Read Dorothy Eden for Free Online Page B

to say. No, this is a poor wretch shot in the Rocks district. Dead, I think. Be a good fellow and come along.’
    ‘To rouse the dead? That’s a wasted journey. What happened?’ Dr Noakes squinted forward at Gilbert. ‘You’re not involved, are you?’
    ‘Good God, no. I was only passing.’
    ‘That’s a blessing. I don’t suppose your bride would take kindly to that sort of thing on the night of her arrival. Well, I suppose I must come. Though what you’re doing playing Good Samaritan I can’t imagine. It isn’t exactly a role that fits you like a glove.’
    Philip Noakes was one of Gilbert’s best friends. He had been a ship’s surgeon before settling in Australia permanently. Gilbert would have taken Eugenia to the Noakes in preference to the Kellys, except for Marion Noakes. She was a disgruntled, outspoken Englishwoman who had hated the country from the moment of her arrival. Gilbert did not intend having his wife exposed to that sort of acid fault-finding on her first day in Sydney.
    But Phil was one of the best. He drank hard, and worked hard. He was plain-spoken, honest, and a dedicated fighter for the rights of the convicts. More than once he had made himself unpopular for exposing sadistic masters. There had been an unpleasant scandal about the death of a labourer subsequent to a flogging. The employer who had administered the punishment was one of the newly rich landholders, a man with influential friends. For a few days it had been a toss-up who would emerge with his character in shreds, the man who had wielded the cat-o’-nine-tails or Phil Noakes, the convict-lover as he was beginning to be called. Fortunately the newspaper The Australian had taken up the case and had made a fervent plea for justice and the simple facts of humanity. Where did fair punishment end and murder begin?
    The guilty station holder left the colony, and Doctor Noakes was called on to work harder than ever among a long and diverse list of patients to justify his defence of what he called the ‘ragtag and bobtail’ victims of an unfair social system. Which pleased his wife even less than her forced residence in such a crude country.
    There was nothing he could do, when he reached the scene of the tragedy, but pronounce death from a gunshot wound and suggest that the bereaved wife came down to the barracks and tell her story to the officer on duty.
    She agreed quietly. She had regained her composure. She smoothed her hair and put on a bonnet. The door of the humble cottage was closed on the dead man, and with Gilbert and the doctor on either side of her, she walked down the street to the barracks.
    On Doctor Noakes’ questioning, she said that her name was Molly Jarvis, she had been married to Harry Jarvis, the dead man, only six months. He had had bad lungs and probably hadn’t long to live, but he had thought that marriage might give her a little protection. There was no other kind for a woman in her position, was there?
    Yes, she said defiantly, she had come out on a convict ship eight years ago and had only recently got her freedom. She was the cook at the ‘Seven Bells’, a bad enough place to work, but she had never gone on the streets. Those men tonight had thought she was a prostitute, and had been furious when they found she was not. No, she had never seen them before and couldn’t describe them since it was too dark, and she hadn’t seen their faces. They would escape scot-free while poor Harry lay dead. Men always escaped, didn’t they?
    This was said without bitterness, merely as a statement of fact.
    ‘Not necessarily,’ said Doctor Noakes drily, and Gilbert looked at the young woman, trying to see her face beneath the prim black bonnet. Her voice intrigued him. It was not altogether a lady’s, but neither was it a servant’s. His guess was that she had worked in some place where she had learned to improve her speech. But what he liked most was her self-discipline. Whatever rage and grief was burning