Free The Noon Lady of Towitta by Patricia Sumerling Page B

she saw them.
    Sweet Rebekah with her fair curly hair spoke from experience when she told me that the men who called themselves gentlemen and had important business positions about town, were not gentlemen at all. She constantly warned me to keep my door locked at night. I was puzzled. I couldn’t think why she should insist on this in a house safe from intruders. It didn’t occur to me she was referring to dangers from within the house. She believed all men were cads and bounders by nature, men who promised the world to prove their so-called sincerity, who gave trifling gifts and trinkets for ‘little favours’.
    I discovered she knew what she was talking about from experience, for one day she asked me to accompany her to a herbalist living on North Terrace who could help her out of her delicate condition. I was startled when she told me this for although we went out on the town together and often met young men of our own ages, we didn’t have sweethearts. So I was baffled as to how she’d managed to get herself in the family way until I remembered her warnings about locking the bedroom door. Just before she died she whispered that the intruder was none other than our mistress’s husband, and that I had better watch out.
    On the morning of the visit, Rebekah told madam she was not feeling well and needed to see a doctor. In the afternoon she was given time off and I was asked to chaperone her. We went to the smart terrace houses next to the Botanic Hotel on North Terrace and I waited for her outside. Sister Kathleen couldn’t contain herself at this, ‘My goodness, I remember now that some of the older nurses were talking about the terraces next to the Botanic Hotel and why they were so popular with country women travelling alone. They never explained how the boarding houses were connected to the hospital. They kept making references but, Mary, I’ve been so naïve!’
    The trick was to start a miscarriage by visiting one of the ‘herbalists’ and then admit yourself to the hospital if things went wrong. About half an hour after Rebekah asked me to wait outside, she appeared looking pale. ‘Now I shall be all right,’ she said quietly.
    â€˜What have you done, Rebekah?’ I asked. But by now I had guessed. Sometimes the servants about town talked of these occurrences. The next morning when I arose early, I found Rebekah slumped on the kitchen floor by the wood stove in a pool of blood. I ran and summoned Madam who immediately sent the carriage driver for a doctor and the police. Rebekah was rushed to hospital, where she died an agonising death from septicaemia many days later.
    Before she died she told the police at her bedside that she had visited Madam Harpur for a certain operation. Madam Harpur called herself a herbalist and she was well known to the police for long-suspected illegal abortions. It was during this time that I first met Detective Bill Priest, the well-known Adelaide ‘D’, who came to interview us. Although Rebekah told me the man responsible for her condition, the police were unable to draw this information from her before she died.
    â€˜Now, Miss Schippan,’ Detective Priest asked, ‘are you sure Rebekah never told you who her sweetheart was?’
    â€˜No, sir, she never told me.’
    Despite the probing questions, the detective was unable to obtain the information he was looking for, which he referred to as corroborative evidence. Madam Harpur was not convicted on this occasion.
    Work in the big house did not stop but it continued in uncomfortable and miserable silence until the funeral. After the funeral I took over Rebekah’s place in the household with the promise of extra help and moved back into the bigger room I had shared with her in those happy early days. It had become difficult to find girls who were happy and able to work as a domestic servant. Madam said so many girls were saucy and forward, and so