by Bowes, K T
“Sshhh,” Hana whispered. “You handled yourself with dignity today. It would have been easier to just lay Kane out on the floor but you didn’t and that took guts, Loge. I’m proud of you.”
“But I left you,” he said, pain twinkling brightly in his irises. “After everything we agreed, I ran. I can’t seem to break the habit of a lifetime and it gets to me.”
Hana shook her head. “For what it’s worth, I understand why you walked away. I don’t think you ran, as much as went away to think. You were coming back, weren’t you?”
Logan nodded. “Of course I was!”
Hana smiled. “Then let’s not count it just this once. But if you do it again, I’ll break your legs.” Her lips tweaked upwards and Logan’s breath caught in his lungs because her eyes were deadly serious.
Logan stood and gingerly lifted the small bundle from her mother and held her awkwardly like she was made of glass. Hana felt tears spring to her eyes. It made the most gratifying picture, her husband and her daughter. For eight months, she’d had the baby all to herself. Hana excused herself to the bathroom and when she returned, she stood for a moment and watched her husband. He held the baby and looked out of the window at the dark brooding sky. He murmured something gently to her.
Hana listened and realised he spoke Māori to the child and then she heard him sniff and realised he was crying.
Du Rose Legacy
Chapter 37
On New Year’s Eve, Hana felt able to make the journey up to Logan’s precious plot of land within sight of the Tasman Sea. It was a bright clear day and they swaddled the baby up in her new clothes, courtesy of Aunty Liza who only patronised the very best of labels. “That baby outfit is probably worth more than the Jeep,” Logan joked, urging Jack’s ancient vehicle up the slope.
He unlocked the gate between the bumpy old track and the developer’s new road and they drove up in relative comfort. Hana was aware of the dirt trail running parallel with them about five hundred metres to her left, the memory of her hurried, bewildered descent still fresh in her mind.
“You ok?” her husband asked, surprised to see her shiver in the sunshine. Hana nodded without certainty.
About three kilometres in they came to what had been planned as a cul-de-sac for the rich houses that would now never be built. Logan got out and offered Hana his hand and she helped him fix the baby sling to his broad chest. It looked funny on him, a pale blue set of straps emblazoned with teddies against his Swazi shirt and cowboy hat. Hana slipped the baby’s legs through the gaps and settled her; the tea cosy hat at a jaunty angle on her head and the little girl snuggled down deep with her fists curled next to her face. “It makes you look softer,” Hana joked to her husband, “having your daughter strapped to your chest. You’re going to drive all the women even crazier.”
“Don’t care about any other women.” He smiled, his face lighter than it had looked since Miriam and Reuben’s joint tangihanga at the marae after Christmas which saw them finally united in death, buried together on the mountain.
They started off up the rise, Logan holding Hana’s fingers tightly over the rougher going, one hand guiding her and the other resting under the precious bundle at his breast. Hana grew puffed, aware she wasn’t as fit as she used to be.
Logan turned to the left and Hana saw the fence had been pulled down and tossed aside so they could step across the boundary. They walked slowly through the clearing past the kauri tree, to take in the view from the top. It was spectacular. “It’s good to come back up here. I needed to get that image out of my head of being face down in the dirt in agony,” Hana sighed. “I needed to come back when the sun was shining and the world was back in order.”
Logan nodded. “I wonder sometimes if it will ever be in order again.”
“It will,” Hana promised, pressing his fingers against her lips. “It just takes time. It’s early days yet.”
The green countryside stretched out before them, tumbling over the ragged cliff edge ahead to greet the Tasman Sea in the distance. There was salt on the breeze even from that far away. The couple sat next to each other on their favourite rock without talking for a long while, Hana thinking about her first visit to this place so many months ago. It felt like only yesterday.
“What shall we call her?” Logan asked, speaking hesitantly into the peace.
Hana had given it a lot of thought but wanted to hear his ideas first.
“What about your mother’s name?” he offered.
Hana shook her head. It was a generous suggestion, but she declined for reasons she didn’t really understand. “What about Miriam?” she asked.
