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But now that she stood beside her deathbed, they had all evaporated. All she felt was a vast sense of pity.
Come nearer, Centaine, Isabella whispered, beckoning her with another feeble flutter of her wasted hand. Talking is such an effort. Impulsively Centaine went down on her knees beside the bed so that their eyes were only inches apart. She felt a terrible need to repent for all the unhappiness she had caused and to ask for Isabella's forgiveness, but Isabella spoke first.
I told Blaine that I wanted to make my peace with you, Centaine. I told him I understood that the two of you had not been able to help falling in love, and that I realized you had tried to spare me as much as possible. I told him I knew that you were never vindictive, that although you could have taken him away, you never inflicted that final humiliation upon me, that although I was no longer a woman, you allowed me to retain the last shreds of my dignity. Centaine felt the pity flood her soul and fill her eyes. She wanted to take this frail dying creature in her arms and hold her, but something in Isabella's eyes prevented her, it was a fierce proud light and Centaine simply bowed her head and remained silent.
I told Blaine that you had filled his life with the happiness I could not give him, but despite that and because of your generosity, I was still able to keep part of him for myself., Oh, Isabella, I don't know how to tell you, I Centaine's voice choked and Isabella gestured her to silence.
She seemed to be gathering herself for some enormous effort. A faint flush of colour came back into her cheeks and the fierce light in her eyes flared up. Her breath quickened and when she spoke again her voice was stronger, harsher.
I told him all these things to persuade him to bring you here. If he had guessed what I truly intended, he would not have allowed you to come. She raised her head from the pillow and her voice became a serpent's hiss.
Now I can tell you how deeply I have hated you every waking hour of every long year, how my hatred kept me alive this long so that I could prevent you from having him as your husband, and now that I am dying that hatred is magnified a hundred times, She broke off and panted for breath, as Centaine recoiled before her glare. She realized that Isabella was a woman driven to madness by the agony she had endured, by the long corrosion of hatred and jealousy.
If a dying woman's curse has any force, Isabella spoke again, 'then I curse you, Centaine Courtney, with my last breath. May you experience the same torture you have inflicted upon me, may you know pain as I have known it.
The day you stand before the altar with my husband I will reach out to you from beyond the grave, No! Centaine stumbled to her feet, and backed towards the door. Stop it! Please, stop it! Isabella laughed, a shrill and taunting sound. I curse you, and let my curse blight your adulterous passion. I curse every minute the two of you spend together when I have gone. I curse whatever seed he places in your womb, I curse each kiss and touch, I curse you and I curse your brat. I curse all your issue. An eye for an eye, Centaine Courtney.
Heed my words, an eye for an eye! Centaine ran across the room and flung herself against the door. Throwing it open, she ran down the passage. Blaine was coming up the staircase at a run. He tried to hold her, but she tore herself from his grasp and rushed out through the front doors to where the Daimler was parked.
She had been driving for many hours, driving fast with the accelerator pressed to the floorboards, keeping the great seven-litre engine at a long sustained bellow, sending a tall pale column of dust into the sky behind her, before she consciously realized she was going back into the desert, back to the dreaming mystical hills that the little Bushmen called The Place of all Life'.
it was two months before Centaine came back out of the Kalahari Desert. For all that time she had thwarted Blaine's efforts to contact her, refusing to reply to the letters he wrote or the telephone calls he made to both Abe Abrahams and Dr Twenty-man-jones.
She read the death notices for Isabella Malcomess in the obituary columns of the newspapers which reached the H'ani Mine only weeks after publication, but they served to increase her feeling of isolation and the brooding premonition of disaster and tragedy which Isabella's death curse had left with her.
She returned to Weltevreden in the end only at Shasa's insistence.
When she arrived her hair was floury with dust from the long journey and she was darkly ta
Shasa must have received her telegram and been expecting her. He must have heard the Daimler's motor as she came up the avenue to the chateau, but he was not on the front steps to meet her, and she realized why when she went into her study. He turned from the window from where he had watched her arrival and now he crossed the room to meet her. He was in uniform.
She stopped in the doorway, and an icy stillness froze her.
She watched him come towards her, and in her memory she was carried back down the years and across space to another meeting with a tall and impossibly handsome young man in the same khaki tunic, with the polished belt and Sam Browne cross-strap, the peaked cap set at a jaunty angle, and the airman's wings on his chest.
Thank God, you've come, Mater, Shasa greeted her. I had to see you before I left. When? she breathed the question, terrified to hear the answer. When do you go? Tomorrow. Where? Where are they sending you? First we go to Roberts Heights, that was the air-force training base in the Transvaal, for conversion to fighters, and after that wherever they send us. Wish me luck, Mater. She saw that he wore orange flashes on the epaulettes of his tunic, the insignia of those who had volunteered to fight beyond the country's borders.
Yes, my darling, I wish you luck,, she said, and knew that her heart would break to see him go.
The roar of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine filled his head even through the earphones of the radio telephone that Shasa wore over his leather flying helmet. The cockpit canopy of the Hawker Hurricane fighter aircraft was open, so the slipstream buffeted his head, but it gave him an uninterrupted view of the blue African sky around him. The three fighters flew in a loose arrowhead formation. The dun-coloured desert camouflage could not disguise their beautiful deadly lines.
Shasa led the flight. His promotion had been rapid. Command came naturally to him, he had learned that lesson well from Centaine Courtney. It had taken only eighteen months for him to reach the rank of squadron leader.
He flew in a short-sleeved khaki tunic, khaki shorts and with velskoen on his bare feet, for the summer heat of Abyssinia was brutal.
Around his waist was belted a Webley service revolver, an archaic weapon for the pilot of a modern pursuit aircraft, but all of them had taken to wearing sidearms since the intelligence section had circulated those obscene photographs. one of the motorized recce units had overrun a village in the mountains and found the remains of two South African pilots who had been forced down and captured by the Abyssinian irregulars, the shufta, wild hill bandits. The pilots had been given to the women of the village. They had first been emasculated, then flayed with hot irons and disembowelled so skilfully that they were still living as their viscera was drawn from them. Finally, their jaws had been wedged open with Thorn branches and the women had urinated into their open mouths until they drowned. So all the pilots carried sidearms now, to defend themselves first, and then to make certain they were never captured alive.
Today the air was clear and bright under a cloudless azure sky, and visibility was unlimited. Below and ahead stretched the rugged Abyssinian highlands, precipitous Ambas, the huge table-topped mountains, the dark deep gorges between, desert and rock, dry and sun-bleached to the dun colour of an old lion's scarred hide.