Telegram Home

by Kirsten McKenzie

  And here she found herself again, stirring a cast-iron pot hung over an open fire, wishing for a phone and a home delivery menu. She was so lost in her thoughts she screamed when Price loomed up behind her, checking on supper.

  ‘Hey, it’s okay, it’s me,’ he said, taking her by the shoulders.

  Annabel tried laughing off to inattention, but the smile died on her face. The further north they’d travelled, the more uncomfortable and withdrawn she’d become. Not with Price’s company, that was the one thing which kept her from going mad. But there was an overwhelming sense something was coming, something no one could control.

  The school curriculum in England hadn’t covered New Zealand’s history, so she hadn’t heard of the land wars which would tear the young country apart. But even if she had known what was coming, she couldn’t have said it was that which was bothering her. It was more indefinable, as if her time here was ending.

  ‘Come sit with me a while, we need to talk,’ Price said, patting the space next to him on a fallen log, another giant of the forest felled by the tsunami of development flooding the country.

  Around the camp, low voices murmured over their own fires and pots of stew. One more day’s trek and they would be at their destination, and from there who knew what would happen?

  Annabel slipped the heavy lid onto the pot before joining Price on the log, tucking her long skirts around her ankles to keep out the chill now she was further away from their little fire. Spread above them was a blanket of stars, more than she’d ever seen. She’d trade all the electricity in the world to have this every night. The universe so vast, so unending that it made her problems infinitesimal, small annoyances inconsequential. As long as you had food in your stomach, it didn’t matter if there were no spices. And there was a fire, it didn’t matter that you didn’t own the latest designed down-filled jacket. And if you were safe, you didn’t care that you’d missed the final episode of Lost. The stars kept her grounded, placing her problems in perspective.

  ‘Annabel,’ Price began, ‘the Governor has decreed that we go to war.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And you can’t be with us then.’

  ‘Women can be soldiers too.’

  Price shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You’d be surprised-’

  ‘I don’t like surprises,’ he said, his voice turning to stone. ‘This has been hard enough-’

  ‘Hard?’ Annabel snapped back. ‘How do you think I feel? I left my life in Dunedin to traipse from here, riding horses, sailing across harbours on boats not fit for their purpose, walking for miles and miles? How hard do you think it has been for me? And all this time, you’ve kept your distance from me like you’ve just woken up in a leper colony.’

  ‘I… ah-’

  ‘See, you can’t even bloody well comment, because you’re a man who’s not in touch with their feelings. I’ve got feelings, and you have done nothing with them. And now you’re going to ride off into the sunset to fight in a stupid war, leaving me, what, here? In the middle of nowhere? With a tent and a cooking pot like some neanderthal’s wife waiting for you to drag a woolly mammoth home for dinner?’

  Price stared at her, and she bit her lip. Did he know what a woolly mammoth was, she chided herself, her emotions threatening to overwhelm her. Running off with a handsome stranger was all very well in books, but in reality it was pretty shite. Shitting in the woods, no toilet paper, no proper bed most nights, sideways looks from men armed with rifles and women armed with knives, no electricity, no real friends, no changes of clothes, no makeup. And no clean underwear. The list was endless. And she couldn’t complain about any of those things because she’d chosen this life. She’d flung herself at the man, begging him to take him with her. She couldn’t explain her past, her strange turn of a phrase or knowledge of geology and astronomy, history and physiology. And she couldn’t describe her feelings for Price, or how she felt about the husband she hadn’t seen for more years than she dared to remember. Lost to her now, but still she fiddled with the gold band on her finger, the one she’d been wearing long enough to leave a permanent dent at the base of her ring finger.

  ‘I’m not planning on leaving you here,’ Price said. ‘The men will make their way to Queens Redoubt. We’ll find the nearest, and safest, town. I’m not sure what a neanderthal is, but I don’t think I am one. And if you want to eat a woolly mammoth, we can ask at the first butchers we find…’

  Annabel erupted into laughter. She couldn’t help but imagine what her local butcher would have said if she’d waltzed in asking for a haunch of mammoth.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, wiping her eyes, her good mood restored. There was nothing she could do about her situation, so there was no point reminiscing. This was her reality, and she had to make the best of it, for it was the only reality she had.

