Beneath the Kauri Tree (The Sea of Freedom Trilogy Book 2)

by Sarah Lark

  “Nevertheless, it is forty miles, Mr. Drury,” she offered to Michael for consideration. “If something were to happen to the child . . .”

  Michael Drury, however, merely laughed at that, as did his daughter.

  “Grainie runs like lightning, Miss Partridge,” Matariki explained proudly. “No one can ambush me. I’d be gone too quickly.”

  The well-traveled roads around Dunedin now posed little danger of highwaymen. The Ngai Tahu were slowly reclaiming the land laid bare by the gold seekers, and they kept an eye on Matariki as soon as Grainie set so much as a hoof in the area around Lawrence and Elizabeth Station.

  To remain fit for the long trips on the weekend, the horse needed to exercise during the week. This gave Matariki an easy excuse to get away from school as soon as she had completed her homework. She skipped evening activities like playing games and sewing, as well as choir and theater auditions, during which the other girls nurtured their friendships.

  “Martha prefers talking to her nag,” Alison Beasley scoffed once again—Miss Maynard remained the only one at the school who used the girl’s proper name.

  “A princess knows her own worth,” Mary Jane Harrington, another victim of Alison’s mockery, said on Matariki’s behalf. Mary Jane was overweight. “As far as I know, the Kiward cobs have a considerably longer pedigree than the Beasleys on Koromiko Station.”

  Miss Maynard smiled at that to herself and moved Mary Jane into Matariki’s room at the next opportunity. In the years that followed, though they didn’t form a true friendship, Matariki and Mary Jane had a superb mutual understanding.

  A few months later, a long-legged, light-brown dog joined Matariki on one of her rides. Afterward, half-starved and fearful, it hid itself in the straw next to Grainie’s stall.

  “The mutt can’t stay here,” said Donny Sullivan, the owner of the stable in Dunedin. “I’ll be damned if I fatten up that critter.”

  “You don’t need to do it for free, you know,” Matariki responded.

  The next Friday, the dog ran after Matariki all the way to Elizabeth Station and slept in front of the door to her room. Matariki rejected her parents’ offer to keep the animal on the farm. Instead, she slipped at daybreak to the stream above the waterfall. The Drurys had tried to keep their gold source a secret from the children, but the Maori were less careful, and Matariki was not stupid. On Monday, she “gilded” Donny Sullivan’s palm to let her dog stay in the horse’s stall. He was to lock it in there every evening. Otherwise, Dingo—as Miss Maynard named him, after the dogs in her Australian homeland—would find a way into the dormitory, where he would stretch himself out in front of the door to Matariki’s room.

  “Well, he can’t brag of any particularly exceptional pedigree,” Alison noted maliciously. “Or are you claiming he’s a prince?”

  Matariki merely shrugged her shoulders meaningfully.

  “He,” said Mary Jane, “makes up for it with character, at least.”

  Matariki Drury did not have any problems and did not cause any—in contrast to her biological father, as Michael Drury and Hemi Kute affirmed in her third year of schooling in Dunedin. It was summer, and the men were drinking beer at a campfire near the stream in front of Elizabeth Station while Lizzie and Haikina experimented with skinning, butchering, and cooking a rabbit. Michael had shot it when Hemi was panning for gold. Some ship had brought the critters to New Zealand, and lacking natural predators, their population multiplied explosively. The Ngai Tahu, though, quickly learned to prize the animals as a new source of meat. Like the invasion of the pakeha, they accepted the rabbits as decreed by fate.

  “Te Kooti sees the critters as new messengers of the god Whiro.” Hemi grimaced. He was uneasy about the Ringatu and Hauhau movement. Kahu Heke had once again “requested” donations. “He cut out a rabbit’s heart and sacrificed it to the gods.”

  “Weren’t Whiro’s messengers supposed to be the lizards?” Lizzie asked. The god Whiro was considered the representative of everything evil on earth, and the lizard was sacred to him. “Those I never really wanted to eat.”

