her surprise, Hettie smiled and Caroline saw that she was beautiful—that quiet, unexpected kind of beauty that was rare enough to sometimes go unnoticed.
‘You’ll do,’ Hettie said. ‘Welcome aboard. It’s hard to work to rosters here, but there’s always work. Maddie, one of our FIFO doctors, usually does the checks on the miners but she didn’t come in and the checks are due—or slightly overdue. You’d know the mine, wouldn’t you? Perhaps you and Keanu could do that today?’
Excitement fizzed in Caroline’s head—the perfect excuse to go down to the mine.
‘What kind of checks do we do?’ she asked Hettie, ignoring Keanu, who was arguing that she was too new in the job to be going down to the mine.
‘Just general health. They tend to ignore cuts and scratches, although they know they can become infected or even ulcerated. And we’ve got a couple of workers—you’ll see their notes on the cards—who we suspect have chest problems and aren’t really suited to working underground. But you know men, they’re a stubborn lot and will argue until they’re blue in the face that they haven’t any problems with their lungs.’
‘Stubborn patients I do understand,’ Carolyn said, smiling inwardly as she wondered if seemingly prim and proper Hettie had experienced many run-ins with stubborn men in her own life. She certainly seemed to have some strong opinions when it came to men in general.
‘As a matter of course,’ Hettie continued, ‘we check the lung capacity of all the men and keep notes, and those two aren’t so bad we can order them out of the mine. Yet. The hospital is, in part, funded by the Australian government, and the health checks at the mine are a Workplace Health and Safety requirement.’
‘More paperwork for Sam,’ Caroline said, and Hettie smiled again.
‘He does hate it,’ she agreed before turning to Keanu. ‘You’re not tied up, so you can take Caroline down there. You can show her where all the paperwork is kept, and the drugs cabinet we have down there.’
‘If Ian didn’t pinch it when he left,’ Keanu muttered, but Caroline couldn’t help feeling how lucky they were, to both have this excuse to visit the mine.
And although more time with Keanu was hardly ideal, this was work, and all she had to do was concentrate on that.
If she was gathering whatever impressions she could of what was happening at the mine she’d hardly be aware Keanu was there.
Hardly.
Stick to business!
‘So, who do you think will be in charge of the mine now Ian’s gone?’ she asked Keanu as they took the path around the house that led to the steps down to the mine.
He stopped, turning around to take her hand to help her over a rough part of the track where the stone steps had broken away.
‘Ian’s never really been hands-on, leaving the shift bosses to run the teams. Reuben Alaki is one of the best,’ he said, speaking so calmly she knew he couldn’t possibly be feeling all the physical reactions to the touch that were surging through her.
‘I remember Reuben,’ she managed to say, hoping she sounded as calm as he had, although she was certain there’d been a quiver in her voice. ‘His wife died and he had to bring his little boy to work and your mother looked after him. We treated him like a pet dog or cat and he followed us everywhere.’
Fortunately for her sanity the rough bit of track was behind them, and Keanu had released her hand.
‘That’s him, although that little boy is grown up and is over in Australia, getting paid obscene amounts of money to play football.’
Then of course Keanu smiled, which had much the same result on her nerve endings as his touch had.
‘Good for him,’ Caroline said cheerily. ‘Maybe you should have gone that way instead of becoming a doctor.’
Then you wouldn’t be here holding my hand and smiling at me and totally confusing me!
Lost in her own thoughts, she didn’t realise Keanu had stopped. He turned back to face her, his face taut with emotion.
‘We had an agreement,’ he reminded her, and now a sudden sadness—nostalgia for their carefree past, their happy childhood—swept over her.
‘What happened to us, Keanu?’ she whispered, forgetting the present, remembering only the past.
‘Ian happened,’ he said bluntly, and continued down the path.
Guilt kept him moving, because he could have kept in touch with Caroline, but in his anger—an impotent rage at his mother’s pain—he had himself cursed all Lockharts.
Of course it had had nothing to do with Caroline, but at the time fury had made him blind and deaf, then, with his mother’s death, it had been all he could do just to keep going. Getting back in touch with Caroline had been the last thing on his mind.
‘All the files are in the site office,’ he said, all business now as they reached the bottom of the steps.
He pointed to the rusty-looking shed sheltering under the overhang of the cave that led into the mine.
‘That’s Reuben there now. Let’s go and see him.’
He knew Caroline was close behind him, aware of her in every fibre of his body, yet his mind was crowded with practical matters and he needed to concentrate on them—on the now, not the past …
The rumbling noise from deep inside the tunnel told him the mine was still being worked, but who was paying the men? And the crushing plant and extraction machine were standing idle, so they could hardly be taking home their wages in gold.
‘Who’s paying the men?’ Caroline asked, as if she’d been following his train of thought as well as his footsteps.
‘Reuben will tell us.’
Reuben stepped out of the shed to shake Keanu’s hand, then turned to Caroline.
‘New nurse?’ he asked.
‘But old friend, I hope, Reuben. It’s Caroline Lockhart.’
Reuben beamed with delight and held out his arms to give Caroline a hug.
‘You’ve grown up!’ Reuben said, looking fondly at her. ‘Grown up and beautiful!’
And from the look on Caroline’s face, it was the first friendly greeting she’d received since her return.
‘And your father? How is he?’ Reuben asked.
‘Working too hard. I hardly see him.’
‘Working and caring for that poor brother of yours, too, I suppose. Same as always,’ Reuben said. ‘Me, I did that when my wife died but later I realised pain didn’t go away with work. I have a new wife now and new family, and my big boy, he’s rich and famous in Australia—sends money home to his old man even.’
‘That’s