“I did think about it,” Logan said, adjusting his position, “but she was cursed with such unhappiness all her life. I didn’t want to play it forward.”
Hana understood and wondered if that had been her reasoning with her own mum - bringing a difficult past into a child’s future.
“What was your grandmother’s name?” she asked, “the lady who gave you this land?”
Logan stared out into the far distance. He saw a woman in her middle years, black haired, brown skinned and delicate. She ran the family with a rod of iron and had bones as fragile as a bird’s. She always wore black, her head covered in a scarf as she fixed fences or herded cattle with the men. She was a matriarch with a philandering, wasteful husband whom she watched her own sons mimicking and she kept the property together despite her men. In Logan she saw a new beginning, a grandson who loved the land and who would fight for it and not over it.
‘Rebuild your house, Logan Du Rose,’ came her whisper down the ages.
Rueben, her favourite son, should have inherited half the land but his indiscretion with his brother’s wife dismayed his mother. Her angry tears had stained the very land Logan now sat on. Yet she could not be sorry. Logan was her delight. His father might have damaged his own mana, but the son was filled to the brim with it. He was a rangatira - royalty - and the old lady saw her own tribal-leader-father reflected in him.
The coded message to a small boy through her will was not of wood, bricks and mortar. It was not that kind of house she dreamed of. It was about a family, a legacy, a house in the truest sense. Hers was flawed, she knew that. She saw death coming like a spectre of doom, washing down from the hills and sucking the life out of everything in its path, killing and stealing. And it had.
She witnessed Reuben’s hunger for his son. She saw the hand of Strife, its shadow down the ages hanging over her like a threat. With certainty, she knew it would arrive long after her flesh had melted back into Papatuanuku’s earth and her bones lay dusty in the family plot at the urupa.
She taught Logan French and Māori, giving him an understanding of whose genes he carried, a love of the land and a desire to preserve it all. He spent every waking moment possible in her company and her death was like losing a limb. He sat next to her on the cliff top as her heart stopped beating prematurely, long before she was ready to be called home to Hawaiki. The boy sat with her until it grew dark and cold. He sat with her until they were found.
“She had what many thought was a strange name,” Logan said, looking sideways at his wife, his long eyelashes dusting his cheek. “Her father was a chief and he gave it to her. It set her apart. Her name meant ‘to be renewed’...but...you wouldn’t like it.”
Hana raised her eyebrows and glared at Logan, defying him to keep it from her or to form opinions about what she would or wouldn’t like. He relented. “It was Phoenix,” he said quietly, “Phoenix Du Rose. She married her cousin and kept her mother’s family name.”
Hana peeked into the sling where the little girl nestled quietly against her daddy’s chest. Her cheeks were flushed from the altitude and dark eyelashes had begun to sprout around her huge eyes. Hana stroked the soft baby cheek. “Hello, Phoenix Du Rose,” she whispered.
Logan sat with his arm around his wife, sensing his child’s heartbeat through his chest wall and felt a familiar contentment swallow him up. It had
abandoned him the day his grandmother died and never returned, despite having sought it the world over. In his momentary connection with a frightened girl on a tube train over two decades ago, he glimpsed it with an insatiable hunger and pursued it, and her, until he felt dead inside.
Peace descended on the land in acknowledgement of the child whose birth had taken place a few metres away, linking her mana to the dirt on which she first entered the world. She was irrevocably tied to it now, her afterbirth nourishing the roots of the sacred kauri tree. One day her body would complete the circle, but not for a lone time. The old tui bird warbled and called from the top of the kauri tree and watched with interest as two ancient forces met, the God of Heaven and Māori ancient lore. Tangata whenua - the people of the land rejoiced as an old lady’s coded prophecy came to pass.
Here is a sample from the next book in the series,
The New Du Rose Matriarch
Chapter 1
Hana Du Rose pushed the pram across the soccer field without seeing in front of her, willing the baby to stay asleep. After twenty odd years of undisturbed slumber, she had forgotten how sleep deprivation felt and wasn’t enjoying the reminder. The child fretted, raising her tiny hands next to her ears and moving her head in quick movements. “Come on, hush,” Hana crooned to the child, placing one foot in front of the other in a haze of misery. “I can’t do this,” she hissed in desperation. “It’s worse than I remember.”
