Oberon, 1896

The Death Trilogy #1

Mark Bryce

Who knew the Meriton twins could both be pregnant at the same time? It was a most singular thing and it had been the talk of the town since the beginning of winter when the two girls made their announcement after the memorial talk for Sir Henry Parkes, given by Mr Turner. John Fletcher, the father of both children, it turned out, had left town ahead of the announcement. I’m sure, without the possibility of offering a shred of scientific evidence to support my memory, that that was the night when the cold first settled. In fact, that is why we gathered in the front of the Meriton house, rather than outside, I am sure, to hear Mr Turner speak. Somebody who arrived late swore they had seen the first flakes of winter caught in the dead gumtree beside Pennington’s Farm, and their words rang flat like a cracked bell over the fading echoes of the announcement, grandly given. It seemed a sign of something, though the feeling was ineffable. The grandfather chimed hollowly in the hall outside the room while the two girls beamed like lights in a dark wood. And then everyone went home, mumbling. As always, my rheumatism made me slow. I was left alone for those few awkward moments with the twins and their mother in the foyer of their house, as Mr Turner made an embarrassed exit past us. I forced my muted congratulations, before the wind swept me into the night.

I relate this story not to make judgment upon the two ladies. The town hummed the next morning and any opinion I might have offered concerning this ill-conceived announcement would have been beyond me to make heard above the hubbub of others. In short, it was a scandal. The level of approbation was beyond the harm either of the girls could have offered to anyone but themselves, and I was called back to the house when their mother, Mrs Meriton, was overcome by apoplexy after she was confronted the next day by the indignation of Mrs Cummins, her neighbour, on the street. She remained mostly in the house thereafter until her oldest girl, Anne, went into labour six months later. The Meriton girls were shunned throughout Oberon.

“It will be the death of me Dr Mersy,” Mrs Meriton assured me as she ushered me into the hallway of their home one afternoon. There had been more snow already – Oberon usually received some during the winter months – adding to the glum reproach of the silent house. My footsteps sounded like grim drums upon the worn hall runner as Mrs Meriton strained against the first step to the bedroom, above.

“They will be two lovely boys, I’m certain,” she effused nervously, looking up the stairwell. She wrung her hands and her eyes glinted sadly, like a glimpse into the future. “It will be a new world Dr Mersy. A new world. All that was said in Tenterfield. What Sir Henry said … How I do regret his passing. Mr Meriton, God bless his soul, he voted for him, you know. Sir Henry. Every time he was Premier, dear Mr Meriton voted for him. Bringing the country together. We’ll be a real nation, we will. And our two new boys…”

I found both girls in their beds. Their mother had done her best to prop them up, but Janette had slid beneath her covers. Her pillow was askew and in danger of falling to the floor. I felt the whole thing to be a sham: the air of a sick room; the curtains drawn; the lack of proper lighting. I assured both girls that they were in splendid health; that many a young lady had, before their own unfortunate circumstance, which I did not entertain in so many words, bloomed.

“You are kind to say so, Dr Mersy,” Anne said to me. “I know I have felt better; the morning sickness has gone, and I think I am mostly tired of sitting in this bed without anything to occupy me.” She glanced at her sister whose face was pale, eyes dull.

“Then you must make arrangements for some exercise. You must take in fresh air from time to time Miss Meriton,” I told her, with every intention that my advice was spoken to her sister as well. “However cold it may be right now,” I added. I thought of the disapproving stares of the local parish. “Or at least to venture downstairs.”

“You are right. You are so right, doctor,” she said, like a little bird chirping to please me. For a second I saw her glance at her sister again, but Janette gave no sign that she was listening to our conversation. She looked as though the shame of their notoriety had settled in her soul.

Of all the occasions I attended the girls, this is the one I remember.

I sat in my carriage that day, after I had made my excuses, looking at the back of my horse before I started for home, and thought about those unborn children. Mrs Meriton had been so proud of her husband’s efforts to push for Federation, and she had continued to encourage interest in the town concerning the matter after he died three years ago. Now Sir Henry, himself, was gone, and I wondered whether all the effort would fall to earth like a punctured balloon. Mrs Meriton’s efforts had made her a central figure in our community in support of a new nation, and she had much to be proud of.

