Song of the Spirits (In the Land of the Long White Cloud saga)

by Lark, Sarah

“It would be better to try something that really suits you.” The banker’s remark bounced around inside William’s head. At first, he had waved it away as the phrasemongering of a risk-averse office lackey, but the life of a gold miner no longer seemed so appealing. Of course, he was out in the fresh air—and the landscape around Queenstown was fantastic. After William had gotten over his initial ill humor, he could not help but recognize that. The majestic mountains surrounding Lake Wakatipu that seemed to embrace the countryside were alone a sight to behold, as was the play of colors that now, particularly in autumn, blended the lush vegetation into a kaleidoscope of red, purple, and brown. Some of the plants seemed exotic, like the cabbage trees that looked like palms, and some strangely alien, like the violet lupines that gave the area around Queenstown its distinctive look. The air was clear as crystal, as were the streams. But after a few more days of working with Joey, he would undoubtedly begin to hate the trees and waterfalls.

  Over the course of the day, Joey proved himself to be a real slave driver. First, William was too slow for his taste, then he was taking too many breaks, and finally, he called William away from chopping down trees to help with the sawing. In addition, he cursed in the foulest way whenever something went wrong—which unfortunately happened most often when William took the saw.

  “But you’ll get it yet, boy,” the old man finally said encouragingly after calming himself down. “I guess you didn’t do much with your hands back home.”

  At first, William wanted to contradict him, but then he realized that the old man was not entirely wrong. True, he had worked in the fields with the tenant farmers in the last few years, after the blatant injustice with which his father administered his lands had gotten to him. Frederic Martyn gave little and demanded much—the farmers could hardly make their rent, and though it was bad enough that they had barely anything left over to live off in good years, they could expect no help if the harvest was bad. The families were still recovering from the great famine of the sixties, and practically all of them had victims to lament. In addition, nearly a whole generation was absent, as hardly a single farmer’s child of William’s age had survived the years of the potato blight. So the work in the fields now lay primarily in the hands of the very young and very old; nearly everyone was overexerted, and there was no hope of relief in sight.

  None of that touched Frederic Martyn—and William’s mother, too, although Irish herself, made no move to advocate for the people. So William had begun helping the tenants with the work in the fields. Later he had joined the Irish Land League, which was striving to help the farmers achieve fair rents.

  At first, Frederic Martyn had found his younger son’s attitude more entertaining than disconcerting. William would never have much say about the lands anyway, and his older son, Frederic Jr., displayed no humanitarian leanings. However, after the Land League cited its first successes, his joking and teasing about William’s involvement with the league grew increasingly cruel, driving the young man ever deeper toward the opposition.

  When William ended up supporting—if not inciting—a revolt among the tenants, the old man couldn’t forgive him. William was sent to Dublin. He was to study a little, law if nothing else, so that he could one day stand up for his beloved tenants in word and deed. In that respect, the elder Martyn had been generous. The main thing was to avoid keeping the boy around to instigate his farmers any further.

  At first, William had launched himself into his work with enthusiasm, but it was not long before struggling through the finer points of English law began to bore him, especially when an Irish constitution was to be proposed soon anyway. He attentively followed the debates over the Home Rule Bill, which promised to give the Irish considerably more say in the issues that affected their island. But then when the upper house rejected it again…

  William did not want to mull all that over again. The affair had been too mortifying and the consequences fatal. He could have come to a much worse end than living in peaceful Queenstown’s lovely environs.

  “What did you do for a living anyway, over in Ireland?” Joey now asked. They had finally finished their work for the day and were tiredly paddling homeward. The bathhouse and a catered evening meal at Mrs. O’Keefe’s hotel awaited William—while Joey had a whiskey-heavy evening at the fire of Skipper’s gold-mining camp ahead of him.

  William shrugged. “Worked on a sheep farm.”

  That was mostly true. The Martyns’ extensive land holdings included first-class meadowland. Frederic Martyn had hardly suffered any loss from the potato blight for that reason. It had affected only his tenants and farmhands, who grew their own food on small patches of land.

  “Wouldn’t you rather be in the Canterbury Plains then?” Joey asked jovially. “There’s millions o’ sheep there.”

