A tiny bit of warmth started to melt the icicle wedged in Mette’s heart.
“He didn’t disembark from the steamer, then,” said Karira. “I’m going to Foxton to see what they can tell me.”
“Thank you Will,” said Mette, her voice husky. She turned to Agnete again. “Is there anything Mr. Karira should know before he leaves? Anything important?”
“Goodness, I don’t know, I’m sure,” said Agnete. Mette noticed that her English had become very…English. She’d been practising her elocution during her time with Mr. Williams.
“Anything?” said Karira. “I don’t want to go running off to Foxton and find out that Frank was following up on something, and everyone knew…”
Agnete put a finger to her pursed lips and said, “Hmm. Well, I saw him talking to a man on the boat. A very large Maori man.”
Mette and Karira looked at each other. “Not…” she said. He finished her thought.
“Surely not Anahera?”
“What did he look like, this large Maori man?” asked Karira.
“Like a Maori,” said Agnete, as if that explained everything. “Not dressed like a Maori, however, but fashionably. He wore a dark suit, and a bowler hat, you know the kind, with a rolled-up brim and high crown. Mr. Williams dressed like that, but I would never expect it of a Maori. A Maori in a suit seems very strange to me.” She was apparently oblivious to the Maori in front of her, dressed in a fashionably cut dark grey suit.
“Did he have te moko– I mean facial tattoos?” asked Karira, ignoring the insult.
Agnete shook her head. “I didn’t see anything like that. He wasn’t the savage kind of Maori, you know. He looked quite respectable. Almost European.”
“I’ll go to Foxton,” said Karira, glancing at Mette, one eyebrow raised. He took off towards the rear of the Royal Hotel, where he kept his horse in the paddock.
“What a nice young man,” said Agnete. “Very well spoken for…”
Mette interrupted her. She was tired of listening to Agnete’s foolish comments.
“Yes, he is, a very nice young man. I like him very much. And he is a good friend to Frank, my, my…” A little sob left her throat before she could stop it from happening.
Pieter touched Mette’s arm awkwardly. “I’m sorry Mette,” he said. “I’m sure nothing has happened to Sergeant Hardy. Everything will be explained when Mr. Karira returns. There’ll be a good reason for all this, I’m sure.”
She hoped he was right, but in her heart, she knew he was not. Something terrible had happened to Frank. He would never disappear without letting her know. He wasn’t that kind of man.
5
Shaken
He awoke on the third morning feeling better; the queasiness he’d experienced the first day had gone. His food came with the morning light, as he’d begun to expect, but with one difference: now the woman was accompanied by men with carbines; he heard the bolts click into place as the trapdoor was unlocked. The knowledge did not help him understand where he was, how he’d come there, and, most importantly, who had brought him here and why.
The carbines pointed to a military encampment, but why would he be in a place like that? Could he be in the Armed Constabulary prison where Anahera had been taken? Not likely. He couldn’t imagine they’d keep prisoners underground, or use whipping posts with crossed halberds. The Armed Constabulary was an honourable organization, especially now with Whitfield in command. They wouldn’t break the rules in that way. Would they?
He spent the morning standing on the upturned bucket attempting to unlock the trapdoor with the butterfly brooch. If it came to it and he had a chance to escape, he might be able to do it that way. But the trapdoor was high above his head and he’d have to pull himself up and push himself through without any leverage from below. Not something he felt he could do without weeks of pulling himself up and down on the planks above him to increase his strength. And he didn’t intend to be in this hole long enough for that.
He thought again about Wellington. Who had seen him there? What had he stumbled into that had lead him to this place?
His search for Agnete had taken him to Oriental Parade in the shadow of Mount Victoria. A slovenly maid answered the door of the run down boarding house and called out to her mistress without moving from the door, eying him up and down, deciding whether he could afford to enter. Agnete Madsen was not happy to see an envoy from her brother, but changed her mind when she learned there was money to be had.
