by Margaret Way
The McQueens are therefore loved and hated for a variety of reasons. Ruth is genuinely hated and perhaps should be. She has done things she had no right to do and all of Ruth’s “crimes” are not known. Her grandson, Kyall, on the other hand, is universally admired. He is a splendid figure, striking of looks, clever, egalitarian, resourceful, innovative, with such charisma he appeals to everyone, men and women alike.
The McQueens are the pulse of the town, their money the town’s lifeblood. It was Ruth McQueen who fought to get a hospital established in the town. McQueen money funded its construction and outfitting. The town has long boasted a resident doctor, a good one, Joe Randall. He’s been there from the beginning, handpicked by Ruth (rumour spread early that he was her lover), but he’s now approaching seventy and must retire. Depending on demand, Dr. Randall has up to six nurses to assist him. Nurses are easier to come by than ambitious young doctors, who can’t be lured into rural and outback practices. Joe Randall can handle most everything in general surgery, but in the event of serious cases, he brings in the Royal Flying Doctor service. The Flying Doctor service, the “mantle of safety” over the outback, was founded in 1928 by Flynn of the Inland, a Presbyterian minister who saw the urgent need for medical treatment for the people of the region. Doctors from various bases fly almost two million miles a year ministering to the far-flung communities.
The Royal Flying Doctor service, like Joe Randall, has the gratitude of the town. Ruth McQueen shows her gratitude through big donations. Ruth isn’t all bad. It’s simply that she always has to have her way. Even if it involves playing God with people’s lives.
For all her ability, Ruth has a strong vein of megalomania. Not so astonishing in a woman who’s had so much power, can lay claim to a fortune, a fine historic sheep station and one of the grandest homesteads in the nation.
Love died for Ruth with her husband. She has never felt close to her children. She’s been far too committed to running the station—or such is her excuse. But love sprang to life again when her grandson Kyall, crying lustily, was put into her arms moments after he was born. The great chunk of ice that entombed her heart for so long suddenly thawed. Love she had locked out for years flooded in.
What does it matter if Ruth brushes aside her only son, Stewart, who stands beside her at the foot of his sister’s bed? Stewart who is destined, bruised and battered, to surrender his heritage rather than submit to a lifetime of endless clashes with his mother, in which he knows he can only come off second-best. As for daughter Enid? Enid will hang in for her son. At Ruth’s insistence, the boy will be known as Kyall Reardon McQueen, an imposition Enid and Max are forced to accept. Kyall is the heir.
In Ruth’s view, it is only fitting that he should carry the dynastic name. Indeed, before the boy is barely three, the “Reardon” is dropped as too much of a mouthful. Ruth has her way. Her grandson is Kyall McQueen—just as she has ordained. Kyall is more or less stuck with it, as this is the name the town, indeed the entire outback, becomes used to.
Ruth has never looked in the direction of Max, her son-in-law. As far as Ruth is concerned, she has “kept” him—although for years and years he’s worked very hard. Max would never have been allowed into the family except for his impeccable background.
At the present time, Ruth is in her seventies. She still holds Wunnamurra in a tight grip, fearing that if she lets go she might die. And perhaps go to hell?
Ruth’s heir, her beloved Kyall, has fulfilled her every hope and dream. She loves him so much he can even move her to tears when she hasn’t shed a tear in all the years she’s been widowed—including when she received news of the death of her son, Stewart, and his wife in a bus crash in Malaysia. They left a young daughter, Suzanne, safe in a Sydney boarding school. Ruth is her guardian.
But Kyall will succeed her. Ruth can die happy. Kyall will marry well. A young woman Ruth approves of from an “exceptional” family. A young woman who can take her place anywhere. Since his early teens, Kyall’s had all the girls, one after the other, falling madly in love with him. Girls from the right side of the tracks.
Only once did Kyall cross into forbidden territory. Ruth never likes to think about that time although the terror of eventual discovery is coiled inside her like a hidden spring. This wasn’t the first time Ruth tampered with other’s lives, but it was the worst. Ruth would like to say she doesn’t fear Judgment Day, but in her heart of hearts she does.
