The Touch

by Colleen McCullough

  “With nutmeg on top?”

  “I don’t care. Just go away and leave me alone, Jade.”

  “I VERY MUCH fear,” said Alexander to Ruby, “that Nell is going to be motherless.” His face twisted, tears gathered; he put his head on Ruby’s breast and wept.

  “There there, there there,” she crooned, rocking him until he quietened. “You’ll get through this, and so will Elizabeth. What I very much fear is that she’s doomed never to carry a child without coming to death’s door.”

  He pulled away, mortified at displaying such vulnerability, mopped his face with a hand. “Och, Ruby, what can I do?”

  “What are the latest pearls of wisdom from Sir Edward?”

  “That if she comes through this confinement, she ought not to try to conceive again.”

  “I’ve just said the same thing, haven’t I? I doubt the news will break her heart.”

  “There’s no need to be bitchy!”

  “Swallow it, Alexander. Give up this particular fight, it’s one you can’t win.”

  “I know,” he said stiffly, put on his hat and departed.

  Leaving Ruby to pace up and down her boudoir, no longer sure of anything beyond her ineradicable love for him. Whatever he wanted or needed from her, whenever he wanted or needed it, she would be there to give it. Yet her affection for Elizabeth kept increasing, and that was a mystery. By rights she should be contemptuous of the girl’s inadequacies, her weaknesses, her sad and passive disposition. Perhaps the answer lay in her extreme youth—not far past eighteen years of age, expecting again, and facing death again. Never having really lived.

  I suppose what I’m feeling is what her mother would feel. What a joke! Her mother who is sleeping with her husband. Oh, how much I would like to see Elizabeth happy! See her find a man she could love. The world has to hold a man in it somewhere whom she can love. That’s all she wants, all she needs. Not wealth, not high living. Just a man she can love. One thing I know: she will never love Alexander. And how wretched for him that is! The injury to his iron Scottish pride, the taste of defeat in a mouth unused to it. How do these things happen? We go round and round and round, Alexander, Elizabeth, and I.

  When she went to see Elizabeth on the morrow she was toying with the idea of speaking to her about the deteriorating situation between her and Alexander, which Ruby was positive lay like a foundation stone at the bottom of Elizabeth’s illness. Oh, not that the illness was imagined! But Ruby had dealt with women of all kinds for more years than she cared to count. Then as she entered Elizabeth’s room she changed her mind. To speak about it, she would have to divorce herself from it, and that she couldn’t do. Perhaps she would accomplish more if she persuaded Elizabeth to eat her lunch.

  “How’s Nell?” she asked, settling by the bed.

  “I have no idea. I hardly see her,” said Elizabeth tearfully.

  “Oh, come, sweetie-pie, look on the bright side! Only six or seven weeks left! As soon as this is over you’ll bounce back.”

  Elizabeth managed a smile. “I am a misery, aren’t I? I’m sorry, Ruby. You’re right, I will bounce back. If I live through it.” Her hand went out, so thin it resembled a claw. “That’s what terrifies me—that I won’t live through it. I don’t want to die, yet I have an awful feeling that an end is coming.”

  “Ends are always coming,” Ruby said, taking the hand and chafing it gently. “You weren’t there when Alexander showed us—Charles, Sung and me—the reef of gold he’d found inside the mountain. Charles called the find apocalyptic—you know Charles, it’s the sort of word he’d use. If he hadn’t chosen it, he would have said cataclysmic or mind-boggling. But Alexander seized on the word, said apocalypse was Greek for a colossal event like the end of the world. Though when I wrote that to Lee, he said it really meant an ultimate revelation—and he had no Greek then, isn’t that amazing? Anyway, Alexander thought that his discovery of this gold mine was a colossal event, and that’s how the Apocalypse got its name. But it hasn’t really been an end, has it? More a beginning. The Apocalypse has changed all the lives it touches. Without it, he wouldn’t have sent for you, I’d still be keeping a brothel, Sung would still be an ordinary heathen Chinee with grand ideas, Charles would be a simple squatter, and Kinross would be a ghost town exhausted of placer.”

  “The Apocalypse is what the Catholics call the Book of Revelation,” said Elizabeth, “so Lee’s definition is the right one. It’s an ultimate revelation, Alexander’s gold mine. It has shown us what we really are.”

