Men of Men (55 page)

She lay beside Clinton in the darkness and ran through a mental list of her preparations for the morrow, and set her mind on the procedures she must adopt. Firstly she must re-open and find the
source of the mortification. She moved and Clinton stirred beside her and muttered in his sleep. She froze and waited for him to settle.

The distraction altered the direction of her thoughts, and she found she was thinking about the man and not the patient. For a while she tried to prevent it, and then gave in.

She remembered him on his quarter-deck, the white linen shirt open to the throat and his chest hair curling out of the V, his head thrown back to hail the masthead, the thick dark mane of his
hair rippling in the wind.

Then suddenly she remembered that morning when she slipped out of her cabin and stepped out onto
Huron
’s main-deck. He had been under the deck pump, while two seamen worked the
handles, and clear sea water hissed over him as he stood naked under the jet. She remembered his body and the way he smiled at her without attempting to cover it from her gaze. Then abruptly she
remembered his eyes, those flecked yellow eyes above her in the gloom of the cabin, eyes like those of a leopard.

She moved again, and this time Clinton came half awake. He said her name and threw one arm across her at the level of her waist. For a while she lay quiescent under his arm and then slowly she
reached down and drew up the hem of her nightdress. She took Clinton’s wrist lightly and guided his hand downwards. She felt him come fully awake, heard his breathing change and his hand went
on without her insistence.

Long ago she had learned, painfully, that there were limits to the restraint that she could exercise over her unruly sensuality. So now she closed her eyes, relaxed her limbs and let her
imagination run unchecked.

S
he drank only a cup of the hot coffee substitute that she had concocted of roasted sorghum and wild honey – and while she did so she
composed her mind by glancing through her notes.

She always found comfort in Celsus’ injunctions, somehow the fact that they were written around the time of Christ made them more poignant.

Then there was Galen, the surgeon of the gladiators, the Roman who had stored all his experience in twenty-two volumes. Robyn had read them in the original Greek, and extracted the pearls of his
genius, which she had used with great success in treating the gladiatorial-type wounds of Lobengula’s young men. Though she had substituted alum for com, iodine for pigeon dung, and carbolic
acid for lamp black and oil in the fight against inflammation and mortification.

The kind of trauma that faced her now as she bowed over the long table in the church was much like those described by Galen, though caused by a different projectile. Mungo St John’s
hoarse, muffled breathing was the only sound in the quiet church. Robyn tested the depth of his coma by pricking his finger with a probe, and then immediately lifted the mask of plaited bamboo and
lint from his nose and mouth.

Then she listened to his breathing as it eased, and found herself examining his face as she had not been able to while he was conscious. He was still a handsome man, despite the missing eye and
marks of pain and of advancing age etched into his face. Louise St John had borrowed Clinton’s straight razor the previous day. Mungo St John was clean-shaven now, and suddenly she realized
that the new lines in his face and the silver wings above his temples accentuated the power of the man, while at the same time the relaxation of his mouth gave him a childlike innocence which made
the breath catch in her throat.

Clinton looked across at her, and she turned her face away quickly before he could see her expression.

‘Are you ready, madam?’ Robyn made her voice cold and businesslike, and Louise nodded. She was very pale, the fine freckles standing out in sharp contrast on her cheeks and the
bridge of her nose.

Still Robyn hesitated. She knew that she was squandering the moments during which the chloroform was having its blessed effect, but she was seized by a terrible dread. For the first time in her
life she was afraid to wield the knife, and a thought transfixed her.

‘If you once love a man, can you ever cease entirely to do so?’

She dared not look again at Mungo St John’s sleeping face; she felt she must turn and run from the church.

‘Are you unwell, doctor?’ Louise St John’s concern steeled her. She would not let this woman suspect weakness in her.

The leg was painted dark yellow brown with tincture of iodine. It looked like a rotten banana. She snipped her grandfather’s stitches and the wound fell open. She saw the depth of the
ulceration, and knew from dreadful experience that a wound like this would never heal, even by second intention. Her main task was not to find the pistol ball but to repair this damage.

