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

by Sarah Lark

  Amey preferred to delay the introductory interview while the children were moving in, but Matariki shook her head and laughed. “Not at all, Mrs. Daldy, you need help. And since I’m here, I can read stories or cook or help the children settle in. All I could do in my hotel would be to sit around. And they don’t like having Dingo there.”

  To Mrs. Daldy’s horror, she pointed to the mutt following her. The animal seemed well behaved. Two of the children immediately sat next to him on the ground and stopped crying the moment Dingo offered them his paw. Matariki already had one of the little girls in her arms.

  “Mrs. Daldy, let me make myself useful. You don’t need to feel obligated in return.” Matariki flashed a mischievous smile at the stern matron. “If you can’t use me as a teacher, perhaps you can recommend me as a nanny.”

  Matariki had originally feared that her return to the North Island would depress her. After all, she had last crossed the island with Colin, enjoying their love. And her memories of Parihaka’s conquest weren’t cheerful. Nonetheless, she was quickly engrossed by the landscape and the greater activity of the North Island, where there were larger cities, more pakeha, and markedly more Maori tribes, which she found especially interesting.

  Matariki took her time on her ride through the country. This time she and Grainie did not ride along the coast but along the new rail line from Wellington to Auckland. She thought wistfully of Taranaki and rode around Hamilton, shuddering a bit. She thought of Kupe, who was likely still studying in Wellington; she knew that Koria, whom she hoped to meet soon in Auckland, had no direct contact with him. However, Matariki had heard he was back together with Pai. If Kupe was with Pai and Matariki’s relationship with Colin was over, there was no reason for any ill will, and perhaps they could be in contact. Colin, however, would never entirely be in the past, and Matariki was not sure what Kupe would say about what the pakeha had left her to remember him by.

  She reached Auckland and was again fascinated by the city between the Pacific Ocean and the Tasman Sea. Matariki had liked Auckland when she had been stranded there with Kupe. She would be happy to live here—assuming Amey Daldy took a liking to her. She wasn’t sure whether the strict Congregationalist would be accepting of a young woman who visibly had not taken seriously the question of chastity before marriage.

  Matariki was pleased that the interview was delayed by moving the children into the house. She seized her chance; by evening, Amey Daldy knew Matariki Drury was useful.

  To Amey’s amazement, Matariki had gotten the little children to bed without any back talk: “Of course you can sleep alone. You don’t need to be afraid of anything. We’ll leave Dingo with you. He’ll make sure you don’t have any bad dreams, and if any ghosts come, he’ll eat them.”

  She had taught the slightly older children a song in Maori, and they were drawing pictures to illustrate it. The eldest were unpacking suitcases and filling drawers.

  “Good job, doing that on your own,” Matariki encouraged them. “When you go to high school or university, you won’t have a maid then either. What, you’re already in high school? What year? Oh, that’s when you start reading Shakespeare. Are you performing Romeo and Juliet? My friend wanted to play Juliet, but let’s just say she didn’t look the part.”

  Matariki laughed and chatted with the children, who forgot their sorrow and their fear of the new house and their strict step-grandmother.

  Only after calm prevailed and the housekeeper no longer felt overwhelmed did Mrs. Daldy take Matariki next door to her own home to interview her. As for her education in Dunedin and her time in Parihaka, she found the answers highly satisfactory. Did the young woman, however, lead the virtuous life expected of a teacher?

  “Miss Drury, am I correct in my perception that you have been blessed?” Amey Daldy glanced with clear displeasure at Matariki’s belly, which was beginning to show evidence of her pregnancy.

  Matariki nodded. “Yes, but that won’t affect my work. On the contrary, I am supposed to work with Maori women, and almost all of them have children. The pakeha practice of not allowing teachers to marry is completely incomprehensible to them. A tohunga is proud of passing on her knowledge to her own children and grandchildren.”

  “But you are not married,” Mrs. Daldy said sternly.

