by Darry Fraser
She started to walk again. As she came up to her house, she glanced across the road at Mrs Cooke’s. It was quiet.
She pushed open the gate at her house and stepped onto the little porch.
Forty-Nine
James stood back at the gateway to Annie and Millie’s little house. He leaned over the pickets, his head swimming. It hadn’t been that long a walk, but he was exhausted. All he could hear were Dr Wilson’s shouted words ringing in his ears at the other house. ‘She’s not dead, man!’
Had Ard saved her life? He must have got there in time. Was that how Ard took the stabbing? It looked to be so. What cost to Ard for saving CeeCee?
He rubbed a hand over his face, felt his own tears, hawked back the snot in his throat and spat.
No feebleness now. CeeCee is in good hands.
So is Ard.
At that house, one of the troopers had bolted to the hospital for the ambulance cart, and when it arrived the doctor had ordered James to return to Mrs Rutherford’s. He told James that he needn’t worry overly much—Mrs Anderson was quite safe. He was not to accompany the ambulance, as his presence would be needed to calm the women at the other house.
After the cart had gone, James’ relief had been palpable, almost too enormous to bear. It was a physical walloping that weakened his knees and sent him to the gutter, crying like a baby. He blubbered out his relief, and finally pulled himself to his feet and trudged back to Annie’s.
Now he straightened up and pushed off the fence. Felt more himself. In control again. He glanced at Annie’s house. No sounds from within. Perhaps no one had seen him. He turned and looked at Mrs Bailey’s house, and the rage he recognised came swiftly, boiling his blood and banging in his head.
His jaw clenched, his fists clenched, guts roiled. He stepped onto the road and a few strides found him at her front door. As he shoved it open, the resounding thud echoed down the small hallway. He wouldn’t yell out; wouldn’t run to it.
I promise you, CeeCee.
Wilkin would be taken like the rabid animal he was and put out of this life forever. Hunted down like James had hunted down Eliza’s husband, like he’d hunted down others.
He checked one room, the parlour. In disarray, but no one was there. The next door, a bedroom, dainty in its decorations. Nothing.
The kitchen. A kettle had burned a scorch into the dining table. Shards of glass and crockery crunched under his booted feet. He stopped. Listened for any giveaway sounds, any scrapes of shoes on stone steps, or footfalls behind or in front. Nothing. James turned full circle, slowly. And then he heard it.
A retching, faint but close.
The back door ajar, he saw another room outside. The wash-house. Only two steps and he stood in the doorway. There ahead of him stood the woman from the street, a large switch in her hands. She was looking at a body, slumped against the boiler, not far from her feet. She seemed as cool and calm as if she were reading a pleasant book.
He took another step. ‘Mrs Bailey,’ he said, and looked beyond her.
She glanced at him. ‘This poor wretch is my brother.’ She inclined her head.
There was Gareth Wilkin, drool at his mouth and down his shirtfront. A stink of something far more pungent than onions hung in the air. Vomit stained the floor around him and faeces crawled over his ankles from under his trousers.
James grimaced, covering his nose and mouth. ‘What has …?’
Mrs Bailey sighed loudly and turfed the switch out the door behind her. ‘Seems he mistook rat poison for sugar in his tea. I told him it wasn’t sugar. I told him.’ She tilted her chin towards the pannikin on its side by Gareth, a tannish stain around it. ‘He always so loved his tea.’
James stared at her. The woman seemed hardly affected by the devastation in front of her. That, or she was as mad as her brother.
Wilkin’s retching was barely audible, his body’s last response to the havoc of arsenic. James’ gut ran cold. To put him out of his misery now would take less than …
‘Go away,’ Mrs Bailey said. ‘He’ll die. It won’t be long now and there’s nothing to be done for him. I’ll stay with him, but you …’ She turned to James. ‘Go away.’
In her wide-eyed stare, he believed she knew who he was, deep in his soul, what he’d done. How he’d despatched men like her brother, and without a backwards glance.
