SYDNEY COVE, JANUARY 1800
She sat with her son as he burnt and muttered. Typhus, Mr Balmain had said. Mr Balmain had been no friend to Surgeon White, but she knew he’d help his son now.
Typhus came with each convict ship, blazing its way through the colony, then dying out until the next ship arrived. Typhus killed more than half the adults who caught it and nearly every child.
Her child. Her precious child. He couldn’t die.
She bent her head, feeling the tears cold on her cheeks. How could she live without him? Day after day, year after year, when he was simply … not.
If only she could keep every day of his six years with her, like you stored butter in a well, days that she could take out and live again. But you never paid attention when you should. You spent the days cooking, washing, brushing your hair. Stupid things, when you could have been watching your son.
She knew there would never be another child. Not for her.
There was nothing she could do. Wash his face and chest to try to keep the fever down, bundle him in rugs when the chills came, reassure him when he screamed in his delirium. Try to coax him to drink some boiled water, to eat a spoonful of stewed apple.
And pray.
It was her fault. Don’t play with the convict brats, she’d said, as if that was enough to keep him safe. But the whole colony was a land of convicts and their diseases.
She should have sent him to England last year, when his father had first written about Andrew joining him. There’d even been a woman passenger, one of the officers’ wives, who’d have looked after him, especially with the golden sovereigns his father sent. Andrew should have been in England now, in that fine brick house on the hill, being raised a gentleman, not running wild with muddy feet.
Not lying here, dying.
Her fault. All her fault.
She bent her head. ‘If he lives,’ she prayed, ‘I will let him go. I promise. No matter how much it hurts, I will let him go.’
She opened her eyes. Somehow she had hoped that her prayer might have made a difference. But Andrew still lay there in a feverish sleep, from which it looked like he might never wake.
He needed fresh water. She stood, leaving the candle burning by the dish of stewed apples, went out to the kitchen and dipped the bowl into the bucket by the door. It wasn’t till she was headed back that she saw the thing on the table.
A fish. A giant fish. Had a friend of her husband’s brought it? But they would have left it covered in a cloth to keep off the flies. And this fish had a great gash in its side. It had been speared, she thought, not caught with a net or hook.
It was a mystery. But she had no time to spare for mysteries now. Still she stopped to put the fish away in the fly-proof safe.