Flight of a Maori Goddess

by Lark, Sarah

  Kevin looked annoyed. “You could support me. It certainly affects your charges too. What do you bet the officers’ quarters are better shielded than the stables?”

  The camp itself lay among truly beautiful surroundings. The tents were pitched to the right and left of a river, which, unfortunately, tended to overflow its banks. Kevin, who approached from the north, was horrified at the mud and water people had to channel out of their tents in improvised ditches.

  “The northern portion of the camp urgently needs to be relocated,” he declared, having only just met the Scotsman he was to replace as camp commander.

  Lieutenant Lindsey resided in one of the stone buildings that also housed the administration. The prisoners’ tents looked provisional, but Lindsey’s domicile was quite comfortable. It was appointed with carved furniture that reminded Kevin of the van Stout farm. The pieces must have been confiscated from a nearby home.

  “You go right ahead and give it a try,” Lindsey scoffed, and placed a bottle of whiskey and two glasses on the table. “But first, have a drink. It’s always worth having a drink before going out there. Protects against contagion, or so they say.”

  “Contagion?” Kevin furrowed his brow.

  “I wanted to relocate the north camp myself when the river overflowed the first time, but the people didn’t want to and still don’t. They cling to the place as if it were their childhood home, even though they’ve lived there only a few months. And don’t start cursing me when you see the hospital. Yes, it’s half-empty even though the people are sick. If anyone comes, it’s women with their dying children. But then they’re already in the final stages, and there’s nothing more our doctors can do. Which only confirms their belief that our medicine is the devil’s work.”

  “The final stages of what?”

  Lindsey threw his hands up. “Typhus?”

  Kevin rubbed his forehead. “Very well,” he said. “I’ll take a look at the hospital first, then the tents. How many inmates do you have here?”

  To Kevin’s amazement, Lindsey shrugged again. “Don’t know,” he replied. “It changes constantly.”

  “You don’t keep records?”

  Lindsey rolled his eyes. “What am I supposed to do? There are hardly any assistants, and everything falls to me. What can I do about it when they only send us one doctor? Did I determine the rations? Someone’s always complaining that the meat is stringy and bony or that there are no vegetables. Am I supposed to plant carrots?”

  Kevin looked at the lieutenant. “Why not? A completely sensible activity. Maybe the women could be moved to do it?”

  Lindsey laughed. “I can only repeat: live and learn. But for now, let’s get you over to see the hospital. I’m determined to be on the next train to Bloemfontein. Back to my old regiment to hunt a few Boers. I’ll thank heaven when I’m sitting back on a horse. It won’t complain all the time about the oat rations.”

  The hospital was one of the few solid buildings in the camp, pieced together out of sheet metal. It must have been unbearably hot in summer, and even now, the stink was eye-watering and flies swarmed around the patients. Typhus seemed to run rampant, and the care was completely insufficient. Family members sat beside some of the sick and seemed to take it on themselves to clean them. But the older patients, many of them women but also an old man here and there, lay in their own filth. It was very embarrassing for the only doctor, Dr. Greenway.

  “I do what I can, Dr. Drury,” he defended himself. “At the moment, I have twenty-seven patients and no nurses.”

  “Can’t you get any of the women to help?” Kevin asked.

  The doctor and Lindsey snorted in unison.

  “They won’t do anything,” Greenway said bitterly. “Nothing that might remotely help us. They opened a sort of competing clinic in one of the tents. They treat them there with home remedies. Yesterday, a woman wanted to kill me because I couldn’t provide her a dead goat. In all seriousness. She was convinced the only way she could heal her child’s lung infection was by wrapping it in the skin of a freshly slaughtered goat. She declined real medicine, likewise a bed in the hospital. The child died this morning. It plays out like a tragedy, Dr. Drury, a singular tragedy.”

  “Do you only have these two rooms?” Kevin asked.

  Though he was used to large sickrooms, he was pained by the thought that people had to die in these stinking communal lodgings. In the hospital in Dunedin where he had done his residency, there had at least been folding screens on hand to preserve a modicum of privacy.

