La Rochelle's Road

by Moir, Tanya

  Twenty-Five

  Down in his blind valley, it seems that Etienne La Rochelle is running out of paper. His journal skips a day, then two. As September passes, his words dwindle, becoming little more than scribbles in the margins of new sketches. At first there are dates. Then only notes on light (dawn, midday, late evening), and colour, Sienna, Madder, Umber, Rose. It does not seem to occur to him that he may not paint again.

  His sketches, Hester thinks, are becoming freer. They have a new looseness, recording less, suggesting more. He can render the mountain range in a single line, conjure the whare with a scrawl. His hand is learning the script of this new landscape.

  In their sparseness, the drawings have the clarity of music on a page. He draws Hine, most of all. There are rivers and peaks and pools, still lifes with eel and pigeon, the dog with a bird between his paws. But always, somewhere, is the line of the woman, graceful and subtle as a bass clef, underpinning all.

  A loose leaf, trapped in the middle of that last recorded month, yields Hester’s favourite drawing. It is somewhat the worse for wear, as if once crumpled and thrown away. In it, the woman sits on the edge of the river, her back a sweeping, breathless curve, one arm clasped around her knee. There is a glimpse of her face in profile, a few strong, sure strokes, cut by a short fall of hair. She is looking over the water, out, away. She looks utterly, irrevocably alone. Hester cannot begin to guess what she is thinking.

  The reverse of the sheet reads:

  A dark circle puts an end to the draft, the telltale stain of a wineglass. The top of the sheet is dated January 1st, 1852, at Nelson.

  ‘My darling Juliana.’ Hester considers, again, this double-sided betrayal. Did La Rochelle’s hand sketch her lines too? Did he come to know her curves as surely? Hester thinks darling Juliana unlikely to sit naked by a river; she imagines her delicate and pale, with the sort of skin that burns, and hands that are never gloveless. But perhaps, at this very moment, a demure portrait of her hangs in some Hampshire pile, while below it the middle-aged Mr and Mrs La Rochelle are reading The Times over their breakfast.

  She wonders if it could really have been as simple for him, this changing of worlds, as the purchase of a ticket. Hester tries to imagine going back, reversing the flow of so much water. She feels like a thread that has pulled to the ends of the earth, unravelling everything behind it. What is one to make of it now? Ahead or behind, there is no clear pattern.

  Twenty-Six

  ‘Dunno.’ Frank squints at his raw weatherboards. ‘Thought I’d ask you about all that. The colours.’

  The sun presses hot on Hester’s back. She is missing the breeze of the tops; here in the valley it is breathless, the air hanging still and heavy as a curtain. She wants to push it away from her face, make herself a space to breathe in. The rattle of the cicadas is so loud they could be inside her head.

  ‘You could paint it white,’ she suggests.

  ‘Show the dirt a bit,’ says Frank, but she can see that he is pleased.

  She thinks, later, that she might have said pink, or green. Rose or umber, madder of earth and stone, ochre of clay and grass. Perhaps things would have turned out differently if she had but thought to consider all her options.

  Frank’s house is almost finished. Ready, as Mary says. It is a good house, Hester can see that, heavy and dense and square where her own is warped and thin, salt-flayed, the weight blown out of its walls. Frank’s windows, as yet unglazed, are of sensible size, and do not look southward.

  ‘Oh,’ she says, when he shows her the bedroom.

  ‘You’ll be comfortable enough in here. Make a change from the bush, eh Frank?’ Mary laughs, and leaves the room. For once, Hester is not pleased to see her go.

  ‘Hessie,’ says Frank.

  She can hear him breathing.

  ‘Father,’ she tells him, not looking up from the floor, ‘is just outside.’

  That night, she dreams of wallpapers, while the easterly sucks and pulls at the attic curtains, and the full moon patterns the failing boards. At first there are seemly violets, but soon their stems grow thick and bloated, and tear free, swirling darkly, like kelp on a rising tide.

  The next morning her face in the mirror is pale. She has little appetite for her tea and toast, and Mary looks at her sharply.