Not that Ruth wouldn’t do it all again. Ruth McQueen is used to disposing of threats, even if they come in the form of a fifteen-year-old girl. Ruth won’t have her beloved grandson’s life ruined. Everything she did, she did for him. Even now she feels no remorse. There are certain laws laid down about who should be admitted into the McQueen family. The Dempseys would never find themselves on the list.
What does it matter that Kyall and Sarah Dempsey grew up together? That they formed a bond Ruth and Enid tried hard to destroy? Tried, but to no avail. For a grown woman to hate a mere child is demeaning. But it happened, and the hatred will continue unabated into the future.
In the end, Sarah Dempsey brought the whole unhappy business to a halt. She got pregnant. Ruth had to work fast to avert a scandal. Sarah’s father presented no problem; Jock Dempsey is dead from a spinal injury sustained on Wunnamurra station, where he was an employee, one of the fastest shearers in the McQueen sheds. After that, Sarah’s mother, Muriel, took on the running of the town’s general store, with twelve-year-old Sarah handling the business side. Sarah is clever. But no match for Ruth. It was up to Ruth, the matriarch, to find a solution.
Sarah was removed from town, weeping bitterly. Her mother, a vulnerable woman, is made to keep quiet. Kyall McQueen is never told. Kyall at sixteen would have given up everything for Sarah. His future, his family. Ruth had to take care of it all. She’d hoped for a miscarriage. Sarah had refused point-blank to agree to an abortion, telling Ruth in a young, ringing voice that nothing and no one could make her get rid of her baby.
So the baby lived.
Ruth knows where she is, one of only three people who do. The fourth has since died of snakebite, although no one knows exactly how the snake, a desert taipan, got into Molly Fairweather’s house.
Ruth to this day can’t bring herself to admit that the child, already the age her mother had been when she’d stolen Kyall’s heart, is her own great-granddaughter. That would take moral courage; Ruth only deals in the physical kind.
Life continues. Nothing goes terribly wrong. Ruth continues making plans, showing a rare smiling face to one India Claydon, who springs from a good gene pool and will make Kyall an excellent wife.
Then one August afternoon around three o’clock, Muriel Dempsey, Sarah’s mother, gives a great cry, calls her daughter’s name and collapses behind the counter in her grocery shop, bringing down on top of her a pile of mail.
In the small space of time it takes for her assistant, the town stickybeak, Ruby Hall, to run for help, Muriel Dempsey dies at fifty-six without ever knowing she has a living, healthy grandchild. Muriel has been robbed of the great joy of knowing her only grandchild. Robbed by a cruel woman whose name is Ruth McQueen.
CHAPTER ONE
Waverly Medical Centre, Brisbane
THE SURGERY HAD BEEN chaotic that morning. Winter flu. The time of year no one looked forward to. The epidemic had hit the city in the wake of the August Royal National Show, a huge crowd-pleaser, with plenty of hot sunshine and flying red dust from the show ring to encourage the germs. The patients, coughing, sneezing, searching for tissues, others with their heads firmly buried in magazines, were either waiting for flu shots—injections of the vaccine, which was an attempt to second-guess what strain of influenza would strike or seeking medication to relieve the distressing symptoms. Antibiotics didn’t work.
Sarah didn’t prescribe them for the flu or a common cold, but she knew she’d always get an argument from some of her patients who thought that only drugs could kill off the virus. These were th
e days of Be-Your-Own-Doctor, with many a patient discussing his or her diagnosis and suggesting various drugs. Home remedies and bed rest simply wouldn’t do. Small wonder the pharmaceutical companies were becoming enormously rich while bacteria became increasingly resistant to the most frequently prescribed drugs. It was a big problem and it worried her.
Around midday things got worse. Pandemonium broke loose when a three-year-old boy with silky blond hair was brought in suffering severe febrile convulsions.
“Please, please. Where’s Dr. Sarah?” The distraught mother registered her terror, appealing to the packed waiting room in general, tears pouring from her eyes.
“It’s all right, Mrs. Fielding, you’re here now. We’ll take care of you.” The clinic’s head receptionist, Janet Bellamy, a kind, competent woman, closed in on the hysterical mother fast, while her junior, Kerri Gordon, ran for Dr. Dempsey, who had a wonderful rapport with her patients, children in particular. Dr. Sarah was the one everyone wanted to see. Especially the mothers of young children.
