This Golden Land (64 page)

     Tapping his chest, said, "I am Thulan."

     But the word meant nothing to the elder, so Neal said to Miriam, "Tell your father's father that my Dreamtime spirit is a lizard the white men call thorny devil. Do you know the word for that?"

     She nodded with enthusiasm and spoke to the elder, whose thick brows lifted in surprise.

     Encouraged, Neal unbuttoned his shirt and exposed his chest, allowing the chief a long look at his tattoos. Sounds of surprise erupted from the crowd of white men. They talked among themselves, speculating on this unexpected turn—had the American been captured and tortured by natives?—while the leader of the Aborigines studied the white man who had undergone a secret Aboriginal initiation rite.

     The elder finally spoke, exotic syllables tumbling from his lips, familiar to Neal and yet foreign, for this dialect sounded like Jallara's. Miriam said, "He ask if you go walkabout."

     "I did. I went walkabout in the great wilderness in the west. Spirits spoke to me in a vision."

     When Miriam translated, her grandfather stood silently for a long moment, the night wind lifting his long white beard to expose the scars of his own initiation scars, incised in his skin long ago. He stared at Neal, dark eyes beneath heavy brows unreadable.

     Finally he nodded in satisfaction and spoke, and Miriam translated. "My father's father say this sacred ground, and sacred ground is sick. Crocodile spirit very unhappy. We come for healing ritual. But white men must go away. Taboo to watch."

     Neal surveyed the onlookers who wore modern jackets and trousers, bowler hats and tweed caps, the women in long dresses and shawls—people from another world who would have no understanding of what was going on here. But he knew it would be impossible to tell them to leave. If anything, mistrust and suspicion about a secret Aboriginal ritual would only make them stay all the more.

     "You tell men go away," Miriam repeated. "Cannot cure sickness with white man here."

     Neal studied the situation—Aborigines protecting their sacred ground,
frightened and angry white men thinking the natives had made their loved ones sick.

     When the chief and his people shifted their attention away from Neal, he looked over his shoulder and saw that once again they were watching Hannah.

     "Why," Neal began, "does the white woman interest you—" But he was interrupted by the appearance of an old Aboriginal woman, pushing her way through, speaking to the chief and making him step respectfully away.

     She was small and bent, her long white hair coarse and wavy and growing over her shoulders and down her back. Her aged body, painted white and draped in necklaces of teeth, feathers and nuts, was plump. When she spoke, revealed strong white teeth. And yet Neal guessed by the wrinkled face and curve of her back that she was very old.

     She spoke rapidly, and Miriam said, "White woman must come here."

     "Why?"

     When he received no answer, Neal looked back at Hannah who, guessing that she was needed, went down the steps to stand at Neal's side. Another rumble went through the crowd of white people—a nervous, jittery sound. Light from lanterns and torches illuminated faces strained with fear. What did the blacks want with a white woman?

     Neal saw that the old Aboriginal woman's gaze was fixed on the magic stone around Hannah's neck, lying at the base of her throat. The old woman then glanced at Neal, the white man with tribal tattoos, and then again at the white woman with a native talisman around her neck, and she seemed to be arriving at a decision.

     "Neal," Hannah said quietly, "what is this all about?"

     Miriam spoke up. "Crocodile Spirit speak to Papunya in a dream. Tell her to come and heal the land."

     Hannah turned to the girl, whom she judged to be around fifteen. A small Christian cross on a string lay on her chest. "Papunya?"

     "Papunya is clan clever-woman. She is my mother's mother's mother."

     Hannah addressed Papunya: "Yes, there is sickness here, and we cannot find the cause or cure. Can you help us?"

     After Miriam translated, the old woman turned away and took a large
wooden bowl from another native woman. The bowl appeared to have been carved from a single block of wood, and she showed Hannah the contents, with Miriam explaining: "These sacred objects come from this place long time ago. Now we bring them back. Land needs these sacred things. We heal the land, we send away sickness with sacred objects that the land knows."

     Hannah saw feathers, bones, stones, dried leaves, clumps of earth.

