This Golden Land

by Wood, Barbara

  Strangely shaped bruises, she noticed.

  Hannah realized that they were are all the same oval shape, and there was even a scar that had once been closed with stitches—it, too, was the same shape. Hannah realized in shock where she had seen that oval before—it matched the unusual gold handle of Lulu Forchette's walking cane.

  Hannah looked up at those around her. "Alice didn't fall, did she?"

  "Lulu wants her to sing for the men," Ida Gilhooley said.

  The light from the kitchen doorway was suddenly blocked. Hannah turned to see the mountainous Lulu standing there robed in a bright red ruffled dressing gown. She stood supported on her cane, with a stormy expression on her face. "What's going on here? Get away from that girl."

  Hannah rose to her feet. "You have been beating her."

  "The silly cow needs it."

  Hannah noticed that, despite her girth, Lulu had no trouble walking. The cane, Hannah suspected, was put to other uses. As the kitchen workers looked on in silence, Lulu and Hannah locked gazes. When Lulu took a step forward, Hannah stood her ground. But her heart pounded, and she was reminded of the wild dingo in the rose garden. There would be no Jamie O'Brien to rescue her now.

  As calmly as she could, Hannah turned her back on the three-hundred-pound madam and knelt next to Alice. "Would you like to come home with me, dear?"

  Alice's eyes widened in fear. She glanced past Hannah at Lulu, and swallowed painfully. Hannah moved so that she blocked Alice's view of Lulu, and said again, "Would you like to come home with me? You will be safe, I promise. No one will harm you."

  When the girl hesitated, Hannah said, "You have the right to be treated with respect and dignity like anybody else."

  Alice finally said in a tiny voice, "Then yes, miss, I should very much like to go with you."

  "The girl owes me," Lulu barked.

  But Hannah ignored her, helping Alice to her feet and wrapping the blanket around her. There would be no time to fetch what few possessions Alice had. With her arm protectively around the girl, Hannah faced her opponent. "You have received your fair payment, Miss Forchette. Alice will not be coming back here. Nor shall I."

  Lulu said nothing, and the air became charged with tension. Some of the "upstairs" girls had come to see what was happening, dressed in night clothes or undergarments, looking sleepy and tousled. Their work day would not begin until afternoon.

  Hannah moved her gaze among them, meeting each one in the eye, girls she had helped, had chatted and even laughed with—Ready Rita and Easy Sal, Gertie the midget, Acrobatic Abby, and the Polynesian twins. "If any of you wish to leave, you can come with me right now."

  They looked down at the floor and nervously cleared their throats.

  "I am at Mrs. Throckmorton's boarding house on Gray Street," Hannah said. "You can come to me any time and I will help you find proper jobs and a decent place to stay."

  To Lulu, Hannah said, "I think the authorities will be interested in hearing about this house."

  Lulu laughed. "Who do you think are my best customers?"

  When Hannah started toward the rear door that led to the rose garden, helping Alice along, Lulu said, "And how do you expect to get back to town? Walk? It's ten miles."

  "I'll take them," Walt Gilhooley boomed from the back steps. "Ain't nothing you can do to me and Ida that you ain't already done." And he gestured for Hannah to come along.

  As the two stepped through the door, Lulu called out, "You'll be sorry you did this, Miss High and Mighty. Dead sorry!"

  8

  G

  ONVILLE DAVENPORT, M.D. HUMMED A LIVELY TUNE AS HE COMBED scented pomade through his thick black hair and inspected himself in the looking glass over his wash basin. He frowned at the first sprouts of gray at his temples and wondered if he should try some boot black on them. The pomade was new. He had purchased it the day before from Butterworth's, telling himself it was to look more presentable to his patients.

  In truth, this recent extra attention to grooming had to do with Miss Hannah Conroy.

  Davenport held two cherished beliefs: the basic goodness of humankind, and that it behooved a man, once in a while, to step outside convention and his own personal boundaries and take a leap of faith. Miss Conroy had put those two beliefs to the test when she had sat in his office, three months prior, offering the most outrageous proposition: that she work for him as an assistant in his medical practice! Having at first been suspicious of her intentions, and then having been convinced of her honesty, Davenport had decided to give her proposal a try. And the result had been a success.

