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

by Lark, Sarah

  “And this Patrick? Your father’s driver? He saw how Sideblossom treated you.”

  Timothy turned the event over and over in his mind. It could not be that Elaine was completely helpless.

  “No, he didn’t see how Thomas beat me. And what’s more, at the moment I shot, I wasn’t being threatened. Naturally, Thomas would have killed me later. But there’s no such thing as ‘preventative self-defense.’ Don’t strain yourself, Tim. I’ve spent whole nights thinking it through. If I take the stand, and the judge believes even some of what I have to say, maybe I won’t end up on the gallows. But I’d be guaranteed to spend the rest of my life in jail, and that has little allure for me.”

  Timothy sighed and tried to move his leg into a different position without disturbing Elaine. The weather was gradually turning inclement. Elaine noticed it too. She kissed Timothy lightly as she rolled out of his arms and began to gather up the picnic things.

  Timothy wondered whether he should speak his mind. It would undoubtedly distress Elaine. But he went ahead anyway.

  “If we want to keep things a secret, that will lead to complications in our personal life,” Timothy said. Though he had spoken in a calm voice, he unleashed an explosion.

  Elaine spun around. Her face contracted, and she held the empty wine bottle as though she wanted to hurl it at him. “You don’t have to marry me, you know!” she spat. “Maybe it was a good thing that we talked about it beforehand.”

  Timothy ducked and made a placating gesture. “Hey! Now, don’t scream at me like that. Of course I want to marry you. More than anything in the world. I just mean that you can never be fully secure here. You may be able to hide from the world as a barroom pianist but not as Mrs. Timothy Lambert. The Lamberts are businessmen, Lainie; we keep an open house. The papers write about the Lambert Mine. You’ll have to engage in charity work, and with every public appearance, the risk of your being discovered will grow. What did you want to do about your parents? Never talk to them again?”

  Elaine shook her head wildly. “I thought I might let another year pass, and then I’d write them. And now that we want to get married—”

  “Now that we will get married,” Timothy said.

  “I wanted to write them right after the wedding. ‘From: Mrs. Lambert.’ Then nothing could go wrong.” Elaine went over to her grazing horse and took it by the halter.

  “You think someone is checking your parents’ mail?” Timothy asked. “You’re going to drive yourself crazy.”

  “What am I supposed to do then?” she asked, disheartened. “I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “But perhaps you could imagine living with me somewhere else?” The idea had just come to him, but the more he thought about it, the more attractive it seemed. “In England, for example. There are a great many coal mines there. I could look for a job. If not at a mine, maybe at a university. I’m a very good engineer.”

  Elaine was touched. She sat down next to him again, pushing Banshee away, who all of a sudden seemed to think that the best grass was under their blanket.

  “You would really leave everything behind for me? This country, your mine?”

  “Hah, my mine. You saw at Christmas what my father thinks of me. And that unspeakable Mr. Weber. If I stayed here in my wheelchair, I could sit and watch my father run the mine into the ground. It looks pretty bad, Matt thinks. We’ve been showing big losses since the accident.”

  “But Weber and Biller looked at Caleb the same way,” Elaine said. “And Florence when she tried to get involved herself.”

  Timothy gave a tired smiled. “Get involved? Florence Weber speaks more knowledgeably about coal mining than my father and the elder Biller together. There’s no question the girl is a pain in the neck, but she knows a great deal about running a mine. If she only learned that from reading books, she deserves all the more respect. Still, their situation can’t be compared to mine. Caleb knows nothing, and no one takes Florence seriously because she’s a woman. But their situation will change the moment she marries Caleb and discreetly takes the reins. If Caleb begins to make constructive suggestions out of nowhere, his old man will listen to him; count on it. But I’ll be lame forever, Lainie. My father will look at me as an invalid until the sun burns out.” He petted Callie. “What do you think of Wales? There’s as much rain as there is here, lots of mines, lots of sheep.”

