Tears of the Moon - Di Morrissey [148]
Tyndall lay in a state of semi-consciousness, only vaguely aware of where he was or what was happening around him. Visions of sharks and swamping waves and the sensation of searing skin haunted him. The pain from his badly infected leg was so bad that the doctor prescribed morphine.
Amy dismissed the nurse, donned a white apron and demure blouse and sat by Tyndall’s bed. The doctor saw she was not going to budge and so carefully gave her the directions for the medication he had prescribed. He said he would be back regularly to check on the patient but she was to fetch him if she was at all concerned at his condition.
‘Doctor, I will watch over him day and night. Don’t you worry about him. He will get all my attention.’
She spoke with such concern, such care and compassion that the doctor was slightly taken aback. This was not the glamorous young woman he had observed swishing through the Continental. He recalled conversations between his wife and her friends about Amy Tyndall and pondered briefly on the complexities of women and their relationships. Amy seemed quite the devoted wife, not at all the woman of dubious repute his wife and her friends had described.
In the meantime, Ahmed asked Toby Metta to write to Olivia telling her of Tyndall’s accident.
Toby put down the details with copperplate handwriting and then laid the pen aside. Looking up at the distressed Ahmed, he asked, ‘Was there anything else you wanted to put in the letter, Ahmed?’
‘Tell her Ahmed very worried ‘bout tuan. While he bin away Mem Amy seen Karl Gunther. Couple of times. Night times, too. Ahmed no like this.’
Toby picked up the pen again. ‘I don’t like it either, Ahmed. But maybe it’s best we don’t mention Mrs Tyndall in the letter.’
Amy settled herself comfortably beside the sleeping Tyndall, adjusting her skirt over the soft velvet bags of pearls tied to her waist. She smiled at her sleeping husband. ‘Poor Johnny. Fate works in strange ways indeed, doesn’t it, my dear.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
With the approach of the wet, the clan returned to the coast from the desert and made camp. Their diet would also change, to nutritious fish and shellfish.
On a fine morning the small group of women set out towards the mission with the comfortable gait of seasoned walkers. They stopped to greet a young Aboriginal man working in the struggling vegetable garden and asked him where Maya was. He shook his head and told them in their own language that she had been sent away. Far away. To live with white people.
The group sat down to talk this over amongst themselves. It was known that children had been taken away from their people to be trained in missions and sent to work for white people. But they had not expected this to happen to Maya. It was painful for them to accept this news.
Brother Frederick came and sat with them and tried to explain why he had let Maya go with the visiting priest to be taken in by a white family. How more opportunities and a better life would result. After all she had apparently already had some white upbringing. And she could almost pass for white, he explained. But this meant little to her family. She was what she was. One of them. Maya had been through the ceremonies and given her shell necklace totem. She had her Dreaming and it could never be taken from her.
The women wanted to know when Maya would come back, when her ‘white business’ be over, but the priest could not give them an answer. ‘Maya has gone to a new home. A new life. It is best for her.’
In response to this, the women began wailing as if Maya was dead. Brother Frederick went in to the church to pray. He knew he had done the right thing, she would be brought up in a Christian home and be taught and trained in the morals and beliefs of her new white Catholic family. She would eventually forget the hardships of her nomadic life, and the rituals and beliefs she’d been taught would seem like childhood fairy stories. He tried to block out the wailing cries of the women as he prayed for Maya and those lost souls who called themselves