A HAZARD OF HEARTS Read online

  A HAZARD

  of

  HEARTS

  Frances Burke

  A Hazard of Hearts

  Frances Burke

  Copyright © 2012 Frances Burke

  www.frances-burke.com

  eBook design by Tim C. Taylor

  Cover art by [email protected]

  PART ONE - DECEMBER, 1852 - MAY, 1853.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Heat swathed the cabins and outbuildings in suffocating layers. It pressed down upon the animals, restless in their stalls, on the mongrel panting under the wooden boardwalk just outside the bar-room doors. In huts and lean-tos folk tossed and sweated on their blankets and wondered who would be next to die, and hoped it would be another, and tried to pray through lips already dry and cracked.

  Further back in the hills the heat writhed beneath canvas shelters to twine itself about the sleepers, moaning and cursing from the depths of their fatigue. Nearby the axe heads lay buried in the hearts of their bloodless victims, the great Australian cedars. Gums drooped, trailing exhausted leaves in the dust, and grasses crackled under the feet of men who sweated through the dark with their terrible loads. Creaking cartwheels covered the sound of laboured breathing, the rumble of iron on stone. Few words would be said over these poor remains. The town had no clergyman, while the doctor could spare no time from the living.

  The hotel, the one properly constructed building in The Settlement, was a cavern from Hades lit by wavering lanterns and smelling of beer and spirits seeped into the walls and floorboards. There were other smells, biting, pungent whiffs – frighteningly medicinal: the acrid stinks of sweat and terror, of escaped bodily fluids; the indescribable odours of humanity in extremis, without hope.

  ‘Pass me the scalpel.’ The voice, harsh with strain, came from a figure stooped over a trestle, his arms bloodied to the elbows, and now preparing to let more blood flow.

  The young woman silently handed him the instrument then steadied the patient, a bearded, barrel-chested male lying flaccid and quiescent, ready for the blade. It would sever him from contact with his forearm forever. Did he know it, she wondered? At some deeply unconscious level was he saying farewell to a part of himself, to his means of livelihood, to his high standing amongst his fellows as the fastest killer of trees in the colony?

  Eleanor Ballard shook off her fanciful thoughts. Lips compressed, she helped her father to clamp the bleeding vessels as he worked to save what he could of the mangled limb. The man could count himself lucky to be in the hands of Robert Ballard, she thought. The sweetish smell of ether hung about the table, and the patient’s eyeballs had rolled back. He was quite out of the world. With her foot Elly shifted the bucket into place beneath the trestle. Savage shadows danced on the wall beside her, snaring her attention. Voices beckoned, moaned, whimpered. She closed her eyes to rest them for an instant, feeling the sweat sting beneath the lids.

  It was monstrous, she thought, that two such disasters should strike within such a short time. The Settlement, reeling under the sudden blow of fever, had scarcely assimilated the danger before an eruption of tempers in the cutters’ camp brought more trouble. Back in the hills where the tall lovely cedars brushed the sky, in a dirt clearing dotted with the detritus of camp life, the interminable, unbearable, implacable heat had done its work. Beneath its goad, knives, fists and ugly emotions had gone into frenzy. And when it had ended some lives had ebbed away into the stony dirt, while for others life balanced on the edge, as did this man’s. His arm now hung ludicrously foreshortened, a stumpy thing, useless for swinging an axe. Useless for most things.

  She heard someone laugh, a cracked sound.

  ‘Eleanor, pull yourself together!’ The surgeon turned, his face lardy in the lamplight, the skin slick yet endlessly furrowed, the face of Methuselah. He was forty-nine years old.

  ‘I’m sorry, Father.’ Elly straightened her tired back. There were only the two of them. Earlier, some women had offered to help, those without young children, but now even they had fallen away. There were too many sick. And the rest huddled in the fetid huts, most likely brewing the fever in their own veins, awaiting their turn.

  She helped to move the patient onto the floor – there were no mattresses – then wrung out a cloth to lay on another man’s brow. She helped an emaciated figure upright to cough and sip water, a woman this time. When the lad beside her failed to respond, she searched for his pulse then, after a few moments, sighed and pulled a ragged shirt over the gaunt, untenanted face, mentally adding one more to the next load to be shifted out through the burning dark.

  ‘Come quickly, Eleanor!’

  Alerted by his tone, she hurried to where her father bent over yet another tormented body.

  ‘This man’s choking to death. Help me get him on the table.’

  Together they struggled and heaved, hampered by the man’s whooping efforts to breathe. Then, abruptly, he fell limp. Doctor Ballard gave one last massive thump to the back.

  ‘It’s no good. I can’t find any obstruction in the throat. We must cut him.’

  Together they began their well-rehearsed routine. Tracheotomy. Elly had assisted only once before but she knew the procedure. As she poured chloride of lime over her hands then soaked the knives, needles and thread she went over each step, only a fraction of time behind her father’s flying fingers.

  Her father moved back from the trestle. His hands dropped. ‘You do it Eleanor. You’re perfectly capable. I... I shall attend to the next case.’

  Her head snapped up. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  With an obvious effort, Doctor Ballard straightened and walked away, saying over his shoulder, ‘There’s nothing wrong. Attend to your patient at once while I attend mine.’

