Come to Grief

by Wendy M Wilson

He went next to the house on Cumberland Street where Caroline’s mother lived with her uncle, Mr. James Graham. He’d learned from Inspector Buckley that she’d come to New Zealand to escape Sir Charles, and had taken shelter with her uncle James, who had arrived several years earlier and made a success of himself, working his way up to the post of Commissioner of Crown Lands for Otago. Unfortunately for him, he’d taken on a young Englishman named Roderick Smith as his assistant.

  The house was a modest verandah villa, with attractive lace curtains and a door painted bright red. He knocked and waited. He did not know what to expect of Caroline’s mother, but hoped she’d be happy to see her daughter returned. While anyone would be better than Sir Charles Pomeroy, he dearly wanted Caroline to have a happy life.

  The door opened and a woman wearing a small cap and a floral morning gown opened the door. She looked so much like Caroline it took his breath away: small, energetic, with bright blue eyes that were rimmed with red, as if she’d been crying.

  She clapped her hands to her mouth, then reached for her daughter.

  “Oh, Caro, my darling Caro.”

  “Mama?’ said Caroline, holding her arms out towards her mother. “Mama?”

  Frank set Caroline on her feet on the verandah, and watched her mother’s eyes open in surprise as her daughter toddled forward. She swooped her up and held her in a crushing embrace, crying and laughing at the same time. “The precious wee thing can walk.” He noticed she had a strong Scottish accent. “When did she start to walk?”

  Frank wasn’t going to tell her about the night in the shearing shed, so said instead, “A week ago at the home of Mr. and Mr.s Brunton, not far from Fortrose. It took me by surprise as well. She’s very young to be walking.”

  “She’ll be one year old in three weeks. I know she’s small for her age but she’s very lively and active.”

  “So I discovered,” said Frank. “I’ve been carrying her around for a week and she’s been a proper handful.”

  She smiled. “Please come in. My uncle, Mr. Graham, would like to speak with you. He’s heard the whole story from the police and he’d like to thank you personally.”

  Frank wanted to make sure Caroline’s home was a proper place for her, so he followed her mother into the house. A short, rotund older man who reminded him of Tweedledum or Tweedledee in Through the Looking Glass was seated at a desk in the parlour. He rose from his chair and shook Frank’s hand with both of his.

  “Sergeant Hardy, thank you for bringing our little angel home. We can’t thank you enough.”

  “Happy to do it,” said Frank. “I learned a few things about baby girls in the past week that will come in handy. I have a daughter of my own.”

  “The same age?” asked Caroline’s great uncle.

  “A few months younger,” said Frank. “But the same size.”

  “Not surprising, considering the size of her father. Now, Helena will bring you a cup of tea while we talk, won’t you Helena?“

  Frank grinned to himself. Something had led him to use the name Helen for Helena’s daughter. Perhaps it was divine intervention. Or perhaps she’d answered to that name when she was about to step from the loft because she recognized it.

  Helena left and he could hear her in the next room, humming to herself as she put a kettle on the hub. He heard her say, “Careful, Caroline,” and smiled. Caroline would never be careful.

  “Now, Sergeant, first I have to apologize for Mr. Smith, my former assistant. I hear he caused you some trouble?”

  Frank nodded. “He’ll be paying for it for a long time, I imagine. Will they send him back here to gaol?”

  “I believe so. The Dunedin Gaol isn’t far from here, on the corner of Castle Street by the Law Courts. I’ll visit him, of course. I hope he escapes hanging. I disapprove of hanging. We’ve only had three in Dunedin, the last one a year ago — a Chinese fellow who was falsely convicted, I believe. But they hanged him anyway. Ah Lee, the poor chap’s name was. Hanged because he was Chinese, and so was the real murderer.”

  Helena served tea and sat down across from Frank, with Caroline on her knee. She wriggled off and toddled over to him. “Fah?”

