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 Sint 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.
The 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 ones, 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 inside, 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 xwhen Mama would certainly be in the church clinic 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.'
