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?’
‘Indeed. And why do we turn a blind eye to it?’
She struggled to breathe, keeping her emotions in check. ‘I have no answers.’
‘I’m not sure there are any. I only know to keep mine safe from hurt.’ Then he coughed and turned his head. ‘Or I thought I knew.’
‘Oh, James.’ Linley stood up to hold his arm. ‘You have.’
He patted her hand. ‘And our other patient. How is he?’
Linley ducked her head. ‘He seems well.’
‘That is good.’ James smiled a sad smile. ‘I will take my leave, my dear Linley, and get to my bath before it’s too dark to see the tub.’
A small but loud squawk reached their ears.
‘Aha,’ James said. ‘I do believe that one belongs to you.’
He opened the door for her and followed her to the kitchen. He continued through to the laundry room outside and Linley heard him carting water to heat in the boiler.
Annie Rutherford had just fed her youngest and put him in his crib. She took up Toby and cradled him in her arms. ‘One more to feed and then we can all go to bed.’ She crinkled her nose. ‘But this one is for you to do something about first.’
‘Oh dear.’ Linley opened her arms for her baby, stinky as he was.