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

by Lark, Sarah

  “I know what you’re about to say. The old man has a bad reputation, but the younger one could be different. Helen made the same objection. And I don’t mean to say anything against the boy. It’s only that”—Daphne bit her lip—“you should probably tell Elaine before her wedding what she can expect.”

  “I should do what?” Fleurette asked, blushing. She loved her Ruben dearly and was not ashamed of what they did in bed together. But to talk about that to Elaine?

  “You should tell her what happens between men and women in bed,” Daphne specified.

  “Well, I think she knows the most important things… We all figured it out for ourselves. I mean…” Fleurette did not know what to say.

  Daphne sighed again. “Mrs. O’Keefe, I don’t know how I can express myself more clearly. But let’s just say that not everyone figures out the same thing, and it’s not always a pleasant discovery. Tell her what normally happens between a man and a woman.”

  Fleurette’s conversation with Elaine turned out to be rather embarrassing for both of them and left more questions unanswered than it resolved.

  In its most important aspects, she explained to her daughter, the same thing transpired between a man and a woman as between a stallion and a mare. Only the woman would not be having any foals—at least not literally—and that, naturally, it all took place in the marriage bed in the dark and not in public in broad daylight. Owen and Banshee had, after all, felt no compunctions about that.

  Elaine turned beet red, her mother no less so. By the end, neither of them could speak, and Elaine preferred to put her questions to a less ladylike initiate. That afternoon she went in search of Inger.

  However, her friend was not alone. Inger was chatting in her mother tongue with a pale-blonde girl; Elaine recognized her as one of the new stars of Daphne’s establishment. Elaine turned to leave, but Inger motioned for her to stay.

  “Maren was just leaving anyway. You can sit with us until she goes. Or does that make you uncomfortable?”

  Elaine shook her head. Maren’s cheeks, however, had flushed. Apparently, the two women had been discussing rather salacious matters. As they continued, it became rapidly clear how uncomfortable Maren felt.

  “Can you translate for me?” Elaine finally asked, annoyed. “Or just speak in English. Maren needs to learn the language if she’s going to stay here.”

  The immigrant girls often did not speak English very well, which was one of the reasons that many of them ended up in brothels instead of finding more suitable employment.

  “The subject is a little difficult,” Inger said. “Daphne asked me to explain something to Maren that she… well, that she would not understand in English.”

  “Well, what is it?” Elaine’s curiosity was aroused.

  Inger chewed on her lip. “I don’t know if respectable girls should hear it.”

  Elaine rolled her eyes. “Sounds like it has to do with men,” she said. “And I’m getting married soon, so you can just—”

  Inger laughed. “Then you definitely shouldn’t hear it.”

  “It’s about how woman not have babies,” Maren said in broken English, looking intently at the ground.

  Elaine laughed. “Well, you’re an expert on that,” she remarked, looking at Inger’s stomach. The young woman was expecting her first child in a matter of weeks.

  Inger giggled. “To know how to avoid having babies, you first have to know how they’re made.”

  “My mother says it’s like between a stallion and a mare,” Elaine said.

  Maren snorted with laughter. Her English was evidently not all that bad.

  Inger laughed too. “Men and women generally do it lying down,” she clarified. “And they look at each other while they do it, if you understand what I mean. You can do it other ways too, but… well, they’re not suitable for a lady.”

  “Why not? My mother says that it’s nice… at least when all goes well,” Elaine said. “Though if it’s so nice, why don’t all girls… um…” She cast a meaningful look at Maren’s “uniform,” a red dress with a wide neckline.

  “I not find nice,” Maren said.

  “Well, not with strangers. But with the man you love, then it’s nice,” Inger said, qualifying her friend’s statement. “Men always think it’s nice though. Otherwise, they wouldn’t pay for it. And if you want to have a baby”—she stroked her stomach—“it’s unavoidable.”

