Flight of a Maori Goddess

by Lark, Sarah

  “Good-bye, Nandi,” Kevin said, then took a provocatively long pause. “And Johanna and Mejuffrouw van Stout, I hope we didn’t inconvenience you overmuch.”

  Doortje looked as if she were struggling against herself. Then, her face broke into a smile.

  “Don’t get your tongue twisted. Just call me Doortje. Anyway, we have to take what God gives us.”

  Kevin almost thought he saw her wink. He returned the smile.

  “Everything happens according to God’s will,” he replied in a preacher’s voice. “And I hope you won’t hold it against him if one day we meet again.”

  With that, Kevin let his horse go, but when he looked back once more, he saw Doortje watching him. Even though Johanna was speaking to her angrily. And something in her gaze gave him hope. What did Cornelis know, what did the oh-so-perfect Martinus know of Doortje van Stout’s innermost wishes and dreams?

  Kevin caught himself whistling. In invoking God, he was thinking less of the Old Testament than of aggrieved Taranaki and Rangi, the divinity who still wept for Papa.

  Chapter 8

  Lizzie Drury was generally a peaceable person and deeply patient. She had learned early on to make the best of life’s adversities. But life had not prepared her for having Juliet as a daughter-in-law.

  “She could at least do something,” Lizzie moaned to Michael a few weeks after Juliet moved in.

  It was winter, and the sheep wandered around the yard. They needed to be taken care of, so she and Michael had their hands full. Added to that, many ewes had been bred early, and their lambs were already being born, providing extra excitement. Lizzie was constantly carrying a rejected or orphaned lamb around until it was strong enough to follow her everywhere, bleating. Most female visitors melted at the sight of the fuzzy creatures. During their visits to the farm, Matariki and Atamarie had doted on them. Yet Juliet seemed to find the baby animals disgusting, and neither could she tolerate the dogs, well-trained and very friendly border collies.

  “Now, no one’s asking her to help with the lambing,” Lizzie replied angrily when Michael reminded her not everyone liked to share their homes with animals. “She doesn’t need to bottle-feed the lambs or train the puppies, but she could cook dinner sometime when we’re outside all day. Or at least clean the house—I’d be happy if she just swept. Instead, she sits around and complains she’s bored.”

  Juliet had reluctantly accepted the fact that her child could only pass as Patrick’s if she pushed back the official birthdate a couple months. If not, she would be exposed to gossip; worse to Lizzie’s mind, the child might be bullied when it got older. Since it was impossible for Patrick to leave his work and take Juliet abroad as the young woman hoped, the only solution was for her to spend months on Elizabeth Station, even after the baby came. A newborn could be recognized as such, Patrick had told her reluctantly, and they’d have to wait a while before they could fudge things and get away with the lie that the baby was younger than it was.

  When Juliet had mockingly asked him how he knew so much about babies, his serious and confident reply was “sheep breeding.” Patrick and his family spoke so openly about sheep pregnancies and births that it made Juliet blush. The Southern belle was anything but a prude, yet the birthing process had been left out of her education. And afterward—well, afterward there would be nannies, of course.

  The months were long for Juliet, who had little in common with her new family. Music and art interested the Drurys little. They did attend Heather and Chloe’s openings if they happened to be in Dunedin, and Lizzie also liked to go to concerts, but she lacked discernment. She found music “nice” in general, no matter what was being played, and could scarcely discuss it seriously with Juliet. Nor could they talk about fashion. Though Lizzie was a loyal customer of the Gold Mine Boutique, she was mostly interested in which patterns were most slimming. What was en vogue in Paris last year and what might cause a sensation in London the next did not matter to her. That left literature, and Juliet’s first sight of the Drurys’ large bookshelf had given her some hope. However, Michael read only books on sheep breeding, and Lizzie liked to read but did so slowly. For a novel that Juliet finished in a week, she needed months. Little in the way of literature filled her shelves. Lizzie mostly hoarded books on viniculture.

  “I do find it alarming that Juliet rarely leaves the house,” Michael admitted. Deep down, he still found Juliet somewhat charming. He enjoyed it when she occasionally flirted with him. “It can’t be good for the baby to have her sitting around unhappily all day.”

