This Golden Land (5 page)

     "Father," Hannah said decisively, rising to her feet. "I shall send for a carriage. Can you tolerate the ride home?" She looked around the room and saw no bottles of brandy or wine. It was a dark, saturnine chamber illuminated by the occasional flash of lightning. "Are you able to walk?"

     Conroy labored for air. "Hannah . . . I must tell thee the truth about thy mother's death . . . it has been on my conscience . . ."

     "Do not speak, Father."

     "The letter, Hannah, read the letter . . ."

     She blinked. "Letter?"

     The walls of the tomb-like parlor were hung with ancestral portraits, men in padded doublets and women in farthingales. As Hannah knelt at her father's side, she felt their eyes on her, the greedy eyes of the jealous dead hungry for her father's life force. You can't have him, she wanted to cry.

     John Conroy didn't breathe for a moment, then he looked at her, at the face that was so like Louisa's, the high forehead and delicate cheekbones, eyes the sparkling gray of mother-of-pearl framed by black lashes. Hannah wore her hair the same as Louisa had: the black tresses parted in the middle and swept over her ears like raven's wings, to lie at her neck gathered in a silk net. He lifted a weak hand and placed it on her cheek. "How like thy mother thee is."

     John Conroy's life had begun, he always said, the day Louisa Reed came into his life "like a fabulous butterfly." Hannah thought it a love story for the ages. Louisa Reed had been touring southeast England with her theatrical company when she had sprained her ankle in Bayfield. Since she was an actress, Miles Willoughby's distinguished predecessor would not see her.
And so she was taken to the local practitioner, a shy young Quaker with a brand new shingle.

     What had it been like on that fateful day, Hannah often wondered, when Louisa had brought her gaiety and outgoing personality into that quiet, modest cottage? What had the beautiful young woman with the midnight hair and lemon yellow gown seen in the softly-spoken man in black? John and Louisa must have been like night and day—and yet, like night and day, they had complemented each other and had fit together into a perfect unit. Hannah's mother had fallen so deeply in love that she had given up the stage to be with John, and he had been so in love with her that he had allowed himself to be expelled from the fellowship of the Society of Friends in order to marry her.

     Reaching into his medical bag, he brought out the bottle of experimental formula. "If I had had this miracle six years ago, I could have saved thy mother." Taking Hannah's hand, he pressed the small bottle into it, saying, "I pass it to thee, Hannah, as my legacy. Use it in thy midwifery. Save lives."

     "We will use it together," she said in a tight voice.

     He rolled his head from side to side. "My time in this mortal life is at an end, daughter. God calls to me. But I must tell thee the truth about thy mother's death . . . I should have spoken long ago . . ." He swallowed painfully. "The letter explains . . . but it is hidden . . . find it. . .."

     "Father, I do not know what you are talking about." Hannah squeezed his shockingly cold hands. "I will fetch Dr. Willoughby—"

     "No!" A harsh whisper spoken with the last of his strength. "It is my time, Hannah. We must accept." He opened his eyes, tried to focus on her face, then let his gaze roam the room. He paused, frowned, and said, "Who is that?"

     Hannah looked over her shoulder. "Who is what, Father? There is no one there."

     "Why . . ." John Conroy whispered. "I know thee, sir . . . " His face cleared, the shadows retreated and Hannah was startled to see her father suddenly smile. "Yes," he said, nodding toward the specter that only he could see. "I understand . . ."

     And then: "Oh, Hannah! The light!" He brought his eyes back to hers
and she was stunned to see focus and clarity in them, and an intensity she had not seen in years. He reached for her hand that still held the bottle of formula and said, "I see so much now. Hannah, this is the
key!"

     Tears rose in her eyes. "Father, I do not know what you are talking about. Let me take you home."

     A strange glow seemed to suffuse his features, his smile now was one of ecstasy. "I was blind, Hannah. I did not understand." His cold fingers grasped her hand tightly so that the small bottle dug painfully into her palm. "This is it, the key to everything. Oh Hannah, my dearest daughter, thee stands at the threshold of a glorious new world! A wondrous adventure—"

     John Conroy died then, smiling, while generations of arrogant Falconbridges looked down gloatingly from their ancient canvases and Hannah, suddenly left alone in the world, wept against his chest and clutched the tiny bottle that had, ultimately, killed him.

I
F THE BOY DIES
, C
APTAIN, WE TAKE OVER THIS SHIP AND SAIL
for the nearest land. Because it's a death ship for sure, and we ain't gonna let our families perish in the middle of the ocean." The angry Irishman curled his huge hands into fists to punctuate his threat.

     "I assure you," said Captain Llewellyn, Master of the
Caprica
, "Dr. Applewhite is doing is utmost best to stop the contagion."

     "Yeah?" shouted a Scotsman who clutched a heavy belaying pin. "Then how come we're dropping like flies down here and that lot up there ain't even touched?" He flung his arm toward the quarterdeck, where the ship's four paying passengers enjoyed privacy and better accommodations than the
Caprica
's two-hundred-plus immigrants who were crowded into steerage.

     Captain Llewellyn drew in a steadying breath to curtail his temper. As the three-masted square-rigger rolled and swayed along its nautical course, alone on a vast sea that sparkled to the far horizons, Captain Llewellyn, a gruff, thickset man with bushy white whiskers and a brusque manner, took the measure of the enraged Irishman. He might not be armed, Llewellyn
thought, but the crew and officers wouldn't stand a chance should mutiny erupt. The Irishman was not alone. Nearly a hundred angry Scotsmen, Welshmen and Englishmen were lined up with him on the deck, for once forgetting their political and religious differences, united in one cause: to take over the ship if the Ritchie boy died.