For the first time since Eliza’s husband, he knew, absolutely, he’d done the last of that work. He knew Wilkin would pass from this life without any help from him. Yet if there was one poor body that needed assistance now, it was Gareth Wilkin.
James backed out of the room, confounded by his thoughts. He reeled through the house, shoving the front door open as he stumbled onto the porch. He gulped great lungs of fresh air and shook the stench of that house from his nostrils. Nothing he had done, nothing he had ever seen was as bad as what was happening to Gareth Wilkin.
He lurched across the road to the house, leaned once more over the picket fence, and coughed up stringy bile. As evil as he thought Wilkin to be, his death was worse than anything James could have inflicted. He would have despatched his prey quickly, with nought but a few words to remind the guilty of his crimes and the reason he was about to lose his life. He’d never have left him to die like Wilkin was dying now.
James waited long minutes until his stomach settled. Hands clasped over the fence, his weight on it, supported by it. His head cleared. It was no longer a concern of his.
And he thanked Mrs Bailey for glaring at him. Had he shown mercy and put the man out of his agony, as sure as James drew breath, the woman would have turned on him. And he would be found guilty of murder and sentenced to death.
He clutched his chest, sucked in the air. Light-headed. He breathed in long, deep draughts and the spinning slowly dissipated. Deliberately, he turned his thoughts.
Linley. Have to tell Linley about CeeCee.
A horse and cart careened into the street followed closely by a horse and rider. The hospital ambulance cart and Dr Wilson. Two men and a woman alighted.
Dr Wilson rode up to James and as he dismounted, said, ‘Mrs Anderson is being attended to at the hospital.’ He clapped James a couple of times on the shoulder. ‘Steady on, Mr Anderson. She is as well as we can make her for the moment. I’ll know more later. But for now,’ he said and pointed across to Mrs Bailey’s house, ‘We need to remove that mess in there.’
James nodded. ‘He’s still alive.’
Wilson’s eyes widened. ‘Is he now? Surprising. It won’t be for long.’ He untied his bag from the horse. ‘You look like shite. Get some whisky into you if you have any. Rum, if not.’ He started across the road.
‘And Ard?’ James called, but the doctor had disappeared inside Mrs Bailey’s house.
Linley rushed out of the house. ‘James! What of CeeCee?’ Her face was pinched white, her eyes bloodshot and harried.
James held up his hands. ‘She’s alive, Linley. CeeCee is in the hospital. That’s all I know.’
She hurried out the gate and to his side. ‘Thank God. And Ard?’ She clutched his sleeve. Then she looked in horror at the blood on his clothes. ‘Whose is this?’
James took her hands in his. ‘Linley.’
Fifty
Three days later
Linley sat alone at CeeCee’s hospital bed. The ward was quiet except for a much older woman in the next bed. Her mouth was open, and each time her throat rattled with the chug of a snore, Linley wished she could go over and wake her.
A pair of stained dentures sat in a dish on a little table between the two beds. Linley pulled a face and touched her own teeth with her tongue. She’d been fortunate, having had very few problems with her teeth. Just fortunate altogether, and because of her aunt.
CeeCee, asleep and propped up a little on firm pillows, had been dressed in a new white cotton nightgown, courtesy of James, though at Linley’s insistence over the hospital issue ones. Its dainty lace and pintucked yoke was tied in a loose simple bow
at her neckline. She looked much like she always had. Well, except for the bruises on her throat and the lump the size of an egg on the back of her head, that was.
The doctor had said her voice was lost, and perhaps it might not return, such had been was the pressure of Wilkin’s hands on her throat. Linley’s tears threatened again, but she swallowed them down.
Would not do to cry like a baby in here.
She was lucky, they said of CeeCee. All manner of things could have happened. Terrible things. Perhaps he hadn’t had her by the throat for long, after all. Linley didn’t know. CeeCee had screamed at her to grab a knife and run with Toby the moment she’d seen Wilkin enter by the kitchen door. Linley had swiped a knife off the bench and barricaded herself and Toby into CeeCee’s room, the blade her only protection. She wasn’t going to leave CeeCee. Not for anything. Not for all their lives. She had to stay. She had the knife and she would’ve used it.
