by Sarah Lark
Kahu Heke gestured for Matariki to step forward. The girl blushed in embarrassment—which did not happen often. She was being put in a position in which she did not belong. Every man and every woman in her own iwi would have declared her insane.
“This girl—Matariki, Daughter of the Stars—will lead you from peace to war, will transform you from warriors to holy warriors. Immortal, invulnerable—without mercy, unconquerable!”
The men cheered, and Matariki hoped she would disappear.
“Now, celebrate, men. Celebrate the liberation of Aotearoa while I do my part to prepare my daughter for her purpose. Pai Marire, hau, hau!”
Kahu Heke briefly fell into the men’s chant. Then he turned to go. Matariki followed him again and sighed with relief when they left the camp. Only one of the men followed them—at a great distance—along a worn path through the forest. After a few strides, they reached a clearing. The chieftain’s lodge, similarly provisionally built like the huts in the camp, stood under an overhanging kauri tree.
Kahu Heke invited his daughter to take a seat with him on a few rocks in front of the hut. The young warrior remained on the edge of the clearing where a fire already burned. He busied himself with the preparations for a meal, and Matariki hoped he was cooking for the chieftain. In any case, as “God’s priestess,” she seemed to be freed from kitchen duty.
“What was all that?” Matariki asked.
Kahu Heke now permitted himself another smile. “You did well,” he praised her. “Would you like to speak English or our language?”
Matariki shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to me,” she said. “I just want some answers. What is all this about, Father? I’m no priestess. I’m not even a tohunga. I don’t know anything about the old ways. At least not any more than any other Maori girl.”
“You’re very cute, particularly when you get excited. Just like your mother. But you have no moko,” Kahu Heke mused. He acted as if he had not heard Matariki’s outburst. “Well, that can still perhaps be remedied.”
“I won’t under any circumstances be tattooed.” Matariki grew angry. “No one does that anymore. I—”
“Very soon we will all proudly wear the symbols of our tribes again,” Kahu Heke insisted. “Even the Ngai Tahu—no matter how much they’ve already acclimated to their occupiers.”
“But that’s stupid.” Matariki raised her voice. “There are no occupiers. We are all one people, pakeha and Maori. That’s what Captain Hobson said in Waitangi: He iwi tahi tatou.”
Kahu Heke snorted with rage. “We are not one people. And the Treaty of Waitangi was nothing but deception. The chieftains had no idea what they were signing.”
The Treaty of Waitangi was a framework that Captain William Hobson and the governor, James Busby, worked out in 1840. Forty-nine tribal chieftains—entirely those of the North Island, since the Ngai Tahu had not been a party—had signed it, formally establishing the equality of the Maori and pakeha as citizens of New Zealand. Later, the British Crown would use that same treaty to assert claims of land ownership and justify land confiscation.
Matariki shrugged. “Then maybe they should have paid better attention,” she replied. “But whatever the case may be, I can’t change it. And I’d like to return to the South Island soon. Without tattoos. What does rire, rire, hau, hau mean, anyway?”
Kahu Heke sighed. “It doesn’t mean anything, Matariki. Those are empty words. But they help the warriors find themselves, their people, and their strength.”
“So says the archangel Gabriel?” teased Matariki.
Kahu Heke rubbed his forehead, touching his hair as he did, and hurried to put his hand on his nose and breathe in deeply.
“The god Rauru,” he remarked, “lives on the chieftain’s head. By touching my hair, I’ve disturbed him. Now I must breathe him in again. Please pay attention yourself so that you do not carelessly touch your hair, Matariki, when one of the warriors is watching.” He pointed to the young man on the edge of the clearing. “It’s a tapu.”
Matariki laughed. “Now you’ve given yourself away, Father. You don’t even believe all of that yourself. The archangel Gabriel didn’t appear to anyone, and—”
Kahu Heke breathed in again as sharply as if inhaling the archangel personally. “See, Matariki. Our leader, Te Ua Haumene, saw the archangel. That cannot be verified, but he claims to have. Then, he founded the Pai Marire religion.”
