The Emergency Committee had already agreed on the arrangements for a speedy burial and a rough coffin had been prepared and stood waiting at the gate. Posy insisted on laying the unfortunate woman out as best she could, using the sheet from her bed as a shroud. Murray laid his wife in the coffin and Caleb hammered the lid shut.

When he was done, Murray fell on the coffin, weeping. ‘Where are you taking her? The cemetery? I need to be beside her grave. We’ve never been apart …’

Caleb put a hand on the man’s shoulder. ‘She will not be buried in the cemetery, Murray. We cannot allow her body to be carried through the town. A grave has been prepared on the hill above this house. The Reverend and I will see her properly interred, but you must remain here.’

‘But I’m not sick.’ The wild-eyed man, who had probably not slept in days, tried to push past them.

Caleb held him back. ‘Your son has the illness. Until this house is free from smallpox, you are not leaving. Am I clear?’

‘It wasn’t me,’ Murray said and sank onto the bench by the front door. ‘She knew she was sick but she wanted to come home.’ He looked around at the little house that had become his prison. ‘She loved this place so much. She made it so …’ Murray gave way to his grief, burying his face in his hands, sobbing and broken.

Caleb nodded to Johnson and, with difficulty, the two men carried the coffin to the gatehouse.

In the street, Caleb took a deep breath. He hadn’t managed more than a few hours’ sleep in the last twenty-four and he longed for nothing more than to collapse onto a bed, but he had promised Murray he would see his wife properly interred and he would keep that promise.

Four hefty miners had volunteered to carry the coffin but it still took two hours to carry it up the steep slope, while across the valley the townsfolk stood on the tram track that was used for carrying wood to the mines. They watched in silence as the Reverend Johnson hung a stole around his neck preparatory to conducting the funeral service with the dignity of any other internment.

In a town where digging holes in the rocky, unforgiving ground was the mainstay of life, another excavation made no difference and a hole nearly ten feet deep gaped before them, ropes laid ready to lower the poor woman to her endless rest.

In the days that followed, Caleb and Bowen were kept occupied vaccinating the town. As the vaccine itself could sometimes bring on a fever, the days following vaccination were equally fraught, and the two doctors barely slept.