‘Dear colleague, you are very good, and in fact there is a kindness you could do me. I should very much like to see my former loblolly-boy, Patrick Colman: he was transported, and now it seems he is in your hospital. If you would leave word at the gate that I am to be admitted, I should be most grateful.’
‘An Irishman, with a complex dysphony and little English, an absconder?’
‘The same.’
‘If you will come with me, I will take you there myself: I am on my way. But no doubt you were going to Government House?’
‘I have to call on Her Excellency.’
‘I am afraid it would be a call in vain: I have just been to see her, and she must keep her bed some days longer.’
They walked down together, Dr Redfern greeted on every hand, and they talked with barely a pause. At one point Stephen said ‘What you say about liver is particularly interesting. I do not like my captain’s at all, and should be glad of your opinion,’ and at another he said ‘There is another of those vessels emitting smoke. Is it a fumigation against pests, against disease?’
‘It is sulphur burning to bring out hidden convicts or choke them to death. Many of the poor devils try to stow away. Every ship leaving is smoked and every boat is stopped by the party at South Head.’ But most of the time they spoke about such matters as the thin-
thread ligature of arteries, Abernethy’s triumphs, and the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
When they came nearer Dawes Point Redfern’s cheerfulness declined and he said ‘I am ashamed to display this hospital in all its squalid nakedness. Happily Governor and Mrs Macquarie are engaged on a new building.’ As they walked in he said ‘Colman is in the small ward on the right. His back is healing, but there is a dejection of spirits and an utter neglect of food that makes me anxious: I hope your visit may comfort him.’
‘Do you happen to know whether there are any other Irishmen in the ward?’
‘Not now. We lost both others a week ago, and since then he has had almost no company.
His dysphony increases in English, what little English he has.’
‘Certainly. On a good day he is positively fluent in Irish, and he sings it without a check.’
‘You speak the language, sir, I collect?’
‘Indifferently; it is a child’s knowledge, no more. But he understands me.’
‘I shall leave you together while I look at the other men with my attendants: you will feel no constraint, I trust.’
There was a gathering in the hall and then they went in, Redfern accompanied by his dresser and two nurses. Padeen, was on the right hand, at the end of a row of quite wide-spaced beds, by the window. He was lying on his belly, so nearly asleep that he did not move when Redfern drew back the sheet
covering him. ‘As you see,’ said Redfern, ‘the skin is healing
– little inflammation: bone almost entirely covered. Earlier floggings had rendered it coriaceous. We treat with tepid sponging and wool-fat. Mr Herold’ – to the dresser – ‘we will leave Colman for the moment and see to the amputations.’
It was not the half-flayed back that wounded Stephen, who like any naval surgeon had seen the results of many a flogging, though never on such a monstrous scale, so much as the extreme emaciation. Padeen had been a fine upstanding fellow, thirteen or fourteen stone, perhaps: now his ribs stood out under the scars and he would barely weigh eight.
Padeen’s face was turned towards him on the pillow: eyes closed, head skull-like.
Stephen laid a firm, authoritative medical hand on his back and said low in his ear ‘Never stir now. God and Mary be with you, Padeen.’
‘God and Mary and Patrick be with you, Doctor,’ came the slow, almost dreaming reply: the eye opened, a singularly sweet smile lit that famine-time face and he said ‘I knew you would come.’ He held Stephen’s hand. ‘Quiet, now, Padeen,’ said Stephen: he waited until the convulsive trembling had stopped and went on, ‘Listen, Padeen, my dear. Say nothing to any man at all, nothing. But you are going to a place where you will be more kindly treated, and there I shall see you again. There I shall see you again. Till then you must eat all you can, do you hear me now, Padeen. And till then God be with you, God and Mary be with you.’
Stephen walked out, more moved than he bad believed possible; and still, as he walked back to the ship after a particularly interesting conversation with Dr Redfern, he found that his mind was not as cool and steady as he could have wished. A lorikeet, or what he took for a lorikeet, flying from a clump of banksia changed its current for a moment. So did the sound of music in the cabin, which he heard well before he crossed the brow.
