by Jude Knight
Mr Berry was distant today, too, but he smiled when he caught her looking at him, so she acquitted him of prejudice and just wondered what had him out of sorts. No. Sad. Something had happened to distress him, though he hid it well.
She left him to his brooding and Myrtle and the young ladies to their discussion, all but pressing her nose to the window. Boring? By no means. Lottie could not see enough of the ever-changing textures and the unending variety of greens in the passing scenery.
They stopped for afternoon tea on the shores of a small lake, which Mr Te Paora called Tikitapu. "The daughter of a high chief, a princess, you would call her, went swimming one day, wearing nothing but a precious greenstone tiki, an heirloom of her tribe, tied to her neck with a flax cord. When the cord broke, the whole tribe searched, but the sacred tiki was lost forever in the deep, making the lake itself sacred; we would say, ‘tapu’."
He entertained them as the carriage drivers and Mr Berry prepared and served tea, boiling the leaves in the water in a pot over a small fire, telling them other stories about the lake. Of an evil magician who was killed on a ridge between this lake and the next, his heart burned on his own altar. Of a taniwha, a water monster, that preyed on travellers until one day, it ate a chieftain's daughter and was hunted to its death.
"There are many taniwha in these lakes," he said, lowering his deep voice for dramatic effect as they climbed back into the carriages. "Some say it is their breath you see in the hot lakes, their voices you hear when the ground rumbles."
Stories about sea monsters occupied Lottie and the Pritchard girls as the carriage wound its way along the road through the bush clad hills. Myrtle dropped off to sleep despite the coach's lurching. Mr Berry was still in the brown study that had consumed him all day. From time to time, he pointed out another landmark, but mostly he sat silent, staring at the little Bible he turned over and over in his hands.
He roused himself at last, tucking the book inside his jacket pocket. "We are coming into Te Wairoa, ladies. If you look from the window, you'll see the hotel."
Lottie was disappointed, on the whole. It would have been interesting to stay in a proper Māori village, but Te Wairoa, despite the exotic name, was very similar to villages she'd seen in England, if a little roomier, each cottage on its own patch of land. They descended outside a two-storied wooden building with a double veranda. On the lower level, despite the biting cold that had descended as the sun dipped below the hills, several Māori children sat dangling their legs, watching the tourists descend from the carriages.
Mr Berry ushered them inside and introduced them to the landlord, who assured them their bed chambers were ready, that hot water would be sent up within minutes, and that dinner would be on the table in one hour.
The hotel was pleasant but not large. The Bletherow party would be sharing a room, Myrtle and Lottie in the bed and Parrish on a low roll-out trundled. Myrtle, who had woken grumpy, objected to Mr Berry, to the landlord, Mr McRae, and to Lottie herself when all her complaints could not increase the number of rooms or reduce the number of other guests.
Lottie was pleased to go down to dinner and unsurprised to be sent back up several times for things Myrtle had 'forgotten'. But the dinner was soon over, and it was time for the tour party and other guests in the hotel to walk through the dark to the local meeting house, which Mr Te Paora called Hinemihi. The moon, somewhat more than half full, was high in the sky, lighting the paths so they didn't need lamps, and Lottie could see them well-enough, converging from all over the settlement on the building to which they walked. Beyond the chatter of the other guests, she could hear mournful cries from the surrounding hills, the same notes, repeated over and over, one sliding down and the other up.
A bird perhaps, though it did not sound like any owl she had ever heard. She would ask Mr Berry.
At the meeting house, they were ushered inside under the ornately carved panels representing ancestors, whose gleaming eyes were made from gold guineas. Inside, they were greeted by a dignified lady who introduced herself as Guide Mary. "Welcome to my home," she said. "Tonight, my cousins and I are pleased to entertain you. Tomorrow, we shall show you Te Otupakuarangi, the fountain of the clouded sky, which you call the Pink Terraces, and also Te Tarata, the tattooed rock, also known as the White Terraces. But tonight, we share with you our song and our dance."
“First, a haka.”
