Sarah's Baby. Margaret Way

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СКАЧАТЬ beloved grandson’s life ruined. Everything she did, she did for him. Even now she feels no remorse. There are certain laws laid down about who should be admitted into the McQueen family. The Dempseys would never find themselves on the list.

      What does it matter that Kyall and Sarah Dempsey grew up together? That they formed a bond Ruth and Enid tried hard to destroy? Tried, but to no avail. For a grown woman to hate a mere child is demeaning. But it happened, and the hatred will continue unabated into the future.

      In the end, Sarah Dempsey brought the whole unhappy business to a halt. She got pregnant. Ruth had to work fast to avert a scandal. Sarah’s father presented no problem; Jock Dempsey is dead from a spinal injury sustained on Wunnamurra station, where he was an employee, one of the fastest shearers in the McQueen sheds. After that, Sarah’s mother, Muriel, took on the running of the town’s general store, with twelve-year-old Sarah handling the business side. Sarah is clever. But no match for Ruth. It was up to Ruth, the matriarch, to find a solution.

      Sarah was removed from town, weeping bitterly. Her mother, a vulnerable woman, is made to keep quiet. Kyall McQueen is never told. Kyall at sixteen would have given up everything for Sarah. His future, his family. Ruth had to take care of it all. She’d hoped for a miscarriage. Sarah had refused point-blank to agree to an abortion, telling Ruth in a young, ringing voice that nothing and no one could make her get rid of her baby.

      So the baby lived.

      Ruth knows where she is, one of only three people who do. The fourth has since died of snakebite, although no one knows exactly how the snake, a desert taipan, got into Molly Fairweather’s house.

      Ruth to this day can’t bring herself to admit that the child, already the age her mother had been when she’d stolen Kyall’s heart, is her own great-granddaughter. That would take moral courage; Ruth only deals in the physical kind.

      Life continues. Nothing goes terribly wrong. Ruth continues making plans, showing a rare smiling face to one India Claydon, who springs from a good gene pool and will make Kyall an excellent wife.

      Then one August afternoon around three o’clock, Muriel Dempsey, Sarah’s mother, gives a great cry, calls her daughter’s name and collapses behind the counter in her grocery shop, bringing down on top of her a pile of mail.

      In the small space of time it takes for her assistant, the town stickybeak, Ruby Hall, to run for help, Muriel Dempsey dies at fifty-six without ever knowing she has a living, healthy grandchild. Muriel has been robbed of the great joy of knowing her only grandchild. Robbed by a cruel woman whose name is Ruth McQueen.

      CHAPTER ONE

      Waverly Medical Centre, Brisbane

      THE SURGERY HAD BEEN chaotic that morning. Winter flu. The time of year no one looked forward to. The epidemic had hit the city in the wake of the August Royal National Show, a huge crowd-pleaser, with plenty of hot sunshine and flying red dust from the show ring to encourage the germs. The patients, coughing, sneezing, searching for tissues, others with their heads firmly buried in magazines, were either waiting for flu shots—injections of the vaccine, which was an attempt to second-guess what strain of influenza would strike or seeking medication to relieve the distressing symptoms. Antibiotics didn’t work.

      Sarah didn’t prescribe them for the flu or a common cold, but she knew she’d always get an argument from some of her patients who thought that only drugs could kill off the virus. These were the days of Be-Your-Own-Doctor, with many a patient discussing his or her diagnosis and suggesting various drugs. Home remedies and bed rest simply wouldn’t do. Small wonder the pharmaceutical companies were becoming enormously rich while bacteria became increasingly resistant to the most frequently prescribed drugs. It was a big problem and it worried her.

      Around midday things got worse. Pandemonium broke loose when a three-year-old boy with silky blond hair was brought in suffering severe febrile convulsions.

      “Please, please. Where’s Dr. Sarah?” The distraught mother registered her terror, appealing to the packed waiting room in general, tears pouring from her eyes.

      “It’s all right, Mrs. Fielding, you’re here now. We’ll take care of you.” The clinic’s head receptionist, Janet Bellamy, a kind, competent woman, closed in on the hysterical mother fast, while her junior, Kerri Gordon, ran for Dr. Dempsey, who had a wonderful rapport with her patients, children in particular. Dr. Sarah was the one everyone wanted to see. Especially the mothers of young children.

      By the time Sarah, who’d been preparing to run an electrocardiogram on a male patient with chest pains, rushed into the reception room, the young mother was screaming her fear and desperation. Janet and one of Sarah’s female patients, an ex-nurse, were trying ineffectually to calm the young woman and take the lolling, unconscious child from her arms. Another child, a little girl who’d been sitting quietly with her pregnant mother, was sobbing into her hands at this frightening new experience, while her mother placed a soothing, protective arm around her shaking shoulders.

      Sarah remembered this wasn’t the little boy’s first brush with seizures. She had recommended further action at the child’s first presentation, but his mother, Kim, had been fiercely against it, no doubt dreading a worse neurological disorder like epilepsy.

      At Sarah’s appearance, Kim Fielding seemed to gather strength. She stopped screaming when Sarah addressed her and immediately surrendered her only child to Sarah’s arms. The frantic look left her eyes and in the examining room she watched calmly as Sarah swiftly administered an anticonvulsant medication. The seizure, however, proved of such severity and duration that Sarah called for an ambulance to take the child to hospital to be admitted for observation. Privately she thought the boy’s high fever was only masking a more serious disorder. She grieved for the mother, and the anxious years ahead, squeezing her hand tightly as the young woman climbed into the ambulance to go with her son. These incidents involving children were deeply heart-wrenching for everyone, doctors and patients alike, but for the sake of her other patients Sarah had to refocus in order to deal with her caseload for the afternoon. It didn’t help knowing she’d have to tell Megan Copeley the results of her mammogram.

      Not good.

      Megan’s fat-rich, low-fiber diet alone had increased her risk of breast cancer by a factor of six. Despite every warning and every lecture Sarah gave her, she’d been unable to wean herself off it.

      “But, Sarah, I can’t go without all the foods I enjoy. Neither can my family. Mealtimes would be so dull. Jeff wouldn’t stand for it. There’s no history of breast cancer in my family, anyway.”

      There was now. Sadness crept up behind Sarah’s fixed resolve to maintain a professional detachment. She could picture Megan sitting opposite her in a state of shock. Megan was only a handful of years older than her. Thirty-five, with two beautiful children. Some days Sarah could hardly bear the terrible burden and responsibility of being a doctor—telling patients their fears were confirmed or breaking totally unexpected bad news. There was no way out of telling the truth, of telling patients that life as they knew it was over. It was her job to help them deal with it. She knew she was a good doctor. She knew her patients liked and respected her, but sometimes she wanted to pull a curtain and hide behind it. To weep.

      What Sarah didn’t know as she agonized for Megan Copeley and tried to swallow the lump in her throat was that tragedy was about to strike her.

      Not for the first time. Sarah was no stranger to loneliness, grief and despair. She had walked, talked and slept with it for years. Could she ever put the loss of her own child, her baby, behind her? Never. A mother doesn’t suffer a blow like that and continue СКАЧАТЬ