  Dr. Greenway shook his head. “No, there are also four smaller areas. If you’d care to see them.”

  He led Kevin down a sort of hallway and pulled a curtain aside, opening a view of an improvised two-bedded room. It had surely not been cleaned in a long time, but Kevin held his tongue. It could hardly be expected that the lone doctor also reached for the broom and mop.

  “These small rooms are unoccupied?” he inquired.

  Dr. Greenway grimaced. “Oh, two are occupied. But the woman in one has already died. I just don’t want to separate the children from her right away. We’re sending her to the cemetery as soon as we’ve found someone to take in the orphans. And the other, it’s one of those dramas that almost makes these people’s attitude toward us understandable.” The doctor closed his eyes.

  “I don’t understand,” Kevin pressed.

  “He’s trying to let you know tactfully that our own men are responsible for the girls’ condition,” Lieutenant Lindsey explained. “A mess without equal. The matter should absolutely have been investigated. But the women won’t say anything, you see—and the fellows who transported them didn’t answer to me. Otherwise, they’d all be rotting in jail until the women gave their statements. You can count on that.”

  The lieutenant was working himself into a rage, which amazed Kevin, considering how little sympathy the man had shown until now.

  “What the hell happened?” Kevin asked. “I’d like to see the women, if you’d allow me.”

  “If it were up to me, of course,” said Greenway. “You’re a doctor, after all. But the women won’t let anyone near them. One is completely deranged; the other scratches and bites when you try to examine her. Yet she’d do well to allow it. She still has hemorrhaging.”

  Kevin stared at him. “You mean to say they were raped? Here? In camp?”

  Lindsey shook his head. “In transport. The men who brought them here insist it wasn’t them. They blame a cavalry regiment that escorted their unit part of the way. That’s sometimes done when we suspect Boer guerillas in an area. Then the transport units ask for protection.”

  “Protection?” asked Kevin bitterly.

  Lindsey looked away. “I can only tell you that this sort of thing rarely happens. Or we don’t hear of it, at least. You can’t necessarily tell a woman’s been raped. But in this case, the girls were beaten. Probably they resisted. Anyway, we had to hospitalize them. We couldn’t put them in a tent in that state. Even if they might be happier among their own.”

  Kevin bristled. “I’d like to see them. Maybe they can be convinced to give a statement. Do they speak any English? If not, my interpreter should arrive tomorrow.”

  “They don’t speak at all,” said Greenway, and led them to the next room. “One is catatonic, and the other won’t even look at you.”

  The doctor pulled the curtain aside and let Kevin enter.

  “Ladies, I regret to disturb you again so soon.” Greenway chose his words with deliberate politeness and care. Kevin’s reservations about him disappeared. The man surely did what he could to create humane conditions in this horrific hospital. Kevin looked over the primitive cots on which the women were resting—wrinkly, grayish-white bedding, lumpy pillows. The girl on the closer bed lay on her back. Her light-blue eyes stared at the ceiling, one of them swollen shut. Her right cheek was lacerated, her lips askew. Although she was so disfigured, the girl seemed familiar to Kevin. “But we have a new camp commander,” Greenway c
ontinued. “Dr. Kevin Drury will care for you along with me in future. He—”

  Kevin looked at the second bed. The woman in it had her face to the wall. Only her small frame could be seen underneath a blanket and bonnet, out of which light-blonde hair spilled. Had she started when Greenway mentioned his name?

  The camp doctor posted himself next to the first bed like a resident during rounds. “Johanna van Stout, fourteen years old, multiple contusions and injuries from violent contact.”

  Kevin froze. At that moment, the woman in the other bed turned toward him. Kevin looked at deep-blue eyes filled with hate, a swollen face, and broken lips. But he still found her beautiful.

  “Doortje,” he cried. “Me-Mejuffrouw van Stout.”

  A nasty smile spread across Doortje’s battered face. She could hardly move, but her eyes burned with rage.

  “You do not need to twist your tongue, Doctor,” she said. “I am a maid no more.”

  Chapter 4

  “And what do you intend to do now?” Atamarie asked.