3
Miss Thompson was entranced by the concert party, and even Mrs Bletherow was interested enough to forget her usual pointless errands and pointed remarks. Tad had taken a seat close by, ready to offer his escort if Miss Thompson was sent on another wild goose chase, and was surprised by his own disappointment when it didn't happen.
She was nothing to him. He was sorry for her, that was all. As he'd be sorry for anyone stuck in her predicament. She'd be better off staying in New Zealand, where Mrs Bletherow's malice couldn't reach her. There was work in Auckland, in shops and factories. Not that a proper English lady would consider such a thing.
She could do it, though. She wasn't as meek as she pretended. He'd seen the steel in her, the fire in those pretty hazel eyes.
The word 'pretty' put a check in his stride, but it was true. She had lovely eyes. Not a pretty face, precisely. Her cheeks were too thin, her jaw too square, her nose too straight for merely 'pretty'. But in her own way, she was magnificent. She was not as comfortably curved or as young as the females he used to chase when he was a wild youth, the sort he always thought he preferred. Not as gaudy as them, with their bright dresses and their brighter face paint. But considerably less drab than he had thought at first sight. She was a little brown hen that showed to disadvantage beside the showier feathers of the parrot, but whose feathers were a subtle symphony of shades and patterns. Besides, parrots, in his experience, were selfish, demanding creatures.
The concert ended with the usual haunting farewell. One didn't need to translate the Māori to feel the pain of a young warrior, separated from his beloved by class and clan, mourning his loss in a song so powerful that, so legend had it, the warring families relented and allowed them to marry.
The audience paid the accolade of silence when the song ended, then burst into enthusiastic applause.
As they walked back through the night, the Pritchard girls twittered happily about what they had seen, and even Mrs Bletherow unbent enough to favour Mrs Pritchard with her opinion that the spectacle had been interesting, if unseemly.
Miss Thompson dropped behind the others, her eyes lifted to the splendour of the Milky Way.
Tad lengthened his stride to reach her, putting a hand under her elbow to catch her just as her inattention to her feet paid dividends. "A penny for your thoughts."
She gifted him with a smile, but her eyes slid away again, immediately. "I was listening, not thinking. What animals are they that call in the forest?"
"The bush, we call it. They are birds, Miss Thompson. Do you hear the call that sounds like two words? One going down and one up? That's the Ruru, the little native owl. Settlers call it morepork, after the sound. Mo-ore Po-ork, Mo-ore Po-ork." He reproduced the sound in a high-pitched tone, sliding his voice to a lower note on the first 'o' and raising it again on the second.
"Hear the shriek? A little higher than the morepork? The kiwi. It's a flightless bird around the size of a large cat with a long curved beak that has nostrils almost at the tip, the better to scent insects scurrying around in the dark."
All the rest of the way to the hotel, Tad picked out bird sounds and described the makers, until he had an engrossed audience, but he had eyes only for Miss Thompson, who thanked him nicely when they arrived at McRae's and followed Mrs Bletherow upstairs to bed.
Tad wasn't tired, his meeting with his brother weighing heavily on his mind. Having a drink with the tourists who thronged McRae's didn't appeal, and heading off to his room alone was no more desirable. Atame was off visiting with relatives; Tad wouldn't intrude. But as he decided to go order a tankard of bee
r and find himself a quiet corner, his friend stepped out of the garden onto the veranda. "Tad! Come have a drink with me and my cousins."
The men were sitting around a fire on a bluff, passing a bottle from hand to hand. Close by, a path led down to the boats that waited to carry his tourists across Lake Tarawera on the morrow. Tonight, they were tucked up asleep, and he'd forget about them, about the news from England, and about the decisions he needed to make. He'd take a few swigs of whatever rotgut his friends were drinking, and let it all go.
Sitting with his back to the winter cold and his front to the blazing heat of the fire, he accepted the bottle, took an incautious gulp, and struggled not to splutter it out again.
Whiskey, and locally distilled by the rough taste. Several of the men were drunk already, but they'd be well enough to row tomorrow. After weeks of hearing nothing but English, he needed to make an effort to tune into their Māori. They were arguing about a sighting on the lake a week or so ago.