She went in deeper, down past the thick pulsing snake of the femoral artery, down to the bone, the bared femur, and again she felt her spirits quail. The bone was malformed, yellow and
cheesy.

She guessed at the cause, this was where the pistol ball had struck and been deflected away. It had struck a long splinter of bone off the femur, and she picked something out of the dead
stinking tissue with the forceps and held it up to the light from the window.

It was a flake of black lead. She dropped it into the bucket under the table and bent once more over the open chasm in Mungo’s flesh. There was hardly any blood, a few drops only from the
stitches, and the rest of it was slimy yellow matter smelling like a corpse.

She knew the risks of attempting to remove this decomposing tissue surgically; she had tried it before – and killed in the process. It was drastic treatment which only a very strong man
could survive, yet if she closed up, the macabre spectre of gangrene lurked close at hand.

She took up the scraper and it rasped over the exposed bone of the femur. Stinking pus welled up from out of the bone itself. Osteomyelitis, the mortification of the bony tissue. She worked at
it grimly, the scraper was the only sound in the room until Louise St John choked.

‘Madam, if you are going to throw up – please leave,’ Robyn told her, without looking up.

‘I shall be all right,’ Louise whispered.

‘Then use the swab as I instructed you,’ Robyn snapped.

The rotten bone came away, curling off the blade in little yellow whorls like wood shavings from the carpenter’s plane, until Robyn reached the porous core – and at last clean bright
blood came up through it like wine from a sea sponge that had been squeezed, and the bone around the hole was hard and white as china.

Robyn sighed with relief, and at the same moment Mungo groaned and would have twitched the leg if Clinton had not been holding it at the ankle. Swiftly Robyn replaced the little bamboo basket
over his nose and mouth then let a few drops of chloroform fall on the lint covering.

She cut away the rotten ulcerations, working perilously close to the artery and the white cord of the femoral nerve. She found more pockets of sepsis around the sutures with which her
grandfather had closed the blood vessels. She cleaned these out and carefully cut away dead tissue.

There was blood now, plenty of it, but clean bright blood. Robyn had reached the most critical stage of the reparative surgery. She knew that there was still infection amongst the healthy tissue
and as soon as she closed the wound it would blossom again.

She had mixed the antiseptic the night before, one part of carbolic acid to one hundred parts of rainwater. With this she washed out the open pit in Mungo’s leg, and the astringent action
of the mixture dried up the weeping blood from the vessels too small to tie off.

She could come out now, and sew up. She had left foreign bodies in before, and often they stabilized and became encysted, causing the patient little further discomfort, but instinct warned her
not to do so this time.

She glanced at Clinton’s big silver hunter watch, which he had placed beside her instrument case where she could see it readily. She had been in for twenty-five minutes, and experience had
taught her that the longer she stayed in the greater the danger of primary or secondary collapse.

She looked up at Louise St John. She was still very pale, but the sweat of nausea had dried on her forehead. She had grit, Robyn conceded grudgingly, and that was one thing she could admire
– much more than her exotic beauty.

‘Madam, I am about to go after the ball now,’ she said. ‘I shall only have time for one attempt.’

She knew from Lister’s writing and her own observation how risky it was to use her bare hands in a wound – but that risk was preferable to leading with a sharp instrument into the
nest of veins, arteries and nerves in the groin.

She had guessed the location of the ball by the restricted movement of the femur within its pelvic socket, and by the focus of intense pain when she had palpated the area while Mungo was
conscious. She probed with her forefinger, boldly up into the tissue above the raw scraped area of the bone. The direction of the shot, from ahead and upwards, must be on this line.

She met resistance and tried again, and then again. Suddenly her finger slid into a narrow canal in the hot meat of his thigh, right in to its full length, and then at the very limit of her
reach she touched something hard. It could have been the head of the femur or the lower ridge of pelvic bone – but she took up the scalpel.

