A HAZARD OF HEARTS (2 page)

‘Father! What’s wrong?’

His eyelids flickered then closed. His body
convulsed, stilled. Elly continued to grip his head between her hands, crazily
convinced that while she held him he could not go.

‘Father. Wait! Don’t leave me. Father!’

But she knew he had.

The heat stayed with them for another week,
and so did the fever. Then, as suddenly as the cloudburst that turned the one
crooked street to a quagmire, slowing wagon wheels and engulfing boots in
glutinous sludge, the fever went. People opened their doors and closed the gaps
in their decimated ranks. They got on with their lives. Widows with children
still left alive hid their resentment of God’s will and started the baking.
Those left childless took their desolation to the unmarked humps of yellow clay
in a hastily widened clearing, there praying for acceptance, or went off to
drink themselves into oblivion. At least one found the way to end her pain with
a rope over a sturdy branch.

Elly simply went on as her father would have
wished, serving the sick and convalescent, making up nostrums as she’d been
taught, alleviating pain where she could, automatically delving into her
tight-packed store of experience to help her fellows. She grew thinner. She
mourned privately. She worked harder than the logging bullocks.

~*~

A few weeks later a stranger came into
town, riding on a high perch wagon painted in large red and black letters
proclaiming: ‘Doctor Harwood’s Remedies’; ‘Famous Throughout Europe, Greater
Britain and the Americas; ‘Relief for Sufferers of Divers Ills’. For the benefit
of those unable to read, there were representations of bottles, pill boxes and
an enormous wooden stethoscope, eye-catching and with a certain lurid
attraction. Like the forerunner of a circus train the wagon lumbered down the
crooked street, demanding attention as it threw up sun-caked clods in the faces
of the urchins who followed.

Elly stepped hastily aside, half-inclined to
laugh at the procession, now enhanced by two brown dogs, a flock of hens, plus
Mrs O’Bannion’s pig. It lacked only a trumpet and kettle-drum, she thought. And
was that ‘Dr Harwood’ himself? The angular man on the driver’s seat wore a
battered topper and a coat of dust so thick that nothing else could be learnt
of him.

She put the strange entourage out of mind,
hurrying on to Bessie Flaxman’s cabin where she was needed. Bessie, a
shrivelled, prematurely aged woman of thirty, had scalded her foot badly, yet
still dragged herself around caring for seven children and a feckless husband
who couldn’t even arrange to have himself carried off in the epidemic, much
less feed his household.

I’m becoming an acidulous spinster, Elly thought.
Her father would have put the fear of God into Tom Flaxman by now. But she was
learning what it meant to be a woman standing alone.

She stopped at the cabin door to gather herself,
drawing about her the professionalism her father had taught, then knocked and
stepped inside. The dirt-floored room was dim after the sunlight. She had to
push past the hovering man with his foolish grin like a slice of melon in a
week’s growth of stubble, to bend over the woman who lay on a cot in the
corner, weeping in pain.

‘Don’t worry Bessie, I’m here to help you.’

~*~

A week later she stood in the same doorway
wondering why she bothered to come. Bessie lay with her leg elevated, simpering
at the man who anointed her foot with lotion while talking with the speed and
assurance of a fair-ground spruiker. Tom lay on the floor, either drunk or
asleep, while the children ran wild.

Elly struggled not to feel like a jealous discard.
It was such a lowering piece of self-knowledge. Yet it wasn’t so much envy of
the stranger who had walked straight past her into the confidence of her father’s
patients, the people she had nursed and helped back to health. She was uneasy
with his patter and supreme assurance. The fact that he dismissed her offer to
assist him did hurt her pride, but she was more concerned about his lack of
expertise. His treatments were sometimes bizarre, and he charged outrageous
sums for his pills and tonics, while making ever more flagrant claims for their
efficacy. It could not be right to cover Bessie’s healing skin with layers of
heavy bandage, then tell her on no account to put foot to floor for another
four weeks.

With a nod at her own thoughts she stepped
inside the cabin, saying, ‘Good day, Bessie. I hope your leg has improved. Good
day to you, Doctor Harwood. I notice you favour excluding air from the healing
flesh, with no exercise for atrophying muscles.’