"I saw it myself," one of them said. "It was a war canoe, I swear, full of warriors. It came out of nowhere and then just disappeared."
"Mist and imagination," another mocked. "There hasn't been a war canoe on that lake in fifty years."
"It's a sign," the first insisted. "Tuhoto Ariki has cursed us."
"Not a curse." The voice came from the shadows. "I see what comes, and I warn. But you do not listen. You turn away from what is right." The speaker advanced far enough that the fire illuminated his deeply carved cheeks and brow, his stern visage. Tuhoto. The feared tohunga of Te Wairoa. He was rumoured to be more than one hundred years old, but only the burden of knowledge in those fathomless eyes confirmed it. He moved and spoke like a much younger man. "Your fathers were warriors," he scolded. "You are careless, foolish boys, cheating the pakeha and yourselves. You are a disgrace to your ancestors and the land, and the land will spit you out."
"We are rich, old man," one of the cousins boasted. "We have built Hinemihi to honour the ancestors and given them gold coins for eyes instead of paua."
Tuhoto sniffed and turned away, his contempt for the speaker palpable. But he stopped as he caught sight of Tad. "Pakeha."
"Tohunga," Tad replied, rising to show his respect.
"Choose your path wisely, pakeha. The first leads to Hine-nui-te-po. Seek a strong roof to cover you, and you will live. The second leads to your past. Can you fit yourself back in that box? The third is best, but you must become someone else. Choose wisely."
He was stepping backwards as he spoke and, by the last two words, had disappeared again.
"Choose wisely, pakeha," one of the other men said, his voice pitched in an inaccurate reedy tremelo. "Another drink or a roasted kumara from the fire."
Tad joined in the laughter, ignoring the disquiet left by the old man's words. Hine-nui-te-po was the goddess of death. The others might mock, but how did the tohunga know what his brother wanted of him? Death, back to England, or—no. He couldn’t become someone else.
He patted the Bible Aunt Em had given him for his eighteenth birthday. The day he left England. “Safe travels,” she wished him, and for the first few years the Bible was his talisman for the only constant love in his life. More recently, he’d started to read it, hearing the now-familiar words in Aunt Em’s voice. He didn’t want to return to his old life, but he knew she would tell him he had no other choice. He could not just disappear and leave Sextus with a missing Earl, all the responsibility of the title and the estate, and none of the authority.
4
Myrtle snored. How Parrish ignored it, Lottie didn't know, but Lottie lay sleepless, occasionally drifting off only to jerk awake again at the next barrage of snorts and buzzes.
At last, she gave up, wriggling carefully off the side of the bed from under the covers, and wincing when her feet hit the cold wooden floor boards. The room was a void of shapes in various degrees of black and grey, but the lighter rectangles beyond the bed must be the window, and the door was opposite them.
She had set her next day's clothes over a chair before going to bed and managed to find them with barely a fumble. The corset could stay; her clothes were roomy enough to make it unnecessary. The petticoats, too. They provided shape and warmth, but she needed merely to look decently covered if anyone were to see her in her nocturnal wanderings. Her dress went on over her nightgown, first the skirt, then the waist, which buttoned in front for easy management. She sat on the chair to pull on her stockings and reached under the chair for her shoes.
She found the door on the first try, with their coats hanging on hooks across it. Hers was nearest to the hinge side. There. And now the key. Turned. And the handle.
She hesitated in the darker passageway beyond the door but decided not to relock it. She slipped the key into her pocket so that Parrish could not lock her out, as had happened in Milan, and felt her way along the passage to let herself into the stairwell, which seemed brightly lit by comparison.
A couple of minutes later, having put her shoes on, she let herself out of the house by the door at the back of the house.
For a moment, she stood at the top of the porch stairs, listening to the sounds of the bush, seemingly much louder now that they weren't masked by the noise made by people. The garden was less dark than she expected, particularly to the left, and when she turned, she realised that someone sat with their back to her further along the veranda. The light was a lamp, turned low, and she must have made some kind noise, for the occupant of the chair looked over his shoulder. It was Mr Berry.