  Not only had Miss Conroy proved to be a boon for his practice, she had wakened old interests in him, so that Davenport found himself looking forward to going to work once more. He had become jaded since arriving in Adelaide, a childless widower. Patients' woes had long since ceased to interest him or make him care. But with Hannah Conroy asking questions, he felt like a medical student again, curious about everything, wanting answers just as she did, and hunting for solutions.

  Miss Conroy had even presented him with a curious personal conundrum of her own. "My mother died of childbed fever," she had said one afternoon when his office hours were over and he was writing in medical charts while Hannah was sweeping the floor. "My father said so, the coroner said so, her symptoms were even what is called textbook, and my father launched a career in searching for a prevention and cure for childbed fever. And yet, after my father's death, I found his laboratory notes and in them he had written a question: 'What killed my beloved Louisa?'

  "Is it possible, Dr. Davenport," Miss Conroy had said as she set her broom aside and looked at him with those remarkable gray eyes, "that my father realized my mother had died of something else?"

  Davenport had asked Miss Conroy to describe the course and nature of her mother's final illness, and after she had done so, he could only agree that Louisa Conroy had indeed died of childbed fever. Why her father had subsequently questioned it, he did not know.

  Davenport had said he was sorry that he couldn't help her, but that night he had opened books not touched in years and found himself getting lost in medical texts. For the first time since Edith's passing, Gonville Davenport was interested in things once more, even if, ultimately, he had not found the answer to Hannah's personal conundrum.

  Dr. Davenport had also discovered that he enjoyed being a teacher, and Miss Conroy was proving to be an eager and enthusiastic pupil. He smiled now to think of one particular medical mystery they had solved together.

  Mr. Paterson, a married shoemaker in his sixties, had come in complaining of headaches. He had also exhibited a strange skin color that he said was driving his friends and his customers away, as they feared he was contagious, and his wife wouldn't let him touch her. Davenport knew at once that such pronounced evidence of jaundice meant advanced liver disease, but Davenport never liked to snatch hope from his patients, and so he had given Mr. Paterson a "tonic" and sent him home. The tonic was harmless sugar-water dyed pink, and he instructed Mr. Paterson to have three spoonfuls a day, not to miss a dose. Most doctors kept such a placebo in their medicinal stores, since it was a kindness to send a patient home with at least something. And as false hope was better than no hope, sometimes the harmless placebo even effected a cure.

  After Mr. Paterson had left, however, Miss Conroy had expressed concern about him because the cobbler was a nice old man whose business was failing and she felt sorry for him. She had then made the observation that the shoemaker's jaundice wasn't the same color as the cases of jaundice her father had seen in Bayfield, and so she wondered if the problem could be something else. "He is more orange than yellow," she had said. "Could it be his gall bladder?"

  Davenport had been taken aback, unused to having his diagnoses and treatments questioned, especially by a woman. But he had learned by now that Miss Conroy's questions were not due to any lack of confidence in him, or arrogance on her part, but merely an expression of genuine curiosity. When he had explaine
d that the absence of epigastric pain ruled out gall bladder disease, Miss Conroy had brought up Mr. Paterson's headaches, which Dr. Davenport could not explain.

  After Miss Conroy had left for the day, Gonville Davenport found that he had a medical mystery on his hands. Miss Conroy had observed correctly: the extreme orange tint of the skin, plus the headaches, were not fully explained away by either liver or gall bladder problems.

  What, then, was ailing Mr. Paterson?

  It had sent Davenport to his medical references, and as he searched, he began to recall an article he had read not too long ago in a foreign medical journal. He spent nearly a night searching his stacks of magazines and periodicals, but had finally found it and, reading the article, had discovered what he suspected was the true cause of Mr. Paterson's strange color. The next morning he had presented himself at Mr. Paterson's Wright Street shop and had asked a few questions he had not asked back in the office—namely, the cobbler's diet.

  "I had read recently," Dr. Davenport reported to Hannah upon returning to the office, "that a substance found in vegetables had been isolated and identified by chemists at the Sorbonne. They named it carotene, after the carrots in which it is found. This got me to thinking. When I asked Mr. Paterson if he ate carrots, he took me out back and proudly showed me his carrot garden. It seems he so loves the root that it's all he eats—boiled, steamed, baked or raw! Miss Conroy, it was the carrots that had turned him orange."

