Affection (20 page)

A butcher from Alderman Castling’s shop near the Victoria Bridge came down with plague and that put the wind up council.

By that stage, no Chinaman nor black had been infected. At least, none had been reported, which I supposed was a completely different thing, but it was proof to some that the disease going around wasn’t plague at all.

The smell of sulphur, burning rubbish and burning rats hung about town in the mornings and it must have been hard for those who didn’t believe in plague to shake the physical evidence of apocalypse. Even Dawson kept a low profile.

As the new patients arrived at Three Mile Creek, Mrs Gard’s daughter appeared to improve.

The Reverend Ward began to fail.

You may think I’m exaggerating. It’s true, modern medicine allows me to dispassionately describe a disease by its cause, effect and treatment, as if I could pin it to a cork board to study and say ‘Yes, that’s it’ and move on. But medicine, if it is a science, can’t describe the horror of a bewildered child dying in agony of, say, diphtheria or whooping cough or one of any number of diseases. The truth is that these ancient diseases are monsters, more real and terrible than any dragon or devil or creation of Mary Shelley. So I want you to understand why I say this; that I also believe that I am a man of science, and that the hairs stood on the back of my neck when I entered the plague tent.

Dr Linford Row, from his unpublished memoirs

HUMPHRY HAD FOR SEVERAL
days insisted on tending the Reverend Ward himself. Now the minister’s condition was deteriorating and Turner let Humphry stay by the bed, even though it left us with more of the work.

One afternoon, with dark clouds blowing in from the sea and smelling of rain, Routh sent for help. The note was addressed to me, Routh by then refusing to deal directly with Turner.

I gathered from the note that Bacot wouldn’t free another doctor and Humphry wouldn’t leave the Reverend’s side, and he needed a second opinion on two patients. Medicines were late, so could I collect them and lend a hand?

No cab could take me to Three Mile Creek. Humphry had his buggy with him. There were no patients waiting for the ambulance, so I had to take the Carbine. I stopped at the public hospital to collect a box of laudanum.

The plague hospital might have been a military camp now. The tents were square and tight, centred precisely inside a barbed-wire fence creating an illusion of order. The glare from the canvas infected the scrub around it and lit the face of Routh so he seemed to be in a fever himself as he accompanied me first to his office with the supplies, and then to the lone tent to which the Reverend had been moved.

He complained about the lack of staff and what Bacot, Turner and the Epidemic Board weren’t doing about it.

‘Is it adequate, though?’ I said.

‘Adequate?’ He pointed his two chins at the tents we passed. ‘Primitive, I’d call it.’

‘Better than West Point, surely.’

‘Hmm.’

‘How are you treating him?’

‘The Reverend? Laudanum for the pain. What would we do without it, eh?’

Routh wanted me to go to the main tent to see his patients, particularly the Gard child whom he thought was fully recovered. He seemed keen to discharge her. He might need the bed soon, he said, the rate Turner was incarcerating people.

‘I’ll see Humphry first,’ I said, so we cut across the grass towards a lone policeman, who got up from his chair and began fiddling with a rope that tied a gate to an inner fence, a loose affair hardly likely to stop anyone who wanted to, say, step over it. He added some sense that things were under control, but there was little chance of this patient escaping.

We stopped outside the canvas flap of the smaller tent. The Reverend Ward had had to be isolated to spare everyone further distress. He’d stopped swearing, said Routh, but his screams were torturous. We pulled up our surgical masks. And then hesitated a moment at the entrance.

‘Poor bugger,’ was Routh’s final, muffled opinion, and we stepped from the modern world to meet this monster from the past.

The air was hot and drowsy with ether. There was nothing to stir it. The light that soaked through the canvas made every person in that tent appear drained
of blood. A nurse sat on a hard hospital chair by a bed with a wet towel in her hand and a basin at her feet. Humphry was hunched over a table with some papers and bottles and might well have been asleep. On the bed lay a form covered in a white sheet.

Humphry stood suddenly and met us by the bed. All of us were perspiring now. I had to take my glasses off and wipe them.

‘Where’s Turner?’ said Humphry. His eyes were red and had dark puffy sacks beneath them.

‘Widding the town of wats,’ I said. A poor joke at Turner’s expense, and I felt ashamed as soon as I said it, but Routh tittered so no harm done.

