The Touch (26 page)

MUCH TO Jade’s dismay, Butterfly Wing had graduated from wet nurse to nurserymaid; Eleanor was passionately attached to her, and would not be parted from her. Indeed, in many ways she seemed to love Butterfly Wing and her father more than she did her mother, who was pregnant again and not thriving. So it was Butterfly Wing who took the child out into the garden, stripped her naked for ten minutes’ worth of sun, guided her first tottering footsteps, gave her her food, her baths, her herbal medications for teething and colic. Alexander approved, delighted that Eleanor would grow up bilingual; Butterfly Wing spoke to her in Chinese, he spoke to her in English.

“Mum is sick,” she said to Alexander at twelve months of age, brow wrinkled in a frown.

“Who told you that, Nell?”

“No one, Dadda. I can see it.”

“Can you indeed? How?”

“Her skin is quite yellow,” said the child with all the aplomb of a ten-year-old. “And she vomits a lot.”

“Well—you’re right, she is sick. But nothing that won’t pass. She’s expecting a baby brother or sister for you.”

“Oh, I know that,” said Nell scornfully. “Butterfly Wing told me when we were picking carnations.”

So much precociousness had Alexander at a loss, particularly because he had come to realize that his daughter seemed more interested in maladies than in toys; she knew when Maggie Summers had a headache or Jade pain in her arm from an old break. More disturbing was her observation that Pearl suffered a depressed mood at regular intervals, though of course Nell knew nothing of monthly courses. How long, wondered Alexander, has this tiny creature been watching us with a thinking mechanism behind her lovely eyes? How much does she see?

It was certainly evident that Elizabeth ailed; when her morning sickness continued into her sixth month, Alexander sent for Sir Edward Wyler.

Who said, “As yet she isn’t pre-eclamptic, but I think I ought to come up to see her in another month. She feels the child move, which is a good sign as far as the child is concerned, but her own constitution isn’t strong. I don’t like her color, yet so far her feet and legs are not edematous. It may just be that Mrs. Kinross doesn’t carry easily.”

“You haven’t really allayed my fears, Sir Edward,” Alexander said. “I thought she wouldn’t have a second eclampsia?”

“It is very rare, but at this stage I do not know. Until—or if—she develops swelling, I would rather that she kept moving about, exercising her limbs.”

“Get her through it, Sir Edward, and you have another icon.”

WHEN THE swelling appeared in her twenty-fifth week, Elizabeth took to her bed voluntarily. Fifteen weeks of it this time.

Oh, will I never be rid of this bed? Will I never be able to do all the things I want to do, from playing the piano to learning how to ride a horse, drive a buggy? My daughter is being brought up by others, she hardly knows that I’m her mother. When she toddles in to see me, it’s to ask me how I feel, demand to see my feet, quiz me as to how many times I’ve vomited, or if I have a headache. I don’t know where she gets this preoccupation with diseases, yet I’m too miserable to fish in her mind. Such a sweet little thing—so like me, Ruby insists. But I think her mouth is Alexander’s—straight, firm, utterly determined. And she has inherited his intelligence, his curiosity. I had wanted her to be known as Eleanor, but somehow she has decided to be known as Nell. I suppose the Chinese find it much easier to say, but I suspect it was Alexander started it.

As with the first pregnancy, it was Ruby who comforted her, Ruby who spent long hours by her bed playing poker, reading to her, talking. When she wasn’t able to come, Theodora Jenkins took her place—less stimulating company, but since her trip to London and the Continent, Theodora was able to talk about more than the flowers in her front garden or the plague of cabbage moth in her vegetable patch.

Everyone worried constantly about Elizabeth save Mrs. Summers, enigmatic as ever, proof against the most charming of Nell’s wiles. Elizabeth had hoped that in Nell Mrs. Summers would see the child she hadn’t been able to bear, but her behavior gave the lie to any such hope; Maggie Summers was retreating, not advancing. As well then for the four Chinese women, upon whom Elizabeth depended for everything; they never let her down.

“Miss Lizzy, you have to try to eat,” said Jade, holding out a dainty triangle of prawn toast.

“I can’t, not today,” said Elizabeth.

“But you must, Miss Lizzy! You’re getting so thin, and that is no good for your baby. Chang will cook you anything you fancy—all you have to do is ask.”

“Baked custard,” said Elizabeth, who didn’t want that either, but knew she had to voice a wish for something edible. At least it would slide down easily, and perhaps it would stay down. Eggs, milk, sugar. Nourishment for a bedridden invalid.

