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 but the metal pellet was slippery and heavy, she cut, 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 taller 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.
linton had collapsed with the shock of deep surgery.
C 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 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 Lourenco Marques on the deep hight 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 min 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 forever 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 Lourenq Marques for coal bunkers, despite the tovrn'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.