It was Jack and Martin, studying particular passages of the D minor quartet: Stephen observed that the viola’s sound was mellower than usual, and at the same time he remembered
their engagement to dine with John Paulton. Fortunately he was already dressed.
‘I have just seen Padeen in the hospital,’ he said; and in answer to their enquiries, ‘He is in very good hands. Dr Redfern is an admirable man. He told me a great deal about the local diseases, many brought about it appears by the dust, and about the convicts’ state of mind. In spite of their failings they are always kind and tender to one of their fellows that has been flogged, and ease his sufferings as much as they can.’
‘I remember when I was disrated and turned before the mast when I was a boy,’ said Jack,
‘that when a man had had a dozen at the gangway his messmates were invariably very good to him – grog, sweet-oil for his back, anything they could think of.’
‘Dr Redfern also gave me directions for our projected journey,’ said Stephen, taking out his ‘cello, ‘and will send me letters to some of the respectable or at least intelligent settlers.’
‘You did mention a journey before we crossed Capricorn,’ said Jack, ‘but I have forgotten just what you had in mind.’
‘Since the ship is likely to be here for about a month,’ said Stephen, ‘I thought that with your leave we should travel inland towards the Blue Mountains and back in a southern sweep to Botany Bay for perhaps a fortnight, come aboard to see whether our services are needed, and then make a northern tour, passing by Paulton’s place, until she is ready to sail.’
‘With all my heart,’ said Jack. ‘And I hope you will find a phoenix on her nest.’
Chapter Ten
‘We seem to have been living this life of wandering tinkers for ever,’ said Stephen, ‘and I must confess it suits me very well
– no peevish bells, no responsibilities, no care for the morrow, wholly dependent on the benevolence of others or of Providence.’
‘So long that I have almost come to like this starve-acre landscape,’ said Martin, looking over plain, covered, where it was covered at all, with thin coarse grass and low bushes, with gum-trees of various kinds standing here and there, the whole, in spite of the tracts of bare sandstone rubble, giving a general impression of a dull silvery grey-green, hot, dry and brilliantly lit. It seemed completely empty at first, but far over to the south-east a keen eye, or better a small spy-glass, could make out a group of kangaroos of the largest kind, while troups of white cockatoos moved among the taller, more distant trees. ‘I sound
ungrateful,’ Martin went on, ‘for not only has it fed me very well – such quails, such chops!
– but it is a naturalist’s treasure-house, and Heaven knows how many unknown plants that worthy ass is carrying, to say nothing of bird-skins. I only mean that it is wanting in wild romantic prospects or indeed anything that makes a countryside worth looking at, apart from its flora and fauna.’
‘Blaxiand assured me that there were wild romantic prospects farther into the Blue Mountains,’ said Stephen. And for a while they ate steadily: they were dining on grilled wombat (all their meals were necessarily grilled or roasted) and it ate like tender lamb.
‘There they go!’ he cried. ‘And the dingoes after them.’ The kangaroos vanished in a fold of the plain half a mile away, moving at a prodigious speed, and the dingoes, which had presumably relied on surprise, gave up the hopeless
chase. ‘Well you may say starve-acre,’said Stephen, looking east and west. ‘I remember Banks telling me that when first they saw New Holland and sailed along its shore the country made him think of a lean cow, with bare scraggy protuding hip-bones. Now you know very well what affection and esteem I have for Sir Joseph; and I have the utmost respect for Captain Cook too, that intrepid scientific mariner. But what possessed them to recommend this part of the world to Government as a colony I cannot tell – Cook, who was brought up on a farm; Banks, who was a landowner; both of them able men and both of them having seen great stretches of its desolation. What infatuation, what wilful . . .’ He broke off, and Martin said ‘Perhaps it seemed more promising after so many thousand miles of sea.’