The Soldier's Curse

Read The Soldier's Curse for Free Online

Book: Read The Soldier's Curse for Free Online
Authors: Meg Keneally
model of perseverance and industry to the audience.
    The lecture, as Monsarrat had written it, was somewhat dry, as befitting a clerk enumerating a collection of facts. Indeed, he knew there were punishments attached to being flamboyant.
    In Honora’s deft hands, it was transformed into a story with the immediacy of events which had happened yesterday, as she leaned in and related tales of Nemean lions and Erymanthian boars as though she were gossiping over a fence. She did, it must be said, avoid mention of Hercules’ murder of Augeas, after the demigod had cleaned the king’s infamously filthy stables and then been bilked on the promise of one-tenth of the livestock. Promoting murder as a solution to a contractual squabble was not one of her objectives.
    When she summoned him to discuss their second lecture (on the cautionary tales embodied by Icarus and Prometheus), he told her the convict who cleaned the stables was now referred to as Hercules, due to the stables’ frequently Augean nature. He was rewarded with an unrestrained and abandoned laugh of the kind he had only ever heard in alehouses, and only from men.
    But she had not given that lecture, being overtaken by her illness soon after. Mrs Mulrooney had brought her tea on the broad verandah of Government House one sunny winter afternoon, so she could read and look out through the passionfruit vines over the sparkling water.
    On occasions such as this, she enjoyed having Mrs Mulrooney sit with her for company. Sometimes they chatted, and sometimes Honora seemed to prefer to read her book, so Mrs Mulrooney brought some sewing so she could sit with her employer and not feel like a ‘pimple on a pumpkin’, as she put it to Monsarrat.
    Honora tended to keep several books by her on the small round table on the verandah. Some were books designed for educated ladies, fit for her station. But she had a secret passion for rollicking adventures, which she could hide amongst the more sedate volumes from Shakespeare, Goldsmith (Fielding was considered a little too racy for the genteel) and Wordsworth. On the day her illness made its presence felt, she was engrossed in the adventures of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe .
    After a time, when most of the tea she had been absently sipping at was gone, she looked up towards the river. ‘Do you know, Mrs Mulrooney, when I was little I would squint at the water and see thousands and thousands of diamonds. I wanted to get a fishing net and scoop them all up.’
    Mrs Mulrooney looked up from her stitching and smiled at Honora, who returned the smile. Then her expression changed – to confusion, then alarm. She stood, dashed into the house and to her bedroom. Mrs Mulrooney ran after her, and found her hunched over her chamber pot, vomiting violently and slick with sweat.
    She looked up apologetically and gave a weak smile. ‘I might rest now,’ she said.
    Mrs Mulrooney fetched some water and gently cleaned her – a process she would need to repeat, as the vomiting was soon joined by more noxious emissions – and helped her into her night-clothes and into bed, before running to fetch Dr Gonville.
    This was where Honora would stay, with Mrs Mulrooney bringing her endless quantities of tea, and food which went largelyuneaten. For the first few days, though exhausted and racked by fits of coughing, she was conscious and alert. Then, as her breathing became more laboured, the convulsions started, and brought with them a delirium which had her begging her father not to commit some unknown atrocity, and asking an unknown spectre why it had followed her here. The outbursts were punctuated with increasing periods of unconsciousness.
    Dr Gonville could determine whether a wound was infected by smelling it. He was far more experienced with dysentery than he had any wish to be. And he had made the regular acquaintance of smallpox, consumption and cholera, amongst a great many others.

Similar Books

Rustler's Moon

Jodi Thomas

A Christmas Kiss

Elizabeth; Mansfield

Obediently Yours

Bella Jackson

Sacrifice

Nileyah Mary Rose

Dinosaurs Without Bones

Anthony J. Martin