she laid her hand upon her own belly as if there was something to feel there like the pistol ball in Clinton’s flesh.
Black Joke called at Lourenc¸o Marques for coal bunkers, despite the town’s notoriety as a fever port. The swamps and mangroves that half-circled the town to the southwards spread the miasmic airs across the port.
Although Robyn had only very limited first-hand experience of the peculiar fevers of Africa, she had made a close study of all the writings on the subject – the most notable of these being probably those of her own father. Fuller Ballantyne had written a long paper for the British Medical Association, in which he recognized four distinct types of African fever – the recurrent fevers with a definite cycle, he divided into three categories – quotidian, tertian and quartan – by the length of the cycle. These he called the malarial fevers. The fourth type was the black vomit, or the yellow jack.
In his own unmistakable style, Fuller Ballantyne had shown that these diseases were neither contagious nor infectious. He had done so by a horrifying but courageous demonstration to a group of sceptical brother physicians at the military hospital at Algoa Bay.
While the other physicians watched, he had collected a wine glass of fresh vomit from a victim of the yellow jack. Fuller had toasted them with the awful draught and then drunk it down at a single swallow. His colleagues had waited, with a certain keen anticipation for his demise and had some difficulty in hiding their disappointment when he showed no ill effects and set off a week later to walk across Africa. Fuller Ballantyne was a man it was easier to admire than to like. The episode had become part of the legend that surrounded him.
In his writings her father insisted that the disease could only be contracted by breathing the night air of tropical areas, particularly those airs released by swamps or other large bodies of stagnant water. However, some individuals most certainly had a natural resistance to the disease, and this resistance was probably hereditary. He cited the African tribes who lived in known malarial areas, and his own family and that of his wife who had lived and worked in Africa for sixty years with only mild afflictions.
Fuller wrote of the ‘seasoning fever’ – the first of which either killed or gave partial immunity to the subject. He used the example of the high mortality rate amongst newly arrived Europeans in Africa.
He quoted the case of Nathaniel Isaacs who in 1832 left Port Natal in a party with twenty-one newly arrived white men to hunt hippopotamus in the estuary and swamps of St Lucia river. Within four weeks nineteen had perished while Isaacs and the other survivor were so wracked with the disease that they were invalids for a year thereafter.
These losses were unnecessary, Fuller Ballantyne pointed out. There was a preventative and a cure that had been known for hundreds of years though under various names, Peruvian bark, or Chinchona bark, more recently called essence of quinine when manufactured in powder form by the Quaker brothers Luke and John Howard. Taken at the dosage of five grains daily it was a highly effective preventative, for even if the disease was subsequently contracted, it was in such mild form as to be no more dangerous than a common cold and responded immediately to a more massive dose of twenty-five grains of quinine.
Of course, Robyn had heard the accusation that her father played down the dangers of the disease to further his grand design. Fuller Ballantyne had a vision of Africa settled by colonists of British stock, bringing to the savage continent the true God, and all the benefits of British justice and ingenuity. His catastrophic expedition to the Zambezi had been in pursuit of this vision, for the great river was to have been his highway to the high and healthy plateau of the interior where his Englishmen would settle, driving out the slavers, bringing the warring and godless tribes to order, and taming and cultivating the savage earth.
Part of his vision had died upon the terrible torrents and rapids of the Kaborra-Bassa gorge.
With a sneaking sensation of disloyalty Robyn admitted to herself that there was probably some shred of justification in the accusation, for she had as a child seen her father in the grip of a malarial fever brought out by the cold of an English winter. It had not seemed as mild as a common cold then. Despite this, there was no one in the medical profession who doubted that Fuller Ballantyne was probably one of the world’s leading authorities on the disease and that he had a real talent in diagnosing and treating it. So she followed his dictates faithfully, administering the daily five grains of quinine to herself, to Zouga and under protest to Captain Codrington. She had no success with Zouga’s Hottentot musketeers, however. At the first dose Jan Cheroot had begun staggering in circles, clutching his throat and rolling his eyes horribly, crying to all his Hottentot gods that he had been poisoned. Only a tot of ship’s rum saved him, but none of the other Hottentots would touch the white powder after that. Not even the thought of a tot of rum would tempt them, which was a measure of their opposition to the cure. Robyn could only hope that they possessed the resistance to the fever t
hat her father spoke of.
Her store of quinine was meant to last for the duration of the expedition, possibly as long as two years, so she had reluctantly to refrain from pressing any of it on Black Joke’s seamen. She stilled her conscience with the fact that none of them would be spending a night ashore, therefore they would not be exposed to the dangerous airs. She prevailed upon Clinton Codrington to anchor in the outer roads where the onshore breeze kept the air sweet and, as an added attraction, the distance offshore prevented the swarms of mosquitoes and other flying insects from coming on board during the night.
The first night at anchor, the sound of music, of drunken laughter and the shrill cries of women at play and at work carried across the still waters to the nine Hottentot musketeers in their corner of the forecastle, and the lights of the bordels and bars along the waterfront were as irresistible to the nine as a candle to a hawk moth. Temptation was made unbearable by the weight and heat of the golden sovereign that each of them carried in some secret place upon his person, the princely advance that Major Ballantyne had made against their salaries.
Sergeant Cheroot woke Zouga a little before midnight, his features a mask of outrage.
‘They are gone.’ He was shaking with anger.
‘Where?’ Zouga was still more asleep than awake.
‘They swim like rats,’ stormed Cheroot. ‘They all go drinking and a-whoring.’ The thought of it was insupportable. ‘We must catch them. They will burn their brains out on smoke and pox themselves—’ His rage was mixed with an equal portion of raw envy, and once they were ashore his enthusiasm for the chase was almost a frenzy. Cheroot had an unerring instinct that led him directly to the lowest dives on the waterfront.