  Good, good! thought Ruby. She’s more animated than I’ve seen her in weeks. Maybe this is a subtle way to dig up that foundation stone. “I didn’t know it was biblical like that,” she said with a grin. “I’m a religious ignoramus, so explain.”

  “Oh, I know my Bible! From Genesis to Revelation, how I know it! As far as I’m concerned, nothing was ever better named than Alexander’s mountain of gold. Revelation upon revelation of beginnings and ends.” Elizabeth’s voice took on an eerie tone, her eyes glowed feverishly. “There are four horsemen riding through it, Death on a pale horse and three others. The three others are Alexander, you, and I. Because that’s what we’re doing—riding out the Apocalypse. It will make an end of me, of you, and of Alexander. None of us is young enough to survive it. All we can do is ride it out. And maybe, when we end, the Apocalypse will swallow us, hold us as its prisoners.”

  And how do I deal with this—this prophecy?

  Ruby dealt with it by snorting and giving the hand a tiny slap. “What nonsense! You’ve gone what Alexander would call fey.” A noise at the door came as a salvation; Ruby turned and beamed. “Lunch, Elizabeth! I declare I’m starved, and you look as if you’re riding Famine, so eat.”

  “Oh, I see! You dissimulated, Ruby. You do know about the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

  Whatever had provoked Elizabeth to speak in a prophetic tongue, Ruby didn’t know, but perhaps the foundation stone had shifted a little, for Elizabeth ate a good lunch, kept it down, and afterward was able to lie next to Nell on the bed and talk to her for half an hour. The child made no objection to her prone position, nor displayed any restlessness; she lay looking into her mother’s face with what, in Ruby’s opinion had Nell been much older, was an almost infinite compassion. Perhaps some Scots are fey, she thought. Elizabeth and her daughter have an otherworldliness about them, and how can a crusty engineer like Alexander cope with that?

  SIR EDWARD WYLER arrived back to see Elizabeth on April Fool’s Day, looking rather embarrassed. Lady Wyler was with him.

  “I—ah—had a gap in my appointment book,” he lied, “and I knew today there was a train to Kinross, so I decided to pop up and see how you’re going, Mrs. Kinross.”

  “Elizabeth,” she said, smiling at him fondly. “Call me that all the time, not merely when I’m at my worst. Lady Wyler, it’s so good to see you. Please tell me that the gap in your appointment book is big enough to stay for a few days.”

  “Well, candidly, Lady Wyler has felt the summer heat in Sydney this year. In fact, it’s quite worn her down. So if you don’t mind, Elizabeth, she would like to stay a few days. Alas, I can’t spare the time, so I’ll just see how things are going and catch today’s train back.”

  Having pronounced her reasonably well, if too thin, and taken a pint of blood from her, Sir Edward departed.

  “Now that he’s gone,” said Lady Wyler in a conspiratorial whisper, “you can call me Margaret. Edward is a very dear man, but ever since his knighthood he’s been wafting a foot off the ground, and will persist in addressing me as Lady Wyler. It’s the way the title rolls off his tongue, I think. He was a poor boy, you know, but his parents scraped and screwed to put him through Medicine—his father worked three jobs and his mother took in washing and ironing.”

  “Did he go to Sydney University?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Oh, dear me, no! It has no faculty of Medicine—in fact, when he was eighteen there was no Sydney University at all. So he had to g
o to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London—it’s the second-oldest hospital in the world, eleven hundred and something, I think. Or perhaps that’s the oldest hospital, the Hotel Dieu in Paris. Whatever, Bart’s is very old. Obstetrics and gynecology were very new specialties and puerperal fever raged if a woman was hospitalized for her labor. Most of Edward’s patients had their babies at home, so he used to run from one alley to another with his black bag—it was appalling, but very valuable experience. When he returned home—he was born in Sydney in 1817—he found it difficult at first. We’re both Jewish, you see, and people tend to despise the Jews.”

  “Like the heathen Chinee,” said Elizabeth softly.

  “Exactly. UnChristian.”

  “But he succeeded.”

  “Oh, yes. He was so good, Elizabeth! Head and shoulders above the—the veterinarians who called themselves accoucheurs. Once he saved the life and baby of a woman prominent in society, his troubles were over. People flocked to him, Jewish or no. He had his uses,” said Margaret dryly.

