Let anyone try and stop him.
BOOK FIVE
1870
1
“Gentlemen, I’m convinced the only choice left open to us is to abandon the colony now, sell out and realize what money we can, before we are all ruined forever.”
The tumult which had preceded the declaration was nothing compared to that which followed it. As was his wont, Coffin sat back in his chair in banker Longmount’s office and let the rest of them rave and shout. There were harsh words and several men all but came to blows. They weren’t angry at each other so much as they were at fate. It did no good to curse fate, however, so they had to settle for screaming at one another.
In truth they seemed to have little choice left. Rushton had merely voiced what many of them were thinking. You had to give him credit for that much, Coffin mused. Rushton was a gambler, the sort of entrepreneur who could be broke one week and wildly wealthy the next, only to squander his new-won fortune anew on some exotic money-making scheme none of his colleagues would touch with a shaved Kauri. Coffin admired the man if not his judgement. Like Rushton he believed in taking chances. That was how he had built the commercial empire that was Coffin House.
He just didn’t believe in taking as many chances.
“There’s no denyin’ things are bad.” Strange to see Angus McQuade suddenly looking his age, Coffin thought. He’d always thought of Angus as so much younger than himself. Now time had caught up with the perpetually youthful Scotsman as well as with the rest of them. “But they aren’t that bad.”
“How can they get any worse?” That was Charpentier. He was on his third brandy. “The only thing that’s keeping this economy going is the gold from Otago, and we know that’s not going to last forever. Some of the first deposits are already starting to run out. When that’s gone,” he shrugged and bolted the last of his glass, “there’ll be no credit for New Zealand at all.”
The banker had put his finger square on the problem. Running a subsistence economy was one thing, but New Zealand had become much more than that. Its complex, developed business structure was centered not on farms now but on growing communities like Christchurch, Wellington, New Plymouth, Russell, Dunedin and Auckland. The colony had been drawn inexorably into the web of international commerce, and lately “international commerce” didn’t think much of the colony’s prospects. With the collapse of the price of wool on the London market, gold was the only thing propping up the colony’s credit. Coffin was in as precarious a position as Rushton and the others. The terrible cycle of depression had become self-perpetuating.
The more the price of wool fell on the international market, the worse their credit rating became and the harder it was to find banks willing to extend new credit. Without that it grew increasingly difficult to maintain operations until the price of goods rose anew.
The real problem was that prices weren’t about to rise any time soon. Nor was it hard to find reasons. Most damaging had been the end of the American Civil War several years earlier. Now cheap American cotton was once again flooding Europe, making good quality cotton garments available to everyone. New Zealand wool was still popular, but it no longer had a large chunk of the market to itself.
As for their other major export, corn, the Australians had begun to grow enough of their own. They no longer needed to import. There was little left the colony could export to raise hard cash. Too many people had expanded their flocks and fields. Coffin was as guilty as anyone else.
He longed for the shouting to be done with. They were wasting their time and many of them besides himself knew it. They knew one thing, though: until this crisis could be overcome normal competition was going to have to be put by the wayside. They were going to have to cooperate.
To his great surprise he found himself wishing Hull was present. Predatory he’d been, but at least he’d said what he believed. You could deal with such a man. Some of those seated with him, the young land speculators recently out from England in particular, you never knew which line they’d follow, which way they’d jump.
Not all of them were useless. Wallingford, for example. Twenty-five years Coffin’s junior, the man was an overweight, overdressed, slick-haired dandy. He was also possessed of a sharp mind that could be counted on to listen to reason. Indifferent fop he might seem, but he was a powerful ally.
Wallingford had sunk his family fortune into New Zealand investments. Now he stood to lose it all. While the others ranted and wailed, he sat back in his chair and dabbed at his lips and nose.
“I’ll tell you what it is.” That was Dunleavy, Coffin saw. “It’s all the fault of these blasted heathen! If we could just settle with them once and for all it would release crucial assets presently tied up in fighting this damnable war!”
Coffin couldn’t help but smile at the younger man’s outburst. Across the table he saw McQuade smiling as well. When in trouble, blame the Maori. When in doubt, blame the Maori. But the Maoris had nothing to do with the falling prices of corn and wool.
He could understand the young merchant’s frustration, though. Wherever the British army had fought—North America, Africa, Indian—they’d eventually overpowered whatever native resistance was to be found. But not here. Not on an island of modest size where if anything lines of supply were easier to protect and the fighting should have been over and done with quickly.