Humphry summarised the medical history of the Reverend William Ward, minister of the Church of England. The Reverend Ward was taken ill five days before with abdominal discomfort, fever, chills, and such. Bacot found swollen glands in the groin and Humphry had serum taken, confirming
pasteurella pestis
.

Blasted Bacot had sent him to Three Mile Creek in the middle of the night.

‘You can imagine the to-do all this caused,’ added Routh. Bacot had now sent a number of patients off into the night, to Turner’s disgust.

Humphry finished by saying the patient had been given vaccine, the buboes had been drained, his condition had deteriorated and it appeared the germ had entered his blood system and there were signs of septicaemia in the past few hours.

‘It’s not easy, you know, providing this sort of care,’ said Routh. ‘I need more doctors if people are going to end up like this.’

Humphry ignored Routh and nodded past me at the bed.

The Reverend Ward’s eyes were open and watching us, which gave me a start. I leaned forward to see his face better. The conjunctiva was no longer white; it was livid, and I could see the tracks of bloody tears which had run down his face and puddled in an ear. His hair was wet where the nurse had been dabbing his forehead. His eyes flicked from me to Humphry. I pulled my mask away and gave him what I hoped was a reassuring smile, introduced myself.

I was astounded when the poor chap smiled back. His gums were bleeding and the blood had stained his teeth. Routh gave a small cough and excused himself from the tent.

The Reverend mouthed a word several times.

‘Do you have pain? You do?’ Humphry said. ‘I’ll find some laudanum.’

I pulled my mask up and leaned closer. The man’s face looked like a pudding sprinkled with raisins, the small black patches of dead tissue, smaller than liver spots, signs of the disease in its advanced stage. I reached out my hand to touch his face, to feel if the flesh had any spring left in it.

I was staring at his open mouth when he coughed, and as I jumped back his body arched and I swear I heard his sinews crack.

The nurse was trying to force him flat on the bed, but the cough produced a seizure that created more pain, prolonging the spasm; bloody tears ran down his face and dark veins boiled at his temples.

Humphry hurried over with a syringe and quickly jabbed it into the Reverend’s thigh, and after an eternal minute his body relaxed and settled back on the bed, the only sound a wet rasp from the man’s chest. And my own heartbeat.

‘That nearly finished him,’ said Humphry, his voice slurred from fatigue. He leaned over to put a stethoscope to the man’s chest and nodded at my gown.

I looked down and there was a fine spray of blood over it and I suspected it was over my mask as well. I took off my glasses and wiped the mist of blood from the lenses. I had no reason to fear for myself. I’d had several courses of Haffkine’s vaccine now. Nevertheless, I tried to slow my breathing and wait for the palpitations to subside.

The sheet had fallen from the upper part of Ward’s body and he was naked underneath, unable no doubt to tolerate the clinging touch of a gown. His thin mottled chest rose and fell painfully.

‘How much laudanum do you have over there?’

‘Enough.’

I pulled the sheet from his groin and saw the buboes were leaking from where they’d been earlier drained. The two bruises joined at the pubis. I gently replaced the sheet and the Reverend shuddered at the touch.

I turned to Humphry to say something. He was looking down at the Reverend and suddenly reached past me.

I turned and saw the man had raised his head and chest again well off the bed, and his eyes and mouth were open. Humphry grabbed him by the shoulder, but couldn’t push him back. It looked as if the man was choking. His arms were straight and rigid, as if desperate to hold on to the soul that was trying to flee the wretched body. He trembled. He made no sound. The nurse looked terrified.

‘I can’t stand this,’ said Humphry, and turned away as the nurse held the man despite her own horror.

I said nothing, but stood transfixed by the scene; a bloody drool ran from Ward’s mouth as he struggled with the thing that was eating him.

Humphry appeared with the syringe and in one smooth motion plunged it into the man’s thigh.

He stood back.

‘How much was that?’ I said.

Humphry wiped a sleeve across his forehead. ‘Enough.’

The nurse had given up and the three of us stood back and simply watched.

I can tell you, I don’t know at what point the man died. I thought I heard a sigh, but the eyes and mouth remained open, the back arched, arms outstretched.

After what must have been a minute, but could have been longer, Humphry stepped forward and tried to
gently push the man back, but his contortions appeared to have become locked with death. Humphry put a stethoscope to the Reverend’s chest, shook his head and turned away.

The nurse straightened the cadaver as best she could, and she eventually turned her head and let out one small sob herself.

