"Wilbur Smith - Courtney 03 - Blue Horizon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Wilbur)

"What will we eat, Papa?" Louisa, like her mother, was always practical.

"Your mother is bringing down food for us from the pantries: cheese, ham, sausage, apples and potatoes. I have my little vegetable garden, and the rabbit hutch and the chickens. You will help me work in the garden. We will continue your lessons. You will make swifter progress without the duller children to hold you back. It will be like a holiday. We will enjoy ourselves. But you are not allowed to leave the garden, do you understand?" he asked her seriously, as he scratched the red flea bite on his bony wrist.

For three days they had enjoyed themselves. Then, the next morning, as Louisa was helping her mother prepare breakfast, Anne fainted over the kitchen stove and spilled boiling water down her leg. Louisa helped her father carry her up the stairs and lay her on the big bed. They

wrapped her scalded leg in bandages soaked in honey. Then Hendrick unbuttoned the front of her dress and stared in terror at the red ring of roses around her throat.

The fever descended upon her with the speed of a summer storm. Within an hour her skin was blotched with red and seemed almost too hot to touch. Louisa and Hendrick sponged her down with cold water from the lake. "Be strong, my lieveling," Hendrick whispered to her, as she tossed and groaned, and soaked the mattress with her sweat. "God will protect you."

They took turns to sit with her during the night, but in the dawn Louisa screamed for her father. When he came scrambling up the stairs Louisa pointed at her mother's naked lower body. On both sides of her groin, at the juncture of her thighs with her belly, monstrous carbuncles had swelled to the size of Louisa's clenched fist. They were hard as stones and a furious purple, like ripe plums.

The buboes!" Hendrick touched one. Anne screamed wildly in agony at his light touch, and her bowels let loose an explosion of gas and yellow diarrhoea that soaked the sheets.

Hendrick and Louisa lifted her out of the stinking bed and laid her on a clean mattress on the floor. By evening her pain was so intense and unrelenting that Hendrick could bear his wife's shrieks no longer. His blue eyes were bloodshot and haunted. "Fetch my shaving razor!" he ordered Louisa. She scurried across to the wash-basin in the corner of the bedroom, and brought it to him. It had a beautiful mother-of-pearl handle. Louisa had always enjoyed watching her father in the early mornings lathering his cheeks, then stripping off the white soapsuds with the straight, gleaming blade.

"What are you going to do, Papa?" she asked, as she watched him sharpening the edge on the leather strop.

"We must let out the poison. It is killing your mother. Hold her still!"

Gently Louisa took hold of her mother's wrists. "It's going to be all right, Mama. Papa is going to make it better."

Hendrick took off his black coat and, in his white shirt, came back to the bed. He straddled his wife's legs to hold her down. Sweat was pouring down his cheeks, and his hand shook wildly as he laid the razor edge across the huge purple swelling in her groin.

"Forgive me, O merciful God," he whispered, then pressed down and drew the blade across the carbuncle, cutting deeply and cleanly. For a moment nothing happened, then a tide of black blood and custard yellow pus erupted out of the deep wound. It splattered across the front of Hendrick's white shirt and up to the low ceiling of the bedroom above his head.

Anne's back arched like a longbow and Louisa was hurled against the wall. Hendrick cringed into a corner, stunned by the violence of his wife's contortions. Anne writhed and rolled and screamed, her face in a rictus so horrible that Louisa was terrified. She clasped both hands over her own mouth to prevent herself screaming as she watched the blood spurt in powerful, regular jets from the wound. Gradually the pulsing scarlet fountain shrivelled, and Anne's agony eased. Her screams died away, until at last she lay still and deadly pale in a spreading pool of blood.

Louisa crept back to her side and touched her arm. "Mama, it's all right now. Papa has let all the poison out. You are going to be well again soon." Then she looked across at her father. She had never seen him like this: he was weeping, and his lips were slack and blubbery. Saliva dripped from his chin.

"Don't cry, Papa," she whispered. "She will wake up soon."

But Anne never woke again.

Her father took a spade from the tool shed and went down to the bottom of the orchard. He began to dig in the soft soil under a big apple tree. It was mid-afternoon before the grave was deep enough. He came back to the house, his eyes a vacant blue like the sky above. He was racked with shivering fits. Louisa helped him wrap Anne in the blood-soaked sheet, and walked beside him as he carried his wife to the bottom of the orchard. He laid the bundle beside the open grave and climbed down into it. Then he reached up and lifted Anne down. He laid her on the damp, fungus-smelling earth, then climbed out and reached for the spade.

Louisa sobbed as she watched him fill in the grave and tamp down the earth. Then she went out into the field beyond the hedge and picked an armful of flowers. When she came back her father was no longer in the orchard. Louisa arranged the tulips over where her mother's head must be. It seemed that the well of her tears had dried up. Her sobs were painful and dry.

When she went back to the cottage she found her father sitting at the table, his shirt filthy with his wife's blood and the grave soil. His head was cupped in his hands, his shoulders racked by shivering. When he lifted his head and looked at her, his face was pale and blotched, and his teeth chattered.

"Papa, are you sick too?" She started towards him, then shrank back as he opened his mouth and a solid stream of bile-brown vomit burst

through his lips and splashed across the scrubbed wooden tabletop. Then he slumped out of his chair on to the stone-flagged floor. He was too heavy for her to lift, or even to drag up the stairs, so she tended him where he lay, cleaning away the vomit and liquid excrement, sponging him with icy lake water to bring down the fever. But she could not bring herself to take the razor to him. Two days later he died on the kitchen floor.

"I have to be brave now. I am not a baby, I'm ten years old," she told herself. "There is nobody to help me. I have to take care of Papa myself."

She went down into the orchard. The spade was lying beside her mother's grave, where her father had dropped it. She began to dig. It was hard, slow work. When the grave was deep, and her thin, childish arms did not have the strength to throw up the wet earth, she fetched an apple basket from the kitchen, filled it with earth and pulled up each basket load from the bottom of the grave with a rope. When darkness fell she worked on in the grave by lantern-light. When it was as deep as she was tall, she went back to where her father lay and tried to drag him to the door. She was exhausted, her hands were raw and blistered from the handle of the spade, and she could not move him. She spread a blanket over him to cover his pale, blotched skin and staring eyes, then lay down beside him and slept until morning.

When she woke, sunlight was streaming through the window into her eyes. She got up and cut a slice from the ham hanging in the pantry and a wedge of cheese. She ate them with a hunk of dry bread. Then she went up to the stables at the rear of the big house. She remembered that she had been forbidden to go there, so she crept down behind the hedge. The stables were deserted and she realized that the grooms must have fled with the other servants. She ducked through the secret hole in the hedge that she and Petronella had discovered. The horses were still in their stalls, unfed and unwatered. She opened the doors and shooed them out into the paddock. Immediately they galloped straight down to the lake shore and lined up along the edge to drink.