  Elaine was confused. “So, how does it work then? I thought you had babies when you did it like…” She trailed off, glancing at Callie, who was letting Maren pet her just then.

  Inger raised her eyes to heaven.

  “Lainie, you’re not a horse or a dog,” she said sternly and began to repeat in English the speech she had just made to Maren. “Women conceive children when they lie with men exactly in between their bleedings. Exactly between. Daphne gives her girls that time off. They only have to sing and dance or work in the bar on those days.”

  “But then you would only need to do it at that time,” Elaine said. “At least if you wanted a baby.”

  Inger rolled her eyes. “Your husband won’t think that way. He’ll always want it. I can promise you that much.”

  “And when still do in tese days?” Maren did not seem to have understood everything either.

  “Then you make a rinse of warm water and vinegar. Immediately after. Wash everything out of yourself even if it burns, and use as much vinegar as you can handle. Then do it again the next day. True, Daphne says it’s not sure to work, but it’s worth a try. She says it always helped her. She never had to have anything done away with.”

  Elaine did not dare ask what Inger meant by “done away with.” Just the thought of washing the most intimate region of her body with vinegar made her shudder. But she would never have to do that. She wanted Thomas’s children, after all.

  5

  A storm was brewing over Kiward Station, and William Martyn spurred his horse on to try to make it back to the house before the rain started. A tumult was raging inside him similar to the one building in the cloud formation above, which had begun sending powerful gusts of wind across the Canterbury Plains. The foremost cloud suddenly obscured the sun, and a thunderclap crashed and rumbled dully over the land. The light over the farm grew strangely sallow, bordering on ghostly, and the hedges and fences cast threatening shadows. Then the first bolt of lightning whipped through the atmosphere, seeming to electrify the air. William rode faster, but did not manage to leave his anger behind. On the contrary, the harder the wind blew, the more he wished he had the power to fling thunderbolts, to give expression to his rage and disappointment.

  As soon as he returned to Kura, he would have to contain his temper. Only then would he have any chance of persuading her to take his side now and again when it came to the interests of the farm. If she would only be willing to more firmly assert her—and therefore his—future claim over the farm! But he was completely on his own in that respect. She did not seem to hear his complaints about the intractable shepherds, the lazy Maori, and the recalcitrant foremen. She merely listened to him with an indifferent expression on her face and answered with non sequiturs. Kura still lived only for her music—and she seemed not to have given up on her dream of performing in Europe. Whenever William informed her of a new slight by Gwyneira or James McKenzie, Kura consoled him with remarks like: “But dearest, we’ll be in England soon enough anyway.”

  Had he really once believed that this girl was rational?

  Still in a temper, he steered his horse between the neatly fenced-in pastures, where woolly ewes were feasting on massive quantities of hay, unperturbed by the weather. This despite the fact that there was plenty of grass adjacent to the farm! Though the spring sun seemed fainthearted, there had already been the occasional hot day. All around the lake and the Maori settlement, the grass stood high from the previous year and was still growing appreciably. For that reason, William had given Andy McAran the order to herd the ewes there. But the fellow had si
mply ignored his order, and, even more infuriatingly, set Gwyneira on him. And she had cut William down to size right there in the cow barn.

  “William, I make decisions like that, or James does, if necessary. You shouldn’t have anything to do with it. The sheep are about to lamb, and we have to keep an eye on them. You can’t just send them out on their own.”

  “Why not? We always did it that way in Ireland. We sent one or two shepherds with them, and then off into the hills they went. And the Maori live there anyway. They can keep an eye on the sheep,” William said, defending himself.

  “The Maori want the sheep munching on their gardens as little as we do,” Gwyneira explained. “We don’t use the land around their houses, around the lake where they live, or the rock formations we call the ‘stone warriors’ for pastureland. Those are holy places for them.”

  “You’re telling me that we’re neglecting several acres of the best pastureland because the darkies over there pray to a couple of rocks?” William asked belligerently. “A man like Gerald Warden agreed to such nonsense?”