“Good and peaceful,” Matariki translated the name into English, “but it sounded very different just now when you spoke.”
Kahu Heke tousled his hair, this time forgetting the god Rauru. “Since then, many have been inspired by the archangel Michael,” he admitted. “He is more warlike. But only one thing is important in all that: The gods and Christian angels turn to our Maori leaders. Te Ua Haumene names us the new chosen people. We’ll no longer be told what to do or be preached to. We’ll take back our land with God’s help.”
“And you need me for that?” Matariki asked.
Chapter 6
Ellen Paisley dragged herself back to the miner’s house she shared with her family. She pulled Rosie, her four-year-old daughter, behind her, trying to ignore that the little girl was whining—as she had been for hours. Violet could not watch her. She had been working at the Burton house for a week. Reverend Burton’s wife had hired her to help her and her daughter with the cleaning. Ellen had heard nothing more specific—she had worries enough of her own—but Reverend Burton seemed to have set his nephew’s head back on straight. Violet reported that, though the young Mr. Burton still lived in the house, he was forced to behave himself in a half-civilized manner. Apparently, the apartments were a wreck when the pastor took over the estate. The women had now taken on the garden.
“Otherwise, they’ll never be able to sell the house,” Violet precociously repeated Kathleen Burton’s words. The pastor from New Zealand, his beautiful wife, and stepdaughter had quickly become Violet’s new role models. She raved about Heather, in particular. “She paints so well. I’d like to be able to do that. And she showed me pictures of her home. It’s so beautiful there—the air is really clear, and the mountains always have snowy caps. Can you imagine, Mother, even in summer? The rivers are clear. No one dumps their rubbish in there. And there’s no coal dust.”
Violet looked wistfully into the distance. Surely, she was dreaming of accompanying the Burtons to their island at the end of the world.
Ellen could hardly blame her—she would love nothing more than to flee. The money Jim had handed over on payday was the last. He had said as much as soon as he got home. Apparently, he had had enough of working for the foreman. According to Jim and Fred, father and son had quit in grand style after the foreman had called them lazy. Mrs. Brown’s husband, however, said Jim Paisley had been fired. Fred was thrown out right behind him—after threatening the foreman with a pickax.
At first, Ellen had not taken the news too seriously. In the last few years, about twenty mines had opened around Treherbert, and the owners almost all hated one another. So far, it was easy to find new work. However, the mine owners’ enmity did not necessarily affect their foremen. On the contrary, the foremen liked to grab a beer together and exchange stories of good and bad workers. Jim and Fred Paisley did not come off well there, particularly not after the story with the pickax.
Days passed before the two of them found work again. And then it was not in a real mine where the miners moved downward and dug out the coal underground; instead, it was in a level, for which they dug a horizontal passage into the mountain. From everything Ellen had heard, this was not a promising approach in Treherbert because the coal lay relatively deep, but opening a level was considerably cheaper than building hoist frames and shafts. Ellen had briefly wondered how the owner, a country gentleman who lived nearby, decided to try his luck with coal mining. He could hardly have much of a sense of it, or much experience in judging workers. Otherwise he would not have hired Jim Paisley as a foreman.
Ellen chided
herself for her unkind thoughts about her husband. Jim had a great deal of experience, and perhaps he really would prove himself. The new boss had paid the men only pocket money as an advance. The real pay would start when the coal mining started.
“What if there’s no coal there?” Violet had asked when her father revealed these conditions. She had received a box on the ear right away for that.
“Where Jim Paisley digs, that’s where the coal is,” he had snorted.
Ellen found these assertions unsettling. If it indicated that the new mine owner was leaving the placement of the shafts to his foreman, there could be trouble ahead, since that wasn’t something Jim knew about.
Nevertheless, the family could bear a week or two without pay. Violet’s work for the Burtons was properly compensated, and she brought laundry with her, which Ellen did at home. If the Burtons stayed a few more weeks—and it looked like they would since the negotiations for the sale of land were dragging on—the Paisleys would be able to survive. By then, Jim would hopefully decide to crawl back to his previous foreman at the Bute mine or to one of the other mines.