  Matariki shook her head. “No, but the Maori women won’t find fault with that. Every child is welcome in the tribes, whether or not the mother takes the father for a husband.”

  Amey Daldy tried to maintain her composure. “Miss Drury, I am seeking someone who understands native customs. But you don’t have to practice everything, you know.”

  Matariki smiled. “It wasn’t quite planned this way,” she said. “I did want to marry.”

  “Did the father leave you in the lurch?” asked Mrs. Daldy, sympathy and disdain in her voice. “When it became clear you were going to be blessed?”

  Matariki chewed her lip. “Not quite,” she admitted. “When I noticed the baby—by the way, the Maori simply say ‘pregnant’—I could still have married him. But, you see, well, the best way to prevent trouble in a marriage is to wed a man who holds Christian values and who is capable of moderation.”

  “And?” Mrs. Daldy asked, interested despite herself.

  Matariki shrugged. “I found out just in time that mine was a scoundrel.”

  Amey Daldy tried to stifle a laugh. “Just in time? Rather a bit late, I’d say.”

  Matariki arched her eyebrows. “Better late than never,” she said.

  Mrs. Daldy regained her composure. “Very well, Miss Drury, the Maori women you will primarily be working with may accept that. However, you will also have to deal with the English. You’ll live among whites, you and your child.”

  “Pakeha,” Matariki said. “We call them pakeha, and they’ll flap their gums, um, forgive me, Mrs. Daldy. I meant to say I run the risk of becoming the object of gossip. However, I’ve thought of that.” Smiling, she drew a small silver ring out of her pocket. “Here, we’ll say I’m a widow. And in a certain respect, that’s true. The fellow’s dead to me.”

  Amey Daldy was a very serious woman, a good Christian, an upright teetotaler, a powerful fighter for the rights of her gender. Yet Matariki Drury overtaxed her capacity to control herself. She shook with loud laughter.

  “Very well, Miss Drury. How does one say your first name again? Mar-tha-ricky?”

  Matariki smiled at her. “You can call me Martha.”

  Matariki occupied a room in the Daldys’ rented house next door to their own. She took care of the orphaned children, placed Dingo on the night watch against nightmares, and found—although Mrs. Daldy only permitted it with reservation—a place for Grainie.

  “Why do you need a horse?” Mrs. Daldy asked. “This is a large city. There are cabs.”

  “That’s too involved,” said Matariki. “You’ll see, Grainie will make herself useful.”

  Amey Daldy later had to admit it. While only a few Maori women ventured into the city to attend Daldy’s Ladies’ Seminary, Matariki rode Grainie to their villages, where they greeted her warmly. The region of Auckland had been densely settled by the Ngati Whatua and the Waikato-Tainui, and the iwi of these and other lines still lived in the Hunua and Waitakere Ranges. To Amey Daldy’s great amazement, the men there did not disapprove of their women and girls learning English or letting Matariki bring them into town when there were political gatherings on the subject of female or Maori suffrage.

  Matariki celebrated it as her first success when one of her students spoke up at a gathering.

  “I do not quite understand,” said Ani te Kaniwa, a musician of the Hauraki tribe. The women’s rights activist Helen Nicol had just announced from the podium that, in her opinion, women did not necessarily need to be members of Parliament but should still have the right to vote for them. “Why women should not want be chieftain?”

  “Is it true that there are female tribal leaders?” Mrs. Nicol asked Matariki afterward.

  She co
nfirmed this. “You see, we do have an advanced culture.” Matariki laughed. “It’s about time the pakeha learned from us.”

  Matariki brought Maori and pakeha women together and tried hard to overcome the gulf that the Maori Wars had opened between the new and old settlers. Though there had been little bloodshed in Auckland, the governor had used the city as the base of operations, and the natives were frightened by the strong military presence and the often less-than-diplomatic behavior of those in uniform. Also, the pakeha had brought with them diseases like pox and tuberculosis, which had decimated the Maori population. Matariki started giving presentations on diseases and fighting them. She led the women through the English schools and made it clear to them that hardly anything better could happen to their children than to be educated. On the other side, she invited the Anglican and Methodist women to visit the tribes and had them experience a powhiri ritual and communal cooking in the hangi.

