Men of Men (56 page)

‘Good.’ She smiled at them tenderly, they were such an angelic pair – sometimes. ‘Good girls,’ she said, and went back towards the kitchen.

‘Where does he put it?’ Lizzie asked softly, without looking up from her reader.

‘What?’

‘His tail.’

‘Watch!’ Vicky ordered. ‘And I’ll show you.’

Napoleon, the aged yellow mongrel, was sleeping in the patch of sunlight on the verandah. He had a ridge down his back, and grey hair around his muzzle. Every few minutes a dream of rabbits and
guineafowl made his back legs gallop spasmodically and he would puff off an evil-smelling fart of excitement.

‘Bad dog!’ Vicky said loudly. ‘Napoleon, you are a bad, bad dog!’

Napoleon sprang to his feet, appalled by this unjust accusation, and wriggled his entire body ingratiatingly, while his upper lip lifted in a simpering sycophantic grin. At the same time his
long whippy tail disappeared between his legs and curled up under his belly.

‘That’s how he tucks it away. Just like Napoleon,’ Vicky announced.

‘How do you know?’

‘If you look carefully, you can see the bulge where it comes out in front of him.’

They worked on distractedly for a few seconds, then Lizzie could not restrain herself further.

‘Do you think we could see his tail?’

‘How?’

‘What if we—’ Halfway through propounding her scheme, Lizzie faltered. Even she realized that it would be impossible to modify the latrine, drilling a peephole through the back
wall, without being apprehended; and their motives could never be convincingly explained, especially not to Mama.

‘Anyway,’ Vicky quashed the plan effectively, ‘Devils are probably like fairies, they just don’t go.’

Silence fell again. Obviously relieved that nobody had followed up the original accusation, Napoleon re-composed himself to his dreams, and it seemed the project was abandoned – until
Vicky looked up with a determined gleam in her eyes.

‘We are going to ask him.’

‘But,’ stammered Lizzie, ‘but Mama forbade us to talk to him—’ She knew her protest to be unavailing; that gleam in Vicky’s eye was familiar.

T
en days after she had removed the pistol ball, Robyn came down to the guest-house with a crutch carved from mopani wood.

‘My husband made it for you,’ she told Mungo St John. ‘And you are going to use it every day from now on.’

The first day Mungo managed one halting circuit of the yard, and at the end of it he was pale and sweating. Robyn checked the leg and the stitches had all held, but the muscles of the thigh had
withered and contracted, pulling the leg an inch shorter than the other. The next morning she was there to watch him at exercise. He moved more easily.

After fifteen days she removed the last catgut stitches, and though the scar was raised and thickened, a livid purplish red, yet there was no indication of mortification. It looked as though it
had healed by first intention – the drastic use of strong antiseptic on living tissue seemed to have been justified.

After five weeks, Mungo abandoned the crutch in favour of a stout stick, and took the footpath that girded the kopje behind the Khami Mission.

Each day he walked farther and stayed out longer. It was a relief to be away from the bitter arguments with Louise which punctuated the long periods of her icy withdrawal.

He had found a viewpoint beyond the sharp northern ridge of the kopje, a natural platform and bench of dark serpentine rock under the spreading branches of a lovely old leadwood tree, where he
could sit and brood out over the gently undulating grassland to the far blue silhouette of hills that marked the site of Lobengula’s kraal.

His instinct warned him that there was an opportunity there. It was the instinct and the awareness of the cruising shark which could detect the presence of prey at distances and depths beyond
the range of other senses. His instinct had seldom failed him, and there had been a time when he had seized every opportunity with boldness, with the ruthless application of all his skills and all
his strength.

Sitting under the leadwood, his hands upon the head of the cane and his chin upon his hands, he cast his mind back to his triumphs: to the great ships that he had won and sailed to the ends of
the oceans and brought back laden with treasures, with tea and coffee and spices or holds filled with black slaves. He remembered the rich fertile lands to which he had held title, and the sweet
smell of sugar-cane fields when the harvest was being cut. He remembered piles of gold coins, carriages and beautiful horses – and women.