  “Lots of cob stallions,” Elaine said, laughing. “Banshee would love it. My grandmother is from there. Gwyneira Silkham of—”

  “The grandmother who’s married to the grandfather who was pulled out of the mudhole by a horse?” Timothy asked. He was fighting doggedly with his leg splints.

  Elaine nodded and brought Banshee into position to help him up. Both of them laughed as he gripped the horse’s tail.

  “That’s the one.”

  Elaine was elated not to have to lie anymore. It was wonderful to be able to tell Timothy about the grand love of her grandparents Gwyneira and James, and about her parents’ flight to Queenstown. It was good not to be alone anymore.

  Timothy wanted to set the wedding date in the middle of winter, but his mother was dead set against it. Though she had accepted that she could not stop her son from marrying a barmaid, she felt that, if it had to happen, it should not be a hastily thrown-together affair.

  “Otherwise, it will look like you had to get married,” she remarked with a stern look at Elaine’s flat stomach.

  Before a wedding, she lectured her son, came an engagement. With a party and announcements and presents—in short, much fuss and fanfare. They could talk about the wedding in a few months. Summer would best, and the celebration would be more enjoyable that time of year anyway.

  “Why not right on the anniversary of the mining accident?” grumbled Timothy when he was alone with Elaine later. “It will be completely inappropriate for us to celebrate anything around then for years to come. But my mother has no concept of that. She’s long since forgotten the miners who died.”

  “I don’t mind going ahead with an engagement first,” Elaine said. It was all the same to her. On the contrary, the longer she could put off sharing a house with Nellie Lambert, the better. Besides, at the moment she was enjoying her life with Timothy just the way it was. He was still doing his utmost to walk and ride more easily as quickly as possible, but he did not exert himself as tenaciously as before. When he had finished his training program in the morning, he treated himself to rest in the afternoon—or at least relaxation. As a rule, that began with Elaine cooking for him. She had rediscovered the domestic side that William had briefly awakened in her. Then they would end up in Elaine’s bed, first for an afternoon nap but later for other activities.

  It did Timothy good to be coddled. He put on weight, and his face lost its strained expression. His laugh lines returned, and his eyes once again sparkled as waggishly as they had before. Though he could not dance yet, he was becoming ever more confident on his horse. A special mounting block had been placed in Madame Clarisse’s stables—Jay Hankins, the smith, had thought ahead. Often Elaine would pick up Timothy in the gig, no matter how sour Nellie looked. And Roly had recently been practicing driving it. The boy was often in as much of a hurry as the horse, Fellow indeed being too lively for pulling a carriage. But when Roly was a sufficient distance from the horse’s hooves and teeth he still feared, the now fourteen-year-old enjoyed his role as a fearless carriage driver. The two-wheeled carriage he had found in the Lamberts’ wagon depot leaped wildly over sticks and stones, and Timothy was generally barely hanging on by the time he arrived at Madame Clarisse’s.

  “I might just as well gallop here on my horse,” he moaned, rubbing his sore hip. “But Roly enjoys it tremendously, and he needs to let off steam from time to time. He gets teased enough for being a ‘Mister of Mercy.’”

  Timothy began once again to take part in the town gossip and jokes. His friends greeted him at their regular table in the pub. Madame Clarisse made a grand production out of replacing the ha
rd chairs around the table in the corner with comfortable armchairs.

  “A special service for our most loyal customers,” she remarked, “normally reserved only for the gentlemen waiting for our ladies’ company.” The armchairs had originated in a waiting room on the second floor. “Make yourselves right at home.”

  Ernie, Matt, and Jay played along as they took their seats in their special “den” with big gestures and even bigger cigars and glasses of whiskey. Timothy was grateful. He stood out enough already with his crutches. He could hardly make it through town or the barroom without people asking how he was doing.