  “She’s trying to say Frank,” he said. He took her hand in his and squeezed it. “Caroline, I’m going to miss you. But I have to return to my own little girl.”

  “Before you go, I have something for you. A small reward for rescuing our darling girl from the ocean.”

  Twice, Frank thought, although he thought it prudent not to say. Not to mention the time she almost walked into space in the shearing shed. If she was a cat she would already have used several of her nine lives. Caroline’s uncle went to his desk and picked up a piece of paper. He put it into an envelope and handed it to Frank. A bank draft, Frank suspected. He refrained from tearing open the envelope to check. He wasn’t expecting much. Mr. Smith had said the uncle was a cheapskate. He’d look when he got back to the hotel. Not that it mattered. He cared a lot more about returning Caroline than he did about being paid for it. He would have turned it down if he hadn’t needed the money.

  He returned to the hotel and found Mette lying on the bed with Sarah Jane, reading the Dunedin paper. They looked contented, and it did his heart good. Sarah Jane was resting against Mette’s hip, chewing a red bootie she had pulled from her foot.

  “Were they nice people?”

  “Very nice,” he said. “I was happy to leave Caroline with them. As long as that idiot Pomeroy doesn’t return, she’ll be alright. I told her mother if she and Caroline are ever in Wellington they can stay with us. I’d like to think that Caroline and Sarah Jane will be friends one day.”

  “And did the bank manager give you a thousand pounds?”

  He pulled James Graham’s bank draft from his pocket. “No. He’s letting Colonel Roberts break the bad news to me. It won’t be much. But Caroline’s great uncle gave me something.” He scanned the draft. “A hundred guineas. Not bad. At least we won’t be totally broke for a few months.”

  “I’ve been thinking about what I should say to Professor Mann,” said Mette. “About his manuscript.”

  “What did you decide?”

  She stared down at Sarah Jane, resplendent in a cream-coloured frock with a red bow on the back and little red booties, one on her foot, the other in her mouth. “Well, you know how I believe it’s always best to tell the truth. Honesty is very important to me.”

  He knew her well. “So you’re going to lie to him?”

  Her face went pink and she nodded, still not looking at him. “I’m going to tell him a man I met in Dunedin has taken it to Melbourne.”

  “But that’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yes it is, but I’ll imply that he’s taking it to a publisher there, and that it may be a long time before he hears from the publisher.”

  “By the time he starts to wonder where it is, we’ll be back on the farm,” said Frank. He sat on the bed beside her and picked up Sarah Jane. “You look very pretty. Your Mama has you all dressed up. Would you like to go to dinner?”

  Mette sat up. “Dinner? What do you have in mind?”

  “I stopped at the dining room downstairs just now. They have an excellent dinner tonight. Oyster soup, followed by a choice of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding or freshly caught snapper on a bed of rice, and for vegetables, asparagus, green peas, or artichokes. Treacle pudding for desert.”

  “Can we afford that?”

  Frank pulled out his last two pounds. “This is all I’ve got left. Just enough for a decent meal and a couple of drinks. I’ve got our return tickets already, thanks to Colonel Roberts, and Nightingale is being shipped to Wellington tomorrow on the Hawea.”

  “Isn’t Colonel Roberts paying all our expenses?”

  Frank returned his last two pounds to his pocket. “I’ll see what they say downstairs. Worth a try. If they go for it we’ll have a feast. If not we can share the roast beef.”

  The maitre d’hotel was happy to send the bill to the
Wellington Constabulary. Frank ordered the roast beef and Mette the fresh snapper.

  “This is so nice,” she said as she picked at the bones of the fish. “I wish we could eat like this all the time.”

  “One of these days, we will” he said. “I feel as if success is just around the corner. I’d like to be able to afford everything you want. I wish you’d bought yourself a new frock, and not just one for Sarah Jane.”

  She put down her fork. “I’m perfectly happy as we are. The main thing is we’re all alive, after everything we went through. That’s more than the passengers of the Tararua can say. So many dead.”