  William had heard that too. But his role in the farmwork had consisted more of managerial duties than actual labor. Though he knew theoretically how to shear a sheep, he had yet to actually do it—and certainly couldn’t have done it in record time like the men who worked for the Canterbury Plains shearing companies. The best were supposed to be able to divest eight hundred sheep of their wool in a single day. That was not much less than the Martyns’ entire herd. On the other hand, some farmers in the east might have need of an able manager or foreman—a job William thought himself to be well suited for. But a man could hardly get rich that way—and William did not intend to make permanent reductions in his quality of life.

  “Maybe I’ll buy myself a farm when we’ve found enough gold here,” William mused. “In one or two years.”

  Joey laughed. “At least you’ve got fighting spirit! All right, you can get out here.” He steered the boat toward the shore. The river wound to the east past Queenstown before flowing into the lake south of the city below the gold-miners’ camp. “I’ll pick you up here again tomorrow at six in the morning, bright and early.”

  Joey waved to his new partner happily as William made his way wearily back to town. After resting in the boat, all of his bones hurt. He did not dare think about another day of chopping wood.

  Nevertheless, something pleasant crossed his path on Main Street. Elaine O’Keefe stepped out of the Chinese laundry with a basket of clothes. She was headed toward Mrs. O’Keefe’s hotel.

  William smiled at her. “Miss O’Keefe! A prettier sight than a nugget of gold. Can I take that for you?”

  Despite his sore muscles, ever the gentleman, he reached for the basket. Elaine did not play coy. She handed her load over to him happily and strolled along beside him with lightened step—to the limited degree that one could move both lightly and in a ladylike manner at the same time. It would hardly have been possible with the heavy basket on her arm. How had the heretical Miss O’Rourke once put it? “To be a lady, you need all your resources.”

  “Have you already found many nuggets today, then?” Elaine inquired. William considered whether she was simply naïve or if she meant that ironically. He decided to take it as flirting. Elaine had spent her whole life in Queenstown. She had to know that you did not become rich that quickly by mining.

  “The gold in your hair is the first today,” he admitted, combining the admission with a bit of flattery. “But, alas, that already has an owner. You are rich, Miss O’Keefe!”

  “And you should introduce yourself to the Maori. They’d declare you tohunga straightaway. A master of whaikorero.” Elaine giggled.

  “Of what?” William asked. He had hardly met any Maori, the natives of New Zealand, up to that point. There were tribes at Wakatipu, as there were throughout the Otago region, but the fast-growing gold-mining town of Queenstown was too hectic for the Maori. Though a few Maori men had joined the gold miners’ ranks, others only rarely ventured into the city. Most of them had not chosen to leave their villages and families. They were lost or had gone astray—like the majority of the white men seeking their fortune there. As a result, their behavior hardly differed from that of the whites, and none of them used such stra
nge words.

  “Whaikorero. It’s the art of beautiful speech. And tohunga means ‘master’ or ‘expert.’ My father is one, according to the Maori. They love his court opinions.” Elaine opened the hotel door for William. He declined, however, to go in before her and skillfully held the door open for Elaine with his foot. The girl beamed.

  William remembered that her father was the justice of the peace and that her brother Stephen was studying law. Maybe he should mention his own efforts in that field sometime.

  “I never got that far with my legal studies,” he commented, as though in passing. “And do you speak Maori, Miss O’Keefe?”

  Elaine shrugged. But her eyes had brightened as expected at the mention of his legal studies.

  “Not as well as I should. We’ve always lived rather far from the nearest tribe. But my mother and father speak it well; back in the plains, they went to school with Maori children. I only really see any Maori when there’s a conflict between them and the pakeha here and my father has to arbitrate. And that’s thankfully rare. Did you really study law?”

  William described his three semesters in Dublin in vague terms. But the two had to go their separate ways at that point anyway. When they’d entered the hotel, the draft had set a melodious wind chime ringing. Mary and Laurie appeared at once, happily twittering at William and Elaine. One twin took the laundry from William and could hardly restrain her excitement at his aid, while the other explained to him that his bath was ready. He had to hurry, however, because dinner would soon be served; the other diners were already there and would undoubtedly not want to wait.