  "And the headaches?" she had asked.

  "I also learned that he wears his hat too tight."

  Mr. Paterson switched to potatoes, bought a larger hat size, and was cured. They had laughed about the case, Gonville Davenport and Hannah Conroy, and now it was their secretly shared joke. Davenport had not felt such satisfaction with the practice of medicine in a long time. Nor such pleasure in the company of a young lady.

  Hannah was also a boon to the women patients. Whereas a physician had access to a male patient's body, and could even ask a gentleman to disrobe, it was unthinkable that a physician should glimpse what lay beneath a lady's clothes. A doctor had to rely on what the patient told him, and very often, women were too shy or embarrassed to be explicit, with ailments couched in delicate terms, leaving the doctor to guess. When a lady blushingly confessed that her "regularity" was off, he didn't know if she was referring to her menstrual cycle or her bowels. Miss Conroy, however, allowed women to speak freely, and she in turn, having had vast experience of this sort of thing with her father, was then able to convey to Dr. Davenport precisely what ailed the patient, thus making his treatments more effective.

  It was no wonder more and more women were flocking to his office! Davenport had decided to expand his hours from three to five mornings a week, increasing Miss Conroy's hours as well.

  As he left his upstairs apartment and descended the rear stairway that led to a kitchen, his private office and the outer waiting room where patients were beginning to congregate, Davenport arrived at a decision. Before Miss Conroy had presented her remarkable offer, three months ago, Davenport had been seriously considering going back to England to marry a distant cousin of whom he was rather fond. But all that was changed now. He had new plans in mind. Although they had only been acquainted for three months, he decided it would not be too forward of him to invite Miss Conroy to a horse race on Sunday, at Chester Downs, a mile outside of town, where there would be a musical band, a buffet of German sausage, bread and beer, and two Frenchman reportedly demonstrating something called a "hot air balloon flight."

  Entering his office and drawing back the curtains to reveal morning sunshine, he went to his desk where he saw that his housekeeper had placed the morning mail. Davenport sifted through the envelopes—bills, adverts, a letter from the cousin back home in England. One envelope caught his attention. He opened it and frowned. As the contents of the letter began to sank in, he stared in disbelief.

  Dr. Davenport went over the letter a third time until his knees buckled and he dropped like a dead weight into his office chair.

  "I know you will like him. His name is Robert," Molly Baker said with enthusiasm, "and he's a clerk for a solicitor!" Moon-faced Molly was an apprentice to a posh seamstress on Peel Street, a position that gave her such confidence that she was boldly outspoken on all manner of topics, a trait her friends suffered patiently.

  The residents of Mrs. Throckmorton's boarding house were in the downstairs drawing room, preparing to leave for the day. "He wears a white collar and has clean fingernails," Molly added as she pinned her bonnet to her head, using the hallway looking glass.

  This was the fourth young man Molly had tried to introduce to Hannah, and no matter how many times Hannah insisted that she was waiting for a young man to join her in Adelaide, an American scientist currently working on a survey vessel out of Perth, Molly wouldn't listen. Plenty of girls boasted of having young men coming out to join them, and few of those swains rarely materialized.

  "Really, Hannah you are such an innocent. Yet you are twenty years old!"

  Molly was twenty-one and liked to brag that she had been kissed not just by one young man, but by an impressive three. None of the kissing relationships had led to anything serious, but she remained hopeful. Marriage was Molly's main goal in life. And marriage not to just any man. He had to work in an office and wear a clean shirt everyday. "I would wager," she said, "that a man has never even held your hand."

  Not just my hand, Hannah thought as she tied her bonnet ribbons under her chin. Neal held my whole body, as we thought our ship was sinking. And then he kissed me . . .

  But Hannah could never tell anyone these things, because it was too private and special, and also because no one who had never been through such an experience could possibly understand. She also could not tell Molly and the others about Lulu Forchette's house, and that, in many ways, because of her visits there, she was far more knowledgeable about intimate matters than a girl who had been kissed three times.