  At first, the pakeha women were shocked by the appearance of the Maori women, so Matariki convinced the tribal women that it was better to cover their breasts when visitors came from Auckland—at least at first. They were always amused when the proper Englishwomen finally relaxed and communicated with the Maori by gesture. Everyone laughed and sang together, and the English matrons even tried to draw notes from the koauau flute with their noses. “Give to the Winds Thy Fears” met with the greatest appreciation among the Maori women. Their tohunga could easily imagine entrusting all their fears to the wind. Matariki translated the hymn into Maori, and the women around Amey Daldy astounded the guest speakers at gatherings by performing the song in both languages. Matariki—and later the women to whom she had taught English—usually followed the song with a few remarks about Maori suffrage: the same country, the same concerns, the same needs for women and children—suffrage for all!

  The thoughts on abstinence, however, offered little to the Maori. Only a few women were won over to the Temperance Union, and they were either married to pakeha or to Maori men who worked in factories and had adopted the habits of their pakeha colleagues. Otherwise, the natives remained inclined toward the sensual and did not shy away from whiskey. That worried Mrs. Daldy, but Matariki felt considerably more comfortable among the tribes than under the strict Christians of the pakeha communities—although she always prayed properly for her husband, Colin Drury, sadly taken too soon.

  For the birth of her daughter, Matariki went to the Ngati Whatua. Mrs. Daldy told the pakeha women that Mrs. Drury preferred to be in the safe harbor of family for the birth.

  “It is true in a sense,” said Matariki, thinking of her birth father, Kahu Heke. He was certainly related to the Ngati Whatua somehow.

  In the care of a tohunga of the iwi, she gave birth one autumn morning to a girl just as the sun rose over the village and bathed it in a tender reddish light.

  “Atamarie,” said the midwife as she laid the baby in the arms of an exhausted but happy Matariki.

  The word for sunrise was a favorite girls’ name among the Maori.

  Matariki sighed. “A beautiful name. But I’m afraid the pakeha will call her Mary.”

  Chapter 3

  Chloe and Colin Coltrane’s stud farm was near Invercargill, a small city in the Southland Plains. The fruitful plain offered grassland for the horses, and the Main South Line connected the South Coast with Christchurch and Dunedin, so the racetrack was easy to reach by train from the cities.

  It was near Invercargill that Colin bought a vast estate that suited his designs. Desmond McIntosh, a descendent of a Scottish noble line, had built it a decade before but then lost his taste for sheep breeding. The man was an eccentric bachelor rumored to have an intense relationship with his young secretary; he now lived in Dunedin and was a patron of the arts. Colin had met him at Heather and Chloe’s gallery. The estate offered a manor house that resembled a Scottish castle, pastures, horse stables, and a coach house.

  Desmond McIntosh had clearly been thinking more of living as landed gentry than breeding sheep when he planned the estate, so it had proved difficult to sell—especially so since he wanted to try to recover some of the astronomical construction costs, and hardly any New Zealander could afford that. So, Colin seemed heaven-sent to Lord McIntosh.

  “The grounds are ideal for you. The house will please your wife, and with a bit of refurbishing, the stables would have space for a hundred horses.”

  Colin was enthusiastic about the estate, though it was not cheap. Ultimately, all of Chloe’s inheritance went to the acquisition of the estate and the construction of the racetrack. Only a small portion remained for the purchase of horses.

  The mare stock of the future stud farm also seemed rather thrown together as Chloe determined on her first walk through the stables. The stallion was promising to be sure, but Colin had bought quantity over quality when it came to the mares. Only Dancing Jewel and a Thoroughbred mare met Chloe’s standards. She would not even have coupled the others with the Thoroughbred stud. Although she did not want to get into another fight right away, she was close to expressing her concerns. But when Colin led her through the house, her recriminations caught in her throat.