Baby Phoenix Du Rose spent the entire night crying, taxing her mother beyond her ability to stay sane. Instinct told Hana it was a reaction to her six week inoculations and would pass, an opinion shared by the midwife. “She’ll be fine,” came the cool voice through the mobile phone. “It happens sometimes. Just keep feeding her and give her the baby painkiller syrup at regular intervals. I don’t think she needs hospital treatment.”
“It’s fine for your father though, isn’t it? Bet he had a lovely night’s sleep,” Hana grumbled, irritated her husband went straight from teaching to a night duty at the school boarding house. Hana had paced the worn lino floor of the scruffy two bedroom staff unit, alternately soothing Phoenix and trying to comfort her lonely self. She left the unit at first light and walked the grounds for the last two hours. “I’m a rubbish mother,” she whispered. “I’m just too old.”
Phoenix tossed and groaned in the pram in answer and Hana rubbed at the tired green eyes aching in her head. She bumped the pram across the pitch and onto the cricket field, hoping Phoenix would go into a deeper sleep. “It worked with Bo and Izzie,” she sighed, relishing the knowledge her older children had offspring of their own to keep them awake.
Phoenix’s tiny cheeks were pink and her breathing full of little hitches, a physical reminder of her crying. She brought her knees up to her chest in pain and opened her mouth, forcing Hana to push the pram quicker, distress adding itself to the guilt of failed parenting. Hana had wanted to vomit as the needle penetrated the spindly little olive-toned leg, feeling a traitor as she held onto her child and allowed the atrocity. The cry of misery was instant and broke Hana’s heart. She ended up feeding her to quieten her while having an embarrassing conversation with the nurse about contraception.
“Here you go. You can take this while breastfeeding.” The nurse sounded kind, returning with a prescription.
After the past twenty-four hours Hana knew she was too old to go through this again, no matter what lip-service her husband paid to his catholic faith. She swallowed the first pill with her only drink since breakfast yesterday. There was no glass involved; she’d swigged straight from the rusty mixer tap in the kitchen, shuddering against the metallic taste in the water.
The pram bumped across the crease in the centre of the cricket pitch as Hana registered another momentary stab of anger at her husband, who hadn’t accompanied her to the clinic. “Sorry, babe, I’ve got a Year 10 English class,” Logan said with regret. “I can’t get cover.”
Stop it Hana, it’s his job, she chastised herself, knowing in her foggy haze she was being unreasonable.
“Oi!”
Hana turned, swinging the pram around to face the shout. A quad bike sped towards her at speed, making Hana tense as it failed to slow. The head groundsman hurled his stumpy body off the jerkily halted machine and strode the final two metres towards her. He pocked face was bulging and purple. “What do you think you’re doing?” he shouted into her face, spraying spittle into the air and onto Hana’s red curls.
Twenty-four hours without sleep caught Hana up in one overwhelming punch and she gaped in disbelief. Getting no answer, the officious man stomped and yelled and chastised her for pushing her pram around on the sacred cricket pitch. “Especially the bloody crease!” he yelled.
Hana’s shoulders slumped in defeat. His rant falling on deaf ears, the groundsman jumped onto his quad bike and tore away. Hana watched dust puff out from behind the heavily treaded tyres and looked at her delicate pram wheels. He did far more damage than I ever could.
Phoenix, asleep during both the noise of the quad and the loud, antagonistic tirade of its owner, opened her eyes and let out another wail.
It was seven thirty in the morning but seemed more like midday for poor Hana. She abandoned the pram outside the dining hall of the boys’ boarding house, St Bartholomew’s, rubbing a shaking hand across her eyes. The school was over one hundred and thirty years old, conceived as the original church school in Hamilton and its first pupils were garrison’s children. The school added the boarding house after the Second World War, when bereaved mothers had no father to direct the family and education became the only way to better circumstances. Boys poured in from rural areas and more distant locations as the success of the school spread by word of mouth. The Waikato Presbyterian School for Boys became one of the most successful boys’ schools in New Zealand and commanded an appropriate price tag.