     Papunya placed the bowl on the ground by Hannah's feet and then received another object from the other native woman: a tall wooden staff carved with intricate designs, from the tip of which objects were suspended on strings—a bird's beak, a crocodile tooth, a scarlet feather, a strip of withered snake skin and a cluster of dried seed pods. As Papunya lifted her eyes to the large brick edifice that covered her sacred ground, Hannah saw no sorrow in the dark eyes, no anger, no perplexity. The clever-woman seemed to be sizing up the situation, as if trying to find a place in her world for this strange intrusion.

     She then looked at Hannah, enigmatic eyes peering from beneath a heavy brow ridge. She spoke, and Miriam said, "Papunya ask who are you, what is your Dreaming."

     "My Dreaming?" Hannah exchanged a glance with Neal and said, "I am a midwife and a healer."

     Papunya closed her eyes for a long moment, and when she finally spoke, Miriam said, "Papunya say you seek hidden knowledge. Very important healing knowledge. You think it is lost but it is only hidden. And it is nearby."

     Neal said to Hannah, "Do you know what she is she talking about?"

     "I have no idea."

     Papunya lifted the tall wooden staff and leveled it at the hospital, its mystical objects clicking together as she pointed and spoke.

     "In there," Miriam said. "What you seek is in there. Crocodile spirit say you find hidden knowledge.
You
heal sacred land."

     "I'm sorry, I still do not understand."

     Miriam held a brief exchange with the clever-woman, then said, "Cannot say more. Taboo to speak of the dead."

     "The dead? Who? I don't—"

     "Burn the place down!" came a shout from the crowd, and a brick suddenly
sailed through the air, breaking through one of the front windows with a crash. When screams came from within, Fintan banged on the doors and was allowed inside, the doors locking behind him.

     The crowd surged, like a living entity, and as men and women pushed and shouted, incited by the rising tension and mistrust of the natives, and fed up with their demands not being met, Hannah quickly said to Miriam, "Please tell me what you are talking about. Who are the dead you cannot speak of?"

     When Miriam's deep, black eyes stared back, Hannah said, "Are you talking about those who have died here in this hospital?"

     Miriam did not reply. Hannah looked from the girl to the old woman, trying to read their faces but finding only impassive expressions. Suddenly, Hannah heard a voice from the past, her father saying, "I must tell thee the truth about thy mother's death . . . I should have spoken long ago . . . The letter explains . . . but it is hidden . . . find it. . .."

     "Neal," Hannah said suddenly. "I think I know what Papunya is talking about. But I have to go back inside."

     "I'll go with you."

     "No, you stay here. Protect these people. If I am right, then I have a way to put an end to this."

     To the volatile crowd of white people, Hannah said in a clear, ringing voice, "Please stay calm. I will be able to answer all your questions in a moment."

     She hurried up the steps, where Dr. Iverson was staunchly guarding the doors, and when she entered the foyer, saw women huddled against the far wall, with Alice and Fintan assuring them they were safe. Blanche stood over the broken glass, calmly asking Margaret Lawrence to please fetch a broom and a dustpan, and then suggesting to her friend Martha that she take the other women up to the female ward to settle the patients who were certain to have heard the crash.

     Hannah hurried through to the new children's wing which was still in wood framing, with the walls only recently installed so that the long dormitory-style room smelled of sawdust and fresh pine. Quickly retrieving her leather medical bag, she took it to Dr. Iverson's office where she found Alice
consoling Mrs. Soames, who had come out of the back room to see what was happening. "There there, dear," Alice said, "it's just a bit of broken glass. Let us go back and see to your husband, shall we?"

     Hannah turned up the lamp on the desk and, with racing heart, lifted out her father's portfolio. Hidden knowledge that is nearby, Hannah thought as she untied the ribbon and lifted the top cover, setting it aside. Something that will heal the sacred land. . .

     Was it the letter?

     Before she left England, she had searched the cottage from top to bottom, finding nothing. She had assumed it would be with the rest of his important medical papers—in the portfolio. But she had examined every scrap of her father's notes and still had found nothing that resembled a letter.

     
Hidden
. . .

     Hannah shifted her attention to the two loose covers of the portfolio. They were old and tattered and looked as if they had once bound a book. She scanned every inch of the top cover and, finding nothing, set it aside. The back cover was even more ragged, testament to her father's thriftiness. When Hannah saw that the endpaper had been neatly cut, she brought it into the light and saw that something appeared to have been tucked beneath the end sheet.