  “Do they know the final count yet?” he said. “It must have been quite a few.”

  “Well over a hundred,” she said. “Perhaps as many as a hundred and thirty. I was reading a report of the inquest in the paper when you returned.”

  “I suppose they found Captain Garrard responsible,” said Frank. “The poor bastard.”

  “You’ll have to stop swearing like that.” said Mette. “I keep finding myself doing it as well, and I don’t want to. It’s not ladylike.”

  He grinned at her. “Neither is throwing someone off the back of a wagon. But you’re right. I’ll try not to. Not in front of you, anyway. What else did you learn from the inquest? Where’s it being held? In Dunedin?”

  “Wyndham. Mrs. Brunton’s son Charles is on the jury. Inspector Buckley’s there as well. They don’t have a final account of the number of people who died, because bodies are still coming ashore all along the coast.”

  “What about Captain Garrard, then. What did they say about him?”

  “Mr. Malone testified that Captain Garrard did everything he could to keep the passengers safe and hopeful. He said he made sure the boats were put off with the best crews possible on each one. He must have known you’d be a good crew member, don’t you think?”

  “I’d like to think so,” said Frank.

  She reached over and squeezed his hand. “He made a good choice. And so did I.”

  21

  Home Again

  Professor Mann was delighted. “My manuscript has gone to a publisher in Melbourne?” he said, his top lip twitching with excitement. “I never imagined…I knew it was…was sehr gut, but…a publisher, after so many years. Das ist wunderbar!”

  Mette disliked having to lie to him, but what else was she to do? Break his heart with the truth? She had heard that a publisher might spend months, or even years, considering a manuscript, and then not return it when he decided against publishing it. At least this way the professor had something to look forward to. She had made up an elaborate story about a publisher’s agent in Dunedin who had seen the manuscript and taken it with him back to Melbourne. She had almost put the fictional agent on the Tararua, but decided that was too much. No need to drown a fictional person if she could help it. Instead, she had emphasized that he was a forgetful, distracted sort of person, but she was sure that eventually he would contact the professor.

  “That’s wonderful news,” he said. “I do need something to show to my department at the university, however. Did you have anything at all? The abstract, perhaps? The list of references?”

  “Actually, I translated the abstract when I was on the train,” said Mette.

  He looked puzzled and she knew she had made an error. If she had the manuscript on the train, how did she give it to someone in Dunedin? She thought quickly. “I translated some of it on the way into Dunedin on the train, and then did some more in my hotel room before I met the agent.” She opened her purse. “Here it is.”

  He took the pages from her. “This will be enough to secure my employment at the university,” he said. “All they ever read is the abstract, in my experience. And the thought that someone is considering publishing my opus will spur me to write more on the topic.”

  “If you write anything new, please consider me to do the translation,” she said. Deep down, she hoped he would never write anything again and certainly not ask her to translate it. She guessed that once he was fully employed at the university he would not. But they were still short of money and if she could find work it would help.

  “Thank you, I may do that,” he said. He frowned. “I do have some work for you in the near future, however.”

  She waited, apprehensive. Please, no more boring texts to translate.

  “A student of mine, a very good student, has been studying German and keeps asking me for extra tutoring. Perhaps you would like to help? The student comes from a very wealthy farm family in the Wairarapa and would pay well.”

  From there, everything fell beautifully into place.

  The farm manager contacted Frank to say he’d sold a yearling, and had also leased out the lower portion of the farm for grazing. That gave them enough for Niall’s quarterly stipend and for the next quarter’s rent of their cottage in Wellington.

  Frank met Colonel Roberts at the barracks and learned he was to receive a reward of seventy eight pounds, ten shillings and sixpence; the reward for a single ingot of the five stolen was two hundred pounds, but because he had not managed to implicate Robert Hinton in the robbery, the bank was paying him half that amount. Colonel Roberts presented him with the reward and a list of expenses he had deducted from the reward: the hotels, the train fares, the cost of transporting Nightingale from Bluff Harbour to Wellington, and all meals, including the large and delicious plate of Bluff Oysters they had eaten before they left Bluff.

