THIRTY-SEVEN
Thirty-seven
7 April 1863
The rhythmic sound of loping hooves scattered the chooks as they scratched about in front of the small bark hut, sending them squawking in alarm as they scattered.
Kate O’Ryan grabbed the rifle from where it rested inside the front door and walked outside. ‘Inside now,’ she ordered in a voice her children had learned never to argue with. Her hand was steady as she aimed the gun at the approaching riders. She’d had more experience than most at handling a weapon and defending her family. She’d had to, growing up as a McNally.
A frown briefly creased her hard stare as she caught sight of a woman cradled in the arms of one of the men and turned quickly into a look of disbelief when she recognised the man as her brother Jack.
Kate rested the gun against the doorframe and hurried across to her brother, gathering the reins and holding the sweating animal as Jack carefully passed the pale woman to her brother Paddy, who’d already dismounted.
‘Who one earth …’ Kate started, but Paddy shook his head briefly, his lips twisted in a hard line.
A small moan escaped the woman’s parted lips, and Kate forgot about asking questions as her eyes rested on the woman’s protruding stomach. ‘Take her inside,’ she said. Kate noticed the blood and felt her heart sink. ‘Put her on the table.’ She moved quickly around her brother to go ahead and make room.
Once the woman had been laid down, she wasted no time in lifting the expensive but grubby material of the woman’s once-fine garments to reveal blood-stained thighs and a tight, large belly that moved in time with contractions, changing shape as the baby inside fought to get out. The child was still alive, despite the fact its mother was barely conscious.
Kate shooed the men from the room and got to work. She noted the bleeding wound on the woman’s side, but there was naught she could do for that at the moment. The child was her first priority.
She was no stranger to being a midwife. She’d had more than her share of experience, even delivering some of her own siblings from a tender age. Her last child she’d had to deliver herself, with the assistance of two of her older children, almost a year ago, when it came early and too fast for the local midwife to arrive. She recognised a problem when she saw it, and this was one of those times. The woman’s pelvis seemed too small for the size of the child’s head. She washed her hands with the cooled, freshly boiled water and pressed gentle hands against the woman’s heaving belly.
Kate was so intent on feeling for the baby’s position that she jumped slightly when a hand clasped her arm, and she looked down into the startling blue eyes of the woman on the table.
‘Please save my baby.’ Another contraction forced the woman to clench her eyes shut tight. ‘I don’t care about me. Just take care of my child,’ she said in a stronger tone once the pain passed. ‘Please.’
‘Hush, now. You’re going to need all your strength to push. We’ll have this baby out and in your arms in no time,’ Kate said, forcing a confident smile to her lips despite the fact she was not at all confident of the baby surviving the ordeal.
Kate talked the woman through her contractions and pushed against the taut stomach, trying to manoeuvre the child inside into a better position for birthing. It was pure agony for the mother, but Kate couldn’t let that distract her—both the mother’s and child’s survival depended on getting this baby out. With one last tremendous push, Kate gently guided the substantially large head that finally appeared and watched in relief as the rest of its body slipped from its mother and onto the table. Kate quickly gathered the limp child and cleared its mouth, willing it to breathe and giving a grateful sigh when a loud cry finally came. Kate briefly closed her eyes, giving thanks, before clamping and cutting the baby’s cord and placing him on his mother’s chest. ‘You have a son,’ Kate said, and she felt her throat tighten with unexpected emotion as the frail woman lifted a hand and placed it on top of the wailing baby.
‘A boy?’ she said faintly in a wondering voice. ‘Alexander would have liked that.’ Her eyes fluttered shut.
Kate gathered the baby and wrapped him snugly in a sheet before placing him safely on the small bed behind her and returning to the woman. Blood had already seeped through the cloth Kate had placed between the woman’s legs as well as pooling by the wound in her side, and despite Kate’s frantic efforts to stem the flow, she had no success. Within minutes, the woman had passed.
Kate heard footsteps approaching but she was too drained to lift her bowed head from where she stood beside the lifeless body of the stranger on her kitchen table. The child cried from the bed behind her.
‘You did everything you could.’ Jack’s deep voice came from close beside her.
‘Why did you bring her here, Jack?’ Kate snapped, jerking around to face him. ‘Who is she?’ She hadn’t asked for grief to turn up on her doorstep today. She didn’t even know this woman but she’d just witnessed two of life’s most extreme gifts—a birth and a death—and she had no idea who this poor soul was.
‘It’s best you don’t know.’
‘I think I have a right to know, don’t you? The woman just died giving birth in my house.’
‘She was in the stagecoach. We had no idea she would be there.’
