by Bowes, K T
Hana remembered what an awesome man of God her father was and regretted the awful memory which replaced the image of his great kindness. “Thanks, Dad,” she sighed, pressing her face into his chest.
Robert smiled, closed his eyes and held his daughter for real instead of just in his head, relishing the preciousness of the moment and not realising how much it would haunt his nightmares in the days to come.
Chapter 29
Hana walked around Rangiriri Pa, absorbing the sacredness and abiding silence, despite its proximity to State Highway 1. The huge mound in the centre of the paddock was once part of the deep, five metre trenches, the Māori used to defend their redoubt from the English. It was an ingenious use of early trench warfare and confounded their enemy. Logan stood next to her, reading the decorative boards describing the war for visitors. “The Māori were war generals, far ahead of their time,” he mused. “The battle for Rangiriri was one of the most significant of the New Zealand Wars and led to heavy losses for the British soldiers.” Logan wrinkled his nose. “Unless you listen to their version, which is very different.”
“Yeah, I can believe that,” Hana said, smiling sideways at her husband. He bit his lip and narrowed his eyes, faking annoyance.
“You doubting me, wahine?”
Hana put her hand over her heart, feeling the tingling beat through her chest wall. “Would I?” She smirked and leaned over the information board, reading its factual description.
‘The trenches were channelled between the Waikato River and Lake Waikare by hand and required the use of planks in order to be crossed. A huge mound of earth rose up above the remains of the pa, betraying the position of the central redoubt which had towered above the ditches. Māori repelled eight British attacks from their stronghold, defeated finally by a misunderstanding over a white flag, which Māori intended for negotiation and the British claimed as surrender. The Māori king movement, Kiingitanga, had taken a significant hit that day.’
“I’m so glad we came,” Robert said, his smile broad as he led Elaine across the damp grass. “Thank you for humouring an old man.”
“It’s fine.” Logan smiled. “I haven’t been here for years.”
“It’s great having that brochure rack in your hotel reception,” Robert said, caressing the coloured pamphlet about Rangiriri in his fingers. He’d snagged it that morning after breakfast. “I’d never have known it was here otherwise and I’m so interested in history.”
Logan nodded. “I love our New Zealand history, although many Kiwis seem more intent on discovering British roots. I always think that’s a shame.” He hefted Phoenix on his hip.
“Tell them about our family’s involvement in the battle,” Tama gushed with enthusiasm. “The Du Roses gave safe house to many of the fleeing Māori, including chief Wiremu Tamihana and Māori King Tāwhiao.”
“Really?” Robert’s eyes lit up with interest and the men wandered away, chatting about a shared passion.
“Logan’s very ardent,” Elaine said and Hana nodded.
“He learned about their history at his grandmother’s knee. She was an important influence in his early life.”
Elaine patted her hand. “I’m happy for you, my dear.” Her green eyes strayed towards Logan’s straight back and the sight of Phoenix twiddling one of his dark curls. “He adores you and your baby and that kind of devotion is very rare.” She sounded wistful but before Hana could respond, she moved away.
Hana looked at the sky and contemplated fetching the picnic from the boot of the Honda, during a rare absence of meteorological discord. Her phone buzzed in her jeans pocket and she fished it out, reading the text from her brother. ‘Just arrived. Are you through that funny gate thing at the top of the steps?’
‘Yep,’ Hana replied.
“I can feel their spirits clamouring for my attention,” Hana said softly as Mark puffed over to her and he stared at her, a strange look in his eyes.
“Whose?”
“The warriors and soldiers who died here,” Hana said, her voice sounding dreamy.
“Weirdo!” Mark chuckled and kissed her on the cheek. “Just gonna say hi to Mum and Dad. I’ll thank your husband for letting me spend a few days with them at your place too. I’m excited to see this hotel of yours.”
Hana nodded and smiled, her gaze faraway. She placed her fingers into the space at the bottom of her ribs and ran them upwards in an arc. When she opened her mouth to speak, Mark was already striding over to Logan, his hand outstretched in greeting. “It hurts,” she whispered, her words ending in a sigh. No one earthly heard but the tangata whenua groaned in dismay.
A little girl ran around on the delicate mounds of earth and Hana looked across in irritation. The signs clearly stated the area was tapu, sacred. They asked politely that visitors refrain from smoking, eating or walking on the area which represented the graves of the fallen, now buried in their trenches by time and weather. The child was attached to a group of tourists and they stomped around, behaving as though the signage didn’t apply to them. It was just another thing to look at and photograph on their whistle-stop coach tour of New Zealand.