  All together, including the hundred guineas from Caroline’s great uncle, they now had almost two hundred pounds, and both of them had work. They felt rich.

  Joey returned from his grandmother’s place in Palmerston North and they met him at the train station. Much to Joey’s surprise, Frank picked him up and hugged him. He hugged Frank back and then wriggled out of his hold. “I missed you, Mumma,” he said to Mette. “And you as well, Sergeant Frank. Please don’t go away again for a while.”

  They sat on the verandah of their cottage and looked out over Wellington Harbour as the sun set late in May. Winter was coming on, but the day was unseasonably warm. Frank had one more surprise for her. He took out a letter and passed it to her.

  “Look who’s coming to New Zealand to visit us.”

  “Just tell me, who?”

  “My father,” he said. “He says he’s tired of Gladstone and prison reform and all the wars Britain is fighting in Africa, and the suffragists and he wants to see if New Zealand is any better.”

  Mette was puzzled. “I thought Gladstone was the name of a bag. Your bag in fact, the one I exchanged with Mr. Hinton.”

  He laughed. “I think the man came first, followed by the bag. William Gladstone, the Prime Minister, used to carry a bag of that style, so people started calling it a Gladstone bag.”

  “It will be interesting to meet your father,” she said. “He sounds like a man with strong opinions.”

  “Yes,” said Frank. “And not afraid to voice them to all and sundry.”

  The sun slipped below the hills across the harbour, and the water turned pink, silhouetting Somes Island on the far side. She leaned against Frank, happy. What would the next few months bring? She’d been hoping for another child soon, but that had not happened. Maybe the fates had planned something more exciting for them in the next year?

  -THE END-

  Thank you for reading the latest entry in The Sergeant Frank Hardy Mysteries. If you’ve written a review for one of my other books, thank you very much. You might be surprised to learn that reviews really help an author sell books (something to do with algorithms). I hope you’ll consider leaving a review for Come to Grief. This book required an unusual amount of hard work and concentration as it took place during a historical disaster that I wanted to present as accurately as possible.

  I read all the reviews, especially those with three or more stars! And I frequently make changes to my books based on readers’ comments. You may have noticed, for example, that there are fewer Maori place names
and Maori speakers in the newer books. In this book I gave the Korowhiti boys a mother from Liverpool, so Frank didn’t have to use his poor language skills to communicate with them. I loved those boys, by the way. I grew up with boys like that in Waitara and Patea.

  If you’d like to hear about the next book, follow me on, BookBub or Twitter (@profwendy). I’m planning a book set on Somes Island, the quarantine island in Wellington Harbour, during a measles outbreak. Frank’s father will also make his first appearance in the series, which you may have guessed.

  Wendy

  22

  Real or Fictional?

  While the other suspects were my own inventions, Robert Hinton was a real person and was a suspect at the time. One of the ingots was discovered after his death in Melbourne in 1883, but the other four were never recovered. He did not have a manuscript with him; Professor Mann and his opus were also inventions. As a writer who has twice lost manuscripts in computer crashes, I can identify with Professor Mann’s loss. Think how difficult it must have been when there was only one copy of a book? Thomas Carlyle’s maid accidentally burned the first volume of his three volume work on The French Revolution. In the novel and the various movies of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Amy March deliberately burns her sister Jo’s manuscript.

  Read more about Robert Hinton in the newspaper article linked below, published in Dunedin’s Evening Star, two years after the events in this book:

  Evening Star, Issue 6203, 31 January 1883, Page 2

  Another interesting person was George Lawrence, who swam for help. He was very young — twenty-two. You can read about him and his subsequent life in an article in The Prow. The article also features a painting of the sinking of the SS Tararua.