     With rising excitement, she used the ivory-handled letter opener that lay on Sir Marcus's desk, and gently coaxed the item out. It was an envelope. On the back, she read three German words:
Wiener Allgemeine Krankenhaus
—Vienna General Hospital.

     Hannah was flung back to the day a curious envelope with a foreign postmark had arrived. It was four years after her mother's death, and her father had been in his laboratory, assembling the new microscope he had recently purchased. Hannah, seventeen at the time, had been taking scones out of the oven when the postman had knocked at the front door. Hannah's father had read the letter in private, to emerge from his laboratory visibly shaken, saying he was going to the cemetery. He had been gone for hours by the time Hannah went searching for him, to find him lying face down on Louisa's grave, sobbing bitterly, the letter from Vienna clutched in his hand.

     Hannah never saw the letter after that, and her father would not speak
of it, but in the two years that followed, his drive to perfect the formula became obsessive. Whatever was in the letter, it had changed his research from one of inquiry to actively using chemicals on himself, to the ultimate detriment of his own health.

     This must be the letter her father had spoken of with his dying breath, the one that revealed the "truth" about her mother's death. But it was in German.

     I shall have it translated at once, Hannah thought as she folded the page. As she began to slip it back into the envelope, she found a second sheet of paper inside. Unfolding it beneath the oil lamp, she saw that it appeared to be a second letter, written in English. But when she compared the two, she realized that the second sheet was an English translation of the first.

     Holding her breath, trying to keep her hands steady as the sheet of paper trembled in her grasp—and praying that these words contained the solution to the crisis outside—Hannah read her father's anguished words.

     "My God," she whispered when she was finished.

     Papunya was right! The answer had been here all along!

     She ran through the foyer, but when she emerged on the other side of the main door, people in the crowd began immediately shouting questions at her, surging up the steps as if to engulf her in their desperation and fury.

     "Can you cure my sister?"

     "Can I take my mother home?"

     "Wait—" she said, overwhelmed.

     Hands reached for her. Someone grabbed at the letter.

     "Stop, I can't—"

     She was pushed back against the doors as the mob rushed her, shouting questions, pecking at her with their hands like a flock of starving ravens.

     And then two strong arms were around her, drawing her sideways, away from the frantic mob, down the steps. Fintan.

     "Where is Dr. Iverson?" Hannah gasped. "I must show this to him."

     "He is with Neal, protecting the Aborigines."

     "Help me to get through."

     Holding tightly to Hannah, Fintan managed to force his way through the milling throng, whose shouts and cries rose to the stars as if from a
single throat. At the center of the angry mass, Hannah saw Neal and Dr. Iverson trying to stave off an assault on the natives.

     "Stop!" Hannah cried. "Listen to me! I have found the answers! All of you! Think of your loved ones."

     Fintan joined the defense, and so did—to Hannah's surprise—Joe Turner and his brother, until the mob was pushed back, their voices dying down, so that Hannah was able to face them and, holding up the letter, say, "This is what the Aborigines came to tell us. Here is the solution to the contagion inside the hospital. You must all calm down and allow us to do what has to be done."

     "Dr. Iverson," she said, turning to Marcus while the onlookers shifted nervously and exchanged skeptical looks. "I have found the answer. Please, read this. Tell me if I am right."

     The crowd fell still and waited in hushed silence as the sheet of paper in Dr. Iverson's hands fluttered in the night breeze.

     His black brows came together as he read, at the top of the translation, John Conroy's preface: "I wrote to learned men in several foreign institutions, explaining that a few days prior to Louisa's death from childbed fever, I had visited a farm wife who had the same childbed fever, and while I was away, Louisa went into labor. I came home in time to deliver our child. When she then came down with childbed fever, I was baffled because our residences are miles apart, we do not share a water supply with that farm, we are not subjected to the same prevailing winds. How was it possible for the two women to come down with the same contagion? Several men to whom I wrote responded that there is a radical new theory that infection can be transmitted from patient to patient by way of a doctor's hands. But the mystery is, where did the original infection come from? If I contracted it from the farmwife, how had
she
gotten it? And so I decided to write to the top authority of the day, the Vienna General Hospital. Here is the response."