Caleb volunteered to enter the house and check on Mrs Murray, although there would be little he could do. A pair of light trousers and a shirt, along with a pair of slippers procured from the Chinese, was all he needed for the second room. Being nearly a head taller and slimmer than his colleague, a similar set of clothing had to be arranged for Bowen.
He found Murray sunk in despair beside the cold kitchen hearth. The little maid sobbed in a corner and the child sat neglected on his bed, crying.
Caleb set the box of food he carried on the kitchen table and crouched in front of the sobbing girl.
‘Pull yourself together, Posy,’ he said. ‘You will do yourself no good. Get the fire going and boil some water. I’m told tea is a mighty good restorative. There’s food in that box that will see you through till tomorrow morning.’
The girl sniffed. ‘What do I call you?’ she said.
He smiled at her. ‘That’s better. My name’s Caleb.’
‘And are you really a doctor?’
For a moment Caleb’s breath stopped in his throat. The denial came so easily and so readily. Instead he said, ‘Yes, I am. Now, I’m going to see your mistress.’
Lizzie Murray had been put to bed in the couple’s neat little bedroom. She lay back on an embroidered pillow, her fingers pleating the bedclothes. Her mouth worked when she spotted Caleb and she crooked a finger, indicating for him to come closer.
‘Don’t blame him,’ she said, her gaze sliding to her husband, who still sat slumped in his chair while Posy busied herself lighting the fire. ‘It was me that insisted on coming home. If I’m going to die, I want it to be here. I loved this house.’
Caleb had no response to that. He understood the woman’s sentiments, but she had endangered everyone in the town.
The disease seemed to be following its natural course. Her mouth was full of sores and the rash that had begun on the woman’s face had spread to her extremities. Her fever had come down.
‘I’m feeling better,’ she said with a brave attempt at a smile.
Caleb returned the smile. ‘That’s good.’
She didn’t need to know that in twenty-four hours, the rash would turn to sores and the sores to pustules and her fever would rise. In forty-eight hours, she could be dead.
All Caleb had to alleviate her misery was a small blue bottle of laudanum. This he gave to Posy with instructions on its administration. Posy bathed the woman’s face and hands and Caleb sat beside the bed watching as Lizzie dropped into a fitful sleep, her feverish hands plucking at the sheets that covered her.
He rose to his feet, stretched and moved to the window. The shadows outside were lengthening and the tall fence made the once pleasant room gloomy. He glanced at Murray, who had not moved since Caleb had entered. He wanted to rail at the man for the idiocy of moving his wife, taking on that risk and responsibility not only for her life but also that of the whole town, but what was done was done and nothing would be accomplished by adding to this man’s guilt and helplessness.
‘Come and sit with your wife,’ he said.
Murray shuffled to the bed and Caleb showed the man how best to ease his wife’s suffering.
Outside he took a deep breath of fresh air and went to the first of the containment rooms. He poured water into the bowl and scrubbed his hands with the carbolic soap that had been left there.
‘You’ll scrub your skin off,’ Posy remarked from the doorway where she stood holding a steaming tin pannikin.
Caleb hastily dried his hands and took the mug from her. ‘Washing hands keeps the illness at bay,’ he said. ‘I want you to make sure that you regularly wash your hands and young Robert’s.’
The girl managed a humourless smile. ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness?’
Caleb returned to the verandah, sat on the bench and leaned his head against the wall. A wave of sadness washed over him as he looked up at the palings that now imprisoned the family. Lizzie Murray had probably sat on this bench chatting with passers-by while she shelled peas or mended her husband’s shirts. He saw death in Lizzie Murray’s eyes. She would not live out the week.
Eighteen
18 January 1872
Maiden’s Creek froze as a pall of fear descended. The roads in and out were shut off. The shops did not open, and parents kept their children home from school. Every inhabitant seemed to hold their breath, eyes turned to the pretty little house hidden behind a great wall on the side of the road to Aberfeldy. Despite the cottage’s isolation, the screams of the dying woman could be clearly heard by people passing the house and, scared, they held their breath and kept to the furthest side of the road.