  “They’re more likely to eat you,” Haikina laughed. “If the gods want you dead, they’ll send one, and it’ll eat you from the inside out. Rabbits just eat the grass out from under the sheep. In which they really hurt the pakeha more than the Hauhau. Te Kooti really ought to love them. But he’s for anything that brings him attention.”

  “Including the ritual killing of a bunny? I don’t know about that.” Michael raised the whiskey bottle. “Don’t you Maori have anything better to offer?”

  Hemi responded with unexpected seriousness. “Tikanga, you mean? Old customs? Yes, we do. You know that.” Lizzie and Michael and their children were invited to the tribe’s festivals. Lizzie and Matariki would sing and dance along, but Michael always felt out of place. He sighed with relief whenever things switched to whiskey drinking and chatting. “All that stuff the Hauhau are digging up, though—”

  “They’re reaching back to rituals from the South Sea. Back to Hawaiki where we come from,” Haikina added, seeming no less concerned. “With some of it, we don’t even know if it was ever practiced on Aotearoa.” She called New Zealand by its Maori name. “It’s been a long time since we Maori ate our enemies,” Haikina said. “But you hear things about the Hauhau. Te Kooti is supposed to have slaughtered people in the most gruesome fashion during his wars.”

  Te Kooti and his men had kept the North Island on edge between 1868 and 1872 through a series of surprise attacks. In one battle, almost thirty pakeha had died, many women and children among them.

  “I can’t imagine Kahu Heke participates in something like that,” Lizzie said. Generally, she did not talk about Matariki’s father, especially not in Michael’s presence. Naturally, her husband had learned at some point who had sired Matariki and under what circumstances, but within their marriage, Lizzie’s relationship with Kahu Heke had never been a subject of discussion.

  Now, however, Lizzie could not hold it inside. She simply had to express her concerns. Kahu Heke was, after all, no bumpkin warrior. He had attended the mission school until graduating high school. If he had been more patient and more moderate in his views, he could have been an attorney or doctor. But Kahu, a chieftain’s son, was proud, cocky, and easily offended. The indignities to which he had been exposed at the mission school and by various employers on the North Island had enraged him and turned him into a burning nationalist.

  At first, his actions had been childish. Like his ancestor Hone Heke, whose audacity had loosed the Flagstaff War in 1845, Kahu also got people to talk about him by knocking down flagpoles and damaging pakeha monuments. Only after his uncle Hongi Hika declared him his successor did he begin to take politics seriously. But to that day, he still had not succeeded Hongi Hika. The Ngati Pau had elected a chieftain with rather moderate views, and he kept completely out of the fights against the pakeha.

  “Kahu isn’t stupid,” Lizzie objected. “And that stuff the Hauhau are preaching, there’s no way he believes that some ritual will make warriors invulnerable or that you can poison someone with the water that runs off the roof of the chieftain’s house.”

  Michael wanted to make some spiteful remark, but Hemi stopped him. “Him, no. I assume, anyway. I never had the pleasure of meeting him.” When Kahu Heke was the guest of the Ngai Tahu, Hemi had still been in Dunedin. “But the average Hauhau is a warrior, not a student. They recruit from the big tribes on the North Island who were always happy to fight one another. Now a few of them are moving together against the pakeha—but if you ask me, they want to see blood more than anything. They want to believe in something, to be enthusiastic about something, and if easy loot happens along, all the better.”

  “Kahu couldn’t support that,” Lizzie said, but she was concerned.

  Haikina nodded. “Right. But when it comes to these things, he never had any scruples. And that scares me. You never know what gets into such people’s heads—which crazy custom or tapu
they might think of next to set off a new war.”

  Chapter 2

  “They’re very different stars.” Heather Coltrane leaned against the railing of the massive sailing ship, looking up into the sky, her back turned to the sea.

  “Yes, and I would never have thought I’d see them again.” Kathleen Burton, Heather’s mother, had directed her gaze to the land, for the first lights of London could be discerned on the horizon. The stars had never much interested her. Kathleen’s orientation was practical at heart. Even now, she thought less wistfully about her early life in Ireland than about the cities in Europe apparently being better illuminated than in New Zealand. When their ship had cast off on a summer evening almost three months before in Lyttelton, Kathleen had lost sight of the land after a few minutes. At least Dunedin, her home on the other end of the world, possessed gas lighting.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” laughed Peter Burton, lightly kissing the nape of his wife’s neck.