  Over the last few months, William had heard a great deal about Gerald Warden, and his respect for the founder of the farm had grown. It seemed like the man had had style; the manor was proof of that. Surely, he’d likewise had the livestock husbandry and his workers under control. Gwyneira let too much slide for William’s liking.

  Her eyes flashed angrily, as they did every time William mentioned the old sheep baron.

  “Gerald Warden generally knew how to pick his battles!” she said gruffly before continuing in a more conciliatory tone. “I know you mean well, William. Just think things through a little more. You read the paper too, after all, and you know what’s happening in the other colonies. Native uprisings, massacres, military occupation. It might as well be war over there. The Maori, by contrast, are soaking civilization up like sponges. They’re learning English and listening to what our missionaries have to say. They even sit in our parliament, and all that in less than twenty years! And I’m supposed to disturb this peace to save a bit of hay? And that doesn’t even take into account the fact that the stones in the green grass have a very ornamental look to them.”

  Gwyneira’s face took on a wistful expression, though she did not, of course, reveal to William that her daughter, Fleurette, had been conceived in that very circle of “stone warriors.”

  William looked at her as though she were out of her mind. “I thought Kiward Station already had problems with the Maori,” he remarked. “You in particular.”

  The fights between Tonga and Gwyneira were the stuff of legend.

  Gwyneira snorted. “My differences of opinion with Chief Tonga have nothing to do with our nationalities. We would argue even if he were an Englishman… Or an Irishman. I’m learning about the obstinacy of those people as well. The English and the Irish fight over things that are just as childish as what you want to start a fight about here. So please, show some restraint!”

  William had backed down. What else could he do? But confrontations like that one were becoming more common, with James McKenzie as well. Fortunately, he was absent at the moment, as he was attending his granddaughter Elaine’s wedding in Queenstown. William wished the girl much happiness, and her fiancé seemed to be a good match. He would not have been against going to the wedding with Kura to congratulate them and could not understand why Gwyneira had rejected the idea so vehemently. Nor could he comprehend why she was missing the wedding. He would have been able to take care of Kiward Station on his own. He might even have been able to get the workers to pick up the pace.

  He was still having trouble with the employees. They were so different from in Ireland, where he had always enjoyed a good relationship with his tenants. In Ireland the tenants feared their landlords and requited every loosening of the reins with gratitude and affection. Here, on the other hand, if William handled one of the shepherds roughly, that shepherd sometimes did not think it necessary to even announce his resignation. He simply packed his things, rode to the main house to collect the rest of his pay, and looked for a job on a neighboring farm.

  The old hands like Andy McAran and Poker Livingston were even worse. They just let his outbursts wash over them. William sometimes daydreamed about firing them as soon as Kura came of age and handed the management of the farm over to him. But the workers did not even have reason to fear that. Andy and Poker, for example, had female acquaintances of long duration in Haldon. Andy McAran’s friend, a widow, even owned a small farm. They could find shelter there in no time. And the Maori were a problem all of their own. They disappeared as soon as William got loud, simply leaving him in the lurch. They would appear again the next day—or not. They did whatever they liked, and Gwyneira let them.

  “Fire!”

  William had been trotting along lost in thought, his head with its wide-brimmed hat lowered against the rain, which had begun to beat loudly and powerfully, drowning out all other sounds. But suddenly William discerned hoofbeats and a high-pitched voice behind him. A Maori youth was racing toward him on an unsaddled horse bridled only with a cord around its neck.

  “Quickly, quickly, Mr. Martyn! Lightning struck the cow barn, and the steers have overrun the fences! I’m going to get help. Ride quickly! It’s burning!”

  The boy did not await William’s response and instead galloped on toward the house. William turned his horse and spurred it to a gallop. The cow barns lay by the lake and contained several herds of steers and cows. If the animals really were running around, then it was possible the Maori and their holy pastures were going to have company after all.

