La Rochelle's Road

by Moir, Tanya

  Hester runs her fingers over the faded covers of books by men called Heaphy, Brunner and Torlesse. She half expects to see Etienne La Rochelle’s name beside them, but of course he has no place here. What, in the end, did he discover but a useless pass, and a swift ship home? It is hardly the same as the Narrative of the Discovery of the West Coast Goldfields, which Hester now picks up and opens, revealing beneath it a small volume of Hints on House Defence, Blockhouses & Redoubts and a collection of Colonial Poems, which has been marked down several times. She catches the proprietor’s eye through the window, and moves on to buy her candles.

  As she walks back down Oxford Street, she thinks, no other soul in all the world knows where I am today, where even to look, much less to find me. It is La Rochelle’s phrase. She had imagined him lonely, a little afraid, when he wrote it, lost in the arms of his fickle pass, high above the Waitaha. Now she is not so sure. She sees there might have been joy in it, too. A note, even, of triumph.

  In her case, of course, the phrase is not yet strictly true. There are those — Robbie and George; Mr Miles, the shipping agent — who would know where to look, and in all likelihood would find her. But she has only to walk a little further. The train station is there, below her. An unexpected turn, and she will be out of reach, a voyager in the unknown, travelling beyond the charts.

  It seems cowardly, now, to have come so far, and never seen the Alps, or Christchurch city. Not to have had some kind of adventure. In the tunnel, the train whistle sounds. She wonders how far four shillings might take her.

  She has stopped outside the Canterbury Hotel, right in the path of its patrons. There are whistles from the verandah, and cries of ‘Gidday love, want a beer?’ Hester blushes, and tries to hurry forward, her eyes on her feet. She has to stop awkwardly to avoid a man and his swag turning into the doorway.

  ‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘Hester?’

  Ten

  Matthew Halloran looks down at Hester, who is not supposed to be here, looking up at him in front of this shithole hotel, but on La Rochelle’s Road, where he left her. He is not ready for her, now, today. He drops his swag in the road. He wants to touch her. His shoulders are tight with holding it in. He pushes his hands into his pockets.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asks. He is almost resentful.

  She looks away quickly. ‘I’m on my way Home.’

  He is so busy watching her mouth he almost misses what she is saying. It comes to him a beat late, like an echo. A passerby jostles his shoulder. He moves forward, closer.

  ‘What about you?’ she is asking, and looking at him again.

  ‘Yeah. I’m heading home too. You on the Mountain Maid tomorrow?’

  She frowns, then smiles. ‘Oh! Not that home. England, I mean. I’m going back to London.’

  Matthew stares at her. His guts twist. ‘You can’t,’ he says, at last. He pulls a wad of pound notes from his pocket and thrusts them at Hester. ‘I’ve got money.’

  She looks alarmed, as if she would like to take a step back, but she is trapped now against the wall. There is laughter from the hotel bar, and a passing mother clicks her tongue and covers her children’s eyes. Matthew feels his cheeks go red. He stuffs the money back in his shirt.

  ‘Have a drink with me,’ he pleads.

  Kissing noises fall from the verandah, followed by further laughter.

  ‘We’ll go somewhere else. Have a cup of tea.’ He touches her elbow, just once. He does it quickly, as if it might burn.

  ‘All right,’ she says.

  In the mirror behind the bar of the Saxon Hotel, Matthew can see the triple mast of the Home ship down at the wharf, and Hester, rigid-spined on the edge of her chair, like a glass that is waiting to break. He orders a bottle of miners’ grog. He is acutely aware of time. The woman behind the bar gives him a hard look, up and down.

  ‘The lady you’re with …’ she begins.

  ‘My wife,’ says Matthew firmly. He places a five-pound note on the bar.

  ‘That’s what I thought.’ The woman nods. ‘I’ll get your champagne.’

  She brings it out to him on a tray, which he carries over, across the floor, to the table where Hester is sitting. He is conscious of his feet on the boards, his hands on the edge of the tray, the speed of his movements, which seem to have slowed, like everything else in the Saxon Hotel, while outside the docks race, frantic.

  Hester looks pale. She is sitting perfectly still, and he sees the steel in it, the effort it is costing. He thinks that she is thinner.

  ‘I finished Candide,’ he says.

  She ignores this. ‘Where did it come from? All that money?’

  Matthew wants to say that this is not what is important, now. But he does not wish to be rude. So he tells her a little about the gold, about Charleston and Addison’s Flat and the Lyell, about Snowy and Aussie Bill and the boys, and the back lead on Darkies Terrace. He tells her more than he means to because it tugs at his groin, the way she listens.

  ‘You’re quite the explorer,’ she says, sitting forward now, as he fills their glasses again. ‘I’ve always wondered. What it would feel like, to be out there. The West Coast. The mountains.’

  He looks at her, bound up so tight in that cage of a dress, with the little buttons that go all the way up to her neck and make his fingers itch, and the clock in the background ticking. It seems important to tell her something real.

  ‘It makes you feel things,’ he says.

