by Kim Kelly
Greta nods, clasping her shame to her breast with her pencils. ‘Yes.’ And there is something in that look that makes me sure she knows now: she knows something is very wrong inside her, something that grows worse daily. If the shame must be exposed, better that Mrs Weston be the one to discover it. She may be outraged, but that outrage will soon be confused by the sudden demise of Alec Howell. She won’t broadcast the transgressions of a dead man around town; she is too decent a woman for that sort of moral gloating; there will be no side to take in grief but ours. And even if she did shun us afterwards, what would it matter then? We will be free of him. We will be free. In a matter of hours.
And I can’t wait one second more than I must. The time is now, or this storm in me will pass; I will lose my nerve.
I squeeze Gret’s hand with all my addled love and cunning. ‘Don’t tell Mrs Weston anything you don’t want to, darling. But you must let her examine you, please – I need to know you’re all right.’
With any luck, Mrs Weston won’t find out about any of this at all. She won’t ever suspect that Greta’s unwellness was anything more than some menstrual anomaly, once I’ve found and administered the cure myself, and the child is gone from her. But of more pressing concern, I must somehow arrange the timing of things precisely so that Mrs Weston will be with my sister this evening, all evening, should anything happen to me. Should I be –
No, I will not be caught.
I keep my eyes fixed to the road ahead.
Step after step, there is nothing but the road ahead.
Ben
‘Suppose that’s it then, old matey. I’ll walk back to the pub, get the next train out of your life. See you in some other realm sometime,’ Cos says to me when we reach the stables.
‘Righteo. Do that then.’ I don’t care what he does; I don’t look away from unsaddling Jack, or bother asking Cos to help with the roan, Rebel. He wouldn’t know how, not that I’d want to put the martyr through any further ordeal anyway. I’ll do it myself; there’s no boy here at Bellevue to do it. No one but Buckley, who’s busy with the mare and the vehicle. And Berylda, who’s taken Greta directly into the house and is clearly making a point of not speaking to me; couldn’t get away fast enough at first sight of the front door. So Cos can go and stuff himself, for all –
‘I reckon it’d be a good idea if yous’d stay with us here for a bit, if you can,’ the old man says behind me.
‘Stay? Why?’ I ask as I lift the saddle. So that Berylda can demoralise and humiliate me some more? It’s not as though I asked her to kiss me, not as though I slipped a note under her door asking for a midnight rendezvous. That’s all my doing, is it? Women are evidently not for me, or this one certainly isn’t: I should have listened to Cos in the first place, shouldn’t I. Oh well, Mama, at least I got a new species to show for the trouble – unless I’m completely wrong about that too, and pink macranthums are endemic across this whole bloody district and I’m the only one who didn’t know about them. Probably. But when I turn to Buckley and see his face, I see a great deal more trouble than that. His eyes nail me with something that looks like dread. I immediately think that Greta is more dangerously ill than she appears. ‘What? You think we should go on to the hospital, after all? Or do you want me to go and get a doctor to come here?’
The man seems torn in his conscience somehow, raising a fist to his head as he wrestles with whatever this is that he does not want to say.
‘What – what is it? Why should we stay?’
‘It’s Miss Berylda,’ he finally says. ‘She’s the one not well, not right in her mind – she intends to …’
‘She intends what?’
‘She intends to harm Mr Howell, her uncle,’ he tells me. ‘She got some – she got something from the Chinaman yesterday, something to see him off. You gotta stop her – someone’s gotta. Get her off this path. She won’t listen to me.’
For a moment I don’t understand what he has said.
Cos groans, incredulous. ‘Oh for the love of Delilah, you can’t be seri –’
‘You don’t say nothing against her.’ Buckley cuts him off with a threat as brutal as it is righteous. ‘That bastard Howell deserves it, like no one ever has.’
‘Why? What has he done?’ I ask him; I must know. Berylda intends to what? Howell does what?
‘Oh Jesus.’ The old man looks up at the rafters, still struggling with this betrayal.
‘You must tell me.’
