"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.
Ten 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 Sint 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 Palarnino 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.