That was what Ellen had thought until the housing management’s letter arrived. The miner’s house in which her family lived belonged to the Bute mine. They preferred renting to Bute workers, and would give them time to pay if they were a little short. However, if someone worked for a different mine, or not at all, the management evicted anyone who didn’t pay. Ellen had stared, uncomprehending, at the paper where they were threatened with eviction on the Monday after next.
“I’m sorry, my good woman, but my hands are tied,” the housing employee said when Ellen went to his office with Rosie to beg for an extension. “Your husband is two months behind on the rent—the foreman had already warned him. We generally do that so as not to upset the family. Most of them do pay, sooner or later. Worst case, we take directly from their pay. Since your husband no longer works for us, we need the houses for our own people. Not that we throw someone out just because he goes to the competition. But then he has to pay the rent, regularly and in full.”
Ellen did—with the help of the whining Rosie, to be sure—negotiate another week’s extension, although she had little hope that something would change in that time. She and Violet could not gather three months’ rent themselves. And who knew how long it would be until Jim was paid at the new mine.
Ellen unlocked the door to her house and began peeling potatoes. There would not be more than a thin soup so she could save some money for the rent. Perhaps if she could make a partial payment, she could talk the manager into another extension. Ellen cried silently. Life with Jim had never been easy. His drinking, his beatings when he took out his frustrations on her, the sympathetic looks of the neighbor women for whom it was going at least a little better.
Yet it had once gone much better for Ellen herself. She tried to comfort herself with dreams of her happy childhood, thinking about her parents’ house in Treorchy, which stood on the edge of the village, and its garden—back then the valley was not yet full of coal dust and soot. Ellen only recalled sunny days, the gold-gleaming grain fields, a glowing blue sky, picnics in the meadows. Her father had been a cobbler, and she had sat in his shop in the afternoons, playing with leather scraps and listening to his conversations with the farmers and craftsmen he measured for boots. But when the first mines had opened, miners poured out from every corner of England into the Rhondda Valley. Jim Paisley had been one of the first in Treorchy—then a handsome young man with a square jaw and flashing eyes, and lips that smiled wonderfully and kissed even more wonderfully.
Ellen had laughed when he came to her black as midnight from the mine. She had met him at the Rhondda River where he swam and scrubbed himself. It wasn’t long before she had filched scented soap from her mother’s well-guarded stores and happily scrubbed him with it. Eventually, he had pulled her into the river with him. They had fooled about, splashing each other like children, and following that, they took off their clothes. Then it had happened. Ellen had enjoyed every kiss, every touch, every time he thrust inside her.
They had soon been discovered, by neighbors on the river, which led to angry inquisitions and prohibitions. Under no circumstances should Ellen Seekers, the cobbler’s daughter with the proper dowry, marry a newly arrived miner, let alone one such as Jim Paisley, who even then liked to take his money to the pub.
The whole situation escalated when Ellen’s mother caught her daughter with her hand in the household’s money box. “Just a few coins,” Jim had said. “I’ll pay it back too.” There were tears, excuses, a second chance, which Ellen wasted as well because she forgot everything in Jim’s embrace. Ultimately, her father threw her out. It was for her own good, he claimed. She would have enough of Paisley before she ever managed to drag him to the altar.
Ellen, however, possessed a bit of jewelry and a few dresses, which she took with her. That was dowry enough for Jim, and he was not opposed to a proper ceremony either. The money sufficed for a boozy wedding and for a used table and chairs for a hut a farmer rented them in Pentre.
Back then, one mine after the other was opening in the Rhondda Valley. It did not even occur to Ellen at first how often Jim changed jobs. Fred was born in Pentre, and shortly after their move to Treherbert, Violet was born. And, later, Rosie. Ellen worried through her pregnancies with her daughters. By then she knew what she had gotten into with Jim Paisley, but there was no turning back.
“What if you just go back to Treorchy and speak with Grandmother and Grandfather?” Violet asked.