And now he does: ‘He hurts Miss Greta,’ Buckley tells me. ‘He hurts her in a way that’s not right, against her will, and she has got the worst for it. You know what I mean.’
Strike me blind, I think I do. And everything makes sense now. Sickening sense.
‘She ain’t the only one either,’ Buckley says. ‘A while back, maybe six or seven years, some girls went missing over a time – three, maybe four. Then another one, couple of weeks back. Only put it together last night, from something the Chinaman said, and talking to Wheeler and some other fellers at Kitty’s about what they’d heard. All of ’em Chinese girls. One from Tambaroora, two around Mudgee way. Maybe one at Gulgong as well. No one ever seen ’em again, except the little one from Tambaroora – they found her just before Christmas, off the Mudgee Road, like she’d been chucked off the back of a cart. Can’t prove it, but I reckon Howell had his way and done ’em all in, one way or another.’
That chills: because I have no trouble believing him capable of such things. Greta’s haunting pictures, the bruise on Berylda’s hand, her sadness, her frown, her charging disquiet: the slug trail that is Alec Howell.
‘What do you want me to do?’ Cos says beside me and I almost tell him to go and fill himself a sock full of shit before he ever opens his mouth again, but when I turn to him his face is full of care. He shrugs and says: ‘I was wrong. Mea culpa. Sue me later. But now, tell me what I can do.’
One day I will no doubt consider this a defining moment in our shared history, but now I can only tell him, ‘I don’t know,’ as I run past him and up to the house, where I bang on the back door, until the housekeeper’s face appears at the kitchen window: ‘Who is it?’
‘Ben Wilberry – I must see Miss Jones – Berylda Jones. Let me in, please.’
The housekeeper looks at me warily, as though I’m mad. ‘Why do you want to come in, sir?’
The staghound, Prince, bounds up to me along the verandah, but he doesn’t launch himself at me; he starts barking beside me, his paws planted on the boards facing the housekeeper, as though he is insisting she let me in, too. I tell her: ‘Miss Berylda is expecting me.’
‘I doubt that very much, sir.’ The housekeeper is doubtful to the point of being rude; a bit above herself. ‘She’s with her sister. Miss Berylda just now came to the kitchen for a plate of my passionfruit custard puffs and then she went back to Miss Greta and she said they were not to be disturbed for any reason.’ The housekeeper glares sourly at the dog: ‘Will you be quiet.’
No. Prince continues to bark, and I agree: bugger your passionfruit bloody custard puffs. I ask her: ‘Is Mr Howell at home, then?’
‘No, sir. He is at the hospital, of course. He is a very busy man.’
Good, I suppose. He’s not here, at least. I can talk to Berylda freely, plead with her to talk to me, and I plead with the housekeeper now: ‘Please, madam. Please, let me in.’
‘Oh.’ She shakes her head, clicks her tongue, nettled but resigned that she will not be getting rid of me. ‘Wait there.’
Like a dog at the back door. I wait with Prince. A small forever. What is taking her so long? I attempt to collect my thoughts as I stand here; assemble and reassemble the elements of all that Buckley has just told me. Berylda intends to poison Alec Howell? Her sister is molested and made pregnant by him? Chinese girls have gone missing from the old goldfields over the years, presumed murdered, and Buckley suspects Howell? The
master of this chocolate box dollhouse. Howell. What else has he done is the question that comes next for me, and it is me that wants to kill him. I will kill him with my bare hands. I look at my hands now. These hands. Shaking with fury.
‘Strange.’ The housekeeper returns to the window, sour mouth turned further down in wonder. ‘Miss Berylda isn’t here. Miss Greta says that she’s gone into town to fetch Mrs Weston, but I sent Lucy to do that not ten minutes ago, first thing Miss Berylda asked of me when she got in, though Miss Greta might be mistaken, mind – she’s a bit tired, she’s not well, you know.’
I don’t need to wonder a second longer. I know where Berylda has gone. But how?
‘Horse!’ I call up to the stables as I run back, and bless Cos for his uselessness for once as he’s not halfway to unfastening the saddle straps on the roan when I get there. In fact, he’s now rethreading the strap he just undid and asking me: ‘Do you want me to come with you?’