By the time Sarah, who’d been preparing to run an electrocardiogram on a male patient with chest pains, rushed into the reception room, the young mother was screaming her fear and desperation. Janet and one of Sarah’s female patients, an ex-nurse, were trying ineffectually to calm the young woman and take the lolling, unconscious child from her arms. Another child, a little girl who’d been sitting quietly with her pregnant mother, was sobbing into her hands at this frightening new experience, while her mother placed a soothing, protective arm around her shaking shoulders.
Sarah remembered this wasn’t the little boy’s first brush with seizures. She had recommended further action at the child’s first presentation, but his mother, Kim, had been fiercely against it, no doubt dreading a worse neurological disorder like epilepsy.
At Sarah’s appearance, Kim Fielding seemed to gather strength. She stopped screaming when Sarah addressed her and immediately surrendered her only child to Sarah’s arms. The frantic look left her eyes and in the examining room she watched calmly as Sarah swiftly administered an anticonvulsant medication. The seizure, however, proved of such severity and duration that Sarah called for an ambulance to take the child to hospital to be admitted for observation. Privately she thought the boy’s high fever was only masking a more serious disorder. She grieved for the mother, and the anxious years ahead, squeezing her hand tightly as the young woman climbed into the ambulance to go with her son. These incidents involving children were deeply heart-wrenching for everyone, doctors and patients alike, but for the sake of her other patients Sarah had to refocus in order to deal with her caseload for the afternoon. It didn’t help knowing she’d have to tell Megan Copeley the results of her mammogram.
Not good.
Megan’s fat-rich, low-fiber diet alone had increased her risk of breast cancer by a factor of six. Despite every warning and every lecture Sarah gave her, she’d been unable to wean herself off it.
“But, Sarah, I can’t go without all the foods I enjoy. Neither can my family. Mealtimes would be so dull. Jeff wouldn’t stand for it. There’s no history of breast cancer in my family, anyway.”
There was now. Sadness crept up behind Sarah’s fixed resolve to maintain a professional detachment. She could picture Megan sitting opposite her in a state of shock. Megan was only a handful of years older than her. Thirty-five, with two beautiful children. Some days Sarah could hardly bear the terrible burden and responsibility of being a doctor—telling patients their fears were confirmed or breaking totally unexpected bad news. There was no way out of telling the truth, of telling patients that life as they knew it was over. It was her job to help them deal with it. She knew she was a good doctor. She knew her patients liked and respected her, but sometimes she wanted to pull a curtain and hide behind it. To weep.
What Sarah didn’t know as she agonized for Megan Copeley and tried to swallow the lump in her throat was that tragedy was about to strike her.
Not for the first time. Sarah was no stranger to loneliness, grief and despair. She had walked, talked and slept with it for years. Could she ever put the loss of her own child, her baby, behind her? Never. A mother doesn’t suffer a blow like that and continue serenely on with life. Maybe she’d learned a deeper, fuller understanding her patients seemed to recognize, but the grief and the insupportable loss would go on forever.
Baby Dempsey, who had lived only a few hours. She’d already named her in her mind—Rosalind (Rose) after the grandmother she recalled with such love. From time to time, although it was fifteen years ago, she relived the long, empty months leading up to the birth. Hidden away with a middle-aged married couple Ruth McQueen had found. She relived the birth itself, which had taken place in a private clinic. My God, the pain! Her patients didn’t have to tell her anything about that, not realizing because of her single status and lack of family that she’d given birth to a child. She remembered the morning after when she’d awakened, wanting to get up, to go to her baby. She’d wanted to tell Rose not to fear, she’d make something of herself. For both of them. Don’t be afraid, my little one. My little one. There were moments when she could remember nothing but the feel of her baby against her breast. So fleeting a time!
Miss Crompton always told her she had what it took to be anything she wanted.
“You work hard, Sarah, and I see a future far beyond this little outback town. You’re one pupil I know in my bones is going to make a name for herself. You have it here.” At this point Miss Crompton always tapped her head.