Hana pressed the brake and retrieved the baby from the copious blankets. As Phoenix wailed again, Hana coloured in shame at the desperate inner voice which rose to the fore, telling her to leave her daughter in the pram. Hana took a deep breath and corrected herself. It’s not because you’re a horrid person. You just can’t think straight.
The baby’s face made a picture of misery as her dark downy head poked out of the blanket and her unfocussed eyes tried to latch on to the shapes and colours whizzing past. Hana walked through the lobby and into the dining room, her eyes downcast and the set of her shoulders oozing defeat. A hundred pairs of eyes turned to watch as she appeared in the entrance and Hana regretted her desperate decision to seek Logan. The last thing her husband needed was a scene in front of the boarders. She tried not to grimace as Phoenix cranked up again for another bout of wailing and searched the feeding crowd, trying to spot her handsome husband in the myriad of faces.
“Hey Miss.” A tall, dark haired, Fijian boy dressed in a prefect’s white shirt and black-and-white striped blazer stood next to Hana.
“Hi, Acton,” Hana said, aware of her red, waist length hair, fluffy and unkempt, her shapeless tracksuit bottoms and sick-stained hoodie.
“You looking for Mr Du Rose?” his voice had a resonant inflection and Hana nodded. Phoenix stopped grizzling and her head nodded comically as she held it up to focus on the young man.
“She won’t stop crying,” Hana blurted, surprised by her own confession of failure to a teenage boy.
He looked sympathetic, reaching out a finger and slotting it into the baby’s little fist. “They do that don’t they?” His face held a knowing expression. “My baby brother squalled when he was born and he’s still going. He’s four now.” Seeing the misery cross Hana’s face, his cheeks reddened with guilt and he tried to back pedal. “This little girl won’t be like that, she’s gonna be gorgeous.”
Every face turned back to their breakfast, a series of heads from different angles chasing cereal spoons or toast into their mouths. Just as Hana gave up on finding her husband, she saw him stride across the room towards her. Her breath caught in he
r chest with that familiar sinking sensation as her stomach flip-flopped. Logan Du Rose’s Māori heritage exuded from him in the smooth olive skin and dark wavy hair. His features were dark, but his eyes were a striking and unusual grey, which could change from granite to smoke in an instant depending on his mood. Logan was tall and lean, muscular from his regular workouts in the school gym and Hana was dwarfed by his immense personality, feeling ragged in comparison. In a second, she went from relieved and overjoyed at seeing him, to woefully inadequate.
Logan’s presence was powerful and authoritative as he issued instructions to the prefect. “Flush out any younger boys who haven’t shown for breakfast, please. Any problems - find me or Matron.”
The prefect nodded and peeled his large brown finger out of the baby’s tiny fist. Logan put his capable arms around Hana and his daughter, disregarding the rapt audience and drawing her into a firm hug. “Hey babe, how did it go yesterday?”
Hana heard the muffled sounds of the dining room dull through Logan’s expensive jacket as the crowd of young men watched the show of affection. Teenage boys missed nothing, chewing like cattle as they observed their respected housemaster.
Logan kissed his baby daughter on her fluffy dark head, smiling as she looked up at him with tears still drying on her gorgeous face. He leaned his cheek against Hana’s forehead. “What’s up love?”
Hana sensed a growing wave of uncontrolled emotion. How could she confess to this wonderful man she was a failure as a mother? “I forgot how hard it was,” she stammered, hating how she sounded a fool. “I thought I’d make a better job of things second time around and having a twenty-six-year-old son and twenty-four-year-old daughter would qualify me to be more superior in the parenting stakes.” Her voice sounded listless and sad. “She can’t tell me what’s wrong and won’t stay quiet long enough for me to get a grip and work it out.” Hana kept her head down, knowing Logan could read her like an open book.