A fine needle jet of blood from a severed blood vessel sprayed her cheek and forehead before she could twist it closed, and she could hear Louise gagging again, but her hands with the swab
barely shook as she wiped away the blood so that Robyn could cut again – and there was a rush of thick creamy yellow matter out of the cut like a dam burst by muddy flood waters. In the flood
were little chips and fragments of shattered metal, rotting threads of woollen cloth and other detritus.

‘Praise God!’ whispered Robyn, and brought her hand out, dripping with the reeking yellow discharge, but with the distorted, misshapen lump of bluish lead held firmly between thumb
and forefinger.

T
he twins had long ago discovered the literary treasure trove that Robyn kept in the locked cupboard against the far wall of her bedroom. Of
course, they could only visit it when their parents and elder sisters were fully occupied elsewhere – for instance when King Ben had summoned them to GuBulawayo and Salina was cooking and
Cathy was painting or reading.

Then they could sneak into the bedroom and push the chair against the wall so that Vicky standing on Lizzie’s shoulders could reach the key.

There were more than fifty books in the cupboard. The great majority unfortunately contained no illustrations. These had proved unrewarding, as the twins’ efforts at deciphering the text
had been shipwrecked on too many rock-hard words; at other times, just when it was becoming intensely interesting, they would encounter a solid slab of foreign language which they suspected was
either Latin or Greek.

The twins avoided these tomes, but the ones with pictures were a forbidden delight, greatly enhanced by danger and guilt. There was even one that had drawings of the inside of women, with and
without a baby
in situ
, and another of the baby in the process of emerging.

However, their perennial favourite was the one they called ‘The Devil Book’ – for there was an illustration on each facing page vivid, lifelike and explicit, of souls in
torment and the devils who attended them. The artist who had interpreted this edition of Dante’s
Inferno
had dwelt ghoulishly on decapitation and disembowelment, on red-hot irons and
hooks, lolling tongues and bulging eyes. Even the briefest stolen perusal of this masterpiece was enough to ensure that the twins would spend most of the following night clinging together in their
bed, shivering with delicious terror.

However, this particular visit to the forbidden cupboard was in the interest of scientific research, otherwise they would never have taken the risk while Robyn Ballantyne was actually at Khami
Mission.

They chose the time of morning clinic when Mama would certainly be in the church attending her patients, when Daddy would be mucking out the sties, and Salina and Cathy at their chores.

The raid went with the precision of repeated rehearsal. They left their open readers on the dining-room table, and were down the verandah and had the key within the time it takes to draw a long
breath.

Lizzie took guard at the window from where she could cover kitchen, the church and the pigsties – while Vicky got the cupboard open and the ‘Devil Book’ out and open at the
correct page.

‘See!’ she whispered. ‘I told you so.’

There he was – Satan, Lucifer, King of the Underworld – and Vicky had been right. He did not have horns. All the lesser demons had horns, but not the Devil, not the very Devil
himself. What he did have was a tail, a magnificent tail with a point like the blade of a Matabele assegai upon the end of it.

‘He’s got a beard in this picture,’ Lizzie pointed out, reluctant to abandon her position.

‘He probably shaved it off – to fool us,’ Vicky told her. ‘Now look!’ She took a pin out of her hair and used the black round tip to cover one of Lucifer’s
eyes. Immediately the resemblance was undeniable, the thick dark curls, the broad forehead, the beaked nose and the piercing eye under arched brow, and the smile, the same satanically mocking
smile.

Lizzie shuddered luxuriously. Vicky was right, it was him all right.

‘Kitty Cat!’ Vicky hissed a warning. Salina was coming out of the kitchen, and they had the book back on its shelf, the cupboard locked, the key back in its hiding-place, and were
once more seated at the table poring over their readers by the time that Salina had crossed the yard and looked in upon them.