“Five hundred pounds?” Agnete clutched her breast with both hands. Pieter had asked Frank to mention a lesser amount to stop her from running up debts. “I could live very well in Palmerston with that much, at least for a year or two, until I could get more settled perhaps…” She dropped her head and eyed Frank flirtatiously through her stubby lashes.
He stared back at her coldly, signalling to her that she shouldn’t entertain ideas about him. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would be interested in her - although perhaps there’d be a Scandinavian man foolish enough to take her on, with her little inheritance.
“I’ll tell Mr. Williams…or perhaps I’ll leave him a note.” She backed into the hallway and opened a drawer, searching for a pen and paper. “He’s gone to Nelson to meet a widow who contacted him through the newspaper.”
Frank understood her situation without her telling him. She’d been left to moulder in this boarding house alone, while Mr. Williams went in search of fresher meat. Serve her bloody well right. He arranged to collect her in a rented pony trap the next day.
As he left he heard the seven-gun salute of a twenty-four pounder, which had been dragged up Mount Victoria that day to much fanfare and with accompanying populace, to be used as a time gun. He enjoyed the excitement of living in a larger New Zealand city. If he and Mette moved here, he’d have no trouble finding work, especially now it was the seat of government. She’d have to give up her idea of having a garden, as the sections were small and steep, but she’d find something else to interest her: the libraries and book shops, the little coffee shops. She’d love it in Wellington.
He’d collected Agnete and her children in the trap and taken them to Lambton Quay to catch the steamer to Foxton. He’d arrived shortly before midday and helped her, her steamer trunk and her children on the trap. The four of them and the trunk barely managed to squeeze in, and she wondered aloud if she should leave the children behind with the maid. The children stared at her wide-eyed, understanding that their fate hung on the balance.
They boarded the steamer, she went to her room on the saloon deck and he went to the bar, and then … he drew a blank. Something had happened…he had vague memories of talking to someone about…what? He thought he might have been chloroformed, based on the nausea and the faint smell when he first awoke, but how that had happened he couldn’t guess. And he had vague snatches of memory of being in a rowboat and a flat boat. Of being dragged up a hill and pushed into the cell.
He remembered in Scutari once, when he’d taken a young private with a gangrenous leg to the hospital, listening to Miss Nightingale rage against Queen Victoria’s use of chloroform during childbirth. Miss Nightingale was not pleased with the idea. She thought a woman should endure the pains of childbirth without the unnatural assistance of chemistry. However, she wished she could use it for men needing to have limbs removed. Chloroform worked very quickly to send the receiver into a deep sleep, she thought, with the added advantage that afterwards the soldier did not remember anything. As it was, she had to make do with a good dose of alcohol and a surgeon who was quick with a knife. The private had lost his leg within thirty or forty minutes, and was undoubtedly spending his remaining days begging in the streets off Golden Square.
Before he found Agnete Madsen he’d spent three nights at the South Sea Hotel. Something odd had happened there. He remembered thinking about it when he first awoke. Something strange. The lingering effects of the chloroform had muddled his thoughts, but now he concentrated on remembering.
/> On the first night at the hotel, he’d played billiards with another ex-soldier. They’d both fought in the Taranaki Wars and reminisced about that between shots. Both had been at the storming of the rebel Maori stronghold of Otapawa Pa in Southern Taranaki, his new acquaintance with Von Tempsky’s Rangers, and they’d had the same misgivings about the attack: a village full of women and children had been used as the launch site for bombardment by the Armstrong six-pounders, and there’d been some killings. They’d overrun the Pa and killed thirty rebels, the rest escaping from the rear towards the river, but eleven Die Hards from the 57th were also killed and two dozen wounded. Afterwards the newspapers came down heavily on General Chute for launching a frontal attack on a Pa he assumed was abandoned. General Chute had responded by leading his troops across the Waingongoro River and destroying seven more Maori villages on a march north. One of the reasons Frank had left the army.
“Are there many such as us in Wellington?” He asked. He’d like to live in a place where he would run into ex-soldiers, men who knew what they’d all been through.