  “Exactly,” Lizzie said. “She needs to get out, move around. I thought maybe the grape harvest would do the trick. She likes to drink wine, after all. But no, first she refused to even come look, and when she did finally come out, she was wearing thin little calf-leather gloves and a mantilla, as if she were going to the opera. And it was freezing. I sent her right back inside. Fresh air won’t do the baby any good if its mother gets pneumonia.”

  Michael sighed. “There’s just nothing for her here. She doesn’t know country life. She—”

  “She comes from a big plantation in Louisiana,” Lizzie reminded him venomously. “It was very much in the country, and she still remembers quite well how many acres it was. In fact, I recall you being rather hurt when she complained what a garden plot this was compared to Daddy’s kingdom. If she never did a day of work, it wasn’t for lack of opportunity. But then again, the people there have their black workers toil for them and moan about the loss of slavery.”

  “Lizzie simply doesn’t like her,” Michael complained.

  The Maori were celebrating Matariki once more, the manu ante were dancing toward the stars, and Michael lay beside his Maori friend Tane on thick mats in front of a tent, gazing into the sky. With every gulp of whiskey, the starlight grew brighter, and both men had made sure of a plentiful supply. Michael and Tane had known each other for decades. First, they had gone whaling together, then worked on a sheep farm, and finally Tane had taken over Michael’s whiskey distillery in Kaikoura. Tane’s tribe maintained close relations with the Ngai Tahu who lived near Michael and Lizzie. Once a year, Tane’s iwi wandered to Otago, and the men enjoyed a jolly, boozy reunion. This time, Tane’s people had come to the New Year’s festival. The greeting ritual had gone on all day, but now the friends had found an opportunity to talk.

  “Yet you’d think the two must have a bit in common,” Michael continued. He was used to confiding in Tane, who knew both his and Lizzie’s past. “I mean, I don’t want to speak ill of Juliet, but she also spent a few years getting by in a, uh, milieu that—”

  “She whored about?” asked Tane placidly. “Since when don’t you call prostitutes what they are?”

  “Well, because I wouldn’t exactly call it that. More like, uh, mistressing, or something.”

  Tane nodded and thought a moment. “Why? Is she like Lizzie, without her own people? Or did she fall in love with the wrong man? Did her father maybe—look at her and touch her as one shouldn’t with children?”

  Tane still supplied the brothels in his region with whiskey, and he was a friendly bear of a man. In the last few years, more than a few prostitutes must have poured their hearts out to him. He knew why most women sold themselves.

  Michael shook his head. “Not that I know of. She’s from a rich family. She’s more like . . .” He wondered how he could describe an American cotton plantation. “Like a sheep baroness.” It came to him. “Spoiled rotten, honestly. But she wanted to be a singer, so she ran away, traveled all over. And she seems to have had quite a time of it.”

  Tane laughed. “And you wonder why Lizzie doesn’t like her! Lizzie hated selling herself. Most girls do. But this Juliet did it willingly. She gave up everything that Lizzie and those other poor girls wished for—a stable home and a family—just to sing in bars and flit from man to man, probably taking the best-paying clients away from hardworking, proper whores. And now she’s snapped up Lizzie’s sweet Patrick. It’s not at all su
itable. If anything, I would have pictured her with Kevin.”

  Michael sighed. “What art are you a tohunga in again? Clairvoyance?”

  Tane grinned and uncorked another bottle. “Doesn’t Lizzie always say, ‘In whiskey there’s truth’?”

  “In wine,” Michael corrected him. “But you’re right. Truth might be in wine, but it floats on top of whiskey. Fine, I’ll tell you. The tribe knows anyway. Just don’t tell any pakeha.”

  Tane whistled through his teeth when Michael told him about Juliet’s pregnancy by Kevin.

  “And this makes Patrick happy?” he marveled. “Where is he, anyway? He always comes to the festival. And where’s the girl? I’m getting curious.”