  Even after their years together, he could hardly be near Kathleen without the desire to touch her, to pull her close and protect her—perhaps because it had taken so long before all that was finally allowed him. The reverend had loved Kathleen for many years before she told him yes, and he was still proud he had not surrendered to the ghosts of her past. Kathleen had been fleeing her violent husband, Ian Coltrane; then, after his death, the love of her youth, Michael Drury, had reappeared. After all that, the final hurdle before their marriage—Kathleen’s conversion from the Catholic to Anglican Church—ultimately had seemed an insignificant stumbling block.

  Kathleen turned to her husband and smiled. She could not possibly admit to him that she had been thinking about streetlights.

  “I was thinking about Colin,” she claimed. “How strange it will be to see him again.”

  Colin Coltrane was the younger of Kathleen’s sons and her middle child. After the violent death of his father, Ian Coltrane, the boy had been difficult, and Kathleen had consented to send him to a military academy in England. It had not been easy for her. As an Irishwoman, she carried a natural aversion to the British Crown. Yet the school had done Colin good. He had finished with good grades and since had been serving as a corporal in the British Army. Now he was stationed with the Royal Horse Guards in London—and was hopefully looking forward to seeing his mother and sister.

  “We could have gone to Ireland too,” Peter said, brushing his straight, light-brown hair from his face. The wind was blowing from the land; even in early summer, it was mostly cool and rainy in London. “Then you could have seen your whole family. We’re going to be descending on nearly my whole tribe while you see only Colin. We won’t be coming back to this place again in our lives. Maybe you can take this opportunity.”

  Kathleen looked into his friendly brown eyes. Peter’s concern made her happy, but she shook her head decisively.

  “No, Peter, I wouldn’t like that at all. Look, there on the Vartry River, nothing’s changed. The people are poor under the landlords’ rule.”

  Three years before, Father O’Brien, the priest who had baptized Kathleen and Michael and taught them as children, had died at well past ninety. Through him, Kathleen had remained in loose contact with her family. Since his death, she had not heard any more from her brothers and sisters. Her parents had been dead for years.

  “If we pop in there, we’ll seem as rich to them as Croesus. I’d rather not stoke any envy.”

  Kathleen pulled tighter the extravagant tulle tie that fixed her small dark-green hat in place and held her hair back like a headscarf—a style from the latest collection of her tailoring workshop—wearable with any sort of travel dress. The Gold Mine Boutique in central Dunedin provided well for its proprietresses. Claire Dunloe and Kathleen earned considerably more than Peter Burton’s parsonage in a suburb of Dunedin.

  Peter grinned at his wife. “And most of all, you don’t want to have to support your tribe from the goodness of your own heart from now on. Which someone would no doubt suggest—or which you’d think of yourself if the poverty is really as bitter in Ireland as they say.”

  “The poverty is surely bitter. So it is with the failed gold miners in Dunedin too.” During the time of the gold rush, Peter Burton had always maintained a soup kitchen for penniless immigrants, and now his parish supported the families of the failed adventurers stranded in Dunedin. “Lord knows I don’t owe my family anything.” Kathleen grew more agitated. “To them, I was dead as soon as my belly showed I was carrying Michael’s child. Not a spark of interest in my life after they sold me off to Ian and shoved me off to the ends of the earth. So, don’t tell me about Ireland and my family. I belong in Dunedin. With you.”

  Kathleen placed her hand in his, and the thought shot through Peter’s head that a more open wife would likely have embraced him at those words, but he could not expect public affection from her.

  Heather, her twenty-nine-year-old daughter, smirked at her mother. “None of our relatives seem particularly lovable,” she said. Heather was not exactly looking forward to a reunion with Colin. “I hope yours are nice at least, Reverend.”

  Peter laughed at the form of address. Through the childhoods of Kathleen’s offspring, he had been Reverend Burton—and even though Kathleen’s oldest son, Sean, had ultimately brought himself to simply call him Peter, Heather never would.