So many women, too many women perhaps; for they were the cause of his present low condition.

He let himself think of Louise at last. She had been a fire in his blood, which grew fiercer the more often he tried to slake it, and she had weakened him, distracted him, diverted him from his
ruthless purpose of old.

She had been the daughter of one of his overseers on Fairfields, his vast Louisiana estate. When she was sixteen years of age he had allowed her to exercise his wife’s Palamino horses;
when she was seventeen he arranged for her to move into the big house as companion and maid to his wife and when she was eighteen he had raped her.

His wife was in the next-door bedroom, suffering from one of her black headaches, and he had torn Louise’s clothes off her body, possessed by a madness that he had never known before. She
had fought him with the savagery of one of her Blackfoot Indian ancestors, but in some perverse fashion her resistance maddened him as much as the glimpses of her hard young flesh, as it was
revealed a gleaming flash at a time.

She had clawed red lines down his chest, and bitten him until he bled, but through it all she had not uttered a word or a sound, although a single scream would have brought her mistress or the
house servants running.

In the end, he had borne her down onto the thick white pelt of a polar bear in the middle of the floor, naked except for the tatters of her petticoats hanging from her long fine legs, and with
his full weight he had spread her and entered her.

Only then had she made any sound, she had gripped him with the same atavistic savagery, legs and arms encircling him, and she had whispered hoarsely, brokenly. ‘I love you, I have always
loved you, I shall always love you.’

When the armies of the North had marched against them, and his wife had fled with the children to her native France, Louise had stayed with him. When she could she had been in the field with
him, and when she could not she had waited for him, filling in the days and most of the nights nursing the wounded at the Confederate Hospital in Galveston, and there she had nursed him when he was
brought in half-blinded and terribly hurt from the battlefield.

She had been with him when he went back to Fairfields for the last time, and shared his desolation at the burnt fields and ruined buildings, and she had been at his side ever since. Perhaps if
she had not, things would have been different now, for she had weakened him; she had dulled the edge of his resolve.

So many times he had smelled out the opportunities – the chances for the coup which would restore it all, and each time she had caused him to waver.

‘I could never respect you again,’ she had said once. ‘Not if you did that.’

‘I never suspected you were capable of that, Mungo. It’s wrong, morally wrong.’

Gradually it had changed, until sometimes, after another abortive attempt to restore his fortunes, she would look at him with a coldness – a kind of icy contempt.

‘Why do you not leave me?’ he had challenged her then.

‘Because I love you,’ she had replied. ‘And, oh, sometimes how I wish I did not.’

In Perth, when he had forced her to bait the trap for him, luring in the intended victim – she had for the first time rebelled. She herself had ridden to warn the man, and they had been
forced to run again, shipping out on a little trading schooner only an hour or so ahead of the constables with the warrant for Mungo’s arrest.

He had never trusted her again, although he had never been able to make the decision to desert her. He found that he needed her still. At Cape Town a letter had finally caught up with Mungo. It
was one of five copies sent out by his brother-in-law, the Duc de Montijo, a copy to each of the addresses that Mungo had occupied in the years since his wife had left him. Solange, his wife, had
taken a chill while out riding and had died five days later of pneumonia. Her children were in the care of the Duc, being educated with his own, and the Duc hinted that he would resist any attempt
by Mungo St John to assume custody.

At last Mungo was free to make good his promise to Louise, the solemn promise he had made to her as they knelt hand in hand before the altar in London’s church of St Martin-in-the-Fields.
He had sworn in the sight of God that just as soon as he was able to do so, he would marry Louise.

Mungo had read through his brother-in-law’s letter three times, and then held it in the flame of the candle. He had crushed the ashes to powder, and never mentioned the letter or its news
to Louise. She had gone on believing that he was married, and their relationship had limped on, sickening and staling.

Yet still she could influence him even when she was not physically present. At the dark crossroads south of Kimberley, even when he had seen the diamonds gleam in Hendrick Naaiman’s hands,
he had not been able to banish Louise’s image from his mind: Louise with contempt in her eyes and cold accusation on her lovely lips.