  “And you, Margaret? Were you born in Sydney? You don’t have a local accent.”

  “No, I was a midwife attached to Bart’s, and met him there. We married and I came back with him.” Her face lit up. “He is a reader, Elizabeth! Every new advance is absorbed and becomes a part of his obstetrical arsenal. For instance, very recently he read of a woman’s surviving a Caesarean section in Italy last year. So in September we’re off to Italy to speak with the surgeon—another Edward, though of course Dr. Porro says Eduardo. If my Edward could save women and babies by Caesarean section, he’d be the happiest man in the world.”

  “What happened to his parents?”

  “They lived long enough to enjoy the fruits of Edward’s success. God has been very good.”

  “How old are your children?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Ruth is almost thirty, married to another Jewish doctor, and Simon is in London at Bart’s. He’ll join his father’s practice when he’s finished.”

  “I’m very glad you’re here, Margaret.”

  “So am I. If you can put up with me, I’d like to stay until your confinement and go back to Sydney with Edward.”

  A smile curled around Elizabeth’s lips. “I think Alexander and I can both put up with you very well, Margaret.”

  TWO DAYS LATER Elizabeth’s condition suddenly deteriorated; the eclampsia was back together with the onset of an early labor. Alexander sent an urgent telegram to Sir Edward in Sydney, but knew that the obstetrician couldn’t possibly arrive in under twenty-four hours. Saving Elizabeth and the baby devolved upon Lady Wyler, who chose Ruby as her chief assistant. The same urge that had prompted Sir Edward to come to Kinross had also caused him to pack everything his wife might need in the event that he himself wasn’t there. So Margaret Wyler took his place to give Elizabeth the injections of magnesium sulfate and cope with her seizures, while Ruby dealt with the birth process, barking questions to the official midwife and obeying barked replies.

  There were more seizures this time, and closer together; Elizabeth was still fitting when the baby was born, a tiny, thin creature so blue and congested that Margaret Wyler was forced to leave Elizabeth to Jade and help Ruby try to resuscitate this second girl. For five minutes they toiled, slapping and massaging the frail little chest, before the baby gasped, jerked, began to wail faintly. Then it was back to Elizabeth, leaving Ruby to do what she could for the child. Two hours later the seizures came to an end, however temporarily; Elizabeth was still alive, and not quite passed into the terminal coma.

  The two women paused to gulp a cup of tea Silken Flower brought, tears streaming down her face.

  “Will she live?” Ruby asked, so exhausted that she sank into a chair and put her head between her knees.

  “I think so.” Margaret Wyler looked down at her hands. “I can’t stop the tremor,” she said, wonder in her voice. “Oh, what a terrible business! I never want to go through anything like this ever again.” She turned to smile at Jade, beside Elizabeth. “Jade, you were marvelous. I couldn’t have managed without you.”

  The little Chinese girl glowed, her fingers on Elizabeth’s wrist to feel a pulse. “I would die for her,” she said.

  “Have you time to look at the baby?” Ruby asked, getting up.

  “Yes, I think so. Jade, if her condition changes by so much as a whisker, yell.” Lady Wyler moved to the crib, where the wizened scrap lay mewling, her skin gone from blue-black to a pinkish mauve. “A girl,” she said, removing the linen Ruby had wrapped loosely about her. “About eight months, perhaps a little more. We have to keep her warm, but I don’t want Elizabeth any warmer. Pearl!” she said loudly.

  “Yes, my lady?”

  “Have a fire lit in the nursery immediately, and put a warming pan in some kind of small bed. Then heat a brick and wrap it in plenty of cloth so it won’t burn. And hurry!”

  Pearl flew off.

  “Jade,” said Margaret Wyler, moving back to the bed, “as soon as Pearl says the baby’s bed is ready, I want you to take her to the nursery and put her in it. Keep her warm, but make sure the bed isn’t too hot. She’s your responsibility now, I can’t leave Elizabeth, and nor can Miss Costevan. Look after her as best you can, and if she turns blue again, call us. Nell will have to sleep in Butterfly Wing’s room, so tell Pearl to move her cot out as soon as you bring the baby to the nursery.”