  ‘If you’ve finished, I was going to say that tomorrow the men will carry on without us. I’ll join them later, after I’ve deposited you in town.’

  ‘Deposited? You make it sound like I’m a bank cheque.’

  ‘We’ll find respectable lodgings for you, where you won’t have to worry that the bishop…’ he left the rest unsaid.

  Annabel had taken nothing from Bishop Dascent’s home, but that hadn’t stopped him from accusing her of theft, which had made the papers, the report revelling in her flight, and all but consigning her to the gallows.

  ‘He wouldn’t have any reason to travel here,’ she said, persuading herself more than Price.

  ‘True, but the lodgings must be suitable for a woman on her own. Miners and gum diggers and loggers and militia fill the towns, and to be honest, I’d probably trust the bishop more than any of them,’ Price said. ‘At least the bishop doesn’t drink.’

  ‘True, but that’s because his insides are rotten from the evil in his soul,’ Annabel quipped, refusing to let her mood evaporate.

  ‘Let’s eat and get a good nights sleep. We should leave before the others tomorrow, we don’t want to be travelling in their wake. The roads are bad enough.’

  ‘That’s no different to a man choking to death on his own vomit… but sure, we can leave early. A proper bed is more exciting than seeing stupid men shoot each other.’

  Price ignored the barb and moved to stir the contents of the pot. He’d never seemed to care too much about what she served for supper and always thanked her for whatever it was she made, regardless of what it tasted like. But stirring the pot was as much of the cooking he did since they joined the army. And Annabel struggled to stay positive as she remembered her place in the hierarchy of life in the 1800s.

  Annabel settled down to another sleep, alone. Not once during their journey had there been anything more than a chaste peck on the cheek, a gentle squeeze or a guiding hand on the hip. Scared that if she made the first move, he’d view her the same way she’d seen him look at the working girls — with a mixture of pity and horror. In a way, her time was easier. Living with a man without marrying him was fine, living with a woman before marriage was also fine. Not getting married was cool. Having a dozen children without being married was also acceptable. But not here, oh no. Even when she was first playing the role of a widowed woman in Dunedin, the married women cast sideway glances at her in church, as if they expected her to throw herself across the stark wooden pews at their buttoned-up husbands. No, she had far better things to do with her time than conduct illicit affairs with other women’s husbands.

  Their camp filled with sounds of the night — the snores of men and the snuffles of beasts. The stomping of hooves and the crackle and pop of fires left to die. The calls of the native birds and the other creatures who hunted in the dark. Familiar sounds, safe sounds.

  But tonight something different filtered its way through, a sinister creeping sound, a tight shuffle, a leaf flutter. Not loud enough to wake the men nor strange enough to disturb the horses or bullock teams who’d stopped with the camp overnight. Annabel lay in her tent, eyes wide in
the dark. With the moon only a sliver of its circular self, the stars barely lit the sky. And with the dying campfires reduced to hot embers, there was no bright burning light to scare away the horrors of the night. Horrors which crept closer.

  There was a rustle outside. Annabel slipped from her blanket onto her knees, a knife in her hand — the blade more suited for fruit than for anything else, but it was all she had.

  With the ties undone, the tent flap opened, and Annabel’s nightmares came true. Her scream froze in her throat and her heart pulsed faster than she thought possible as an unidentifiable figure, waddled inside, pulling the waxy linen flap shut behind him.

  A thousand plans flashed like a kaleidoscope across her brain, each one more impossible than the first. Her body refused to obey a single order she tried to give.

  The man loomed closer, reaching for her. Annabel struck, launching herself from her knees towards her otherworldly attacker, knife in hand.