Now, her family were pariahs. But ill beginnings could still make good ends, I thought. Look at New South Wales. The colony had become something. A few old convicts from the old days were still to be seen on occasion, but somehow, without war or revolution, Sir Henry Parkes had brought the colonists together and we would soon be a country. Even if I was too old to ever see it. Anne and Janette’s boys would see it. By 1915 they would be men and they would live in a great new country of peace and prosperity. The accident of their births would never sully their lives’ success. One boy for the Federation of the colonies, and the other for the Republic, I thought foolishly, which one day would follow. I imagined, a hundred years from now, Janette’s son, one of the last people still alive from the days of the colony, sitting at the head of a table of men who sought his wisdom, to usher in our independence from Britain. The certainty gave me a brief moment of warmth.

Rugged now against the cold, the snowflakes already bearing down from a leaden sky, I hitched the reigns and my horse, already affected by the cold through his woollen coat – a coat supplied to me by Mrs Meriton during my early visits when she saw the poor beast from her window, suffering outside – gruffed into movement through the thin slush of snow and mud. I had once told Mrs Meriton that Mrs Mersy frets whenever I am out in the carriage after dark, a fact which I happened to reveal to her when the subject of the children’s father weighed unexpectedly between us. She took this intelligence to heart, to mean that I was embarrassed by our association, I guess, and ushered me out the door, momentarily.

“You must go, Dr Mersy,” she insisted, “Or you will catch your death.” This was the way she talked. As though death is something we pursue with zeal, rather than the opposite; that death pursues us daily until we are too tired to flee.

And it made me think of Janette, lying upstairs. Who is to say that her lying in was this tired acquiescence to death, rather than death growing within to take her by surprise? From the moment of that ill conception?

“You must get up,” I had told her. “This is not healthy.” But her mother pushed me out the door, where I stopped and turned, offering awkward banter and awkward excuses. Mrs Meriton’s pride spoke clearly through her zealous mothering of me. As though she saw that every exhortation to her daughter was also an exhortation for my own weary life. I was ninety years old. Too old to wander these frozen roads. Yet I must be a grandfather and husband once again, it seemed. Yet Mrs Meriton felt our separateness. Still, I stopped to talk, to consider the weight of some trifle, until she had me turned, facing the gate, and I felt her cold hand upon my shoulder, impelling me to go.

I am old. I doubt my hands. I forget my skills. I question everything I know.

This last time I left the house, perhaps a few weeks later, I turned the horse off the main road at the end of Pennington’s farm. Suddenly, it seemed that the snow, from which I had been shielded by Pennington’s trees at the edge of his property, was a thick down, like a blanket falling upon me in small pieces. Falling like the soft down of my bedding. I pulled the horse up, since he was puffing with the effort of pushing through the snow and mud, and I rested him. I could curl into that down and remain, I thought. We sat there for some minutes.

I looked at the end of the light as the day drew to its conclusion, fading in the trees at the edge of the bush, like the fingers of God, withdrawn. The snow moved like mist through the light; like thought, incoherent. Night was only minutes away but the snow gleamed. It crunched under my horse’s hoofs as he shifted his weight, waiting impatiently. Everything was silent except for this, and I was persuaded in my mind that the rest of the world had been annihilated, leaving only this gleaming light fading into darkness. Everything was white or dark, and for minutes I saw the light, how it teetered upon the darkness.

I do not know whether death grew within her, but it was not this whiteness. It was red and raw. It was still on my hands. It was on my coat. The cries of Janette Meriton echoed in my head. Her sister’s face was white when she saw the horror that is life, and the sheets were red. I sat wondering whether the town would ever offer her mother the mercy that the horror of her daughter’s death deserved. Without husband, without respect, without future. And what future now? Were we all so vulnerable when finally cut from society and family? I wondered. Was I thus vulnerable, wandering the woods far from home on this lonely night?

My horse shook his head, distracting me from my reverie. For some moments I saw the future, like a candle lit in the trees, but it seemed to flicker, as though snuffed by a flake of falling snow. The cold was a hand, pressing upon my shoulders. I thought of my home and my wife, waiting. Inside, I felt hope struggle with despair. With a shake of the reigns, I set us moving once more, and abandoned all thought of what might one day be.

© Mark Bryce, 2024

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