Unlike the rest of the town, the police station bustled with activity. Extra constables had been sent up from Buneep to assist with securing the roadblocks and the Emergency Committee had taken over Sergeant Maidment’s office.
Adelaide hurried up the deserted main street, carrying an envelope containing the latest telegram advising that the vaccine had left Melbourne and would be with them on the next day, roads permitting. As she stepped onto the verandah of the police station, the front door opened and a man hurried out, colliding with her. He caught her by the arm before she fell onto the road.
‘I’m sorry, Adelaide. I didn’t see you there.’
Her heart skipped a beat. ‘Caleb. You’re forgiven. You must have a lot on your mind.’
He stood holding her arm and staring at her with sunken, red-rimmed eyes as if he had never seen her before in his life. He looked like a man who needed a good night’s sleep.
‘I’ve brought a telegram.’ She held it up. ‘The vaccine will be here tomorrow.’
‘That’s excellent news. Have you been vaccinated?’
She shook her head. ‘No, none of us have.’
He tightened his grip. ‘Then make sure you are the first in line. If anything were to happen—’
‘Caleb, you’re hurting me.’
He dropped his hand with a mumbled apology. ‘I’m sorry. Losing track of time. What day is it?’
‘Thursday. How is Mrs Murray?’
‘She will be dead by tomorrow morning,’ he said in a flat voice.
Adelaide closed her eyes. ‘Poor, poor woman. And her family?’
He paused. ‘Her son—’ He began and looked away. ‘He’s showing the symptoms and it is likely he will follow his mother. The other two will be all right.’
Adelaide thought of little Robert Murray in his mother’s arms as she showed him off to the ladies in the post office, and she wanted to weep. ‘I knew them …’ she said, dashing at the tears that welled in her eyes. ‘Forgive me. I think we are all feeling the strain. How are you managing? It all seems to have fallen on you and Bowen.’
‘I will be glad when this is over. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get up to the Murray house.’
Adelaide glanced at the envelope in her hand. ‘And I must give this to Sergeant Maidment.’
Caleb caught her arm again and she looked at him. His dark, haunted eyes held hers. ‘Adelaide, I’m sorry … for everything. There will be time to talk when this is over.’
He dropped his hand and his firm footsteps echoed on the wooden verandah boards. She did not move. Only when she could be certain he had gone did she dare to breathe.
Caleb sat on the verandah of the Murray house, a pannikin of tea provided by Posy on the bench beside him, as he took a few minutes to smoke his pipe. The rich scent of tobacco masked the stench of the sick room. As he picked up the pannikin a knock on the palings made him start, slopping the hot, horrible liquid on his hand.
‘Who is it?’
‘Reverend Johnson. The Murrays are my parishioners. I have come to pray and keep vigil.’
‘You can’t come in, Reverend.’
‘I’ve had the smallpox, doctor, and I have brought a second set of clothes with me.’
Caleb stared at the stout defences. Lizzie Murray was dying. Nothing on the earth would ease her suffering, though perhaps she needed th
is man to ease her way from this world to the next.
‘Constable,’ he addressed Maidment’s man who kept guard at the entrance to the fortress, ‘let the good Reverend in.’
At the sight of the vicar of St Thomas, Posy burst into tears. Murray grasped the Reverend’s hands and wrung them between effusive, almost tearful, words of thanks.
Caleb left the family in peace and returned to the bench on the front verandah.
The warm summer evening was closing in when Reverend Johnson joined him, holding a pannikin of tea.
‘I don’t know what it is about tea,’ Caleb said. ‘Give me good honest coffee any day.’
Johnson took a sip. ‘I, myself, am rather partial to the brew but I think it is the act of making, serving and drinking it that is the solace to the soul, not the brew itself.’
Caleb nodded. ‘Maybe.’