  In contrast to his status among the mine owners, the miners’ respect for him had risen since the accident. Everyone had followed his long battle for recovery under Berta Leroy’s regimen, and even the new miners had been told first thing how the mine owner’s son was the first one to enter the mine after the accident and how he had attempted to dig the men out with his own hands, risking his own life. Ever since then, Timothy had become one of them. Someone who knew who knew how dangerous their living was, and the degree of fear and insecurity they lived with each day. For that reason, they greeted him respectfully, occasionally asking his advice or asking him to intercede against a foreman or the mine’s management on their behalf. Unfortunately, in these latter instances he had to disappoint them. Timothy’s influence over his father remained weak, and the Lambert Mine was hardly in a position to be doing its men any favors these days. Matt increasingly entered the pub with a troubled face and described the business’s catastrophic financial situation.

  “It all goes back to our not getting enough new workers. ‘Lambert pays bad, and the mine’s dangerous.’ That’s the first thing that every recruit hears. And that’s not going to change either. Your father has lost any support he had from the workers. The assistance he offered the families of the victims was a joke. It hardly covered the burial costs, and the wives and children have had to rely on charity since then. Not to mention the total lack of decision making. We need to rebuild, invest money, and modernize everything down to the last mining lamp. But nothing’s happened. Your father is of the opinion that he needs to make it out of the red first before he can think about investing. But that’s the wrong way to go about things.”

  “Particularly when he continues to invest his money in whiskey.” Timothy sighed. He knew that he should not speak so familiarly with his employees, but Matt had to smell the boss’s alcohol fumes. “By the time he comes home at noon, he’s usually already drunk. Then he starts up again in the afternoon. How’s he supposed to make sensible decisions like that?”

  “The only solution would be to hand the running of the mine over to you as soon as possible,” Matt mused. “Then we’d hardly know what to do with all the workers who’d come running, and a bank loan surely wouldn’t be a problem, either.”

  “Are things so bad that we need a loan from the bank?” Timothy asked, alarmed. “I thought my father had cash reserves?”

  “From what I understand, those have been stuck in a rail line that, for the moment at least, is sinking in the mud,” Matt murmured. “But I’m not sure. He hasn’t given me much detailed information about his finances.”

  When Timothy looked into the matter afterward, he was rather shocked. Naturally, Lambert’s investment in the rail lines would pay off someday—railroad construction was a sure win—but until that day came, they were more or less broke. The modernization of the most important mining structures would indeed have to be financed with a loan—which shouldn’t be a problem since there was plenty of collateral, after all—but could Marvin Lambert still get credit from the bankers of Greymouth?

  When he spoke to his father about it, another serious fight ensued. Timothy was on the verge of booking passage to London right away.

  “And then to Cardiff, Lainie! We’ll skip all the theatrics of an engagement and the rest and we’ll marry in Wales. I have contacts there. So we could find a place to stay if the Silkhams don’t want to open their doors. Just imagine your grandmother’s surprise when you send her a card from her old homeland.”

  Elaine merely laughed, but Timothy was almost entirely serious. For a while now, it had ceased to be solely the mine and his anger at his father that robbed him of sleep; he was now also concerned for Elaine. She had told him all about her family, and he was scared to high heaven just thinking about it. Sheep barons in the Canterbury Plains, a trading house and a hotel in Otago, connections to the most widely known families of the South Island, and finally, the strange story with her cousin Kura, who had ended up in Greymouth too, of all places. Someone was eventually bound to recognize Elaine, especially if she looked as strikingly like her mother and grandmother as she claimed. Perhaps nobody took a second look at a barroom pianist, but it would be perfectly normal to assume that a Mrs. Lambert had connections to the country’s best families. Someone was sure to notice the resemblance and ask Elaine about it. Perhaps even at this engagement party that was looming in their near future. Timothy would have liked to ship off with Elaine to Cardiff at the earliest possible moment. He felt as if he could hear a bomb’s fuse sizzling.

  “Still nothing from Westport?”

  John Sideblossom had not offered his informant any whiskey, but he was drinking a second glass himself as he spoke. Not only were his investments in the railroad not proving profitable, but no one had heard a thing about his fugitive daughter-in-law. John Sideblossom, by now almost completely gray-haired, slammed his fist angrily into the table.