  Indeed, he soon detected the smell of something burning. The lightning strike must have been powerful. The flames were already spreading from the feedlot despite the rain, and mayhem reigned all around the barns. Workers were running about in the thick smoke, trying to free the last, miserably lowing cattle. Gwyneira McKenzie was with them. She burst out, coughing, from the barn, dipped a cloth in a bucket of water, held it to her face, and ran back inside. There did not yet appear to be any danger of the building collapsing, but the animals in the barn could suffocate. The Maori men—the entire village had arrived with lightning speed—were organizing a chain of buckets from the well to the barn; the women and children had formed a second chain to the lake. The loose cattle were running in all directions, trampling the ground into a bog and leveling their paddock fences. Jack McKenzie and a few other boys tempted death by standing in their way but could do nothing to halt the panicked animals. Not that most of them were in any direct danger, as practically all of the barns’ stalls had been opened by then. Only a few dairy cows and bulls were still penned up inside—and Gwyneira was attempting at that very moment to free them, along with a few remaining heifers.

  “William, go let out the bulls!” Gwyneira called to him, screaming wildly against the wind. She had just emerged for the second time, dragging a cow behind her that seemed to feel safer inside. “That’s where we need people who know something about livestock.”

  William had wanted to manage the bucket chains and encourage the people to work faster, but he turned with trepidation in the direction of the bulls’ stalls.

  “Get to it!” roared Andy McAran, taking William’s horse without asking after William had finally dismounted.

  “Come on, Gwyn, we’ve got enough heifers. We need good riders to herd the steers in. Otherwise, they’ll level the Maori village like they did the paddocks.” The old farmhand dug his heels roughly into the flanks of William’s horse, which seemed to have as little desire to plunge into the tumult as its rider. However, the situation was becoming critical. While the boys held the heifers and dairy cows in check, the young steers had long since been on the move. William observed Gwyneira leaving the cows to other helpers and leaping onto her horse. She rode alongside Andy toward the Maori camp. Her cob mare did not need to be spurred on, seeming to have been waiting for the chance to leave the burning buildings behind.

  William finall
y approached the barn, annoyed at Andy McAran for taking possession of his horse. Why could the cad not release the bulls himself and let William ride off with Gwyneira?

  Meanwhile, flames were pouring out of the dairy cows’ barn, but the cows were already trotting about outside. Two Maori women who seemed to know what they were doing had freed the last of them and were now drawing them into a paddock that their men were in the process of jury-rigging. The boys were driving the heifers in the same direction. The animals had calmed down significantly, and the rain and thunder slowly abated.

  William stepped into the barn, but Poker Livingston held him back.

  “Take a rag first and hold it over your nose or you’ll breathe in smoke!” The old farmhand then ran back into the barn, directly toward the stamping, roaring bulls. The animals could now see the flames and were panicking in their pens. William began working on the first pen’s lock. He didn’t feel entirely safe stepping up to the raging monster to untie it, but if Poker thought…

  “No, don’t go in!” thundered Poker, running among the pens. “Haven’t you ever worked with cattle before? Those beasts’ll kill you if you get in their pens now. Here, come and hold me. I’m going to try and undo the chain from above.”

  Poker clambered up the stall and balanced precariously on the thin wall. As long as he held tight to a beam, it was fine, but to undo the chain, he had to lean forward and have his hands free. He would have to let go of the cloth covering his mouth too, though the smoke in that area was not overpowering yet.

  William climbed onto the wood divider as well, straddled it and held Poker’s belt tightly. Poker dangled perilously but kept his balance as he fumbled with the first bull’s chain. Both men had to keep a watchful eye to avoid being struck by the mighty animal’s horns.

  “Open the pen, Maaka!” Poker called to a Maori boy who stood ready in front of the stall. The boy who had just been driving the cattle with Jack ducked behind the gate in a flash as the bull burst forth from his pen.