  Really, it was an idle question. Roberta would do exactly what her studies had prepared her to do. The newly minted young teacher would look for a suitable position, and that would be that. Atamarie sipped her champagne in frustration. Violet Coltrane rarely allowed alcohol at her table, but Roberta’s graduation had to be celebrated. It was a beautiful evening, and Atamarie was on vacation. She didn’t know why she was in such a bad mood.

  Roberta already had pink cheeks and shining eyes after her first sips. She looked happy and adorable in her new dress of dark-blue silk, but also agitated—Atamarie hadn’t seen her so keyed up in a long time. During the two years of her studies, after all, she had tried her best to fit the image of a spinster grammar-school teacher.

  “Well, I think that’s been established for years,” Reverend Burton said with a smile before Roberta could answer. “Our school is waiting for you, Roberta. We’re all looking forward to it.”

  Roberta blushed even more deeply, and Atamarie recognized the look Roberta got when she had big news. Her curiosity was piqued. It was one thing for Roberta to hide something from her parents, but since when did her friend keep secrets from her?

  The ever-perceptive Kathleen Burton gave her husband a disapproving look. “Now, don’t push her, Peter,” she chided. “Who knows, maybe she has other plans. Perhaps she wants to marry.”

  Patrick Drury winced with pain. He had never heard another word from Juliet. No one else was the slightest bit worried about the brazen singer, but Patrick spent hours at a time worrying about her. Atamarie smiled at him and his daughter. Little May sat on Patrick’s lap, captivated by the bubbles in his champagne and babbling happily to herself.

  Atamarie choked back a comment that the toddler apparently shared her mother’s tastes. Heather, who sat across from Atamarie, seemed to have the same thought—Atamarie caught a stifled smile on her face, and she whispered something to Chloe that made them both laugh.

  Roberta shook her head decisively. “No, certainly not. I didn’t study so hard just to turn around and get married. But I, well, I thought.” Roberta took a deep breath. “I signed a contract yesterday,” she announced. “I’m going to South Africa, for one to two years.”

  “South Africa?” Patrick Drury spun to look at her. “Do you want to shoot Boers?”

  Roberta laughed nervously. “No, just the opposite. I—have you all heard of Emily Hobhouse?”

  Her mother looked probingly around the room. Of course, Kathleen and Peter Burton knew of Miss Hobhouse’s protests. They viewed the war just as critically as Sean and Violet did. Nor did anything having to do with women’s rights escape Heather and Chloe. Only Patrick and Atamarie were clueless.

  “Miss Hobhouse is campaigning for the dissolution of the concentration camps,” Violet explained. “Camps in which Boer women and children are penned in together to demoralize their menfolk and move them to surrender.”

  “It’s about time they did surrender!” declared Patrick. “This guerilla war—”

  “That’s a different question,” Sean said. “But Miss Hobhouse argues quite rightly that it’s beneath the British Empire’s dignity to wage war against women and children.”

  “Are they really that bad, these camps?” Atamarie asked, taking another sip of champagne. She needed time to ruminate on Roberta’s decision. Her friend had never before expressed special concern about refugees. “I’ve heard they have to live in tents, but—”

  “It’s not a camping trip, Atamarie, even if the army likes to portray it that way,” Reverend Burton said sternly. “These women and children starve, die of infections, and Miss Hobhouse is right. The camps are a disgrace to England.”

  “But now things are supposed to change, you see.” Roberta seized the word with unusual decisiveness. Normally, she would not have dared to interrupt the reverend. “Miss Hobhouse has collected money. Her Relief Fund for South African Women and Children is sending nurses and teachers to the camp. Along with groceries and medicine and all that, of course. I leave next week on the Beauty of the Sea.”

  “I hope that’s not a troop transport?” Heather asked, taking another appetizer.

  Roberta shook her head. “No, it’s a completely normal passenger ship. There aren’t many of us, you see. Just two nurses and myself. A few are coming from the North Island, but most of them from England, no doubt.”

  Violet nodded, visibly torn between pride in her daughter and disappointment at only now being let in on her plans.