‘I feel you and I did not, perhaps, get off on a good footing, Hunt,’ Johnson said after a long moment.
‘I think we are very different men, Reverend.’
‘I can only imagine the things you have seen. They say war is hell.’
Caleb scoffed. ‘Hell would seem a pleasant alternative, Reverend, but for all of that, there are those who went into battle professing God and came out of it still professing the same deity. Not me.’
Johnson studied him for a long moment. ‘Then I’ll pray for you as well. I think you need to come to a place of peace in your life, Hunt.’
‘I’d be obliged.’ Caleb smiled at the man’s ingenuous belief that prayer would help his troubled soul. ‘Anything to help.’
‘You will probably disagree, but God is working through you. He sent you here.’
Caleb thought about the thug lying dead on the filthy street of San Francisco, a bullet from Caleb’s Colt through his heart. ‘If you had the slightest idea of what sent me here, Johnson, you would not say that.’
‘Wouldn’t I? He works in mysterious ways—’
Before he could expound further on the workings of the Lord, the front door opened and Posy peered around. ‘Reverend? She’s asking for you.’
Johnson tossed the dregs of his tea on the ground and considered the empty cup. ‘I will stay and see this out, Hunt.’
Elizabeth Murray died in the dark hours just before dawn.
The Emergency Committee had already agreed on the arrangements for a speedy burial and a rough coffin had been prepared and stood waiting at the gate. Posy insisted on laying the unfortunate woman out as best she could, using the sheet from her bed as a shroud. Murray laid his wife in the coffin and Caleb hammered the lid shut.
When he was done, Murray fell on the coffin, weeping. ‘Where are you taking her? The cemetery? I need to be beside her grave. We’ve never been apart …’
Caleb put a hand on the man’s shoulder. ‘She will not be buried in the cemetery, Murray. We cannot allow her body to be carried through the town. A grave has been prepared on the hill above this house. The Reverend and I will see her properly interred, but you must remain here.’
‘But I’m not sick.’ The wild-eyed man, who had probably not slept in days, tried to push past them.
Caleb held him back. ‘Your son has the illness. Until this house is free from smallpox, you are not leaving. Am I clear?’
‘It wasn’t me,’ Murray said and sank onto the bench by the front door. ‘She knew she was sick but she wanted to come home.’ He looked around at the little house that had become his prison. ‘She loved this place so much. She made it so …’ Murray gave way to his grief, burying his face in his hands, sobbing and broken.
Caleb nodded to Johnson and, with difficulty, the two men carried the coffin to the gatehouse.
In the street, Caleb took a deep breath. He hadn’t managed more than a few hours’ sleep in the last twenty-four and he longed for nothing more than to collapse onto a bed, but he had promised Murray he would see his wife properly interred and he would keep that promise.
Four hefty miners had volunteered to carry the coffin but it still took two hours to carry it up the steep slope, while across the valley the townsfolk stood on the tram track that was used for carrying wood to the mines. They watched in silence as the Reverend Johnson hung a stole around his neck preparatory to conducting the funeral service with the dignity of any other internment.
In a town where digging holes in the rocky, unforgiving ground was the mainstay of life, another excavation made no difference and a hole nearly ten feet deep gaped before them, ropes laid ready to lower the poor woman to her endless rest.
In the days that followed, Caleb and Bowen were kept occupied vaccinating the town. As the vaccine itself could sometimes bring on a fever, the days following vaccination were equally fraught, and the two doctors barely slept.
By the end of the following week, the child—incredibly—had recovered and no one else in the Murray household had come down with the disease and neither had anyone they had been in contact with.
On being told that they could leave the house, Murray smiled for the first time. ‘Thank the Lord. You can pull down the wall and we will be free to go back to our lives.’
But they left the house without even the clothes on their backs. Everything that had been the Murrays’s was left behind. There was no shortage of explosives in the town and powder was set at strategic points in the house. Lighted brands were thrown in and, as the fire lit up the town, Jacob Murray knelt on the road, head in his hands, and wept.