  William politely took his leave of Elaine, whose disappointment was clearly visible. He had to make another move soon.

  “What does one do in Queenstown when one would like to invite a young lady to partake in respectable amusement?” he inquired of the younger of the two bankers just before dinner a short time later.

  He would have preferred that Mrs. O’Keefe not overhear, but the old lady had sharp ears. She seemed to focus her attention inconspicuously but still noticeably on the two men’s conversation.

  “That depends on how respectable,” the banker sighed. “And on the lady in question. There are ladies for whom no amusement is virtuous enough.” The man knew what he was talking about. He had been trying for weeks to court their housemate, the young teacher. “You can accompany those girls to church on Sunday at most… which is not necessarily amusement. But you can invite normal young ladies to the community picnic if there’s one taking place. Or maybe even to a square dance when the housewives’ association puts one on. Daphne’s has one every Saturday, of course, but that is not exactly respectable.”

  “Just let little Miss O’Keefe show you the town,” remarked the older banker. “She would no doubt be happy to do that. She grew up here, after all. And a walk is an innocent undertaking.”

  “As long as it does not lead into the woods,” Mrs. O’Keefe interjected drily. “And if the young lady in question really does happen to be my granddaughter, and therefore a very special young lady, you might want to obtain her father’s permission first.”

  “What exactly do you know about this young man?”

  Although it was a different dinner, the subject was the same. In this case, Ruben O’Keefe was questioning his daughter. Because although William had yet to dare to issue an invitation, Elaine had run into him again the very next day. Once more purely “by chance” of course, this time in front of the entrance to the undertaker’s. A poorly chosen meeting place, but Elaine could not think of any other place that would do the trick on short notice. Not only was Frank Baker, the undertaker, an old friend of her father’s, but his wife was a chatterbox. As a result, the whole town knew about Elaine O’Keefe’s relationship with William Martyn—“A fellow from the gold-miners’ camp,” as Mrs. Baker would no doubt have put it.

  “He’s a gentleman, Daddy. Really. His father has an estate in Ireland. And he even studied law,” Elaine declared, the last bit not without pride. That was her ace in the hole.

  “Aha. And then he emigrated to look for gold? There are too many lawyers in Ireland, is that it?” Ruben asked.

  “You wanted to look for gold once too!” his daughter reminded him.

  Ruben smiled. Elaine would not have been a bad attorney herself. He found it difficult to be strict with her because, as much as he loved his sons, he worshipped his daughter. Elaine was, after all, simply too much like his beloved Fleurette. Aside from the color of her eyes and her mischievous little nose, she took entirely after her mother and grandmother. The red shade of her hair differed a bit from that of her female relatives, Elaine’s hair being darker and perhaps even finer and curlier than Fleurette’s or Gwyneira’s. Ruben had passed on his placid gray eyes and his brown hair to his sons alone. Stephen in particular was “just like his father.” His youngest, Georgie, was the adventurous one. By and large they fit together wonderfully: Stephen would follow in Ruben’s footsteps with regards to jurisprudence, while Georgie dreamed of opening branch offices of the O’Kay Warehouse. Ruben was a lucky man.

  “There was a scandal involving William Martyn,” Fleurette remarked casually as she set a casserole on the table. They were having the same thing for dinner as the guests at Helen’s hotel, since Fleurette had asked Mary and Laurie to make her a dinner to take home.

  “Where did you hear that?” Ruben asked as Elaine almost dropped her fork in surprise.

  “What do you mean by ‘scandal’?” she mumbled.

  A glow passed over Fleurette’s still-elfish face. She had always been a talented spy. Ruben could still recall all too well how she had once revealed to him the secret of the O’Keefe and Kiward Stations.

  “Well, I visited the Brewsters this afternoon,” she said offhandedly. Ruben and Fleurette had known Peter and Tepora Brewster since they were children. Peter was an import-export merchant who had once built up the wool trade in the Canterbury Plains. But then his wife, Tepora, a Maori, had inherited land in Otago, and the couple had moved there. They now lived near Tepora’s tribe, ten miles west of Queenstown, and Peter directed the resale of all the gold extracted there across the globe. “They are entertaining visitors from Ireland at the moment. The Chesfields.”