  The man deflected her knife with the ease of experience, before grabbing her wrist and slapping a hand over her still silent mouth. ‘Be quiet, or you’ll get us both killed.’

  The Ambush

  Time stopped until Annabel realised whose hand was over her mouth. Price’s. She relaxed, folding into Price’s body, his scent as familiar as her own. She didn’t miss men drowning themselves in expensive aftershave. A real man didn’t need designer perfume to be attractive.

  ‘Wha-’

  ‘Shh, put your boots on, grab your coat, and follow me,’ he whispered in her ear.

  He turned to peer through the tent flap, and to give her some privacy. Although given the blackness of the night, she could have pranced around naked and he wouldn’t have seen a thing.

  Annabel slipped on her outer clothes, shaking as she tried doing up her laces. He must have realised, as he put his hands over hers and finished the job before giving her fingers a gentle squeeze.

  Part of Annabel wished he’d come into her tent for other reasons, that he was undoing her laces, her buttons. She’d dreamt of that almost every night they’d been together, but the insufferable man was a paragon of virtue, and now it was to too late for anything more exciting than holding hands as they waited for death.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Not now, please trust me and do what I say.’

  Annabel bristled. She wasn’t a child — incapable of understanding the complexities of life. She was a grown woman, older than Price. This was the unspoken obstacle between them — he treated her as a second-class citizen. She supposed he couldn’t help it, society ingrained it in the men of the time. But the Reverend Cummings, the man who’d first saved her from the streets in Dunedin, hadn’t been that way, and she’d met other men on the road who treated their partners as equals. So why couldn’t Price treat her as an equal?

  ‘Not until you tell me what’s happening,’ she whispered back.

  ‘We don’t have time for this,’ Price said, grabbing her by the wrist. ‘We have to go now.’ He pulled her from the tent and set off at a low run with Annabel stumbling behind.

  To Annabel, the night sounded the same. There were no shouts of alarm nor the clinking of harnesses. But the birds had fallen silent, and it was then she knew something wasn’t right. And instead of hindering their flight from camp, Annabel picked up her pace until she was running alongside of Price instead of being dragged behind him. He let go of her wrist, nudging her when they needed to change direction or slow down or speed up. Then she heard the first cries.

  Chaos erupted in camp, accompanied by a chorus of accents from around the world. Guttural tones of the Cornish miners, en route to the gold-filled hills of the Coromandel; stoic Scots who’d followed their more adventurous family out for a better life; the short but hardy West Coast miners — their heavy accents almost indecipherable to anyone other than their own countrymen. A handful of Americans, distinguishable not only by their drawling vowels, but by their height and their hats, everything about them oversized compared to the English. There’d been a handful of Australians in their camp too, drafted into the militia; and volunteers — who’d decided an army pay was better than dying down a mine shaft.

  But in the still night air, they screamed in the same language — that of utter terror and despair.

  ‘Shouldn’t we help?’ Annabel asked.

  Price ignored her, picking up the pace before suddenly changing direction as they came to an impassable load of giant Kauri logs blocking their path.

  Zigzagging around the trees, stumbling over unseen obstacles, the screams behind them, the giant hills lost in the pregnant cloud cloaking the stars she’d admired only hours earlier. And then the ground was pulling at her boots, their flight hampered by the soft ground. Price turned back towards her, tugging her through the swampy ground.

  ‘My boot,’ she cried, turning to retrieve the boot sucked from her foot by the mud.

  ‘No time, leave it.’

  And still the screams of men being butchered followed them. Shots rang out, echoing off the surrounding hills stripped naked for profit.

  Annabel stumbled again in the boggy ground. Price scooped her up, her muddied skirts adding to her weight.

  ‘Hold on,’ he said, navigating the ground churned up by gum diggers, cart wheels, pack horses and the boots of thousands of men.

  Annabel held on, survival the only thought in her head. She clamped her thighs around Price’s waist and hung on round his neck. So much for being a strong woman, capable of holding her own. If it took being carried like a toddler to survive, then that’s what she’d do.