  It seemed to be done in the twinkling of an eye; Jade changed places with Lady Wyler and went to the crib, where Ruby gathered the baby up and handed her to Jade. Who looked down into the agonized tiny face with profound awe. “My baby!” she crooned, cuddling the bundle delicately. “This one is my baby.”

  Off she went, leaving Lady Wyler and Ruby to station themselves on either side of the narrow bed to which they had transferred Elizabeth the moment her travail had started.

  “I think she’s just sleeping,” said Ruby, looking across the inanimate form at the midwife’s drawn face.

  “So do I. But be ready, Ruby.”

  “No more children for Elizabeth.” Ruby made it a statement.

  “That is so.”

  “Margaret, you’re a woman of the world, aren’t you?” Ruby asked, trying to make the question sound inoffensive. “I mean, you’ve seen a lot in your time, you must have done.”

  “Oh, yes, Ruby. Sometimes I think I’ve seen too much.”

  “I know I have.”

  Having put this gambit forward, Ruby fell into a silence, sat chewing her lip.

  “I can assure you that nothing you say will shock me, Ruby,” said Lady Wyler gently.

  “No, this isn’t about me,” said Ruby, taking all propensity to shock as her province. “It’s about Elizabeth.”

  “Then—tell me.”

  “Um—sex,” Ruby blurted.

  “Are you asking if sex is now prohibited to Elizabeth?”

  “Yes—and no,” said Ruby, “but it’s a good place to begin. We know Elizabeth can’t possibly run the risk of having more children. Does that mean she must avoid the sex act as well?”

  Margaret Wyler frowned, closed her eyes, sighed. “I wish I had the answer to that, Ruby, but I don’t. If she could be sure that the sexual act didn’t result in conception, then yes, she could lead a normal married life. But—”

  “Oh, I know all the buts!” said Ruby. “I ran a brothel, and who better to know every trick in the book to avoid conception than a madam? Douches, the right days in the cycle, the man’s withdrawing before he ejaculates. But the trouble is that sometimes none of the tricks works. Then it’s a dose of ergot at six weeks and pray the stuff does its job.”

  “Then you know the answer to your question already, don’t you? The only absolutely sure way is not to have intercourse.”

  “Shit,” said Ruby, then straightened her shoulders. “Her husband’s downstairs waiting. What do you want me to tell him?”

  “Let him wait another hour,” said Lady Wyler. “Then if Elizabeth’s condition hasn’t changed
, you can tell him that she will be all right.”

  SO ANOTHER hour elapsed before Ruby entered the dull green Murray tartan room with a soft, warning knock.

  He was sitting where he usually did, at the big window that looked across Kinross toward the distant hills. Night had not yet fallen; severe though Elizabeth’s crisis had been, time had telescoped the past nine hours into an eternity. His book had fallen into his lap and his face was tinged with the dying gasp of the setting sun as he stared sightlessly at the angry sky. Her knock made him jump; he turned, got to his feet awkwardly.

  “She’s come through it,” said Ruby gently, taking his hand. “Not out of danger yet, but Margaret and I believe she’ll be all right. You’re the father of another little girl, my dear.”

  He sagged, sat down abruptly. Ruby took the chair facing him and managed to smile. He looked older, greyer, as if, for all his strength and power, he had finally confronted a greater foe, and lost the battle.

  “If you can summon up the wherewithal, Alexander, I am in desperate need of a cheroot and a huge snifter of cognac,” she said. “I can’t close the door because I might be needed again, but I can drink and smoke with one ear cocked.”

  “Of course, my love. You are my love, you know,” he said, producing a cheroot and lighting it for her. “There can be no more children,” he went on as he walked to the sideboard and poured two balloons of cognac, “that is manifest. Och, poor wee Elizabeth! Perhaps now she’ll know some peace. Perhaps now she’ll start to enjoy her life. No Alexander in her bed, eh?”

  “That’s the consensus of opinion,” said Ruby, taking the glass. A big swallow and she exhaled deeply. “Jesus, that’s so good! I never want to go through this again. Your wife suffered terribly, yet knew no pain. Isn’t that extraordinary? It’s all that kept me going. When one has a baby oneself, one doesn’t see what it’s like. Though Lee’s birth was easy.”