     As more immigrants appeared on the deck, faces twisted in fury, Captain Llewellyn glanced up at the quarterdeck where he saw a lone man watching. Neal Scott, the young American, one of the
Caprica
's four paying passengers—a scientist bound for Perth to work on a survey vessel for the colonial government. A pleasant fellow, Llewellyn thought, if a bit mysterious, traveling with those strange crates right in his cabin instead of stowing them in the hold. The captain did not care for Mr. Scott's current keen attention on the brewing trouble. Scott would tell the others and then the captain would have a panic on his hands.

     Llewellyn brought his attention back to the Irishman and fixed him with a stern gaze. The Master of the
Caprica
had small bluebell-colored eyes, like two pin pricks set deep in the creases of his weathered face, and they did not miss a thing. Behind the angry men, womenfolk were starting to line up, widows who had buried husbands and children at sea and who now brandished broomsticks and rolling pins. It will be a bloody slaughter, Llewellyn thought. And neither side will win.

     Although Llewellyn knew he was a good and fair captain who treated his crew better than most, he also knew that a seaman's life was hard and that if the immigrants did take control of the ship, his sailors would be only too happy to sail her to the nearest rock if the immigrants were generous about it, which he had no doubt they would be. Turning to his First Officer, he said quietly, "Send for Dr. Applewhite."

     Mister James hesitated. "Will it do any good, sir? The doctor's been down there numerous times already."

     During his long career at sea, with each voyage carrying a ship's doctor, Captain Llewellyn had learned that medical men were unpredictable. They were not regulated the same way sailing men were. Llewellyn had had to serve many years as an ordinary seaman, and then had had to study long and hard at navigation, the stars, weather, how to read maps, how to handle
a sextant and to read the wind before he got his master's ticket. But any man could call himself a doctor. There was no general standard, no regulations, nothing by which to measure a medical man for competency. Private medical schools dotted the map like mushrooms, with courses as short as six months and then the diploma was awarded. And so when one hired a ship's doctor, one never knew if he was of the barest education and experience, who didn't know a boil from a scab, or an Oxford scholar who could name every nerve in the body and who spoke in words that cost a shilling apiece. Llewellyn himself had sailed with his share of charlatans and snobs, and in the grand scale of things, he counted Applewhite among the more capable. If the contagion could be stopped, Applewhite was the man to do it.

     "Fetch him," he said quietly, "if only to make these ruffians stand down."

     "It's awfully quiet out there," said Mrs. Merriwether, looking toward the open doorway that led from the salon to the companionway. "I'm used to hearing the pipes and fiddles of the immigrants on the main deck. I don't like that silence."

     "There there," said her husband, Reverend Merriwether, in a tone of comfort that he himself did not feel.

     Seeing the distressed look on both their faces, Hannah Conroy said, "I am sure Captain Llewellyn is handling things."

     The Merriwethers were a missionary couple on their way to Australia, and Hannah liked the reverend's wife, a plump lady in her fifties, tightly corseted into a blue and white striped gown. Like Hannah, she wore her hair in the fashion of the day—parted in the middle and swept back into a chignon (although the reverend's wife sported old-fashioned and slightly girlish ringlets that quivered over each ear when she spoke).

     The Reverend himself was portly, with a pleasant disposition, and a scalp so bald that it was shiny (a deficit, Hannah suspected, that was compensated for by prodigious bushy gray side whiskers).

     The Merriwethers had literally rescued Hannah back in London.

     Although a formal inquest had ruled Lady Margaret's death as due
to natural causes, and although Hannah's father's name had been cleared, things were not the same after that. As much as the local people had loved John Conroy, they feared Lord Falconbridge more. And as the baron and Dr. Willoughby continued to rail against the Quaker for the untimely death of the baroness, the name of Conroy was destroyed forever. Mrs. Endicott, the egg farmer's wife who had asked Hannah to attend her ninth birth, had said, "Sorry, but I've my customers to think of." As if someone named Conroy could spoil all their eggs. Hannah knew that no one would hire her, that Bayfield was no longer her home.

     And then she had thought: England is no longer my home. Hannah knew that wherever she went, she would encounter the same class prejudice, and the same narrow-minded thinking that had killed her father. With his final breath he had said, "Thee stands at the threshold of a glorious new world!" And so to a new world Hannah would go. And perhaps, while she was building a new life for herself, she would solve the mystery of John Conroy's other final words, for which Hannah had no explanation: the "truth" about her mother's death, and a mysterious letter she was supposed to read but which she had not been able to find among his belongings.

     After burying her father and selling their cottage, Hannah had gone to London to buy passage to Australia, where she had heard the sun shone like gold and opportunities were as vast as the continent itself. But she had discovered that no ship's captain would take on a young, unmarried lady who was not escorted or chaperoned. "You would be a severe distraction for the officers and crew," one captain had declared. "I dare not risk a breakdown in moral order." As Hannah could not afford to hire a lady's companion, she was beginning to despair of leaving Britain when the booking agent found a husband and wife missionary couple traveling to Perth. He had sent a note to the inn where they were staying, inquiring if they wouldn't mind chaperoning a young woman on the voyage. Hannah had then met with the Merriwethers, and they had decided she was a young lady of good character, albeit in reduced circumstances, and had graciously offered to watch out for her welfare aboard ship.