  ‘You’re minding yourself, now, aren’t you?’ she says, when Daniel and Robbie have gone. Hester looks blank, and Mary clicks her tongue. ‘You’re watching your time of month? Not letting him … you know …’

  ‘Who?’ asks Hester, bemused. ‘Not letting who what?’

  Mary looks incredulous. Her fingers twitch. Instinctively, Hester takes a step backwards. But Mary puts her hands up to her own face and gives a short laugh. Then she stops, smoothes her apron, and sighs.

  ‘You can’t trust a man like Frank to look after you,’ she says at last, ‘no matter how much he swears he’ll do it. It’s all very well up here — most ain’t too fussy. And supposing anyone counts, there’s few’ll hold a month or two against you. But it’s different in town. It don’t do to be standing up in front of the priest with a four-month belly.’

  Hester has the sensation of having stepped in something unpleasant. At last she sees the nature of the conversation they are having. But it is too late to avoid it; she is already immersed, and must resign herself to its repugnance.

  ‘You got to take charge yourself,’ Mary concludes, as if this advice is somehow helpful.

  Hester cannot help her curiosity. ‘How?’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake …’ Mary sighs again. ‘You tell him when he can, and when he can’t, and always make sure he gets out well beforehand.’

  Hester stares at her. She can see no point from which she might begin to unravel the mystery of this sentence.

  Mary shakes her head. ‘And don’t you believe the bastard if he says he can hold it in.’

  An awful thought occurs to Hester. ‘Is that what you do?’

  Clearly she has not kept her disgust from her face, because Mary laughs nastily and says, ‘What? Don’t you fancy a little sister?’

  There is a queasy silence. Then Mary looks away, and a little sad, and says abruptly, ‘Don’t have to worry about that any more. I been taken care of.’

  She does not make it sound like a tender thing, and Hester feels suddenly sorry for her. She does not imagine that anyone has ever taken much care of Mary.

  Mary says nothing further and, though no wiser, Hester lets the subject rest. She finishes the washing up, her mind on the question of what she must make Frank leave, and why, and what any such comings and goings could possibly have to do with the gentle matters of which her mother spoke, so long ago, on the warm summer day of her thirteenth birthday.

  Twenty-Seven

  Two weeks pass before Hester has a chance to return to Matthew Halloran’s clearing. She feigns illness while Mary ties her boots, a slowness she hopes will excuse her from great achievement in Mary’s absence.

  Mary is rushing to be on the road to Pigeon Bay, for she wishes to be overtaken by Sarah Delacroix and her wagon.

  ‘You queasy again?’

  ‘Cramps,’ says Hester, quickly, and blushes. ‘You know … that time of the month.’

  ‘Ah,’ says Mary, ‘just as well for you, eh?’ She buttons Letitia’s coat and is gone.

  ‘Awful woman,’ says Hester to the bread dough. She allows herself a little shudder. But she has no time to waste on Mary today; her mind is on other things. Before midday she has left the bread to prove, changed her clothes, and is on her way up through the bush.

  She tells herself she is going to help Matthew with his reading. Certainly, she intends nothing more. Against the surface of this intention there presses a liquid wanting. She is the skin around a need, its containment fragile as a bead of water’s. The lightest touch, a finger’s brush, will break it.

  The morning is sharp as a new knife. Three days of rain have washed the dust out of the air. Hills and sky and bush are clean-
edged, fresh with possibility. She feels the whetted light on her skin, the breeze move in her hair. The track climbs steeply. Hester does not look back.

  Only when she sees the clearing does she pause for breath. Her stomach pounds. She pats her forehead dry with her handkerchief. She fixes her hair. She thinks, for the briefest moment, of Frank, and a pot of whitewash. She moves forward, out of the half-light of the trees, into the sharp sunshine.

  The door of the hut is closed. She walks towards it slowly, pushing through a silence heavy and thick as water. A sudden, unearthly squeal slices across her nerves and echoes about the clearing; a piglet dashes out of the overturned whale pot, back into the bush. The silence returns.