The man appeared to unfold himself, like an
angular measure hinged in several places. When erect he looked down on Elly’s
five feet four inches by a good extra foot. His manner, too, was lofty, suited
to the importance of his calling, although he couldn’t have been much more than
thirty. His oddly piping voice seemed incongruous.

‘My treatments vary with each patient, Miss
Ballard. I should not normally trouble the lay mind with explanations but you,
with your smattering of medical knowledge, might appreciate the information
that a swaddled bandage has lately been found to counteract the injurious
humours prevalent in the atmosphere of the countryside hereabouts. The resinous
gums exude a most unsavoury noxious odour which must be kept from the healing
flesh – protected, also, of course, by my own special remedy against such
fumes.’

Elly’s indignation swelled, but she concealed
it.

‘Doctor Harwood, I know it’s not my place to
question your treatment. I’d simply like to draw your attention to my father’s
experience in similar cases to Bessie’s. I have his case notes if you’d care to
see them and verify that the treatment of choice, once the new skin has formed
over the wound, is clean air plus gentle exercise. My father –’

‘Clean air. Precisely, Miss Ballard. Not an
atmosphere laden with the fumes of resinous gumtrees.’

‘I believe you are mistaken, sir.’ Elly’s temper
slipped a notch. ‘The air in the countryside is a thousand times cleaner than
in a city. As for the gumtrees, their eucalyptus oil has only the most
efficacious effect in many, many illnesses. I’ve seen this for myself.’

He managed to be both aloof and amused, staring
down his long nose and piping, ‘Young lady, permit me to point out who is the
qualified medical practitioner here. What-ever your limited experiences, they
are not to be compared with my own. I must ask you to leave me with my patient.’

Elly tilted her head back to meet his gaze and
tried to sound more pleasantly amenable than she felt. ‘Of course I’ll go, if
you want me to. Yet I could be of assistance to you. I know the townsfolk and
the background to their troubles. I can assist you in operations, care for your
patients in convalescence. I can even make all my father’s notes available
to...’

His look of dismay stopped her. What had she
said? More urgently now, seeing denial in his face, she added, ‘Doctor Ballard’s
large experience in care of burns would be valuable, particularly in the matter
of muscle atrophy caused by immobilising the limb...’ Again she stopped, warned
by something in the atmosphere.

For some seconds Harwood stared down at her, his
cold eyes locked with a pair as vividly blue as the southern summer skies and
presently just as hot, betraying Elly’s true feelings.

‘Madam, I’m not answerable to you or any person
other than my confreres, and I certainly do not require your assistance. Kindly
leave, Miss Ballard.’

Angry tears stung beneath her lids as she swept
out, aware of Bessie’s hostility and Harwood’s barely repressed contempt. She
hurried off down the dusty street towards her own small cabin set at a distance
from the others in the shade of several eucalypts, the trees so despised by this
interloper. She breathed in their aromatic scent as she sped inside to throw
down the medical bag which accompanied her on her visits to patients.
Ex-patients, more like. Doctor Harwood had made it clear he didn’t want her
near them.

Having placed the kettle on the fire she sat
down in her father’s chair, a solid Windsor wheel-back that had come from his
home in Perthshire and stayed with him throughout his travels. That chair, more
than anything in her life, epitomized her father. He’d occupied it when seeing
patients, exuding the confidence that helped start the healing process; and
again, each evening after dinner, he’d been there, book in hand, pipe drooping,
for an hour of unspoken companionship. While she had this chair her father’s
presence remained with her.

Her half-tame currawong swept down from the
trees to land on the windowsill, cocking a golden eye. Sunlight burnished his
elegant black back and a stream of liquid notes poured from his throat.

Elly glared at him. ‘I’m parboiled, sticky and
enraged,’ she told the bird. ‘I have a right to be. The temperature is over one
hundred degrees in the shade and that man is a charlatan. He can’t possibly
have earned a medical degree. Father would have stripped away his pretence
within a day. “Injurious humours”, indeed!’