Expert marksman that he was, the shade of Louise had spoiled his aim. He had fired a wink too late, and a touch too wide. He had not killed the Bastaard, but if he had done so, Louise’s
reaction could have been no more severe.

When he rode back to where she waited, reeling in the saddle, the wounded stallion dragging under him, he had seen her face in the moonlight. Even though she caught him when he might have
fallen, and though she had tended his wounds and gone for succour, he had realized that they had crossed a dividing line over which there was no return.

As if to confirm it, he had seen Zouga Ballantyne staring at her in the lantern light with that unmistakable look in his eyes. Many men had looked at her like that over the years, but this time
she had returned Zouga’s scrutiny openly, making no attempt to hide it from either man.

On the long road northwards, as she walked beside the cart in which he lay wounded, he had challenged her again and she had not denied it.

‘ – At least Zouga Ballantyne is a man of honour.’

‘Then why do you not leave me?’

‘You know I cannot leave you now, not as you are—’ She left it unfinished, and they had not spoken of it again, though in her icy silences he had sensed the presence in her
mind of the other man, and he knew that no matter how desperately unhappy a woman might be she will seldom leave a relationship until she has the prospect of something better to replace it. Louise
had that prospect now, and they were both aware of it.

He wondered if he would let Louise go if she finally made the decision. There had been a time not long ago when he would have killed her first; but since they had reached Khami, everything had
begun altering even more swiftly. They were rushing towards some climax, and Mungo had sensed that it would be explosive.

For Mungo had forgotten the magnetism that Robyn Ballantyne had once exerted upon him, but now he had been vividly reminded by the mature woman, Robyn Codrington. She was even more attractive to
him now than she had been as a girl. He sensed that her strength and assurance would provide a secure port for a man tired to his guts and the marrow of his bones by the storms of life.

He knew that she was the trusted confidante of the Matabele king, and that if his fortune awaited him here in the north, as he had come to suspect, then her intercession with the Matabele would
be invaluable.

There was something else, some other darker need within him. Mungo St John never forgave or forgot an injury. Clinton Codrington had commanded the Royal Naval cruiser which had seized
Huron
off the Cape of Good Hope, an action which seemed to Mungo to mark the beginning of his long decline, and herald his dogged misfortune. Codrington was vulnerable. Through this woman
Mungo could be avenged, and the prospect was strangely compelling.

He sighed and shook his head, roused himself and used the stick to push himself erect. He found himself confronted by the two small figures. Mungo St John liked all women of whatever age, and
though he had not seen his own children in many years, the youngest would be about the same age as these two.

They were pretty little things. Though he had seen them only fleetingly or at a distance, he had felt the stirring of his paternal instincts; and now their presence was a welcome relief from his
dark thoughts, and from the loneliness of the past weeks.

‘Good afternoon, ladies.’ He smiled, and bowed as low as his leg would allow. His smile was irresistible, and some of the rigidity went out of the two small bodies, but their
expressions remained pale and fixed; their eyes, huge with trepidation, were fastened upon the fly of his breeches, so that after a few seconds silence even Mungo St John felt disconcerted, and he
shifted uncomfortably.

‘What service can I be to you?’ he asked.

‘We would like to see your tail, sir.’

‘Ah!’ Mungo knew never to show himself at a loss in front of a female, of no matter what age. ‘You aren’t supposed to know about that,’ he said. ‘Are you,
now?’

They shook their heads in unison, but their eyes remained fixed with fascination below his waist. Vicky was right, there was definitely something there.

‘Who told you about it?’ Mungo sat down again, bringing his eyes to the level of theirs, and their disappointment was evident.

‘Mama said you were the Devil – and we know the Devil has a tail.’

‘I see.’ Mungo nodded. With a huge effort, he fought back his laughter, and kept his expression serious, his tone conspiratorial.

‘You are the only ones that know,’ he told them. ‘You won’t tell anybody, will you?’ Quite suddenly Mungo realized the value of having allies at Khami, two pairs of
sharp bright eyes that saw everything and long ears that heard all.