‘No.’ I don’t know what I’m going to do but I’ll be doing it alone. I take the reins of the roan from him.
And he grabs my wrist as I do. ‘I’ll be here,’ he tells me, old matey returned at the eleventh. ‘Whatever happens, I’ll be waiting for you here. Doesn’t matter what you do – do whatever you must. I’ll have your back however I can.’
I don’t know what he might do for me at my back or otherwise, but I take some heart at the thought as I mount and turn the horse towards the stable doors, to find Buckley searching the landscape for some sign of her.
‘I’d guess she’ll have gone as the crow flies,’ the old man supposes, ‘up through the scrub, round the back of Glynarthen, the property next door. Two mile that way.’ He nods in the direction of the town.
And I look across the bald expanse of this property here with him: nothing but tussocky wire grass and a few wind-beaten wattles all the way to that distant stand of candlebark. She must have flown. And so shall I. I’ve got to head her off – stop her. She can’t go through with this, no matter what Howell might deserve. It can’t happen at her hand. I can’t let it.
Berylda
Glances of the sentinel turrets guide me through the bush. I glance at my watch, only twenty-one minutes gone and I am almost there. My lungs are scorched with every breath, the muscles in my legs wail as the hill climbs more steeply now, and my left shin stings from the lashing of blackberry thorns that snagged up under my skirt, but I don’t stop. Not until I see the tin sheds of the dairy at West Street do I stop. I place my basket on the ground for a moment, smooth and pin my hair, check to see there are no tears in my stockings, as if anyone might see them if there were; there are a few burrs caught in the edges of my skirt, though, and I pick them off. I am tidy. I tidy the tea towel that covers my basket too, tuck in the red and green stripes all around to make them straight, and then I walk up the lane by the dairy and into the grounds of the hospital.
Along the sweep of the drive, I close my eyes, afternoon sun blasting over my shoulders, steadying my breath and the pounding of my heart. When I open my eyes again, the arched colonnades that run top and bottom from sentinel to sentinel are gaping mouths condemning my every step. I walk past them. I turn their iron to marzipan. I turn into the passageway between the east wing and the central building, to take the rear staircase to Alec Howell’s private consulting room.
‘May I help you?’ A nurse stops me on the stairs. Her voice is low, reverent, and poised to deter me, a small wall of starched white pinafore. I am approaching a doctors-only quarter here, not that I have visited these halls very many times myself to know them with any great familiarity; only on a handful of occasions, at his command, have I been summoned here for tea with his colleagues, for him to boast of my academic results as so many reflections of himself. I barely know these steps I take, and I don’t recognise this nurse at all.
I inform her: ‘I am Berylda Jones. I am Mr Howell’s niece. I must see him immediately, on an urgent medical matter. There is an illness in the family.’ And you will not block my path.
‘Oh?’ she replies and looks up the deserted corridor behind her and back to me. ‘Mr Howell is not in his private room at present.’ As if she might have eyes that see around corners and through walls. Admiring and protective of him, as his handmaidens invariably are, she adds: ‘He has many matters of importance to attend to.’
‘Where is he?’ I demand. ‘On rounds?’
‘No. Er.’ I have her as swiftly ruffled. ‘Mr Howell is still downstairs, in the operating theatre, I imagine. It’s been a – hm. A difficult afternoon.’
I manage not to smile: how excellent. He will be ruffled then, and therefore more easily suggestible, more vulnerable to my manipulations. My game. This final game between us. I inform the nurse: ‘I will wait for him in his consulting room. Please make him aware that I am there.’
Her forehead twitches a little in dismay but she does not stop me.
A detail missed almost stops my heart, however: Neddy, our workhorse – Alec would almost certainly have ridden him here – he can’t be left uncared for overnight; he’s old, and I don’t want him to be out in the paddock alone. I look back down at the nurse upon the stair and inform her further: ‘Oh, and should we leave together by cab, as I suppose we might, please see to it that Mr Howell’s horse is stabled and brought out to Bellevue tomorrow – yes?’