  Hester stops. The windows and doors of the hut are boarded up. Matthew Halloran is, quite clearly, gone.

  Twenty-Eight

  ‘We are saved,’ writes La Rochelle. He draws a line under the date, November 12th, 1852.

  Hester stares, and reads again the impossible abruptness of this ending. She imagines him pausing at this point, tries to make out through the fading ink the colour of his feelings.

  She turns the page. There are few left now; rescue has come just in time for La Rochelle’s reserves of paper. The prospect of their replenishment would seem to have loosened his pen, for he fills the next pages with solid walls of words.

  Hester turns the page. The reverse is blank. She is looking at the very last leaf in Etienne La Rochelle’s journal.

  He has written nothing on it. There is only a sketch, of the woman sitting in the mouth of a cave, with the light behind her. She has her back to him, leaning forward, all the long lines of her loose and free, a hand resting calmly on crossed ankles.

  ‘Hester!’

  She closes the journal quickly.

  ‘Will you come and see to this bloody goat!’

  Down in the front garden, Mary is trapped against the verandah post, holding her basket of seed potatoes as high as she can over her head, while Penelope, having come in search of her afternoon milking, stretches up on hind legs to reach them. Hester takes the goat by the collar. Penelope bleats petulantly, releasing a shower of stolen carrot fronds from her mouth, and allows herself to be dragged back to her pen.

  ‘Did I not tell you to keep her tethered?’ calls Mary. ‘If I catch her thieving again, she’ll be on the table.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Hester to the goat. ‘You have to stay tied up.’ She checks her knot. ‘It’s all right, though, she doesn’t mean it.’

  Penelope looks unconcerned. The yellow eyes are quite unmoved. Hester thinks that perhaps milk goats, being sensible creatures, pay no heed to idle threats, nor mourn the end of imagined freedoms. There is some relief, after all, in being saved from oneself.

  Hester walks back to the house. Again, she avoids meeting Mary’s eye. She tells herself she has no wish to learn where Matthew Halloran has gone; indeed, it is of no importance at all, since he is not here, and did not choose to say goodbye.

  Part

  Four

  One

  The full stop after ‘mails’ is somewhat rotund, as if La Rochelle’s pen has rested there for longer than it should. Hester stares at it, a tiny pool of ink in which to drown a friend, a pause in which to take his lover.

  The letter ends with some matters of business in London, and hopes of his mother’s continued good health. It is dated December 2nd, at Pigeon Bay, more than two weeks after his final journal entry, and many miles from his club. Hester shakes her head, and reads it again. She wonders if Juliana received a similar lesson in geography, botany and anthropology from her missing fiancé, and whether she found it instructive. If so, it was penned with better control, for there is no spoiled draft among his papers.

  The nor’wester is picking up, beginning its familiar song in the roofing iron. Hester looks again at La Rochelle’s final sketch. There is reason enough for his detour, perhaps, in its lines. She hopes so, for he was mistaken about the wind.

  The next of his papers is a page removed from a longer letter, its date and addressee unknown. Halfway down, he has sketched the face of a man, a deft little portrait about which there is something familiar.

  Hester looks down at George Karupoti, smiling boldly from the broken spell of the page, a victim of his author’s lapse in concentration. She hopes La Rochelle drew his face again, re-created George and his faeries in a second, more discreet draft. But perhaps he simply left out the page. She begins to see that much had to be lost, to hide the woman.

  Two

  She finds it buried in the body of a letter to his mother three weeks later, placed casually between a paragraph on lizards, and a description of Mrs Karupoti’s method of cooking a Christmas ham.

  So this is how it began. The birth of La Rochelle’s Road. His ‘little speculation’. She is not fooled by such nonchalance, and doubts that Henrietta La Rochelle was any more so. He cannot disguise the weight of it. It is there, in the studied shortness of his sentences. ‘It is a pretty place.’ Hester sits forward, excited. She feels she is looking at something important, the sowing of a seed that will rise, like a magic beanstalk, into her own story.

  She is not at all surprised to see that as the summer passes, it grows rampantly. By March 29th, La Rochelle’s words run riot, filling both sides of a page.