Toby was safe, still at the house with Annie, who tended Millie and the other children. It had been three days now. At least CeeCee looked brighter each time Linley visited her.
Ard was another matter.
Linley patted her aunt’s hand and was pleasantly surprised when, in her sleep, CeeCee murmured and smiled. That surely must be a good sign.
‘Well done, Aunty. Come back to us soon.’ Linley stood up and leaned over to kiss her forehead. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow, CeeCee.’
Then she steeled herself and walked out of CeeCee’s ward and down to the ward for men. She checked with the sister that she was allowed to visit Ard and after a curt nod, a ward nurse was beckoned to take her.
‘You can’t stay too long, Mrs O’Rourke,’ she was told. ‘We need to attend to their baths and their meals.’
She didn’t know what to expect, but her heartbeat leapt when she saw him.
Ard’s bed was in the middle of six along a wall, only three of which were occupied. One held a child of perhaps twelve whose breathing was laboured, his face shiny with sweat. In the other was a man of about sixty, but it was hard to tell. He was curled up like a baby facing Ard, and appeared to be staring at him, but his eyes were vacant. Linley brought a chair to Ard’s other side.
His eyes were on her. ‘If you look directly at me, you won’t notice his stare so much.’ His smile was a little lopsided.
Linley’s gaze roved over him. ‘Yours is not such a pretty face right now.’
There were stitches in his scalp at the hairline and more stitches travelled down part of his forehead to the top of his left ear. Puckered, it looked sore. They’d snipped away some of his hair, and the stubble poked through. His face was black on that side, purple and deep pink where the blood had run under his skin. In some parts it had already begun to fade off to green and yellow. A swathe of bandages covered his stomach and rib cage, a plump wad of padding sticking out at his right side.
Linley needed to run her hands over the smooth skin of his shoulders and down onto the warm muscles of his chest. Just to feel for herself that he really was all right. She didn’t dare. She looked around for a distraction.
A discarded shirt lay rumpled at the end of the bed. She fiddled with it. ‘Thank you for being there for my aunt.’ Tears threatened again, damn and blast them. She lowered her head a moment. ‘She surely would have perished at the hands of that man. Thank you, Ard.’ It steadied her, and she looked up.
‘I was a moment’s distraction.’ Both his eyes were closed.
‘Nevertheless.’
There was so much she wanted to say to him, the father of the baby she had in her care. But where to start and what to say? The angry words she had written to him months earlier about Mary’s death sat heavily on her mind. So, too, did Ard being with Mary.
Linley huffed at herself. She’d had no claim on him. Never did. He was free to go off with someone else. She just hadn’t ever thought he would.
Well, why not, Linley, you fool? You weren’t engaged to be married or anything even close. He is a man, after all.
She bristled. But how could they both ever—
‘How is Miss CeeCee?’ He shifted, but grunted and stopped.
Linley caught herself, rolled her shoulders, tried to relax. ‘They say they won’t know for a while longer.’ She looked down at her hands. ‘James is distraught.’
‘Yes. He would be.’ His good eye opened a little.
She smoothed the stretch of linen sheet where it tucked under the mattress. ‘How much longer do they say you’re to be in here?’
‘They reckon the hole in my side closed up pretty quick. No damage to my lung. So now they’ll watch for infection. It could be a week.’ He shifted again. ‘Send me mad.’
‘But you’re still in pain.’
He grunted again then sighed. ‘I’m lucky.’
Lucky. We were all lucky. Linley nodded. The doctor had told her the knife had missed all vitals but had plunged deep enough. He would be sore for months, with the ever-present threat of infection hanging over his head.
Ard had his eye on her. ‘And how is Toby, Mrs O’Rourke?’
Linley’s face warmed. ‘He is well enough. Has a good set of lungs on him, and he’s always hungry.’
Ard shuffled his legs under the sheet. ‘He looked a fine lad when I caught sight of him.’
‘He is.’ She smiled, felt the light in her voice.