Kate felt the blood drain from her cheeks. ‘Jack, what have you done?’ she whispered. It was not like her brothers to take such an enormous risk.
‘It doesn’t matter. We got the money. This is life-changing for the whole family, Katie. We can start over, maybe in America. Head over to California and live in big houses. We can have servants of our own. Imagine that, Katie. After all those years of you and Ma workin’ as maids, you can finally be the lady of your own manor,’ Jack said, jubilantly.
‘You’ve lost your mind,’ Kate said, staring at her brother. ‘You’ve robbed a stagecoach. They’ll be out looking for ya. How on earth do you think you’ll get to California?’
‘We’ll have to lie low for a bit,’ he admitted. ‘But think of it, Katie,’ he said looking off into the distance, ‘No more highway robbery. No more hiding. We can all start again, make something of ourselves. We’re rich.’
‘We’re dead is what we are,’ she snarled, cutting into his delusional daydreaming. ‘This woman is nobility. Look at her clothes, her jewellery,’ Kate said. ‘They’ll hang you just for this, don’t worry about the gold you stole or the troopers you’ve killed. A wealthy woman with child died. This will be on you, Jack.’
‘How was I supposed to know she was that close to giving birth? I didn’t even know she was on board.’
‘Why would you bring her here and put us at risk?’ she demanded. ‘Now we’re part of this too.’
‘Where else was I going to go, Kate? Her husband’s dead. The guards were dead. I couldn’t just leave her there alone in the bush.’
‘Maybe you should have thought about that before you killed her husband!’
‘He gave me no choice.’
‘This is pointless!’ Kate said, throwing her arms in the air. The crying baby interrupted her frustration and she crossed the room to pick it up, feeling milk begin to leak through her bodice. Just what she needed when her youngest babe was almost ready to wean. ‘We can’t let them find the body,’ she said after a moment, her mind racing. ‘Bury her.’
‘What about the baby?’ Jack asked.
‘It played no part in all this,’ Kate said stiffly. ‘I made a promise to his mother. I’ll raise it alongside my own wee ’uns.’ Part of her tried to protest that this baby probably had other kin who would want to know of his existence, would wonder maybe at what had happened to him. But there was no way he would ever be able to know who his real family were. Kate was now an accomplice—her life and the fates of her own children were at stake. Her job had always been to hold the family together and protect them, and that was what she would do.
‘There are no witnesses to say you robbed the coach, no one alive to testify that you took a pregnant woman from the scene. If you stay low and quiet, then no one can prove that the robbery was you. Then maybe we’ll all get out of this alive.’
‘They’ll know it was us,’ Jack said with his trademark cockiness. ‘Proving it won’t matter.’
‘All the same. Keep your mouth shut and disappear. Go north and stay there.’
‘That’s what I was planning to do,’ he snapped. He’d never liked being told what to do, especially by a woman and his sister no less, but they both knew that Kate was his sounding-board and the one who could always be counted on to solve a problem—most of the time. This, though, was bigger than any they’d ever had to deal with.
‘We need to make haste and clean up before anyone gets here. I need clean water fetched and you men need to go dig a grave—not in the family plot, make sure it’s somewhere away from the homestead, where no one will ever find it.’ Kate shooed her brother outside, placed the baby back on the bed and quickly set about mopping up the blood and gathering the bloodstained cloths into a pile. She then sat down on the bed, lifted the wailing baby and let him feed.
Fifteen long minutes later, Jack returned with a pail of cold water from the creek, and she detached the child, placing him in the cradle that had held so many of her own. Swiftly she removed the mother’s once-fine clothes, noting the lack of any damage on her smooth, creamy skin—this woman had clearly never had to scrub laundry or forage for food, chop wood for a fire to keep her children warm in winter or toil on the land to grow crops. Even her voice, weak with pain, had clearly indicated an educated and wealthy background. Kate had no great love for the gentry, but she washed the woman on her kitchen table with movements that were gentle as well as quick.
This was a woman and a mother who had been robbed of her life and her child and, no matter what her background, she deserved a proper burial.
After she’d dressed the body in a simple shift, Kate opened the door so the men could enter and then took out a folded blanket from the old, timber box at the base of the bed, handing it over to her husband and brother to wrap the woman’s body. The blanket could have been used for her family this winter, but there was no way she could in good conscience let this poor woman be put into that cold ground only encased in bloody sheets. She stood back and watched as Jack gently folded the blanket over the woman’s face.
‘Wait,’ she said, suddenly, snatching up her sewing scissors and crossing to the cradle. The baby was fast asleep, and she deftly sliced a small lock of soft downy, blonde hair off the tiny head. Kate reached behind her neck and unfastened the chain she wore, removing the gold locket her brother had given her years before.