  Michael took a long pull from the new bottle. The Maori had begun to sing. The constellation stood clearly visible in the night sky. It was cold and dry, and there was a full moon—perfect weather for the festival. Both tribes would dance and play music all night. The aroma of food wafted over to the men. Michael glanced around for Lizzie, but she was off celebrating with the women. She spoke Maori well, and the Ngai Tahu considered her a woman with a lot of mana, status and charisma. Michael didn’t want her to hear him saying anything bad about Juliet.

  “Juliet didn’t want to come with us,” he finally told his friend. “She doesn’t understand our friendship with the tribes. It’s understandable because, in her country—”

  “In America, they made Africans slaves, and there had to be a war to stop them,” Tane said, surprising Michael with his worldliness. “That was more than thirty years ago now. And she’s not even in her country. It’s no excuse to treat like filth everyone whose skin is a different color.”

  “She doesn’t,” Michael protested. “It’s just that, for her, it’s not—natural to socialize together and—”

  “And Patrick?” Tane interrupted his stammering.

  “Patrick didn’t want to leave her alone,” Michael admitted. “He says you can see the stars from the farm, too, and the manu aute. When the baby’s born, he’ll build it one, and they’ll come fly it at the festival.”

  Tane snorted. “You’re kidding yourself, Michael. She’ll find reasons to keep her white, golden child away from the dirty Ngai Tahu children. Tell me, Michael, so I really get it: Patrick rode all the way here from Dunedin to celebrate with us, but she talked him out of it?”

  Michael nodded sheepishly. “I also have a wife with a lot of mana. You know how Lizzie can be.”

  Tane laughed. “So, you’re claiming this Juliet has mana? With which tribe? The people in Dunedin? If she had mana, she wouldn’t need to hide her baby and crawl into the bed of a man she doesn’t love. If she had mana, Kevin wouldn’t have left her. God knows that boy needs a wife with mana—just like you did, my friend.”

  He punched his old buddy on the shoulder. They failed to notice that Lizzie’s friend Haikina had approached. She laughed and sat down next to the men.

  “I’m supposed to tell you to come to the fire and eat. But first you need to dance the haka, Tane. Your mother says not to feed you until you’ve danced. You’re getting fat.” She slapped Tane’s formidable belly.

  “Speaking of women with mana,” moaned Tane.

  Haikina smiled. “You were discussing the Juliet problem, I take it?”

  “You hate her too,” said Michael, almost whining. “Like Lizzie.”

  “Name one woman who can stand her! We may have mana, Michael, but we don’t use it to lead men around by the nose. In that art, Juliet is a true tohunga—and she makes your Patrick dance like a manu on a string.”

  The months leading up to the birth of Juliet’s baby passed torturously slowly. Patrick was unhappy because he saw his wife on weekends at most, and even then, he was sometimes advising on farms far away and could not manage to ride to Lawrence.

  “Another reason it’s good you’re here with my parents,” he told Juliet when she complained about her loneliness. “In our house, you’d be completely alone, and if the baby came . . .”

  There were about four more weeks until the birth, but Juliet already felt like a beached whale. Patrick had been too cautious to sleep with her for a while already, making Juliet even more bad-tempered. Patrick couldn’t hold a candle to Kevin in bed, but she still felt deprived.

  “Well, the care here isn’t exactly the best either,” she replied, turning the conversation to one of her favorite subjects, the question of help with the birth.

  After endless fighting, they had reached a compromise: Juliet would have neither a Maori midwife nor a doctor from the city. Instead, the midwife in Lawrence would come—as long as she didn’t have another delivery just then. Juliet was horrified that her husband and in-laws thought a single midwife could cover a whole region.

  Patrick and Lizzie, though, were concerned that a city doctor wouldn’t go along with falsifying the baby’s birthday—even people in Lawrence were capable of counting the months between a wedding and a birth. Fortunately, no one there knew that Juliet had been with Kevin before, so the gossip would not be all that malicious. Lizzie still would have preferred the Maori woman. She was excellent at her job and worried far less about the paternity of children.

