‘There, there! Gently!’ said the woman, and modified her actions in accordance. ‘What is your name, love?’ she asked.
‘Ellen.’
‘Ellen what?’
There was the slip-slop of dreamy water, the passage of a sweating, soaped flannel.
The woman did not press for an answer. ‘I am Mrs Oakes,’ she informed instead. ‘And my husband — Ted Oakes — was a sergeant in his day. We come here with the first contingent. We was Wilshur folk. Ted received a grant for ’is services, and that is ’ow we is farmin’ beyond Brisbane River.
‘It’s a good life,’ she added, in case her patient might not believe.
Ellen Gluyas was only too ready. She sat whimpering in the dark house, moved by all that her senses recalled, through creaking boards and warm flannel, somewhere the smells of milk and smoked bacon, and was it — yes, it was raw wool. Outside, cows’ hooves were thudding homeward down a hard path. She thought that she might not be able to endure this onslaught by the present on accumulated memory.
‘Will we sit you right in the bath, Ellen?’ Mrs Oakes inquired.
Ellen shook her head. She was afraid that, if she spoke, a bubble might shoot out of her mouth instead of words.
‘Well, not yet perhaps,’ Mrs Oakes agreed. ‘Everythin’ gradual like.’
She would have been at a loss after that had her patient not informed her, ‘I lost my wedding-ring, which I brought almost here, threaded on a vine, carrying it all the way from the wreck.’
Mrs Oakes was at once suspended. ‘You’re a survivor’, she asked, ‘from the wreck we’ve ’eard tell about? From the Bristol Maid?’
It had become too terrible to answer.
‘Are you Mrs Roxburgh?’ the woman asked.
The patient shook her head. ‘You won’t persecute me? And string me up to the triangles? No one will believe, but a person is not always guilty of the crimes they’s committed.’
‘Come, love, you mustn’t work yourself into a state. Nobody’s goin’ to persecute you.’
‘Not when I’m guilty? Not wholly — but part.’
In the silence which followed, except for the stirring of water and the squeezing of a flannel, she ventured to add, ‘I am not Mrs Roxburgh, whatever you may think. I am Mab, but can’t tell you her other name.’
Mrs Oakes must have stolen away, for Ellen overheard soon after, ‘When the boys come in, John must take a fresh horse, Ted, and ride to the settlement, and tell as we have a survivor, and ask what we should do. ’Tis the one they call Mrs Roxburgh, an’ the poor thing deleerious.’
From the grumbles and the shuffles, Ted Oakes must have wished they had not been saddled with any of this. It was his wife who appeared the sergeant.
‘It’s our duty,’ she reminded, ‘and now come and give me a ’and to lift ’er on the bed.’
They hoisted Mab to higher than she had been accustomed. She lay squirming amongst the wool and feathers.
‘Do tha want to suffocate me?’ she cried.
But settled after a pat or two.
The boys must have returned home. She heard male bodies fling themselves down on benches, questioning, then groaning and protesting, as they slurped at some kind of pottage. She heard fists slammed against a table, and after an interval, the angry hoof beats of a horse urged too abruptly from a walk into a canter.
Mrs Oakes brought a yellow candle, then another, which did not so much illuminate the darkness as obscure any part of the room which lay beyond their vicinity.
‘What would you like to your supper?’ she asked, as though she might produce any manner of delicacy.
‘I don’t know,’ Mrs Roxburgh replied, fretting her head against the feather pillow. ‘If I can remember, my maid will bring me it on a tray.’
Mrs Oakes did not wait, but went and fetched a bowl of something.
‘There!’
She spooned a mess, soft, sweet, and bland, into the patient’s mouth. It made Ellen cry, even as she masticated and swallowed: she was not equal to the memories it evoked. For that reason she was soon fed, and clamped her jaws together whatever ideas her nurse had.
‘This way we’ll never get you better.’ Mrs Oakes sighed.
She left the room with the tepid bread-and-milk barely touched.
Now that her eyes were more accustomed to the light Mrs Roxburgh took advantage of her nurse’s absence to explore the room from where she lay. It was of an altogether gaunt appearance, its walls of unadorned grey slab. As far as she could distinguish, the few sticks of furniture could never have possessed any but the humblest virtues. What might have passed for embellishment was of such a rudimentary nature it must have been done to occupy the craftsman rather than to beautify a chair or cupboard. Because her own furniture came crowding round her, the whole rout of barley-sugar or fluted legs, explosive silks, chiming crystal, under the brooding swags of cynical brocade, she closed her eyes. (In any event, none of it was hers, less than ever since she had elected to go dredging the sewers.)
When her eyes were again opened she noticed between shutters left ajar a face darker than the night around it.
She might have shrieked had not her nurse been standing by the bed.
‘Have they come for me?’
‘Who?’
‘The blacks!’
Mrs Oakes said, ‘That is Jemmy. I would trust ’im — and all of our natives — if Ted and the boys were gone a month.’
It was innocence on Mrs Oakes’s part. Mrs Roxburgh did not believe she would trust anybody, whatever their colour. She would not trust herself, she thought.
Suddenly she began to shiver. ‘Do you suppose they’ll be gone a month?’
‘Why — no!’
Mrs Oakes latched the shutters after slamming them to.
She felt her patient’s brow and went and brought some bitter-tasting stuff.
When she had extricated herself from the relentless and evilsmelling spoon, Mrs Roxburgh gasped, ‘My husband was an invalid.’
‘Your husband?’
‘Yes.’
Mrs Oakes laid the spoon in a saucer.
‘Delicate though he was, Mr Roxburgh would have made every effort to save me — had not those blacks murdered him.’
‘Tt! Tt!’
‘Poor Jack! My dearest husband!’
‘Don’t fret yourself, pet. I’ll stay ’ere beside you. No one will harm you — unless it be a dream. I can’t prevent dreams, can I? only break up the attack when I see it takin’ place.’
Mrs Oakes was arranging herself on the leather-and-horsechair throne.
Mrs Roxburgh raised herself amongst the feather pillows. ‘They’ve murdered Mr Roxburgh, but will the whites — kill Jack?’
Mrs Oakes decided to doze.
The same limping, waterlogged boat brought them to the shores of morning, Mrs Oakes’s large face misshapen from resting on the leather gunwale, Mrs Roxburgh’s limbs probably for ever rusted, her lips so tightly gummed she could not masticate the air.
Mrs Roxburgh informed her fellow survivor, ‘On most of these islands there’s shellfish aplenty, but see that you don’t tear your hands. And water — can we but sop up the dew with our handkerchiefs.’
Mrs Oakes was putting up her hair by instinct. ‘What I’ll bring you will put more heart into you than any rotten whelks — unless you don’t fancy a fresh egg, an’ cup of milk warm from the cow.’
Mrs Roxburgh did not refuse what she felt she should have denied herself, considering.
By the time Mrs Oakes brought her offerings Mrs Roxburgh had persuaded herself that she was justified in accepting them. ‘With his spear and net, he need never starve, I’m thankful to say. Otherwise, how should I swallow this egg?’
‘I don’t rightly know, dear,’ Mrs Oakes replied; she would have liked to, none the less.