  “My relatives are typical English country gentry,” he answered her. “Prim, conceited, set in their ways, and guaranteed not to look particularly well upon us, although Uncle James was compelled to bequeath his estate to his lost nephew in the Pacific, of all people.”

  Heather giggled. “Although his justification really was rather mean spirited.” With a serious expression, she recited from James Burton’s will: “‘I do bequeath my estate at Treherbert, Wales, to the only member of the Burton family who ever did anything sensible with his life.’”

  Peter shrugged. “When you’re right, you’re right,” he said. “But it’s best not to expect the tribe to welcome us with open arms. Look there, London. A world-class metropolis with museums, libraries, theaters, palaces. We should spend a few days here, indulging in a little culture. I’m sure I can find a colleague who will put us up.”

  “And many, many soup kitchens.” Kathleen furrowed her brow. “I know you, Peter, and the people you know work in the poorest quarters of the city, helping beggars and urchins. Within two days, we’d be at the point of you listening to their stories while I make stew. I won’t hear of it, Peter Burton. We’ll be staying in a proper hotel—nothing showy, but nothing shabby either. We’ll meet Colin there, if possible tomorrow. And then we’ll travel on to Wales.”

  Peter raised his hands. “Peace, Kate, I approve of the hotel. Anyway, I’m foregoing an audience with the queen—even if I do have a thing or two to say to her, precisely regarding the charitable sector. But until we’ve arranged our meeting with Colin, I may show you two around the city, may I not?”

  The next morning, Kathleen contacted Colin at the Hyde Park Barracks. Following that, they visited the National Gallery at Heather’s urging. Kathleen’s daughter had inherited her mother’s artistic talent, as was clear in her portraiture. The sheep barons of the South Island fell over themselves to be eternalized in oil by Heather Coltrane—and to have their wives, children, and horses painted as well. Heather once painted a prize-winning ram of Michael Drury’s, and since then, the Sideblossoms, Beasleys, and Barringtons all wanted pictures of their animals. Heather made good money, although she now mentioned mournfully that she would not likely ever make it into the National Gallery with a picture of the Beasleys’ stud horse.

  “Here, perhaps not, but in New Zealand for sure,” Peter joked, and Kathleen laughed along, happy that Heather was clearly enjoying herself and once more showing signs of life.

  It had not been easy to convince Heather to travel with them. She was in mourning. Not because of any death—on the contrary, it was a joyful event that had robbed Kathleen’s daughter of her joie de
vivre. Her friend of many years, Chloe, the daughter of Kathleen’s friend and business partner, Claire, had fallen in love and married. Yet the girls had always spoken of opening a business together like their mothers had with the Gold Mine Boutique. Chloe had imagined running a gallery in which she would sell paintings by Heather and other artists. But then, Terrence Boulder, a young banker who was to lead the branch of the Dunloe Private Bank on the North Island, appeared, and Chloe did not give Heather another thought.

  There was nothing to hold against the young man. He was smart and friendly, educated, and open-minded; Chloe’s mother and her stepfather, Jimmy Dunloe, could not have wished for a better son-in-law. After a grand wedding, the social event of the season in Dunedin, the young couple had moved to Wellington. Since then, Heather had been moping, despite her commissions and successes.

  That afternoon, Peter visited a colleague—as Kathleen had expected, the man worked in the most dilapidated area of Whitechapel—while Kathleen and Heather went to Harrods.

  At the hotel, there was a message from Colin, suggesting they meet around seven o’clock in the hotel’s foyer.

  “Seven! It’s already six. We need to change, Heather, at least spruce ourselves up a bit. And hopefully Peter will come back on time. Do you think it’s worth sending a message? It’s possible he’s lost track of the time talking to his friend and—”

  Heather rolled her eyes and calmly pulled her mother toward the stairs. “Colin has seen both of us in evening gowns and in our nightgowns—and I don’t think it matters to him either way. He doesn’t think much of us to begin with. I hope the army’s driven out all his back talk and his belief that the male Coltranes are so much above the female creatures of the world.”