She says, ‘Hm. Yes,’ and continues on her way down the stairs, as I continue upwards.
I open the door to his room. I take the cake tin from my basket and set it on his desk, remove the cover: four pastries here in all, and I set one in the very centre of a plate, in the very centre of the desk, for him; and an empty plate near the cake tin for me, with napkins placed upon it, as if I have been interrupted at the arrangement. I take the bottle of poison next, from its snug wadding of tea towels in the bottom of the basket, unstop it gently, carefully, with my handkerchief around the rubber seal, and I inject whatever is in the dropper into the centre of the custard puff. It will be more than the three drops Ah Ling instructed; it will do what is required. I open the door to the balcony and tip the remainder of the bottle into the potted palm there; it’s half dead anyway. Its withered fronds shiver in the warm breeze; it will be wholly dead soon, I suppose. I drop the bottle over the edge of the balcony rail, and it vanishes into the dense hedge below, just an empty, carelessly discarded phial amongst hundreds, thousands, should it ever be found at all. One shot. One shot I have, here inside a pastry on a picnic plate, a surprise afternoon tea treat for the one I am promised to. Let it find its mark.
Beyond the desk, the bookshelves stare down at me from the case against the wall opposite. The key to this case will be mine tomorrow. No one will deny me his books when I ask; who would deny a grieving medical student all this knowledge? This is almost too-sweet a revenge, that I should steal his books as I steal back my sister’s life. As I wait for him, I smile amongst the titles, amongst the jumble of gold lettering along the spines, searching for the one that will tell me how to safely and efficiently induce an abortion. I will find it. A German text swims out at me immediately, Medizinische Gynäkologie, and another The Obstetric Armamentarium. I will find it quickly. Tomorrow. One step at a time. Today there is only one task that must be completed.
The gold spines blur and swirl around the pastries reflected in the glass. The blue hills roll and roll away beyond the balcony door. I unbutton my blouse to the top of the yoke, turn out the collar like the little slut I am, revealing just a hint of my camisole lace, and I am ready for him. I am ready to end him.
At this moment, so calm and so fixed upon this singular resolve, I frighten myself.
Ben
‘Mr Wilberry, isn’t it?’
Is it? I’m not sure I know that, either. But it’s that German fellow from the dinner the other night, the chemist, asking me, here in this hallway, or wherever I am in this impenetrable warren of a place.
‘Geb
hardt, we met at Mr Howell’s abode, on New Year’s Eve, you remember.’ He is extending his hand.
‘Yes. Mr Gebhardt.’ Of course you are, I shake his hand, looking over his shoulder for some sign to direct me to the District Medical Officer’s secretary, of whom I’ve been told I might best enquire after Mr Howell’s whereabouts.
‘Doctor, I am a doctor. I am a pharmacist, actually,’ the German corrects me. ‘What brings you here this afternoon?’
‘Ah, I’m looking for …’ And now I see him, Howell, making his way across the landing at the top of this staircase, right above us. ‘Um – Howell. I’m here to see Mr –’ I point up the staircase.
The German is not letting go of the handshake; he is saying: ‘It was a wonderful evening, don’t you think so? The fireworks were magnificent. Our Mr Howell puts on a jolly good show, ja!’
‘Ja – yes. But I really must –’
‘Oh? You are in a hurry to find him today? What is the reason? A happy reason, I hope.’ The twit lets go of my hand but he does not stand aside to allow me to take the stairs. He is looking me over from head to toe, the way only a German can. I am filthy from the road and ill-attired, yes, and unquestionably mad: what I am going to do when I confront Howell, when I confront Berylda, I have not the slightest idea. I should not be here at all. The fathomless intricacies of Berylda’s deceit – a deceit that I am beginning to suspect has in no small part brought me precisely here – should turn any sensible man away, but I can’t turn away. I can’t turn away from her suffering, whatever her suffering at his hands might be; nor her sister’s. And I can’t let her kill him, either.
Unaccustomed to deceit myself, though, I let the German have the first garbled load that comes out of my mouth: ‘I have made a discovery – a new plant. I really must – ah. Share the good news with – My apologies –’