"Miss Thompson," he said, coming to his feet. "Having trouble sleeping?"
"I am afraid so," Lottie agreed. "I thought I would come out and listen to the birds. The bush here is very beautiful, is it not?"
"I find it so." Mr Berry tucked the book he was holding into his pocket, but not before Lottie saw it was the Bible he'd been reading in the coach. "Most English people do not agree with us, however. They look at that marvellous variety and see a wasteland. A few useful timber trees and otherwise just rubbish to be cleared to make way for wheat or cattle. Have you taken a good look at our stars, yet, Miss Thompson?"
"I recognise the Milky Way, of course," Lottie told him, "and I think I saw Orion's Belt our first night in Auckland, low on the horizon. I am no stargazer, though. I know only a few of the constellations."
"The constellations this far south are mostly very different those seen in England. May I show you?"
They stood in the garden of the hotel while Mr Berry pointed out various stars, giving them their Māori names and the legends that went with them. Mr Berry said they'd get a better view of the stars low in the eastern sky if they followed the path up the hill behind the hotel. Lottie shouldn't. No. How silly. Mr Berry had never given her reason to believe he was untrustworthy, and no one would ever know they were alone together. As to his intentions, she was in her thirties and dowdy besides. A man as handsome as him undoubtedly had plenty of willing female interest.
Myrtle would be horrified, and that was reason enough!
"Yes," she said, and after a breathless scramble, she was glad she had.
As the moon sunk towards the western horizon, the stars seemed closer and brighter, as if she could reach out and drape the Milky Way around her shoulders. Te Ika-o-te-rangi, the Māori called it.
"The birds are silent," Mr Berry observed, and as he said it, the earth lurched under Lottie's feet, a sharp jolt that landed her on her behind, followed by a rocking and swaying that had her grasping at the grass to keep what balance was left to her.
As suddenly as it started, it was over. Mr Berry, who had somehow remained on his feet, held out his hand to help her up. "Just an earthquake, Miss Thompson. We have them from time to time. That was a sharp one, though. Perhaps we should go in."
But below them, the hotel was awake, windows showing lights and people coming out onto the porch to look up at the hills. Lottie shook her head, unwilling to give Myrtle fuel for another decade of recriminations by being caught
alone with a man. "Can we wait until they settle back to bed? Or I will wait on my own, if you prefer."
The ground shook again, more roughly this time.
"Let's settle back on the grass," Mr Berry suggested. "I should have brought up a blanket to save your coat from the dirt. Here..." He began to remove his own, but she put out a hand to stop him. "I have been on the ground already and look: It is quite dry." Lottie lowered herself to the grass and lay back, and after a moment, so did Mr Berry, settling on his back a little more than an arm's reach away.
Lottie decided to follow his example and ignore the earth's shivering. "Is there a South Star?" she asked. "The equivalent of our North Star?"
"No," Mr Berry replied. "No South Star. You can find South by drawing mental lines from the Southern Cross and the Pointers, and finding where they bisect. I'll explain."
She began to follow his instructions to work out due South, but they both fell silent when an explosion attracted their attention to a large inky black cloud that welled up above the mountain beyond the ridge between them and the lake, lit by constant flashes of lighting. Lottie sat up and edged closer to Mr Berry.
"It's Tarawera," he said, leaning in close and shouting to be heard. "It has erupted."
The shakes continued, as they watched the mountain in awe.
Several men started up the hill from the hotel. Lottie was relieved they followed a path further along than the one she and Mr Berry had taken.
Mr Berry watched them until they went out of sight around a curve in the path. "They'll be going to the old mission station. They'll get a good view from there."
A sudden explosive roar, louder than she had ever heard, brought her surging to her knees. A great curtain of fire rose heavenward from three points along the mountain. Another earthquake shook the ground, and Lottie clutched Mr Berry's hand as the billowing cloud began to shoot fireballs like rockets, showering down on the lake and the mountain side.