He tried to sit up. ‘Linley, when I get out of here …’
The nurse returned and stood by her. ‘Time for you to go, if you will, Mrs O’Rourke. We have to get on with our patients.’
Linley glanced at the nurse. ‘I’ll come back soon, Ard.’ She stood up and made no attempt to reach for him.
With his one eye still on her, he smiled crookedly. ‘Tomorrow, then.’
She didn’t answer.
As she left, she heard him say to the nurse, ‘My shirt, please. I need something out of the pockets.’
She heard the nurse give what sounded like a platitude.
The early summer evening made a pleasant walk home, yet even as Linley came up the street to Annie’s house, she tried not to glance at Mrs Bailey’s.
Three days now since those terrible events. Mrs Bailey had been taken to hospital. They’d said she was in a small room by herself, resting. The police had come to see her, too, but the gossip Annie had gleaned was that she had nothing to say to them. Linley wondered if she even still had her wits.
Gareth Wilkin had died that night, apparently, a most vile and agonising death. She shuddered all over again remembering when Annie related to her the type of death arsenic poisoning would induce. Though how Annie knew was something Linley had yet to discover. And she was in no hurry for that.
Coming up to the gate to the house, she saw James sitting on a kitchen chair pulled out onto the small verandah.
‘How are the patients?’ he asked, and stood up as she approached.
He indicated she sit in his place, which she did.
‘CeeCee is the same. She looks peaceful.’ She glanced at him. ‘In fact, she smiled just before I left.’
James leaned against the verandah post. ‘When she gets out of hospital, Linley, we will be married. I will never unwittingly subject her to a life without some protection—’
‘She wouldn’t view it like that, James. You know that.’
He shook his head. ‘In our line of work now, it is clear to me that she, you, all of us, are not safe. This wouldn’t have happened if CeeCee and I had been living together as husband and wife.’ He hung his head, the red hair stringy with sweat as it fell onto his forehead. He checked his hands. The fingernails were dirty, skin roughened and torn in places. ‘Excuse my state. I have been building a fence to keep myself occupied.’
‘You know how CeeCee feels about being married,’ Linley said.
‘She told me just after you arrived in Echuca that she was ready for it. It gave me great hope.’ When he looked at her his red-rimmed eyes were pained.
‘Then lucky you, James.’ She smiled
. She knew how much they loved each other.
James stood straighter. ‘Mrs Rutherford has kindly said that I can bathe by the outhouse. Then I will take my leave to the other house.’
Linley started. ‘But you said there was a lot of blood—’
‘Mr Jenkins and his boy sluiced it out with lye and hot water. He says it’s clean as a whistle.’
‘Oh.’ Linley shuddered. She wasn’t sure she ever wanted to go back there.
James looked rueful. ‘No matter what happens in this work, Linley, we must continue. No epidemic was ever managed without putting shoulders to the wheel.’
She inhaled deeply. ‘And it is an epidemic, isn’t it?’
‘As much as the influenza, regrettably,’ he said. ‘Except I don’t see it running its course and dying out any time soon.’
Linley rubbed her hands down her crumpled day dress, one Annie had lent her until she could find a seamstress. ‘I see it everywhere, where I never used to look before. Almost as if it can’t be unseen once I do see it.’
He nodded. ‘That’s right.’
She started to say something and stopped.
‘Go on,’ he said.
She spread her hands. ‘Why is it you champion the cause, James? A man …’
He smiled. ‘If not a man, or men, then who? We are the perpetrators, after all. We should be the ones to stop it. We should cull the sick ones.’
‘But you are alone. I’ve never seen another man in this work.’
He shook his head. ‘Others approach me. More curious, mind you, than anything else. And then it’s usually to deride me.’ He smiled at her then looked at his hands. ‘I’m used to it. We are not reliant on anybody or anything, no agency or parliament to tell us right from wrong, so it doesn’t matter what they think.’
‘But your finances must suffer.’
‘We have benefactors who like to stay very silent. It is not a popular cause.’
‘Why must it be so?’ Linley cried all of a sudden. ‘Why must this violence occur on women and little children?’