‘What are you doing?’ her husband asked, alarmed by her intention.
Kate ignored the question, concentrating on placing the hair inside the delicate locket. She returned to the woman on the table.
‘Kate—that’s gold,’ Jack said with a frown.
‘I know what it is.’ She unfolded the woman’s hand as best she could and slipped the locket into her fist before tucking it back in and rewrapping the blanket tightly around her once more.
‘That was our insurance,’ her husband complained. ‘What are ye giving it to a dead woman for? It ain’t gonna do her any good where she’s goin’ now, is it?’
Kate looked up at the two men before her and held their angry gazes with a steely glare. ‘That gold was stolen—it weren’t ours to begin with. We have blood on our hands today, and I intend to make good with the Lord by sending this woman on her way with compassion. And a piece of her little ’un. If either of you want to stand in the way of that, then you’ll have to take it up with God himself!’
The men swapped an uncertain glance, but neither made a move to intervene.
Kate swept up the pile of bloodstained sheets and marched them out to the waiting cart and then stood in the doorway, watching with a heavy heart as they carried the woman out of the house and drove her away.
While the men were burying her, Kate cleaned up the remaining evidence and packed what supplies she could gather for her brothers and the rest of the gang. She knew they would split up and go separate ways to avoid being tracked, eventually meeting up in one of their hideouts deep in the mountain bush. Once it was safe to do so, they would send for Kate, her husband and children.
That afternoon, Kate watched her brothers ride off, rocking the small baby in her arms in a movement now second nature to her, having nursed a child almost without pause since she was eighteen. She looked down at his sleeping face and felt her heart lurch. She would love this baby as fiercely as any of her own and it would never know a day of anguish, grieving for its lost mam.
Less than two weeks later, news arrived of Jack’s death. Her brothers had all been slain—hunted and shot down like animals by the authorities—and Jack’s body displayed like a trophy.
Many years later, as Kate prepared to walk out the door of her little home for the final time, her thoughts went to all the people in her life whom she’d lost over the years. Her parents, her brothers, two babies and a husband—so many. She was old and grey now—her children were mostly grown up and some had children of their own. Her life had been hard—much harder after Jack’s death. Her husband, bless him, had been a simple farmer, but without the extra money Jack and her brothers had occasionally brought in life had become more of a struggle. The hard winters had become too much for her to handle now and she was tired.
‘Are you ready Mammy?’ her son asked. The horse and cart behind him were packed with a surprisingly small number of belongings—not much to show for the life she’d lived here up in the mountains.
‘I just need to do one more thing,’ she said. ‘I won’t be long.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.
She turned, holding up her hand. ‘No. It’s something I need to do on my own. I’ll be along shortly.’
It was further than she remembered and the walk was harder than last time, but the buzz of insects kept her company and the birds sang merrily as she breathed in the smell of the eucalypts. She missed Ireland, but this place had been her home now for more years than her homeland had been.
When she reached the small clearing, she almost missed what she was looking for. It was hidden beneath long, spindly native grasses, with nothing to mark the place except the small rosebush she’d planted last time she’d come up here. The bush had been a gift from her husband, an unexpected extravagance after meeting a silver-tongued travelling peddler in town one day—a piece of the Old World, for their new one. She was glad to see that it had survived.
She took a seat on a large, flat rock nearby and tilted her face towards the morning sun, enjoying the peace and quiet. This was a good place, Kate thought. She hadn’t come up here for many years, and for most of them she’d pushed away any thoughts of what had happened that terrible day when her brother had brought a stranger to the house, close to dying and in great pain, yet using her last breath to plead for the safety of her child. But she had never truly forgotten that woman, whose name she didn’t know to this day. How could she, when each time she looked into Finnegan’s face it was like looking into the same blue eyes of the woman to whom she’d made a deathbed promise?
A slight rustle made Kate open her eyes, and she watched as a small wallaby entered the clearing from the dense bush beyond. It stopped when it noticed her, tilting its small head and fixing its dark eyes on Kate’s face intently.
There is a knowing in those eyes, she thought, and a sigh of awareness ran through her.
‘I kept my promise,’ Kate said, softly. ‘I’ve loved your boy like he was my own and I kept him safe. I’m sorry you never got to see him grow, but no good can come from digging up the past now, so this is how it must be. I’ll face my Maker with the knowledge that I did all that I could do, and I did it with a pure heart.’
Kate rose slowly from her seat. The wallaby blinked but didn’t jump away as she crossed to pluck one of the small flowers from the bush. She carefully laid it on the ground, over the invisible grave. ‘Until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of his hand,’ she whispered. She watched as the little wallaby hopped away, and then slowly made her own way from the clearing without looking back.