The currawong carolled, and Elly dragged herself
out of the chair to make a pot of tea. She ignored the empty meat safe hanging
overhead, its curtain of sacking dried hard in the heat, and took a knife and
tin from the dresser, carrying them to the well-scrubbed table. Only the heel
of a loaf remained, as hard as the sacking, but she could soften it in the tea.
Cutting an extra slice she fed pieces absentmindedly to the bird while she
turned over her problem.

This new man had swallowed the loyalties of The
Settlement as easily as a snake taking eggs in an untended nest, and he clearly
planned to be rid of her. That alone increased her suspicion that he wasn’t the
qualified medical man he pretended to be. Might he be afraid of revealing
himself before someone with even a small amount of medical knowledge? Someone
like Elly? If he was acting a part while intending to take over her dead father’s
practice in The Settlement, he couldn’t risk having her around to question his
credibility, because he’d know she’d stand up to him if she caught him risking
the lives of her townsfolk.

A shadow passed across the window and she looked
up to see Old Susan peering in. Elly beckoned and the woman’s sun-furrowed
cheeks screwed themselves into ingratiating lines as she hastened through the
door and dropped onto a bench, her body sagging like the week’s wet wash.

‘Can you spare a drop o’tea, Elly? I got
something to tell you.’

Elly reached for another cup, recalling that Old
Susan took almost as much pleasure in the fine china as she did in swilling the
brew around her toothless gums while dreaming up new, interesting symptoms to
confound her father. It was easy to give her pleasure.

‘What did you want to tell me?’

The faded eyes followed her movements as the pot
was heated and tea carefully measured then ladled in. ‘Some’un should warn you.
There’s talk in the town.’

Elly replaced the kettle and straightened up. ‘What
kind of talk?’

‘Bad talk. That new doctor’s been saying things,
like you don’t know what you’re doing.’

‘I know he wants to prove himself superior.’
Elly hid her worry under a smile, adding almost to herself, ‘He’s so insecure
he has to make me look inadequate to bolster his image.’

Old Susan looked confused. ‘I don’t know about
that, but I do know he’s blaming you for Juniper Jones’ bad back and Millie
Cross’s baby’s croup and –’

‘All right, Susan. I understand. It’s no good me
pointing out that Juniper disobeyed my instructions to stay in bed and instead
went out and chopped wood until he collapsed, or that the Cross baby lies in a
damp cot and never sees the sunlight. I could quote any number of other cases
where people refuse to help themselves. No doctor on earth can cure human wilfulness,
but Harwood has to see someone take the blame.’

Old Susan nodded, although it was doubtful
whether she appreciated, as Elly did, the crux of the situation. The
townspeople needed to believe in Harwood’s skill. They were delighted at their
luck in obtaining a new doctor so suddenly after the death of the old one, and
of course they believed he would naturally be superior to any unqualified
female, however useful she’d been in the interim.

Also, she knew that her passionate dedication to
her patients, her fear that he would harm them, had delivered her into his
hands. He was using her own outspokenness against her, deriding her methods
from the pinnacle of his own unassailable professional heights.Well, if she
wasn’t wanted here, if the loyalty of her neighbours shifted, she supposed she
would have to go. There were other towns where she could put her skills to good
use amongst strangers, if she must.

Depressed at the thought, she finished her tea
and cleared up. Time would solve her problem, she thought, as she sent Old
Susan off with a piece of loaf for her supper.

~*~

It only took another two days. On her way
to the store for supplies Eleanor heard a terrible outcry behind her, and
turned to see Molly O’Bannion rush from her cabin screaming that her Maureen
was dying. Elly dropped her basket and ran, with half the loiterers following.
Inside the cabin she almost fell over the pig, then righting herself,
discovered that Dr Harwood had managed to be ahead of her. His lean shape bent
over a child who writhed on her cot, her lungs straining for air. The doctor
had taken his tin of medical instruments from his pocket, laying out the
contents on a box beside the cot. He fumbled amongst them, dislodging flakes of
rust and nameless encrusted material.