She knew something was wrong as soon as she walked in and saw her mother crying at the kitchen table. Violet had been in high spirits on her way home. Heather Coltrane had given her a dress, and Kathleen had shown her how to alter it. Peter Burton had mentioned the tough negotiations with a mine owner who wavered on whether he wanted to buy the house. Maybe he would buy it with the land around it, or perhaps not. It seemed to Peter that selling the whole property to one buyer was unlikely. So, the Burtons would be in Treherbert a few more weeks.
When her mother pushed the letter from the house management over to Violet, the girl almost cried with her. In the Rhondda Valley, there was no alternative to the mining company houses. And even they were overcrowded. Whoever had snatched a larger apartment sublet to one or two young men. Naturally, there were still a few farms in the area, but the farmers did not like the miners there, and certainly none of them would share a house with the Paisleys. Violet had no illusions. They would have to leave Treherbert and move to another mining settlement, so this was the end of her employment with the Burtons and her mother’s laundering. In a new town, they would have to start fresh, at first dependent on her father’s and brother’s pay. Unless . . .
“How long has it been since you saw them last? Fifteen years? No one can hold a grudge that long. At least not against their own daughter.”
Violet had been trying to convince her mother for years to reestablish contact with her parents. The Seekers, she argued, could not do worse than throw her out of the house. And if she took Rosie with her? Who could resist her little sister’s rosy cheeks and curly strawberry-blonde hair?
“I’m ashamed, Violet. It’s embarrassing to show up like a beggar.”
Ellen wiped her nose. Jim and Fred would be coming home soon—if they managed not to stop at the pub for too long. She did not want to look like she had been crying when they arrived. She needed to speak reasonably with both of them. Perhaps this new mine owner could be talked into forking out more money this once. Ellen wanted to find out what the man’s name was at any rate.
“Then I’ll go,” Violet said determinedly. “If you won’t do it, I will.”
“I don’t understand why you’re in such a hurry, Reverend,” Mr. Hobbs said.
Mr. Hobbs was interested in the land Peter had inherited. He was an incredibly wealthy mine owner, but he could not make up his mind about buying one of the parcels of land. He had just revealed to Peter that h
e would come once more with two of his most experienced foremen. Did Peter have anything against test drilling?
Peter found the back-and-forth frustrating. With as much restraint as he could manage, he explained that he wanted to sell the land quickly. If the drilling could be done right away, he had nothing against it. He certainly did not want to deceive anyone, but whether he sold the land for industry or agriculture did not matter. What was important to him was that the sale finally get going.
“Now you want to get into the mining business too. You won’t be able to oversee the mining from afar, certainly not from New Zealand.”
Peter frowned. “Now that I what?” he asked. “Mr. Hobbs, the last thing that would ever cross my mind or my wife’s would be to open a mine. First, I know nothing about coal mining, and second, I love my position as a pastor. I have a parish in Dunedin waiting for me. And as for my wife, she already owns a ‘gold mine’ she would not trade for a few coal tunnels.”
Malcolm Hobbs smiled incredulously. “Oh? But isn’t that your land south of town where they’re digging a new level? You see, I would have sworn you were going to offer that parcel to Arnold Webber because his mine is next to it. And now you’re digging yourself. I must agree with you on one thing: you know nothing about coal mining. There’s no coal on that land, Reverend. Perhaps a couple of hundred feet below ground, but you could bore ten tunnels into the mountain, and you wouldn’t find anything there.”
He laughed, bent over, and crumbled some soil between his fingers as if its consistency could tell him whether a coalbed might lie beneath it.
Peter was now quite confused. “Levels are the horizontal shafts, isn’t that so?” he asked. “Into my mountain, you say? Are you sure you’re not confusing it with another?”
Hobbs shook his head, grinning. “Certainly not. My people looked at the land too, Reverend. If we’d suspected there was coal there, we’d have bid against Webber. I know, you see, where it is. And as for Webber, he told me just yesterday he wanted to make you another offer. He needs land for worker housing. But, as mentioned, you’re digging there yourself now. Gave him a good chuckle, Reverend.”