  ‘What sort of things?’ She is looking him straight in the eye, a look that reaches across the table and slides fingers over his skin. Matthew tries hard to think of snow and rock, and icy waters.

  ‘I don’t know the right words. Like you want to paint pictures. But it’s too big.’ He has to look down, away. He tries to concentrate. ‘The bloke who built your house, he almost had it. I liked his pictures.’

  ‘La Rochelle?’ She says it all breathy, like a sigh. ‘You knew him?’

  ‘A bit.’ He sees there is blood in her cheeks now, the wine, perhaps, widening her eyes. ‘When I was a kid I’d go down there sometimes, when my old man was out, and watch him working. He’d feed me a bit of bread and jam, and let me look through his bookshelf.’ Matthew feels it again, the white calm of the room, the shafts of kindness. He says, mostly to himself, ‘I was sorry when he died.’

  ‘He didn’t die,’ she says. ‘He went back to England.’

  ‘He died,’ says Matthew, ‘in the Karupoti Stream.’ He sees that he is saying something important. ‘A big slip came down from the block they were felling above, made a wave, swept him out to sea. McLean and his whole gang saw it.’ He stops. Hester is staring at him, saying nothing, demanding all.

  ‘They never found his body. That’s why she waits there, down on the beach. His woman, Hine, I mean. For his bones to come home. For the water to give him back.’

  The sadness of it flows out of him, over the table, and fills up Hester Peterson. Her lips part with it; he wants to take her by the shoulders, and suck it out.

  ‘He never went home,’ she says.

  ‘No.’ Matthew thinks, again, of a study filled with the light of the sea, and a woman laughing. He shakes his head. ‘He was always talking about it. But you knew he was never going to go. You could see it. The way he looked at her. She took up all of him.’ Here it is at last, the thing he is trying to say. The weight of it pushes him forward. ‘It happens, sometimes, that way.’

  His touch on her hand is so light that it quite escapes the notice of the other drinkers in the Saxon Hotel. But there is the full force of him in it, muscle and blood, narrowed to a point so fine that the contact is almost painful. Something passes between them, runs from his body to hers and back, a flicker, a gasflame gasp.

  She finishes her champagne.

  ‘Let’s go to your room,’ she says.

  Eleven

  Outside the door of Room 19, the hotel clock strikes four. Hester opens her eyes. In the strange room, the clock’s chimes echo and fall,
settling slowly down like dust in the afternoon sunlight. Their rhythm, like her own breathing, joins with the rise and fall of Matthew’s chest, keeping time with the steady pulse of his heart beneath her cheekbone.

  The interlude is over. It is time for her to go.

  Her arm lies across his ribs, and she stares for a while at the line it makes, the places where their skins meet. Beyond the bed, she can see her crinoline halfway across the floor, where it stands ridiculous, like the outgrown shell of a beetle. The room is littered with clothing, a trail of layers leading from the door. Here, at its end, she and Matthew Halloran lie curled together on hotel sheets, fresh creatures, pale and open.

  Hester stirs herself slowly. She can feel the afternoon slide over her skin, as if she is turning in deep water. She sits up.

  ‘Don’t.’ Matthew Halloran holds her easily, with one hand. He is calm and certain.

  She thinks of Lucy, waiting, across so much ocean. Buttoned-up, straight-spined, in her new Richmond parlour. Hester has never seen this room, but she can guess the pattern of its walls. The way to it is clear; she has already begun upon it. Beyond the door of Room 19, it slices straight and sure as a ship’s keel, back into known waters. But she is tangled, somehow, in this afternoon, in these sheets. It is not as simple as she had thought it would be, to get up, and go.

  She wonders if Lucy has ever lain like this.

  ‘Stay with me,’ says Matthew.

  ‘I can’t.’ Hester shakes her head, and smiles. ‘Stay where?’

  ‘Anywhere you want.’

  Matthew Halloran lays her back down gently, as if she is something fine and new that he fears to break. The sheets are cool against her back. She does not feel fragile. Hester looks up at him. She does not yet know how to read his face. He leans over her, and beneath the skin of his arms, the sinews twist in patterns she has not learned, tracks across unknown territory.

  ‘They might look for me.’

  Matthew laughs. ‘Not here.’

  The clock strikes five. Outside, a bosun’s whistle pierces the hum of the docks. There is shouting, and the rumble of a tugboat. Matthew Halloran is smiling.

  The last of the afternoon sun moves over his face. Hester watches it glint in the pale blue eyes, a shifting of light and darkness.

  The whistle sounds again.

  ‘Oh God!’ Hester presses her hands to her face. ‘My things!’ She sees, in the cabin, the wooden box with its delicate silver things, her battered gold initials. Matthew Halloran’s long fingers move on her skin, and she laughs at what, hours before, she had thought necessary.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Matthew’s voice speaks close to her ear. ‘We’ll get you new things.’

  Hester watches the muscles move in his arms, the pulse in his throat. The distance between them closes.