  "I am sure Robert is a very nice young man," Hannah said, "and I do appreciate your efforts at introductions, but I am not looking right now."

  When Hannah saw Molly's cheeky smile, she knew what her friend was thinking: that Hannah had her eye on Dr. Davenport. "He owns his own house," Molly had said only last week over a dinner of Mrs. Throckmorton's steak and kidney pie. "With the entire upstairs for living, and downstairs for his practice. A doctor, Hannah, with a good income. And not bad looking, if a bit old."

  Hannah allowed Molly to believe what she wanted, knowing that Molly could not fathom Hannah's true reason for working at Dr. Davenport's office. That she wanted to make a career of healing people.

  Bidding Molly a good day, Hannah left Mrs. Throckmorton's house and struck off into the crisp autumn morning. When she reached the muddy street, she turned and looked up at a third floor window, where Alice was looking down, waving. Hannah waved back and continued on her way.

  Alice was recuperating from the severe beating Lulu had given her a week ago, and she could not go outside until the facial bruising was entirely gone. But Alice, Hannah had discovered, despite her frail looks and shyness, possessed a strong inner fortitude. She was not a girl to languish in self-pity. Alice had promised that when she was better, she was going to look for a job in town. Her time at Lulu's house had forced her to face and overcome her fear of fire, so that now she could work at any domestic occupation, and be glad of it.

  Thinking that it would aid Alice's recovery, Hannah had persuaded her to come downstairs one evening and sing for the other boarders. They were enraptured. One girl had said, "Alice's voice is like an unexpected break in the clouds sending down a ray of sunshine on a dismally rainy day." Another enthused, "She makes me feel sad and joyous at the same time." And Molly Baker had declared, "She could catch a rich husband with that voice!"

  But out of Alice's hearing, they all agreed that it was such a shame about her facial disfigurement.

  It had been a difficult seven days. First, Hannah had had to lie to
Mrs. Throckmorton about Alice's "accident," persuading the landlady to allow the injured girl to share Hannah's room. At the same time, Hannah's conscience had become greatly troubled by the house of ill-repute. Now that she knew the women were held there against their will, and physically abused, she knew must do something about it. But she had no idea what. Alice had begged her to forget it. "The authorities won't do anything. They are Lulu's best customers. I could name judges, bankers, men high up in the colonial government who go to her house on a regular basis. They won't want you making this public. It could backfire on you."

  For a week Hannah had struggled with the moral dilemma, torn between her conscience and the truth of Alice's warning, and now she had come to a decision. She would seek Dr. Davenport's advice. He was a smart man, educated, and wise to the ways of the world. She would take him into her confidence and explain about the house beyond the edge of town—he would undoubtedly be shocked to hear of the existence of such an establishment, and that men in high positions were patronizing it, but Hannah needed counsel on what to do.

  She reached Dr. Davenport's a few minutes later, as Light Square was not far from her boarding house. Going up the front steps of the two-story brick residence sandwiched between a dress shop and a bookstore, Hannah smiled at the shiny brass plaque with Dr. Davenport's name on it. Someday, she knew, her name would be there, too.

  The street door opened onto a tiny foyer that offered two doors. One was labeled Private and it led to the kitchen and servants' area in the rear. The other door said Waiting Room, and Hannah entered it to find a small crowd already waiting to see the doctor.

  A bench ran along two walls. When a patient came out of the doctor's office, the next person in line got up and went in, and everybody slid along. As she passed through, Hannah smiled at everyone. A few of the men stood, others touched their caps, murmuring, "Good morning, miss." There was Mr. Billingsly, the haberdasher, with an infected toe, and the baker's wife, Mrs. Hudson, with a cough that wouldn't go away. A man with his right arm in a sling was Sammy Usher, a drover who fell off a bullock dray and dislocated his shoulder. Hannah noticed that Mrs. Rembert was back with her arthritis, and Mr. Sanderson had no doubt returned to collect another bottle of the doctor's tonic, which he declared had given him the vitality of a twenty-year-old. There were a few whom Hannah did not recognize. She knew that some came out of curiosity as word had spread of a woman working in a doctor's office, and people came to see for themselves.