His newfound friend shrugged and shook his head. “Most have settled in the countryside,” he said. “With the scrips for land grants and our pensions we can make a good life. I’m hoping to settle near Napier. I hear it’s pleasant. You been there?”
Frank had spent the rest of the night regaling him with the beauties of the area, and how the population of Napier was expanding daily with new immigrants from Home.
“Any good for grape growing up there, d’you think? I’d like to start a bit of a vineyard. Not much wine sold now in this country, but one day perhaps….”
“It’s not unlike northern Portugal, come to think of it.” Frank had not thought of the similarity before. “You might make a go of a vineyard up there, make a decent port wine for the locals. All they’re used to drinking is ginger wine so they won’t be fussy. Prone to earthquakes up there though. If I were you I’d go to Wanganui. It’s a fruit area, and they’re already growing grapes there.”
He’d not seen the ex-soldier again. He told Frank he was a book salesman and was off to the Wairarapa early the next morning to deliver an order to Marton. Frank hoped he’d turn up in Palmerston one day; he liked the man. If he and Mette moved to Napier, he’d have a ready-made mate.
Later, when he was checking out of the South Sea, there’d been a – what could he call it? A situation involving a self-important colonel, ex British Army. Frank was chatting to the proprietor, an Englishman named Nixon, about life in Wellington, especially for ex-soldiers, when the colonel interrupted them, speaking as if Frank were not there.
“Landlord – I wish to lodge a complaint about the condition of my son’s room. The fire wasn’t lit and the window was left open. The room was freezing. He almost died of cold”
He’d spoken from behind Frank’s back, and Frank had stepped aside to let him move forward, turning towards the man as he did so. He found himself under intense scrutiny from the bulging-eyed, ginger-haired colonel, a look somewhere between shock and dislike, as if he remembered meeting Frank in the past when Frank was taking part in the riotous aftermaths of a battle, or had committed a terrible social faux pas.
“And who are you, sir?”
Frank had introduced himself, mentioning his rank and his regiment, as was usual in such circumstances. He couldn’t remember ever meeting the man before, and held out his hand towards him. The colonel ignored it, staring at Frank with narrowed eyes. “You were in India?”
“Yes,” said Frank. “Back in the late fifties. I don’t think we’ve ever…”
The colonel stared at him for a long minute, then harrumphed, turned on his heel and left the hotel.
“What the hell was that about?” asked Nixon. “Did you murder one of his children?”
“If I knew who he was I might be able to tell you,” said Frank. “I can’t remember ever seeing him before, let alone meeting him.”
“Colonel Humphrey Mountjoy,” supplied Nixon. “Ex Indian Army, currently an adviser to the New Zealand government. He served as British Consul in Samoa, and now I hear he has his eye on the governor’s job when it comes up next year. But he’s an absolute fool, from what I’ve seen. God help us if he becomes governor. His wife is the daughter of someone high up in the Admiralty, which should increase his chances. Family is always a determining factor for the English.”
Frank shook his head. “Doesn’t mean anything to me.”
As he left the hotel he saw the colonel and his son boarding a coach. The son was taller than his father, better looking, with a straight athletic body and dark hair, but a sullen face. Frank saw the curtain on the window of the coach twitch, and he wondered if the colonel’s wife was inside. She’d have to be handsomer than her husband, to have a son who looked like that.
Sitting in his prison, he tried to think about what he could have done in India that might incur the hatred of the colonel. Nothing came to mind, other than the time he’d been sent undercover to bring back a captain who had gone absent without leave with a native woman. They thought with the proper clothing he could pass for a local, because of the dark skin he’d inherited from his Spanish mother, but it had been tricky and he’d been lucky to get out alive.
Then of course there was the Relief of Lucknow. He’d taken a message from his commanding officer to Lieutenant Mowbray Thomson, in Cawnpore, and arrived just after the Bibighar massacre when all the British women and children who’d been held captive had been massacred. All those dismembered bodies tossed like so much meat into the well…woman and children, one hundred or more, hacked to death by local butchers after the rebel troops declined to do it.