  Twelve

  It begins below the Bay of Whales, a tremor in the sea’s black bed, a shrugging of ancient bones. It moves northwest, over the floor of the Southern Ocean. It passes through the pierced hull of the Matoaka, stirring her broken timbers, and disturbing the pages of Hester’s journal. In its wake, an old photograph floats free, all light and shadow dissolved now, leaving only a white card, blank and clean, suspended in the cabin, while high above the icebergs pitch in the swell.

  On La Rochelle’s Road, the new roof rattles. Daniel looks up from the black figures in his ledger, and reaches out his hand to steady the sway of the paraffin lamp before going back to his work.

  At the foot of the Southern Alps, Hester feels the earth move beneath her spine. She presses her mouth closer to Matthew Halloran’s neck, and the stones of the riverbed flutter down to stillness.

  On the beach at Karupoti Bay, Robbie wakes to the sound of the surf, and the sand’s soft rocking. He lies still, and listens. The door of the whare is open. Hine sits there.

  ‘Shhh,’ she says. ‘Go back to sleep. Not this time. Not tonight.’

  Author’s Note

  While my characters are entirely fictitious, the Matoaka was a real ship, and made eight voyages from London to New Zealand between 1859 and 1869. Five of these were to Canterbury.

  In 1867, under Captain Alfred Stevens, who commanded the ship for seven years, she landed several species of English birds for the Canterbury Acclimatisation Society, including large numbers of starlings, thrushes, blackbirds, larks and chaffinches. She had also carried several pairs of English robins, but these all perished during the voyage.

  The following year, Captain Stevens landed even more birds, including twenty-two house sparrows (the result of a slight miscommunication) and seventy-seven pairs of blackbirds. This time, a single robin survived the journey. In August of this same year, three tidal waves laid bare Lyttelton Harbour and caused substantial damage to Banks Peninsula’s eastern bays.

  On 13 May 1869, the Matoaka left Lyttelton for London, with forty-seven passengers and thirty-two crew. She was never seen again.

  In March 1870, the ship’s agents in London declared her lost. Icebergs were a common sight on her route around Cape Horn, and it was supposed that the Matoaka must have hit a berg in the darkness and foundered with all hands. A search was mounted of islands near to her course, in the hope that there might be survivors, but no trace of the ship or those she carried was ever found.’

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks go to the great Kai Tahu leader Teone Taare Tikao (c.1850–1927) for the gift of his learning and intellect, and to the historian Herries Beattie for recording Tikao’s words with humility and grace. From Tikao Talks: traditions and tales, told by Teone Taare Tikao to Herries Beattie I have borrowed my own fictional Teone’s cosmology, and the stories of whakapapa-reciting tui and Maeroero fishing Peninsula mudflats by night, as well as adopting the book’s versions of names and spellings.

  I am also grateful to the goldminer and explorer Alphonse Barrington for his journal entry ‘if this night does not kill us we shall never die’, written on his epic journey across the main divide in 1864, which is paraphrased by La Rochelle in similar circumstances.

  Other particularly valuable sources included Banks Peninsula, Cradle of Canterbury by Gordon Ogilvie; The First Generation by Pat Keegan; With Anthony Trollope in New Zealand edited by A. H. Reed; The Great Journey: an expedition to explore the interior of the Middle Island, New Zealand, 1846–8 by Thomas Brunner; Great Journeys in Old New Zealand: travel and exploration in a new land compiled by Gordon Ell and Sarah Ell; A First Year in Canterbury Settlement by Samuel Butler; White wings: immigrant ships to New Zealand, 1840–1902 by Henry Brett, edited by Cyril R. Bradwell; the Okains Bay Maori and Colonial Museum; the Akaroa Museum; the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre; Papers Past; Times Archive; and Winsor and Newton’s digitised historical catalogues.

  This novel owes a huge debt to Bernadette Hall, Charlotte Randall, Fiona Farrell, Frankie McMillan, Anna Rogers, Morrin Rout and all at the Hagley Writers’ Institute; to Harriet Allan at Random House; to my editor Rebecca Lal; to my husband Ian; to family and friends; and to Gilbert McMillan, whose encouragement has echoed through the years.

  About the Author

  Tanya Moir was born in Invercargill and grew up in rural Southland. She has worked in radio, print and television in New Zealand, and as a television promo producer in Rome and London. In 2008, she received the inaugural Margaret Mahy Award from the Hagley Writers’ Institute in Christchurch. Having lived on Banks Peninsula for four years, she now divides her time between the hills near Pigeon Bay and the west coast of Auckland, where she lives with her husband and an Irish wolfhound called Wrolf.

  Copyright

  A BLACK SWAN BOOK published by Random House New Zealand, 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland, New Zealand

  For more information about our titles go to www.randomhouse.co.nz

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

  Random House New Zealand is part of the Random House Group

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  First published 2011

  © 2011 Tanya Moir

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  ISBN 978 1 86979 339 5

  This book is copyright. Except for the purposes of fair reviewing no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Design: Carla Sy

  Cover images: Getty images

  Printed in New Zealand by Printlink