  “But why haven’t you said anything, Roberta?” she asked sternly. “Don’t misunderstand me. I have nothing against it in theory. On the contrary! But we—”

  “We could have collected donations,” Reverend Burton said. “Money and goods. People are always more generous when someone gets involved personally in a matter.”

  Roberta lowered her eyes. “I, uh, decided rather late.”

  Atamarie knew Roberta was lying. She’d probably been plotting ways to get to South Africa for months. Miss Hobhouse’s initiative had hardly been the catalyst.

  Atamarie pounced as soon as the guests had dispersed throughout Sean and Violet’s large apartment with coffee cups or liqueur glasses. She dragged Roberta into her room.

  “Admit it,” she began. “This is about Kevin. You just didn’t say anything so that I couldn’t talk you out of it.”

  During dessert, Roberta had relaxed again and even chatted quite calmly about her planned assignment on the cape. Now, however, the blood shot to her face anew.

  “That’s not true! It’s just—the conditions there are so terrible. I’d like to help and, um, see a bit of the world.”

  She lowered her gaze, in which not a trace of wanderlust was to be seen.

  Atamarie rolled her eyes. “I’m sure. You’re completely crazy for lions and rhinos. You always wanted to ride an elephant! Spare me, Robbie. How can you still be in love with him?”

  Roberta glared at her. “You’re still in love too! With that Richard of yours, even though you haven’t seen him in months.”

  “That’s completely different,” her friend insisted. “Richard is, well, he moves slowly. But Kevin—Robbie, he’s a womanizer, and he never noticed you. Besides, South Africa is a huge country. How are you going to find him?”

  Roberta bit her lip again. Without a doubt, this was her plan’s weak point.

  “I don’t have to find him,” she said quietly. “I just want to be near him. And who knows—”

  Atamarie threw her arms up. “Now I’m going to hear about the gods’ gift again.”

  Roberta’s gaze was level. “You believe in it too,” she replied. “So, why don’t we help them out?”

  In the week that followed, Reverend Burton’s parish donated enough powdered milk and medicine to fill a huge crate. Violet held a fiery speech in front of the local Women’s Christian Temperance Union, after which they collected clothing, diapers, and toys. Sean spoke to his clients and Kathleen to the Dunloes who, af
ter all, knew everyone in town with money to give away. The attitude of most people in Dunedin was ambivalent. New Zealand was still supporting England’s war with all its heart, and critical voices were not suffered gladly. At the same time, it was easier to support women and children—especially when a nice, young Dunedin lady personally requested it. So, Roberta had to go along to donation drives and charity dinners. She was completely exhausted when Atamarie finally accompanied her to the ship. The Beauty of the Sea gleamed white and inviting in the deep-blue water of Dunedin’s natural harbor. Atamarie would have loved to come along.

  “I’m simply no good at giving speeches and all that,” Roberta complained. The night before, Heather and Chloe had held a reception and auctioned two paintings, with proceeds going to help the camps. “That was more stressful than teaching for six hours.”

  Atamarie laughed. “Teacher college spoiled you for the wider world. Everyone there went around like they were at a funeral, and you were probably only allowed to speak when you raised your hand. Now you have to be loud again.”

  Roberta blushed. For her appearance at the gallery, she had promptly slipped back into her teaching uniform, and she’d hardly managed a word at the podium.

  Atamarie squinted at her friend’s traveling outfit. “Even if you do find Kevin, he’s never going to notice you in clothes like that,” she teased, and confidently waved the three porters carrying donations to the pier.

  Roberta looked at her friend enviously. Atamarie would have raised her voice before an audience of hundreds uninhibited, but the man she loved did not pay attention to her either. Roberta was ashamed to find this last thought comforting.

  “Plus, you’re traveling to Africa,” Atamarie continued. “How much do you want to bet the Africans aren’t as stiff as the Church of Scotland? I picture them being more like the Maori. I’m sure they like colorful clothing and laughing and dancing.”

  Atamarie let the wind play with her blonde hair. During vacation, she saw no reason to force it into austere buns. In her red-and-green summer dress, she looked like a colorful flower.