chested; her hair had the same dark brown colouring, though shot through with tones of russet and chestnut, her skin the same youthful lustre, and her nose and chin the same forceful size and thrust.
Then as she came closer, Ralph realized that he had been mistaken and that she was older than Cathy, perhaps even older than Salina, but not much.
'Hello, Ralph,' the girl said. 'I'm your Aunt Robyn.'
Ralph felt the blasphemy of surprise leap to his lips again, conscious of Salina's hand in his he suppressed it.
'You are so young,' he said instead.
'Bless you for that,' she laughed. 'You turn a prettier compliment than your daddy ever did.' She was the only one who made no effort to kiss him; instead she turned to the twins.
'Right!' she said. 'I want ten pages of copperplate written out before Evensong, and I don't want to see a single blot., 'Oh Mama!
Ralph 'Ralph has been your excuse for two weeks. Go, or you will eat in the kitchen hut tonight.'
Then, to Cathy: 'Have you finished the ironing, young lady?'
'Not yet, Mama.' Cathy followed the twins 'Salina, your baking.'
'Yes, Mama.'
Then there were three of them alone in the little church, and Robyn ran a professional eye over her nephew.
'Well, Zouga has bred a likely boy,' she gave her opinion. 'But I never expected anything else.'
'How did you all know I was coming?' Ralph voiced his bewilderment at last.
'Grandpa Moffat sent a runner when you left Kuruman, and Induna Gandang passed here two weeks ago on his way to King Lobengula's kraal.
His eldest son was with him, and Bazo's mother is an old friend of mine.'
'I see.'
'Nothing moves in Matabeleland but the whole nation knows of it immediately,' Clinton explained.
'Now, Ralph, how is your father? I was terribly distressed to hear of the death of Aletta, your mother. She was a lovely person, so good and gentle. I wrote to Zouga, but he never replied.'
Robyn seemed determined to catch up on the doings of a decade in the first ten minutes, and her questions were quick and incisive; but Clinton soon excused himself and left the two of them alone in the little church to return to his gardens.
Ralph replied dutifully to all her questions, while he reassessed his first impression of his aunt. Youthful she looked, but childlike she was not. Now at last he could understand the remarkable achievements of this forceful woman. How she had enrolled at a famous London hospital, one which would never accept a female on its student body, by impersonating a man. Dressed in breeches, she had kept her terms and been granted her doctorate when she was twenty-one years of age. The scandal which attended the discovery that a female had invaded an exclusive male preserve had rocked all England.
Then she had accompanied Zouga to Africa, equal partners in the expedition to find their father Fuller Ballantyne, who had been missing in the unexplored interior for eight years. When she and Zouga had fallen out over the conduct of the expedition, she had pushed on, a white woman alone with only primitive black tribesmen as companions, and achieved the main object of the expedition on her own.
Her book describing the expedition, entitled Africa in My Blood, had been a publishing phenomenon and had sold almost a quarter of a million copies, three times as many as Zouga Ballantyne's A Hunter's Odyssey published six months later.
Robyn had signed over all her royalties from the book to The London Missionary Society, and that august body had been so delighted by the donation that they had reinstated her as a society officer, had ordained her husband as her assistant, and had approved her heading a mission to Matabeleland.
Her two subsequent publications had not enjoyed the same success as the first. The Sick African, a practical study of tropical medicine, had contained ludicrous theories that had earned her the derision of her medical peers she had even dared to suggest that malarial fever was not caused by breathing the foul night airs of tropical swamps, when this fact had been known since the time of Hippocrates.
Then her further account of her life as a medical missionary, Blind Faith, had been too homely in style and too prejudiced in championing the indigenous tribes.
She had firmly embraced the beliefs of lean-Jacques Rousseau and had added her own refinements to them. Her round condemnation of all settlers, hunters, prospectors and traders, and of their treatment of the noble savages, had been too salty for her European readers.
Indeed, scandal and contention seemed to follow Robyn Codrington as vultures and jackals follow the lion, and at each new provocation all her previous adventures would be recalled: What decent female missionary would provoke men sufficiently to make them fight a bloody duel over her?
Robyn Ballantyne had.
What God-fearing lady would sail aboard a notorious slaver, unchaperoned and with only slavers for company?
Robyn Ballantyne had.
What lady would choose for husband a man who had been court-martialled, stripped of his naval rank and imprisoned for piracy and dereliction of duty? Robyn Codrington had.
What loyal subject of the Queen would hail the terrible reversal of British arms at Isandhlwana, the bloody death of hundreds of Englishmen at the hands of the savage Zulus, as a judgement of God, Robyn Codrington had, in a letter to the Evening Standard.