“With nutmeg on top?”

“I don’t care. Just go away and leave me alone, Jade.”

“I VERY MUCH fear,” said Alexander to Ruby, “that Nell is going to be motherless.” His face twisted, tears gathered; he put his head on Ruby’s breast and wept.

“There there, there there,” she crooned, rocking him until he quietened. “You’ll get through this, and so will Elizabeth. What I very much fear is that she’s doomed never to carry a child without coming to death’s door.”

He pulled away, mortified at displaying such vulnerability, mopped his face with a hand. “Och, Ruby, what can I do?”

“What are the latest pearls of wisdom from Sir Edward?”

“That if she comes through this confinement, she ought not to try to conceive again.”

“I’ve just said the same thing, haven’t I? I doubt the news will break her heart.”

“There’s no need to be bitchy!”

“Swallow it, Alexander. Give up this particular fight, it’s one you can’t win.”

“I know,” he said stiffly, put on his hat and departed.

Leaving Ruby to pace up and down her boudoir, no longer sure of anything beyond her ineradicable love for him. Whatever he wanted or needed from her, whenever he wanted or needed it, she would be there to give it. Yet her affection for Elizabeth kept increasing, and that was a mystery. By rights she should be contemptuous of the girl’s inadequacies, her weaknesses, her sad and passive disposition. Perhaps the answer lay in her extreme youth—not far past eighteen years of age, expecting again, and facing death again. Never having really lived.

I suppose what I’m feeling is what her mother would feel. What a joke! Her mother who is sleeping with her husband. Oh, how much I would like to see Elizabeth happy! See her find a man she could love. The world has to hold a man in it somewhere whom she can love. That’s all she wants, all she needs. Not wealth, not high living. Just a man she can love. One thing I know: she will never love Alexander. And how wretched for him that is! The injury to his iron Scottish pride, the taste of defeat in a mouth unused to it. How do these things happen? We go round and round and round, Alexander, Elizabeth, and I.

When she went to see Elizabeth on the morrow she was toying with the idea of speaking to her about the deteriorating situation between her and Alexander, which Ruby was positive lay like a foundation stone at the bottom of Elizabeth’s illness. Oh, not that the illness was imagined! But Ruby had dealt with women of all kinds for more years than she cared to count. Then as she entered Elizabeth’s room she changed her mind. To speak about it, she would have to divorce herself from it, and that she couldn’t do. Perhaps she would accomplish more if she persuaded Elizabeth to eat her lunch.

“How’s Nell?” she asked, settling by the bed.

“I have no idea. I hardly see her,” said Elizabeth tearfully.

“Oh, come, sweetie-pie, look on the bright side! Only six or seven weeks left! As soon as this is over you’ll bounce back.”

Elizabeth managed a smile. “I am a misery, aren’t I? I’m sorry, Ruby. You’re right, I will bounce back. If I live through it.” Her hand went out, so thin it resembled a claw. “That’s what terrifies me—that I won’t live through it. I don’t want to die, yet I have an awful feeling that an end is coming.”

“Ends are always coming,” Ruby said, taking the hand and chafing it gently. “You weren’t there when Alexander showed us—Charles, Sung and me—the reef of gold he’d found inside the mountain. Charles called the find apocalyptic—you know Charles, it’s the sort of word he’d use. If he hadn’t chosen it, he would have said cataclysmic or mind-boggling. But Alexander seized on the word, said apocalypse was Greek for a colossal event like the end of the world. Though when I wrote that to Lee, he said it really meant an ultimate revelation—and he had no Greek then, isn’t that amazing? Anyway, Alexander thought that his discovery of this gold mine was a colossal event, and that’s how the Apocalypse got its name. But it hasn’t really been an end, has it? More a beginning. The Apocalypse has changed all the lives it touches. Without it, he wouldn’t have sent for you, I’d still be keeping a brothel, Sung would still be an ordinary heathen Chinee with grand ideas, Charles would be a simple squatter, and Kinross would be a ghost town exhausted of placer.”

“The Apocalypse is what the Catholics call the Book of Revelation,” said Elizabeth, “so Lee’s definition is the right one. It’s an ultimate revelation, Alexander’s gold mine. It has shown us what we really are.”

Good, good! thought Ruby. She’s more animated than I’ve seen her in weeks. Maybe this is a subtle way to dig up that foundation stone. “I didn’t know it was biblical like that,” she said with a grin. “I’m a religious ignoramus, so explain.”