Hana put her hand up to get their attention and Logan saw, his brow creasing in irritation at their ignorance. He watched his wife’s face change from mild discomfort to agony in a heartbeat, as the nagging indigestion exploded and revealed its true nature. It burst into flames in her chest wall and caused her to let out a loud gasp as breath exhaled, but would not return. Something was stuck somewhere, a bodily malfunction with no obvious cause. Hana suffocated in her own frame, the constricting pain squeezing air out without replacing it. She sank to her knees as a tingling ache began in her armpits, panicking and grabbing at her chest. The small explosion in her eardrums unleashed a darkness which reached for her. Nothing made sense.
“Take her!” Logan handed Phoenix roughly to a surprised Tama and ran towards his wife as though in slow motion. He hurled himself to his knees and pulled Hana into a sitting position, his arms around her ribs. Her green eyes stared at him, begging him to help and he floundered, not understanding.
Mark reached them and saw Hana’s lips adopt a familiar grey hue and his face paled in agony. “No, no, no! Hana, Hana!” He kneeled next to Logan and wrenched Hana from him. “Get off!” he shouted. “You don’t understand!” He hadn’t been there for Judith, but he would be there for his sister. Mark dragged her from Logan’s arms and laid her on her back, his fingers grappling for a pulse in her neck. “It’s faint!” he shouted, his eyes finding Tama’s. “Ring for an ambulance.”
The last thing Hana remembered before her brain shut down was trying to turn on her side to alleviate the awful pain. Some part of her still believed it was indigestion, but Mark’s terrified green eyes sent a thrill of inevitability as a painful tingle snaked up the front of her neck and into her jaw. A wise woman once told her before Bodie’s birth not to fear pain, because her brain would override her consciousness before it became unbearable.
As the pain rendered Hana’s lungs empty and stopped her heart, it wasn’t the slow fade she imagined but more like a light bulb blowing. One minute, she saw the stricken face of her husband and the next moment, nothing.
Dear Reader
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K T Bowes
Logan asks you to rate him when the prompts appear.
Hana gives him five out of five stars.
I hope you enjoyed One Heartbeat. Check out the first chapter of
The Du Rose Prophecy
with my compliments.
Chapter One
The grounds of the Waikato Presbyterian School for Boys were silent and calm, just as the man liked it best. Holidays and weekends carried a different atmosphere for him, when the whole place felt like his own. No noisy students or aggravating teachers; just peace and solitude, as if the land was asleep. Time to finally think straight.
He sighed and ran a hand through his curly hair, feeling the glossy blonde locks under his palm. Vanity momentarily distracted him as he caught sight of his smart figure in a reflection from one of the expensive framed watercolours, donated by a past student who was now incredibly famous and sought after. “Nice,” he chuckled to himself, remembering how he coerced the poor man into parting with it. “The painting, not you. Mind you, you’re not bad either, you old bugger,” he said to his reflection, adjusting the angle of the toupee to his particular satisfaction. He surveyed his empire from the upstairs landing in the main building. The heavy bannister rail under his palms shone in the light from the high, stained glass windows. “This school wouldn’t cope without me,” he muttered under his breath, running his hand over the kauri wood beneath his fingers. He had always loved this staircase. He blew at an imaginary speck and wiped at it with his sleeve.
Even in a hurry, dashing from class to class or simply storming about, catching out errant boys and staff in equal measure - the man always stopped there. The stairs swept away from him on either side, completely identical, cascading downwards at a steep angle for a school. The health inspectors raised concern over it every year. One hundred and thirty years of existence and yet they wrung their hands with the imagined fear of some lump of a boy, falling down it and breaking his neck. At the bottom, each staircase curved around to greet the parquet floor of the administration corridor, like a pair of arms rushing to enfold it in a loving embrace, the antique wood intricately carved and delicate. He never knew until he reached this spot, which of the staircases he would descend to the ground floor. It was enlivening - that moment of choice. Life hadn’t allowed him many choices, not since the day his heart was broken. “No, don’t go there,” he chastised himself, straightening his spine and clicking his heels together.
Someone with a good business head would have rented the building out for weddings at weekends and in the holidays, making a fortune. The bride could have swept down either staircase of her choosing, gliding elegantly into the Great Hall at the end of the corridor to make her grand entrance. The building was filled with stained glass windows, beamed apex ceilings and all manner of expensive heritage, left to the city by Hamilton’s founding fathers. It was one of the few places preserved in this throw-away-culture.