  “Damn it, I was so sure she would show up on the West Coast. Dunedin is too close to Queenstown, she’d stick out like a sore thumb in Christchurch, and I’ve had an eye on Blenheim since the start. I even have the ferries to the North Island being watched. There’s no way she can have escaped.”

  “You’re still not looking at every corner of the country,” the man said. No longer young, he was a typical Coaster in worn-out leather pants and a dirty waxed jacket that he had worn during his stints whaling, seal hunting, and gold mining. His features were hard and weathered, his eyes bright blue and alert. John knew why he paid him. Nothing got past this fellow. “She could be on some farm or among the Maori.”

  “I’ve checked the farms,” John explained coolly. He hated when people doubted his competence. “Unless she’s holed up at Kiward Station. But I doubt that’s the case; otherwise, George Greenwood wouldn’t be casting about for her too. The McKenzies are just as in the dark as I am. As for the Maori, something tells me she hasn’t been wandering around with them for two years. If for no other reason than that they don’t wander for two years at a time. They always come back to their villages. Of course they could pass the hussy from one tribe to another. But that doesn’t fit; that’s beyond their level of thinking. No, I’d swear she’s taken up residence in some gold-miners’ camp or coal-mining backwater. Probably in some whorehouse. Westport, Greymouth—”

  “Since you mention Greymouth…” The man felt around in the pocket of his raincoat. “I know you have your own man there. But this was is in the paper a few days ago. It probably doesn’t have anything to do with our girl, but it did strike me as funny. The names are so similar.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Marvin Lambert of Lambert Manor in Greymouth would like to announce the engagement of their son, Timothy Lambert, to Lainie Keefer of Auckland.

  John Sideblossom read with furrowed brow.

  “Marvin Lambert. I know him a bit, from the old days on the West Coast.”

  He also knew the man in front of him from that wild time in his life. But unlike John Sideblossom and Marvin Lambert, fate had not been kind to this man. As though he had just been reminded of that fact, John raised the bottle and finally poured his informant a glass of whiskey. As he poured, he thought, and his eyes took on an almost febrile gleam.

  “‘Lainie,’” he mumbled. “That fits. Her family called her that. ‘Keefer,’ hmm. Well, it’s an interesting possibility, if nothing else. I’ll look into it.” John grinned
sardonically. “Who knows, maybe I’ll pay this engagement party a surprise visit.”

  Satisfied, he filled his glass once more before counting out the man’s pay. He considered including a bonus, but then decided a small gesture would suffice.

  “Take the bottle with you when you go,” he declared, giving the whiskey bottle a tap so that it rolled in the visitor’s direction. “I think we’ll be seeing each other on the West Coast.”

  After the man had left, John Sideblossom read the engagement announcement again.

  “Lainie Keefer.” It was possible; indeed, more than likely. He considered whether to set out for Greymouth right away. He felt the thrill of the hunt start to burn within him, just as he had when he set after James McKenzie. But he needed to keep a cool head. This bird would not fly away; it felt too safe in its nest for that.

  Mr. and Mrs. Marvin Lambert of Lambert Manor in Greymouth would like to announce the engagement of their son…

  The old Coaster gnashed his teeth. Elaine must feel herself to be quite secure to agree to an announcement like this. But he would catch her and rip the birdie from her nest.

  John closed his fist around the newspaper sheet. He crumpled it into a ball before ripping it into little pieces.

  2

  William Martyn had had enough of the Maori. It wasn’t that he didn’t like them. On the contrary. They were gracious hosts, generally good-natured, and were clearly making every effort not to irritate the genteel pakeha with customs that made him uncomfortable. On the West Coast, William had followed his usual strategy of demonstrating respectability by maintaining an air of aloofness. Indeed, the Maori spoke English with him as much as possible, imitated his gestures and expressions, and loved tinkering with his sewing machine. After two weeks of traveling to three different tribes, however, William had had his fill of their haka—their long stories told with great gesticulations whose gist he could only inadequately grasp—and their flavorful but repetitive food: sweet potatoes and fish followed by fish and sweet potatoes.