The town council were not without compassion and an empty house had been found for Murray and his child and the town rallied with donations of household items and clothing for the three unfortunates, but Murray was in no state to understand the enormity of his loss. Nor did it help that Charles Cowper took it upon himself to berate the man for his stupidity in taking his wife back to his home instead of into the isolation of a smallpox hospital.
Bowen sat at the uneven table in his cabin and wrote to the Health Department in Melbourne advising that the outbreak had been contained.
‘Credit for the early detection and measures adopted to ensure the safety of the inhabitants of Maiden’s Creek must be given to a medical person, trained in America, who happens to be on our goldfields at the present time …’ he read aloud.
‘Don’t mention me,’ Caleb said, pouring them both whiskey.
‘Why ever not?’
‘I have no standing here,’ Caleb said.
Bowen tapped his fingers on the table. ‘Do you have any proof of your qualification?’
Caleb shrugged. A battered leather folio in his box contained the yellowed and torn diploma from the medical school in Washington he had attended, and the long out-of-date certificate of his registration to practice in Virginia. He often wondered why he still carried these papers, but perhaps this small corner of his life was one he could not quite let go.
He showed them to Bowen, who nodded and handed them back.
‘I need to make this report in person,’ he said. ‘If I take the coach tomorrow, I will be back in a week. You can manage.’
‘A week! I keep telling you, Bowen. I haven’t practiced medicine for years and I’ve no legal standing.’
Bowen waved a hand. ‘I don’t think folk around here will be asking to see your qualifications. You’ll be fine. And don’t tell me you wouldn’t appreciate a bit of extra income.’
Caleb turned away with an exasperated snort. He sat in the battered armchair beside the smouldering fire and sipped his whiskey. Now the crisis had passed, he craved nothing more than his bed. Anything else could wait until tomorrow.
Nineteen
2 February 1872
‘Good morning, Mrs Greaves.’
At the soft American accent, Adelaide, busy with sorting the long overdue mail, spun on her heel. The joy at seeing him and the ridiculous burst of warmth that ran through her body found expression in a smile. ‘Caleb—Mr Hunt—how unexpected. I hear that you are the darling of the town,’ she said. ‘Patients queuing up for miles to
see you.’
He gave a soft laugh and inclined his head. ‘Bowen’s due back any day and I, for one, will be pleased to see him.’ Caleb frowned. ‘Have you done something to your hair?’
Adelaide patted the soft curls that framed her face. ‘I believe this is now a more fashionable style. Not that I follow fashion …’ She took a steadying breath. ‘I apologise. I’m rambling. It’s good to see you. Doctoring agrees with you. You look positively respectable.’
He wore a conservative—for him—waistcoat of dark green over a neatly pressed shirt and his hair, still damp, looked to have had a trim. He was clean shaven and the faint, familiar scent of sandalwood drifted across the counter.
‘Did you have any adverse reaction to the vaccination?’ he asked.
Adelaide rubbed her left arm. ‘No. A most unpleasant experience but if it means we are safe from smallpox, worth the inconvenience.’
Caleb nodded. ‘I don’t think there’s any further risk.’
‘Poor Mrs Murray, but how wonderful that the child survived.’
‘Children are often more resilient than we give them credit for,’ Caleb said. ‘He’ll be scarred but at least he’ll be alive.’
A silence stretched between them, interrupted by a woman wanting to buy a stamp. The woman glanced at Caleb and, recognising him, smiled and insisted on taking his hands in her own. ‘’Tis a miracle,’ she said. ‘God sent you to us in our hour of need.’
Caleb cleared his throat and extricated his hands with a mumbled thanks. When the door shut behind the customer, he turned to Adelaide. Leaning across the counter, he said in a low, urgent voice, ‘I have to get out of this town, if only for a few hours. Would you consider closing the post office and coming on an adventure with me?’
‘I can’t.’ She waved at the unsorted mail. ‘I’ve—’
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