  The ground hardened and Price moved faster, his breathing heavy.

  ‘I can manage from here.’

  Price slowed, sweat pouring from his face,

  The sun had risen over the hills as surreptitiously as the attack on their campsite. It wasn’t just sweat Annabel could see on Price, it was the complete exhaustion of a man who’d given everything of himself. A man who had abandoned the many to save her. The weight on his conscience was a visible as the sun on the horizon.

  Annabel stretched out her hands to hold Price’s face.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  She leaned in and kissed him. Not a quick kiss at the door after a first date, but a torrential outpouring of pent up love. And he returned her kiss.

  The Rifles

  Entwined like a vine against the rough bark of an ancient tree, they stood for hours, centuries even. Hands snaked around each other’s waists, connected at the hip, the chest, the thigh. Two people in their own world, the rest of the universe as ethereal as a morning mist over low-lying fields.

  A musket fired.

  Annabel screamed.

  Price fell.

  ‘Run,’ Price said. ‘Go.’

  Annabel ran blindly with no idea of where she was going And what she’d do once she got there. She thought only of what she was leaving.

  Scrappy trees tore at her legs and the undulating ground took every opportunity to trip her. Her bootless foot screamed as concealed obstacles in the earth pierced her skin, but she carried on, limping towards an unknown destination. Until pain, and fear and hopelessness pulled her down, leaving her sobbing amongst the tatty ferns and fluffy toi toi.

  If she’d looked through the leafy fern fronds, she might have seen the impressive wooden palisades of the Māori pā, the fort, but grief overwhelmed what little energy she left. And so she lay not caring whether she lived or died. Memories of her daughter Sarah ran through her mind. Sarah playing at the beach, her first day of school, having to stand on a stool to help behind the counter at The Old Curiosity Shop. When she thought of her husband Albert, his face kept morphing into Price’s, her memory fragmented by history. It was time to give up, to die.

  Two pairs of hands lifted her from the ground and Annabel’s body a dead weight between them. They didn’t carry her far — only twenty or thirty metres — she was too tired to check, keeping her eyes closed hoping if this was the end, it would be
over quickly.

  Her skin prickled as though there were a hundred pairs of eyes on her and she felt the temperature change as they carried her into a building, which confused her. They weren’t near anything resembling civilisation. The people carrying her let her slump to the ground and Annabel chanced opening her eyes. She was lying on a woven mat on the wooden floor of a house, with a pitched roof and walls, but no dividing walls, just one large room with a front entrance way. With no other doors or windows, the dawn light struggled to enter the room.

  Was this where she’d die? She had a moment of craziness worrying about her blood staining the woven mats on the floor.

  A conversation ranged above her head, one she couldn’t follow. A baby cried behind her. Strange words flowed around her, filling the cracks in her imagination. This was what speaking in tongues was like, she thought. People at the church were in awe of the phenomenon, she’d never seen it. The most exciting her church ever got, the one back in London, was some flag waving once when they’d been lead by a visiting minister from America. He hadn’t lasted. The English weren’t fond of flags being waved in the aisles of their churches.

  Annabel tried focusing on the voices from her position on the floor. Dark faces loomed around her, adorned by tribal tattoos with huge hunks of greenstone round their necks and hanging from their ears. Pieces of jewellery she’d seen in catalogues from the best auction houses - Christie’s and Bonhams and Sotheby’s, but never in the flesh. She rolled over, and the crowd stepped back.

  ‘I recognise you,’ said a young man, stepping forward with a baby in his arms.

  Annabel looked up, confusion smothering her. Did she know this boy? His voice pulled at her memories, but memories from when? And where?

  ‘You’re the lady from Dunedin,’ the boy said. ‘I’m Colin Lloyd.’

  His name elicited no recognition for Annabel and a flood of unintelligible language interrupted them. A woman stepped forward, relieving the boy of the baby, whilst replying to the unseen speaker. Annabel pushed herself to a sitting position. If they talking about her, she wanted to see who it was.