  Beneath this is a sketch of a carved box, which looks decidedly familiar. But the work is unsatisfactory, it seems, for drawing and page are then dismissed with an angry line.

  A sacred, untouchable box. Hester shivers a little. Still, it is too late now. She looks for the next page.

  There is a fragment, undated, which she thinks might come from a second attempt at the same letter. The exuberance of the previous draft remains; it carries him across one page and onto its back before he trips, once again, upon the root of his enchantment:

  Three

  At first there is nothing but thick, brown smoke. Supplejack stems blacken and vanish, but do not flame. Daniel’s fire grows tentatively, wary tendrils testing the strength of the north-east breeze.

  Then, in the heart of the pile, it begins to crackle. The flames fatten on nettle and scrub branch, and the kanuka hisses and sparks, spitting embers up into the wind. Slowly, the dry wood litter around it starts to scorch, and glowing specks advance across the dust.

  ‘Hooray!’ shouts Robbie, as the fire leaps high on a gust of wind, and catches in the next heap of cuttings.

  By lunchtime, the fire has burned down to the top of the cliffs, and a heavy, stinking smoke fills Sutherland Bay. Sutherland rides up out of it to drag Daniel from his dinner.

  ‘So,’ he says. ‘You do know that it’s Sunday.’

  Daniel crosses his arms and waits, in silence.

  Sutherland brushes soot from his sleeve. He looks down over the blackened hillside, and then up at the sky. ‘If the wind shifts,’ he says, ‘that fire will be in my timber.’

  ‘It’s under control,’ says Daniel.

  ‘Is it indeed?’ Sutherland lets out a small snort, like a bull winding up for the charge. ‘You haven’t the faintest idea what you’re doing, if you ask me.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ says Daniel, ‘ask you.’

  Sutherland’s head jerks back. He looks Daniel over again, up and down. He nods. ‘I’ll see you in court,’ he says coldly, ‘for any damage.’

  Through the afternoon, the wind picks up, and north-west gusts drive pockets of flame back across the slope. Across the break Daniel has made between it and the house, Mary and Hester patrol the dry grass with brooms and buckets of water.

  On the other flank of the fire, the dense green undergrowth smokes, but does not catch, and Daniel burns back from its edge as Frank has taught him. The heat of the ground beats up at him, and above the wet cloth he has tied over nose and mouth, a black sweat runs into his smoke-stung eyes.

  He looks out, for the first time, over open country. The felled scrub is nothing but embers now, and a feathery ash which drifts and settles like a hot snow. Th
e fire, he thinks, is almost done.

  As the sky darkens into evening, the hillside begins to glow. Embers flare and fade in the dusk, like sleepy breathing; charred tree stumps redden into life as the wind blows here, and there. Up and down the slope, stealthy fingers of fire probe the boundary of the burn. At midnight, Daniel can still see them, from where he lies, fully clothed, on his bed.

  ‘Go to sleep,’ begs Mary. ‘We won’t burn in our beds.’

  Daniel does not look at her. ‘The wind,’ he says, ‘is shifting south.’

  ‘Aye, well serve his lordship right if it does.’ Mary sighs, and rolls over. ‘If they were worth the price of felling, he’d have had his trees out by now.’

  Daniel is silent. He has no intention of sleeping tonight. But he wakes to a soft grey light, and the sound of heavy rain.

  Four

  The season, Hester thinks, has turned. The sunlight is thickening to a slow, clear gold, the heat of summer simmering down like jam, heavy and sweet, all its sun-bleached colours deepening. Below, Sutherland Bay is green and still; on the hillside, a breeze stirs gently.

  Beneath her boots, the black earth holds in the warmth of the season. At last, she is sowing grass.

  It is easy work; every bit as easy as she had imagined, in London, more than eighteen months ago. The seeds fall from her fingers like promises, fistfuls of good faith in a deal she is striking with the land, a contract that now binds them. She likes the rhythm of it, the steady, constant pace and throw, as if she moves in step with the earth’s turning.