“Oh, I know my Bible! From Genesis to Revelation, how I know it! As far as I’m concerned, nothing was ever better named than Alexander’s mountain of gold. Revelation upon revelation of beginnings and ends.” Elizabeth’s voice took on an eerie tone, her eyes glowed feverishly. “There are four horsemen riding through it, Death on a pale horse and three others. The three others are Alexander, you, and I. Because that’s what we’re doing—riding out the Apocalypse. It will make an end of me, of you, and of Alexander. None of us is young enough to survive it. All we can do is ride it out. And maybe, when we end, the Apocalypse will swallow us, hold us as its prisoners.”

And how do I deal with this—this prophecy?

Ruby dealt with it by snorting and giving the hand a tiny slap. “What nonsense! You’ve gone what Alexander would call fey.” A noise at the door came as a salvation; Ruby turned and beamed. “Lunch, Elizabeth! I declare I’m starved, and you look as if you’re riding Famine, so eat.”

“Oh, I see! You dissimulated, Ruby. You do know about the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

Whatever had provoked Elizabeth to speak in a prophetic tongue, Ruby didn’t know, but perhaps the foundation stone had shifted a little, for Elizabeth ate a good lunch, kept it down, and afterward was able to lie next to Nell on the bed and talk to her for half an hour. The child made no objection to her prone position, nor displayed any restlessness; she lay looking into her mother’s face with what, in Ruby’s opinion had Nell been much older, was an almost infinite compassion. Perhaps some Scots are fey, she thought. Elizabeth and her daughter have an otherworldliness about them, and how can a crusty engineer like Alexander cope with that?

SIR EDWARD WYLER arrived back to see Elizabeth on April Fool’s Day, looking rather embarrassed. Lady Wyler was with him.

“I—ah—had a gap in my appointment book,” he lied, “and I knew today there was a train to Kinross, so I decided to pop up and see how you’re going, Mrs. Kinross.”

“Elizabeth,” she said, smiling at him fondly. “Call me that all the time, not merely when I’m at my worst. Lady Wyler, it’s so good to see you. Please tell me that the gap in your appointment book is big enough to stay for a few days.”

“Well, candidly, Lady Wyler has felt the summer heat in Sydney this year. In fact, it’s quite worn her down. So if you don’t mind, Elizabeth, she would like to stay a few days. Alas, I can’t spare the time, so I’ll just see how things are going and catch today’s train back.”

Having pronounced her reasonably well, if too thin, and taken a pint of blood from her, Sir Edward departed.

“Now that he’s gone,” said Lady Wyler in a conspiratorial whisper, “you can call me Margaret. Edward is a very dear man, but ever since his knighthood he’s been wafting a foot off the ground, and will persist in addressing me as Lady Wyler. It’s the way the title rolls off his tongue, I think. He was a poor boy, you know, but his parents scraped and screwed to put him through Medicine—his father worked three jobs and his mother took in washing and ironing.”

“Did he go to Sydney University?” Elizabeth asked.

“Oh, dear me, no! It has no faculty of Medicine—in fact, when he was eighteen there was no Sydney University at all. So he had to go to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London—it’s the second-oldest hospital in the world, eleven hundred and something, I think. Or perhaps that’s the oldest hospital, the Hotel Dieu in Paris. Whatever, Bart’s is very old. Obstetrics and gynecology were very new specialties and puerperal fever raged if a woman was hospitalized for her labor. Most of Edward’s patients had their babies at home, so he used to run from one alley to another with his black bag—it was appalling, but very valuable experience. When he returned home—he was born in Sydney in 1817—he found it difficult at first. We’re both Jewish, you see, and people tend to despise the Jews.”

“Like the heathen Chinee,” said Elizabeth softly.

“Exactly. UnChristian.”

“But he succeeded.”

“Oh, yes. He was so good, Elizabeth! Head and shoulders above the—the veterinarians who called themselves accoucheurs. Once he saved the life and baby of a woman prominent in society, his troubles were over. People flocked to him, Jewish or no. He had his uses,” said Margaret dryly.

“And you, Margaret? Were you born in Sydney? You don’t have a local accent.”

“No, I was a midwife attached to Bart’s, and met him there. We married and I came back with him.” Her face lit up. “He is a reader, Elizabeth! Every new advance is absorbed and becomes a part of his obstetrical arsenal. For instance, very recently he read of a woman’s surviving a Caesarean section in Italy last year. So in September we’re off to Italy to speak with the surgeon—another Edward, though of course Dr. Porro says Eduardo. If my Edward could save women and babies by Caesarean section, he’d be the happiest man in the world.”