He carried on with the regiment as they marched to Lucknow, all the men in a white rage to relieve the garrison there after so many months, and the slaughter had been ferocious. Not him though. He hadn’t killed any of the rebel soldiers. He’d been given the task of protecting a young woman, the daughter or wife of an important person, he couldn’t remember who. She’d been a strange woman, high-strung, nervous…Lady…something. She’d broken her ankle escaping from an awkward situation and he’d been sent to bring her out and get her medical attention.
He’d been helped by her maid, Betty, a sturdy young woman from Devon. She’d been impatient with her mistress for breaking her ankle, and spent hours complaining to Frank what a difficult family she worked for and how much care her lady needed, even without a broken ankle. Frank remembered the mistress as being an attractive woman, fair-haired, an English rose. He hadn’t seen either of them after that as he’d returned to his own regiment.
He’d remained in India as the Crown took over from the East India Company in the late fifties, but hadn’t kept up with news. Disraeli had recently declared Queen Victoria Empress of India, so he supposed the problems in the sub-continent were done with now. He was there until his regiment, the 57th Foot, were sent to New Zealand in the mid-sixties. The question remained. Was there anything that had happened during those years that would rouse the ire of the colonel?
And was this imprisonment even connected to the colonel? All he’d seen so far was the young Maori woman he’d pulled into his cell; and he’d heard an Irish voice that sounded familiar, and sounds of carbine bolts being shot. Was it an anti-government conspiracy of some kind? Fenians, perhaps? They’d been active in New Zealand in recent years.
Soon after his evening meal arrived he felt a faint tremor underfoot. An earthquake. Earthquakes were frequent in this country, something to be ignored. But this time he was trapped underground. He got up and looked at the trapdoor. If he stood on the upturned slop pail and picked the lock with the brooch pin, maybe, just maybe he could lift himself through the opening if aftershocks made his situation worse.
On the wall near the trapdoor he noticed the tunnel where he’d trapped the weta. If escape became imperative he could force his toe into the weta tunnel and boost himself up. He sat down again and returned to his meal. The frequent earthquakes a
t worst cracked walls and brought down hillsides. New Zealanders protected themselves from that by building their homes with wood, which swayed during earthquakes but didn’t fall. Of course, that meant fires were a hazard instead. He resumed eating and decided not to worry.
A sudden jolt knocked the food basket from his lap and sent the slop pail flying, spilling its contents across the dirt floor. A large crack opened along the wall in front of him, and one of the wooden planks reinforcing the wall buckled, followed by a shower of dirt raining on his feet. He stood, worried. Was he doomed to be buried alive here, with no one ever able to find his body? Would Mette think that he’d deserted her? And what about his father, to whom he seldom wrote? He’d just think his son had forgotten about him, sitting in his cottage on the estate of his employer, with only the badly-painted portrait of his wife to comfort him. He might never know that Frank was dead.
He stepped on the upturned bucket, feeling it push into the dirt with his weight, and picked the lock with the pin. It clicked open and he pushed open the trapdoor with a loud thump. Nothing happened. No one came to close it. He managed to pull himself up above ground level and hold himself for a few minutes before his arms gave way. However, his brief glimpse of the outside showed him things were worse than he thought.
A new smell wafted towards him on the wind, a smell that sent terror into the hearts of settler and Maori alike. Smoke! He was in the bush, and it was burning.
Sounds of men yelling and horses whinnying reached him. He thought he heard women screaming as well, more than one.
He grabbed his coat from the corner of the cell, folded it, and placed it under the slop bucket to stop it sinking with his weight, and to add height and give him better leverage. He threw open the trapdoor and considered his next step. The bucket was still not enough, but by jamming his toe into the weta tunnel he managed to pull himself up enough to get his elbows over the edge of the open trapdoor. He hung there for a minute to consolidate his strength, then, with one tremendous heave, lifted himself up enough to grab hold of one of the slats. From there it was easier, but he was out of breath and gasping, his muscles seizing up, by the time he managed to pull himself out on to the flat area.
Recalled to Life Page 4