  Obediently Elly forced aside her concern for him and gave her attention to the man whose life immediately depended upon her. Neck stretched hard back. No time for ether. Pull the skin tight below the hollow of the throat, draw the blade downwards through the skin, keep to the exact midline. Now divide the muscles. Wipe up that blood. Insert the knife tip into the windpipe, twist delicately. Ah! Air sucked into the opening and expelled with blood and mucous, gurgling and bubbling hideously, but the sound of life.

  Elly’s tightened shoulders relaxed as she wiped away more blood, watching the man’s cheeks change from grey-blue to pink. Holding the wound open, she delicately inserted forceps and withdrew a lump of wadded material.

  Her father appeared beside her and took the forceps. He peered at them, snorted, then dropped the wad on the floor. ‘Tobacco plug. What next! Sew him up smartly and don’t forget the piece of cotton for drainage. I hope to Heaven the fellow hasn’t developed the fever already. He’s got enough of a battle against sepsis under these conditions.’

  Watching, he nodded approvingly as Elly cut the final thread then stood back, her hand on the patient’s pulse, her gaze checking her work for leakage.

  ‘I think the worst may be over, Father. There were fewer cases brought in today.’ Elly washed carefully in an inch of water in a basin then wiped clammy hands down her apron and tried to tuck back wisps of fine blonde hair that drooped from her plaited crown. She longed desperately for a bath, to strip off heavy petticoats and tight-sleeved bodice, to peel away stockings and toss her boots into the corner. To feel clean water lap over her body. What utter bliss. What idiocy, to dream of water where there was none. With the creek-bed dry and barrels lined in living slime, and no drop of rain in four months.

  It would be Christmas in two weeks, she thought suddenly. How terrible – a festive season lined with fresh graves and only the half-living to toll the bells. She must be light-headed. She turned to her father and saw him stagger.

  ‘Father! You’re not wel
l. You’ve done far too much.’

  ‘It’s nothing, girl. I’m weary, of course. Who would not be?’ He shook his head angrily, a gesture at his weakness rather than her. ‘I’ll have a drink and sit for a minute.’

  When she ran forward he waved a petulant hand. Perhaps he, too, felt a degree of helplessness, Elly thought. For all his efforts, he’d snatched few lives from the grasp of this fever. Slumping onto a bench, he took a long draught from a mug standing on the bar counter. Beer was the only fluid left in The Settlement. Even the children drank it.

  Elly shrugged and took a gulp from her own mug. Just about any liquid would do to wet her throat. But her father worried her. Always generous with his time and skill, he’d come close to giving away his health to this motley crowd of creek dwellers and brawling timber men.

  She’d never understand why he’d chosen to bury them both here in The Settlement. There were so many other places they could have gone to in the Colony. If he’d wanted to leave Sydney Town, there was always Parramatta, or Liverpool, or even Bathurst over the mountain range. There were townships with amenities such as decent houses, shops, parks, perhaps a river running through. Why did they have to go north to the cedar hills, to frontier country? They were not pioneers. Her father’s superlative skills were wasted here on the few, when he could have headed a great hospital, healing while teaching on a grand scale.

  Surreptitiously, she studied her father. He was still a relatively young man – a graduate of Edinburgh University Medical School, a post-graduate student at the Charite in Paris, and the colleague of such men as Professor Rokitansky in Vienna, who still corresponded and kept her father abreast of developments in the medical world. Why had he chosen to bury himself in this desolation? Why? The years had been so long. Twelve years since Mother had passed away, leaving them to work out a relationship that sometimes seemed to Elly more student to professor than daughter to father.

  She sighed and sipped her warm beer, reminding herself of her good fortune to have Doctor Robert Ballard as mentor. It was Elly’s great grief that she had been born female. She knew women did not study medicine, especially not women without means, buried twelve thousand miles from the great teaching centres. But she’d worked alongside her father and had been allowed to experiment, to gain experience as a son might have done following in his father’s steps.

  ‘I’ve no time for namby pamby females,’ he’d growled, levelling his pipe at her. ‘For a woman, you, Eleanor, are exceptional. You have a brain and, by Jehoshaphat, I’ll see you use it!’

  Her breast swelled with pride. For she had done it. She’d slaved to prove herself as good as any son, fit to stand beside a great surgeon and assist him in every possible way. The college training could never be hers. The letters ‘M.D.’ would not be attached to her name. Yet there were compensations. After a decade of the kind of intensive training few women could hope for she’d become an experienced nurse and assistant who could think for herself.

  It was hard to understand just why nursing should be regarded as so lowly and relegated to the unskilled and unfit in society. There had to be a place for nursing as a profession. How many women fretted their lives away uselessly as dutiful daughters or idle wives, when the right training could turn them into productive members of society? In every city there must be hundreds of kind, capable women perfectly suited to caring for the sick. And what about those isolated on farms and sheep stations, who had to be combined doctor, nurse and dispenser, as well as comforter of the sick?

  Elly pulled herself out of her daydream. She put down her mug and smiled at her father. Light flickered on his nearly bald scalp as he bent slowly towards her, a surprised expression on his face. Elly’s smile stiffened. She rose and took two steps forward. For an endless moment her father hung there, as though caught around the middle. Then he slipped from the bench and fell on his face only inches from her boots.

  Elly dropped down in a pool of grubby skirts. With shaking hands she raised his head as he vomited on her and on the floor. His congested eyes seemed to plead with her.

  ‘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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  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 some
times 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.’