She might’ve had the brains, but emotionally she’d been frail. At fifteen she’d been made pregnant by the great love of her life, the only love, and she was into her thirty-first year now, with all her friends either married or getting married. But she couldn’t forget Kyall and the wonder of loving him. His spirit, like their baby’s, was locked up inside her. Internalized. She carried Kyall within her, and his presence in her life sometimes seemed so real it was as if he was there, melting her spine with love of him. Other times she hated him with a shocking intensity, lowering herself to curse him to hell. How could he have abandoned her? Kyall McQueen, her soul mate. They’d each shadowed the other, despite the opposition of the all-powerful Ruth McQueen, his grandmother, and his mother, Enid. Even her own mother had found their unique bond a source of great worry.
“You can’t be so daft, Sarah, as to think anything good can come of this. They’re the McQueens! God almighty, they’re royalty to the rest of us. We’re nothing, nobodies. It takes all my time to put clothes on your back and shoes on your feet. With your father gone…” Here her mother used to choke on her tears.
In the end, her dear sweet mother had been right. A few secret hours spent together one starry night, one single glorious starry night cocooned in the bush, and she’d gotten pregnant when she was little more than a child. So much for Miss Crompton’s pleasure and pride in her! Her whole future ruined. Kyall’s splendid future already mapped out. Master of Wunnamurra, one of the country’s most historic sheep stations. Kyall had been born not with a silver spoon in his mouth but the whole goddamn service.
Ruth McQueen had snatched her away from the town. Snatched her away from Kyall. Forced her devastated mother to keep her mouth shut about Sarah’s baby. But the terrible hurt… How many times had Sarah gone to the phone during those long months of waiting, wanting to scream that she had to speak to Kyall. Of course they’d never have let her. Finally she believed what Ruth McQueen kept telling her. She would destroy Kyall’s young life. She would ruin her own chances, having a baby so young.
“My dear, what you need is an abortion,” Ruth had told her, voice very calm, very firm. “I can arrange it. Afterward I’ll see to it that you have a good education. A private school in Brisbane. You would board. Harriet Crompton keeps telling me ad nauseam that you’re a very clever girl, although you haven’t been terribly clever about this, have you, my dear?”
She had been shocked at Ruth McQueen’s utter callousness, especial
ly when the baby in her womb was Ruth’s great-grandchild. She had told the woman what she thought of her murderous suggestion, her own voice every bit as determined as that tyrant’s. She believed that abortion was wrong, and she wasn’t about to cower before Ruth McQueen. When she first knew she was pregnant, she was wild with panic like some trapped animal, but it didn’t take all that long for her to settle down. She felt almost calm. Full of wonder. She would have the most beautiful child ever known to woman. Her child. Kyall’s child. Her baby would have turquoise eyes like his, olive skin, blue-black curls. Her next baby would look like her. A brown-eyed blonde with a little dimple in her chin.
But she had lost her baby. She only remembered its little body lying on hers, its darling little head pressed into her shoulder while she crooned words of love. She’d felt that rush of maternal love, even exhausted and foggy from all the medication they’d given her. How her baby had hurt her coming out! The pain. Agony, really. She awoke sometimes at night crying out with that remembered pain. It was like being on the rack. The tortures of the Spanish Inquisition. And for what?
She learned the next morning from Ruth. Believing but never quite believing, somehow.
“No!” It was a scream that still resonated in her head. Not surprisingly, Ruth McQueen was much kinder to her than before. She attended to everything. It was McQueen money that sent Sarah to that exclusive boarding school, McQueen money that got her through medical school, though she’d worked hard at part-time jobs to pay as much of her own way as she possibly could. The McQueens were great benefactors. Sarah shivered as she took a breath. To lose her baby was in the order of things, wasn’t it? She had never figured in Ruth McQueen’s plans. She and her widowed mother were the ordinary people of the town. The baby, hers and Kyall’s, had died without her ever telling a soul. Kyall never knew, and her mother had been advised to look on the whole tragic incident as if it had never happened. But her mother wasn’t like that. Muriel carried the pain deep within her. Unspoken but never far from her mind.