The man turned once again, checking his shiny hair in the reflection of the delicate brush strokes of a watermill scene, before choosing the staircase to the left. In truth, it was his favourite. He loved the stained glass window on that side, glinting at him from above. The Virgin Mary smiled down on him with gentle, tender eyes, offering him absolution. The window on the other side depicted a sword wielding Christ, which filled the man with fear and regret. Still, when he walked down his favourite staircase he was careful only to look at Mary’s face and no other part of the picture window; especially not the bouncing baby boy in her arms. The child’s eyes could drill into his conscience with terrifying astuteness if the sun was at the right angle. Yet it remained the better route. He only chose the other staircase periodically to tease himself. “If you get what you want all the time, you don’t properly appreciate it,” he muttered, a familiar, time-worn mantra.
He teetered on the top step, the toes of his shiny black shoes poking over the uppermost tread. It was the staircase designated for staff. Boys used the other one, which is why the teacher occasionally deviated to it. He loved the way the adolescent males surged out of his way in both directions, irritated, but too afraid of him to display it openly as he forced himself right through the middle of the narrow space and caused a bottleneck. They hated it. He loved it. Power.
Listening to the silence was calming but perplexing, because it shouldn’t be silent at all. The intruder alarm should be clanging out into the surrounding area with deafening peals of distress. The school nestled into a suburb on one side with gully and fields the other. The Waikato Presbyterian School for Boys existed first, out in the countryside for years until the city encroached on its sanctuary, bringing arterial roads and ugly modern housing.
The phone call came early, as he washed his car and enjoyed the peace of a Saturday morning. “One of the local residents reported the alarm sounding. Want us to check it out?” the alarm company co-ordinator asked, making a horrid slapping sound into the phone with whatever he noisily chewed.
“Don’t bother!” the teacher snapped. “Not at your prices for a callout.” He finished smoothing the paintwork with a leather cloth and told his wife where he was going.
On the top step he listened for a moment, still hearing nothing. “Thanks for the wasted trip!” he spat. “Idiots!”
His body jerked as a sound from behind made him turn sharply, almost overbalancing and pitching down the staircase. The faithful bannister helped him right himself, grappling to hold onto the smooth wood at the last minute. The experience left him shaky and disquieted.
“Well, hello.” The man’s eyes widened and he whipped around to face the speaker, the last of the colour draining from his face as cold eyes regarded him, shrouded in a characteristic smugness.
“You!” He gulped, forgot where he was and took a foolish step backwards. The last thing he saw was the flash of silver in the visitor’s hand as sunlight glinted through the stained glass window and reflected a myriad of prism colours, enticingly beautiful. But it was a hated thing, the cursed metallic object, and it caused a deep frown to cross his features as his flailing body hit the first of many hard-edged wooden steps.
The seasoned oak did not yield, but the teacher’s fifty-eight-year-old body did. By the time he rolled awkwardly down the final, curved embrace of his beloved staircase; he was already unconscious.
The teacher might have survived if the visitor cared enough to ring for help. The bang to his brain from the sharp edge of the newel post would ensure a different kind of life, but he would have lived to labour it.
With a small smile of satisfaction and a casual, “Oops,” the visitor slipped stealthily away, thoroughly delighted with the unexpected outcome of the not-so-chance-meeting.
If you’d like to grab the next in the series, The Du Rose Prophecy, click HERE
About the Author:
K T Bowes is married to her very own Logan Du Rose, with four delightful children, all making their own way in the world. She works part-time which allows her to write most days. She lives in Northern Waikato between the river and the bush and keeps horses and a cat. She is a Christian and attends a Hamilton church. You can follow her on:
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Other Novels By This Author
The Hana Du Rose Mysteries
Logan Du Rose
About Hana - FREE HERE
Hana Du Rose
Du Rose Legacy
The New Du Rose Matriarch
One Heartbeat
The Du Rose Prophecy
Du Rose Sons
Du Rose Family Ties
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Free from the Tracks -FREE HERE
Sophia’s Dilemma
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Gone Phishing
UK based mystery/romances:
Artifact
Demons on Her Shoulder
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The Actuary’s Wife
The Actuary in Trouble
New Zealand Soccer Referee Series
All Saints
Small Town New Zealand Romance Series
Deleilah
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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