  In the end, everything turned out well—at least in the eyes of the Drurys. Like most first-time mothers, Juliet was in labor for many hours, giving the midwife plenty of time to get to her. Moreover, the baby chose a Saturday to enter the world—Patrick was already on his way to Lawrence when the contractions began. He arrived at almost the same time as the midwife and found a completely hysterical Juliet. She had been having contractions for hours and was convinced she was going to die.

  “I keep telling her that human births take longer than sheep or horses,” Lizzie informed her son, who seemed about to get worked up himself. “She just won’t believe me. I have no idea what world she was living in before now. At any rate, I did what I could. She has a neat room, a clean bed—I made her tea and even opened a bottle of wine, in the hopes it would calm her. And now Sharon’s here, so she’s in good hands.”

  A scream came from Juliet’s room, and Patrick went pale. “Is there anything I can do for her?”

  Sharon Freezer, the midwife, stepped into the room.

  “Of course,” she answered. “Go in. Maybe you can comfort your wife. Everything’s going well. The baby’s in the right position, and the birth canal is opening slowly. It might take another five, six hours. A prospect that seems to have, um, dismayed your wife. She’s a little overwrought. But maybe if you soothe her a little? Could I get some tea, Lizzie?”

  Lizzie and Sharon drank tea while Patrick, with unwavering patience, devoted himself to his spouse. He told Juliet about all the births he had witnessed—from ewes to mares to sheepdogs. Nor did he skip the dramatic details. Juliet felt first bored, then disgusted, then finally frightened to the point of panic. Still, she was not screaming anymore, instead whimpering to herself as the contractions grew stronger. Patrick noted the short gap between the contractions with the cheerful relaxation of the professional livestock breeder. He probably could have handled his own child’s birth. Juliet, however, found his presence demeaning—how was she ever supposed to charm and captivate this man again after he had seen her so unshapely, sweaty, and screaming? In the end, she shouted urgently for the midwife, and Sharon threw Patrick out at once when she saw that things were progressing.

  “Have you two decided on a name?” asked Michael to distract his son.

  Patrick shrugged. “Anything but Kevin,” he joked. “I like Joseph. Joe’s easy to say. Or Harold, Harry. But Juliet wants something French—Baptiste or Laurent.”

  “What?” asked Lizzie, but was interrupted by a shrill scream from Juliet’s room.

  “That sounded terrible, but also relieved,” she observed. “Heads up, it’s almost over.”

  Indeed, the scream was not repeated. After just a few minutes, the door opened. Sharon stepped out, beaming, a bundle in her arms.

  “Here’s your daughter, Mr
. Drury. Isn’t she the most charming baby you’ve ever seen?”

  Patrick looked stunned but accepted her happily. He grinned as he gazed into the tiny face.

  “A girl?”

  Sharon nodded. “And look how cute she is.”

  Lizzie had to stand on her tiptoes to get a look at her granddaughter. “She really has a lot of hair, doesn’t she? And a bit of a darker complexion? I haven’t seen such a handsome baby since my Matariki.”

  Michael looked somewhat skeptically at the baby. He adored all his children but had never been able to comprehend how people could discern family resemblance in the red, wrinkly creatures, let alone future beauty.

  “What should we call her?” he asked.

  Nothing short of warfare broke out over the naming. Patrick did not care much. He was simply delirious over the baby and relieved that everything had gone well. He was also ready to fulfill Juliet’s every desire. Lizzie, however, fought bitterly against her daughter-in-law’s suggestions.

  “Celine, Laetitia, Monique! To think of giving such names to a baby!”

  “A bit exotic, sure,” said Patrick, “but just because we haven’t heard them.”

  “It speaks well of you, Son, that you’ve never heard them,” remarked Michael, who shared Lizzie’s position in this matter. “But the names aren’t that unusual really. They’re—”

  “Your father means to say that he knows at least half a dozen whores who chose such noms de guerre,” Lizzie said. “In New Orleans, such names may be normal, but here, you can’t inflict that on your own daughter.”

  Patrick bit his lip. It was true; he did not know any prostitutes. In Dunedin, the Church of Scotland kept them well in the shadows.

  “Why not a good Irish name?” asked Michael. “Why not—”