I pulled the stained sheet over him, and knew that would be the image that would stay with me, the one my mind would tuck away in the gallery it saved for special horrors.

I stayed for the funeral. The Reverend Ward was buried at the cemetery by the Reverend Walsh, a Methodist minister who acted in an interdenominational capacity as the plague hospital chaplain. Humphry made a fine speech and I think he was relieved it was over.

The burial was done at an almost undignified pace. The Reverend’s arched body was wrapped in a sheet soaked with sublimate and somehow fitted into a coffin with quicklime packed around the body, the coffin nailed shut and buried in a deep grave in the sandy soil. Lime was thrown over the coffin and, within an hour of death, there was a cross on the plague cemetery’s first grave.

Humphry found a cot in the staff tent, and we sat and shared his flask. And then he lay down and went to sleep.

I went to see the Gard child. She was better, but not well enough to leave. Routh grumbled, but I wasn’t
going to release her until I had somewhere to send her, in any case. I was relieved that she would survive, but that good news couldn’t erase the bad and I rode back to town to break it to Turner.

Turner was tormenting the Mayor.

‘For God’s sake, I’m doing everything I can,’ said McCreedy, who then attacked Turner about the heavy-handed treatment of ratepayers, the reports of police using batons to enforce quarantine.

I told them my news. It quietened them both for a while.

Dawson’s dark presence had apparently flitted off to Charters Towers for some urgent railway meetings. The plague crisis in Townsville had resurrected interest in the direct route to Bowen. The stagnation of trade through Townsville’s declared port must have helped, turning plague into Dawson’s ally. His alliance with McCreedy might well have been shaky now, but this was wishful thinking on my part, too. I never felt comfortable with Dawson hanging about. I still believed he would somehow get me, in revenge for West Point.

Word of the plague death spread. I noticed that in the street, in dealing with each other, people seemed to be trying hard to prove things were normal. Personal greetings were exaggerated, men were thicker in the hotel bars and laughed louder, and there appeared to be more women out shopping on Friday morning. There
was a jagged edge to the town, as if everyone might become hysterical all at once.

That night I went home with four small bottles of serum and a large bag of boiled lollies. Maria rolled up her sleeve and smiled for the girls, but they weren’t convinced and she had to hold each of them tight for my needle. Allan was a stoic, but fled to the front verandah as soon as the inoculation was done.

Maria avoided my eyes and saw to the girls. I gave Allan some time, and found him on the front steps beside a carbide lamp. He had an enormous moth in his hands.

‘
Coscinocera
,’ I said, remembering the moth in Turner’s office. ‘Is it dead?’

He nodded.

I sat beside him and started talking ridiculously about moths. I was surprised at how much I remembered from Turner’s monologues. I made up a story about a silver butterfly that flew at night towards the moon. I felt him leaning against me and when I looked down I saw he was asleep. I picked him up and carried him into his room. Everyone was asleep. I put him to bed, closed his hand over a sixpence, and lay down gently beside him, hearing his gentle steady breathing.

I left before he woke, before anyone woke.

Later that morning I was still in my office when I heard the ambulance coming fast and stopping with a
clang. I went downstairs and found it in the middle of the street, the horses already sweating, a few people gathering around, as they do for ambulances.

Turner had followed me down. It seemed at first that the plague might have come to the Town Hall itself, but the driver who met me on the steps told me a guest from the Commercial Hotel had ridden horseback to see Bacot at the hospital, to tell him the landlord had a fever. Bacot had said that it was nothing to do with him, and sent the ambulance to collect one of the Government doctors, who could tell whether the man needed to come to him or go to the plague hospital.

‘I’ll go,’ I said, but Turner said he’d join me, so we fetched our bags and climbed in.

The driver swung the horses around and took us at a gallop through the main street and over the bridge.

‘Are you all right, Row?’ Turner said.

I had a white-knuckled grip on the side. ‘I was thinking that every time I get into a carriage with you, I take my life in my hands.’

Mrs McLean sat beside her husband. ‘Constitution of a steam engine.’ She dabbed her eyes.

But he appeared to be out of steam. His breath was a rattle and he hadn’t the strength to cough, choking instead, his wife wiping away the bloody sputum as soon as it bloomed in the corner of his mouth. The sheets were crisp and tight across his body, the room smelled fragrant, windows open and the light streaming in.