The Noon Lady of Towitta

by Patricia Sumerling

  It seemed to be hours before we came back with the constable. He lit the lamp and we all followed him into the house with sticks and forks. I held onto Willy’s hand while the constable, followed by August, cautiously crept through the kitchen to the bedroom. The lamp shone on the body of Bertha stretched out across the floor. The brothers gasped in horror at what they saw and the constable yelled, ‘Out of here, quick. There’s been a murder and I must get help.’

  As we retreated I grabbed my boots from under the sofa and put them on over my burr-covered stockings. We blew out the lamp and ran back across the silvery fields now bathed in moonlight towards Constable Lambert’s house. It was about midnight when Mrs Lambert, his mother, made us each a makeshift bed in which to sleep while her son saddled his horse and rode to Truro for reinforcements.

  It was almost dawn and already hot when I awoke. I was alarmed to find myself in a strange bed and it took some time to remember where I was and how and why I came to be there. I felt confused, were the events of the night before a nightmare? And I ached from head to toe, I was covered in scratches and my head throbbed.

  Mrs Lambert provided me with a large bowl of cool water in the outhouse and I did my best to wash and tidy myself before finishing donning my dusty and shabby clothes. We sat around shocked and silent until Constable Lambert returned and we then followed him and his mother back across the paddocks to our farm. He never once asked me questions about what had happened, so I remained silent. When we arrived back, they stripped Mother’s bed and spread it with an old blanket. Bertha was laid there on her back and washed down, but there was no attempt to clear up the blood on the floors or walls.

  Shortly after, the place was abuzz with police and locals trying to find out what was going on. I sat on the bench outside the farmhouse. The boys told me they were going to look around the farm for clues. That night I slept in the barn with the brothers and next morning Detective Priest, the very one I had met a couple of years earlier, arrived with a large group of reinforcements.

  News certainly travelled fast by the bush telegraph for Mother and Father returned from Eden Valley the next day. The boys attended to the horse while Mother wrapped her arms around me and asked what was going on. She told me that she had heard some news in Eden Valley the night before and they had made tracks for home at first light.

  28

  Following this confession to Sister Kathleen, I began to cough. I held the cloth to my mouth to catch the blood. It was some minutes before I could stop. Sister Kathleen rushed to my side and after my coughing bout had passed she said, ‘This is such a horrible time for you. I wish it didn’t have to be like this.’ After cleaning me up, she said, ‘Now look what you’ve done to yourself. This kind of excitement is not good for your condition, it could bring on a fit. You know there’s no need to make up such a story just because you feel guilty about what happened so long ago.’

  Although weakened by the retching, I still protested, ‘But, Sister, I am not making this up. Don’t you realise that what I am telling you now is true? Why I am not mad with the guilt, I don’t know. Had Father lived longer, I would be in the lunatic asylum where that Schwanefeldt girl was sent.’

  ‘Who is she?’ interrupted Sister Kathleen.

  ‘She’s the girl my sweetheart Gustave was supposed to be engaged to, whom I knew nothing of until that dreadful night. After all that fuss and bother following the confession at the trial, Mother told me that Mr Schwanefeldt had sacked Gustave. They had not known that all the time he was planning to marry their daughter he was also making overtures to me. After the admissions in court of his affair with me, the girl’s parents didn’t think he was a suitable person for their daughter to marry. They sacked him and warned him to stay away from her. She, poor girl, had a nervous breakdown and was eventually incarcerated in the Glenside lunatic asylum. As far as I know she’s still there after all these years ranting and raving about cutting throats.

  ‘Gustave also had a hard time at the hands of his own family. He ended up with no job and no sweethearts and was beaten by his older brothers. A passage was booked for him from Port Adelaide to Queensland. His brothers forcibly put him on the ship and sent him to stay with relatives so he could work in the cane fields far north of Brisbane. He later changed his name, married someone else and had a family.’

  ‘I had no idea.’

  When I told Sister Kathleen that I was beginning to feel cold even though we were sitting in warm sunshine, she put a blanket around my shoulders and over my knees and propped up my pillow. She had been so kind to me since I was brought into the Consumptive Home a few months before when the disease had returned with a vengeance. My life was fast slipping away from me and I was confined to days of sitting about or long sleeps. Before I became too ill Sister Kathleen had promised to take me to Semaphore to look at the sea. But I knew now I would never see it.