  “Very tastefully furnished,” Desmond McIntosh had assured him with slight regret.

  He was obviously happy to part with the estate but not with the furniture. After stepping into the living room, into which the sunlight fell through large, tall windows, Chloe understood why.

  “It’s unbelievable,” she marveled as she touched the thick brocade curtains and the furniture crafted of old kauri wood. “These pieces don’t come from England or Scotland.”

  Colin shook his head. “No, Desmond had the furniture made, from his own designs, or those of his secretary. Come upstairs; you must see the bed. So decadent, you’d think kings were conceived in it.”

  “Well, perhaps not so much,” Chloe joked, thinking about Desmond McIntosh and his secretary, “but we could certainly try for little Coltranes.”

  They tried amply, which made Chloe struggle against feelings of guilt when she thought about Heather. Would McIntosh have exchanged his secretary for another woman as inconsiderately as Chloe had Heather for her husband? Surely the wealthy lord did not have a lack of candidates. The secretary was no makeshift solution, and no one seemed to take it as such. When women lived together, people spoke of old maids or late bloomers who lacked suitable husbands and offered each other platonic company. No one seemed to imagine they might share a bed.

  In Colin’s arms, Chloe forgot Heather and her concerns about the horse breeding. The next morning, she was again convinced the marriage was the right thing, even when confrontations loomed about the mares and she dreaded the arrival of the new stable master.

  Chloe thought first of gypsies when Eric’s hay wagon rolled onto the estate. Laden with household belongings, it was pulled by a scrawny pony and steered by a woman to whom a frightened-looking girl and two small children clung. The elegant Thoroughbred gelding, Lancelot, renamed Spirit’s Pride, followed them. Eric Fence sat proudly in the saddle, pulling inexpertly on the reins to stop the horse. Anger seized Chloe, who watched the whole scene from her dressing room. She had not imagined the transportation of the valuable horse like this. If the man had tugged the whole time, the sensitivity Pride needed in a race was probably gone—at least temporarily. A callous-mouthed horse could not be kept at a trot when others passed it. It would take the reins from the rider and gallop forward. Eric Fence did not seem to know anything about riding, and as for horses in general, his pony needed more feed. Just like his children. Excepting the rather fat little boy, everyone looked famished.

  Chloe had wanted to prepare for an evening event in Invercargill—the notables of the small city had immediately invited their new neighbors to festivities, surely to test whether they belonged to better society. For Chloe, a good presentation was second nature, and Colin, too, could be charming. However, he did not like making small talk with factory owners and sheep barons. He only played along beca
use he hoped to make relationships with new customers, and he was usually successful.

  Colin made it clear to the often nouveau riche owners of wool factories and warehouses that owning a racehorse was among the things that made a gentleman a gentleman. Already two of his new acquaintances were seriously considering acquiring either a galloping or trotting horse and ordering it from Coltrane. Chloe hoped they would really be getting their money’s worth. Though the main races were the domain of high society, with harness racing, the opposite had so far been the case. That evening’s event was a dinner given by a factory owner, and Chloe had already laid out her gown. For the moment, she quickly slipped into a house dress. She had to watch over the invasion below.

  The hay wagon and harnessed pony were still in the yard when Chloe came down. Colin and his stable master had taken Pride to his stall. The handsome black horse was in a stall next to Spirit, and the stallion was agitated about this. In every other male horse, Spirit saw a rival. The stables were half-empty. Could they not have found a different stall for the gelding? Chloe’s annoyance gave way to sympathy when she saw the young woman and her children standing fearfully in the stable aisle. Mrs. Fence carried the little girl. The older girl clambered onto her, and the boy held tightly to her skirt. Unlike his mother and the girls, he looked more interested in the raging stallion than fearful.