  “And you thought this William Martyn would be well-known throughout all Ireland?” Ruben inquired. “Where did you get that idea?”

  “Well, I was right, wasn’t I?” Fleurette replied mischievously. “All joking aside, of course there was no way for me to know that. But Lord and Lady Chesfield belong unmistakably to the nobility of English origin. And based on what Helen had already found out, the young man comes from similar circles. It’s not as though Ireland is all that big.”

  “And what has Lainie’s sweetheart been up to?” Georgie asked inquisitively, grinning impishly at his sister.

  Elaine exploded. “He’s not my sweetheart!” She swallowed any further remarks though. After all, she, too, wanted to know what scandal clung to William Martyn.

  “Well, I don’t know the specifics,” Fleurette said. “The Chesfields only dropped a few hints on the subject. In any event, Frederic Martyn is quite a powerful landlord. Lainie was right about that. William, however, does not stand to inherit anything. He’s the younger son. And the black sheep of the family besides. He sympathized with the Irish Land League—”

  “That speaks rather well for the boy,” Ruben interjected. “What the English are doing over there in Ireland is a crime. How can you let half the population starve while sitting on full grain stores yourself? The tenant farmers work for starvation wages, and the landlords grow fat. It’s wonderful if the young man is advocating for the farmers!”

  Elaine beamed.

  Her mother, however, looked concerned. “Not when that advocacy degenerates into terrorist activities,” she remarked. “And Lady Chesfield hinted at something along those lines. William Martyn is supposed to have taken part in an assassination attempt.”

  Ruben frowned.
“When was this? As far as I know, the last major uprisings took place in Dublin in 1867. And there has been nothing in the Times recently about individual actions by Fenians or similar groups.” Ruben received English newspapers, though mostly with a delay of a few weeks, and he read them attentively.

  Fleurette shrugged. “It was probably thwarted in time. Or it was only planned, what do I know. This William fellow isn’t sitting in prison, after all. No, he’s publicly courting our daughter using his real name. Oh yes, there was another name mentioned in connection with the matter. Something about a John Morley.”

  Ruben smiled. “Then it’s surely nonsense. John Morley of Blackburn is the chief secretary for Ireland. He resides in Dublin, and he supports home rule. That means he’s on the side of the Irish. It would certainly not be in the interests of the Land League to kill him.”

  Fleurette began to fill the plates. “Like I said, the Chesfields did not express themselves very clearly on the subject,” she said. “It could very well be that there’s nothing to the story. Only one thing is clear: William Martyn is now here and not in his beloved Ireland, which is strange for a patriot. When they emigrate of their own volition, it’s usually to America, where they meet like-minded people. An Irish activist in the gold mines of Queenstown strikes me as rather strange.”

  “But not sinister,” Elaine declared fervently. “Maybe he wants to find gold to buy the land from his father and—”

  “Very likely,” Georgie said. “Why doesn’t he just buy all of Ireland from the Queen?”

  “We should, in any event, see the young man for ourselves,” Ruben said, bringing the subject to a close. “If he’s really to go walking with you”—he winked at Elaine, whose breath nearly caught at the prospect—“and that’s an intention he’s voiced, a little bird told me, you might invite him to dinner. There, and now on to you, Georgie. What did I hear this morning from Miss Carpenter about your math work?”

  Her brother turned to find out what exactly he had heard from Miss Carpenter. Meanwhile, Elaine was so excited that she could hardly eat anything. William Martyn was interested in her! He wanted to go on a walk with her! Maybe even go dancing. Or even to church. Oh, this was marvelous. Everyone would see that she, Elaine O’Keefe, was a sought-after young lady who had managed to catch the eye of the only British gentleman to ever wander into Queenstown. The other girls would burst with envy. And her cousin most of all. This Kura-maro-tini whose beauty everyone spoke of endlessly. And whose visit to Queenstown hid some dark secret that definitely had something to do with a man. What others sorts of dark secrets were there, after all?