  She straightened my pillow and looked straight into my eyes and said seriously, ‘But how can this story be true? I remember that case so well for I read about it in the old papers that my parents had kept. They never threw them out, you know, because the murder was so sensational. And of course everyone spoke about it for ages at family gatherings and at mealtimes. We all know you couldn’t possibly have done it because you are left-handed and the newspapers wrote that the murderer was right-handed.’

  ‘Well that may be so, Sister. But you see, what no one bothered to find out was that I can use both my hands equally well. There’s a special name for it, I’m told. Further, when I helped my brothers with the slaughtering of a pig or a sheep, I would hold the pig down with my left hand while slitting its throat with my right hand. I always did it that way.’

  ‘Mary, you really do know how to tell a good story, but you know you shouldn’t tell tales quite so realistically for one day someone might believe you. If I didn’t know you better, I would have believed that story. And that stuff about Bertha thinking you were expecting a baby. If that was true, what was that about? I don’t remember hearing anything about a baby in this story before.’

  ‘Only Gustave and the women in the Adelaide Gaol knew I was expecting. The women were helpful. One of them, Melissa, was very helpful. When we got together for our sewing afternoons, we would tell each other of our supposed crimes. She told us that she had got caught after one of her special operations had gone wrong. One afternoon she whispered to me, “Tell me, dearie, you’re in the family way aren’t you?” ’

  ‘Well, I broke down there and then partly from the relief of having a shoulder to cry on. My clothes were tightening around my waist and I’d already let out the seams once. It was only going to be a matter of time before this news leaked out.

  ‘ “Look, I can help you,” she told me. “I know what a desperate state you are in and I’m quite experienced in situations like this. Your trial’s coming up soon and believe me, you’ll have even less hope of escaping that noose once everyone knows your true condition. Even if you get off, you’ll still be having a baby out of wedlock and you’ll be just as damned. Further, if we don’t do this little operation soon, it will be too late for you to have one at all. I can do them easily and quickly but not if you’re more than three months gone. Would you like me to help you?” ’ ‘

  “Please.”

  ’ ‘ “It’s quite easy, we’ll do it tomorrow afternoon. As you know when we’re all together in the sewing room we’re watched by the warden like a hawk. However, there is about ten minutes when she takes the repaired overalls from us and takes them back to stores. She must trust us but I don’t know how she gets away with it. In those few moments we are unsupervised I’ll be able to help you.” ’

  ‘So the next day when the warden walked away with the load of repairs, the women laid me out on the table and Melissa swiftly performed her operation with a knitting needle, the same one used by the women who knitted clothes for babies and children so Mrs Maughan, the clergyman’s wife, could give to the poor in the West End of Adelaide. You can see
there were no secrets there.

  ‘Melissa told me to expect the results of her handiwork about the next day or so. And so it happened. We were in the sewing room two days later when I started to feel things start. I asked to use the privy and everything happened without a fuss. It was a rough few nights for me; that’s when I had some of my worst nightmares about being hanged. I had a fever for a few days but then it passed. Following the miscarriage I felt a bit down for a few days but the women kept my spirits up and protected me from any possible exposure.

  ‘About a week later when we were at our sewing one afternoon, a lawyer came into our sewing room with one of the wardens. The warden shouted out, “Madam Harpur, sorry, I mean Missus Melissa Fairbairn, you have a visitor.” At that moment my blood ran cold. I realised my operation had been performed by none other than the woman who had killed Rebekah.’

  Sister Kathleen didn’t bat an eyelid and I don’t think she really understood the full impact of what I had been telling her for she said, ‘Look, I’d better get back to the ward. I’ll help you back to your room because the sun is going down and it is cooling down quickly.’

  So Sister Kathleen assisted me back to my room and saw me into my bed before she said, ‘Mary, that was one of your best stories, seemingly so believable.’

  ‘But, Sister, it was a true story, you must believe me.’

  But she laughed in response and as she left the room she repeated, ‘Yes, that was a good story, Mary.’

  And I was left alone with my first and only confession.

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