Instead it had dragged on for more than a decade. When one pocket of rebels was wiped out another magically appeared elsewhere to resume the fighting. Based on their losses in the great battles at Ngatapa and Te Porere the previous year it was reasonable to assume the Maori would give up and agree to a treaty. Instead they continued to fight as furiously as ever under yet another mysterious new war chief, the devilish Te Kooti. For two years he and his men had been fighting to push the settlers off the east coast of North Island. They gave no indication of surrendering until they had done so.
So the war went on, unending.
With the rush to the gold fields Dunedin had rapidly become the colony’s largest community. In response to the population shift Wellington, at the southernmost tip of North Island, had been made the new capital. But Auckland remained the colony’s financial center. Old money and real power remained by the harbor he and Angus McQuade had surveyed so many years before, even if the seat of government had shifted some hundreds of miles to the south.
Yet a man still couldn’t ride with impunity between these two burgeoning cities for fear of being ambushed by Maori rebels.
Not all was despair, however. While Te Kooti had grown stronger, many of the Maoris were beginning to lose heart. Though they won individual battles, they were unable to dislodge the colonists from the cities and major towns. For each warrior who died valiantly, five more pakehas seemed to disembark from the great canoes. Then there was the colonials’ greatest ally—disease. Epidemics repeatedly swept through both friendly and hostile pas, devastating a population which had no resistance to the imported infections.
Despite all that, it now seemed as if the Maoris might win anyway. Not on the battlefield, but in London. Rushton’s proposal was extreme but not beyond the realm of possibility. After finally defeating them on the battlefield, the colonists might find themselves giving the land back to the Maori because they could no longer obtain the credit necessary to farm it profitably. That might very well happen unless the price of wool experienced a dramatic and unexpected rise, or unless extensive new gold deposits were unearthed.
Somehow the colony’s good credit had to be reestablished. Fighting a protracted war with the natives while the price of one’s primary exports continued to plunge was not the way to reassure already uneasy bankers. South Africa and Australia were big enough to ride out such periodic depressions. New Zealand was hardly an afterthought on Fleet Street.
The new court ruling might break the Maoris faster than the army, Coffin knew. It had been decided that any Maori holding title to any portion of land was qualified to sell it, even if it was land tra
ditionally held in common by an entire tribe. This proved disastrous to the Maori while at the same time it eliminated the problems of fraud and illegal land seizure by legitimizing them. It made many neutral and friendly Maoris sullen and bitter.
Those who continued to fight adopted a new name, the Hau Hau, and fought on with a ferocity unknown ten years earlier. While they could not hope to defeat the now experienced and well-armed soldiers of the regular army and militia, they were able to continue bleeding the country.
“What do you think we should do?”
“Yes, Coffin, what do you suggest?”
He looked up, realized they were all looking over at him. He’d been drifting. The cacophony had finally died down. They were looking to him for advice, and not for the first time. Angus was smiling encouragingly.
What did they expect from him? Miracles? He was fifty-seven, still strong and healthy, but not the harbinger of new ideas. By rights that should come from men like Wallingford and Rushton.
That wasn’t why he felt so tired all the time, though. That much he could admit to himself honestly. No, it was because when this meeting was over and done with, regardless of what was decided, he knew he would have to climb into his carriage and ride home. Knew he would once more be compelled to pass into the finest private residence in Auckland only to enter a world unimaginable to the men around him. A world where the staff moved in unnatural silence, dusting and cleaning, cooking and washing, speaking only rarely among themselves and then in whispers.
Coffin sympathized with them, did not make an issue of their murmurings and sideways glances. He knew they lived for the time when they could escape that turreted, stained-glass mausoleum and return to the world of the living. He wished only that he could go with them.
He couldn’t, of course. His place was in his home, beside his wife. Holly, clad in never-changing black, sometimes reduced now to moving about in a wheelchair, at other times rising to walk like a sooty spectre through empty halls and rooms.
The household staff attended to her well enough, seeing to her simple daily needs and wants. Coffin ate in the great house as ir frequently as possible, pleading the press of business, unable to sit anymore at one end of the long table while she ate mechanically at the other. She’d aged rapidly, shockingly so. Though younger than he she’d taken on the aspect and appearance of an old woman.
The doctors came and examined her and went away shaking their heads dolefully. They had prescribed and treated ad infinitum. Nothing worked. Eventually Coffin gave up on them and they ceased coming. Except for Hamilcar. He at least kept her alive.
His wife had willed herself into a kind of living death, Hamilcar explained. It was the shadow of a real life. Sometimes she responded to Coffin’s inquiries and comments, usually not. Why she continued to live he couldn’t imagine. So he spent as little time in the vast mansion as he could while dreaming of the days and weeks when he could escape, could mount a horse and ride as fast as possible toward Tarawera and the cheery, open house which overlooked the lake. There he would throw himself into the arms of a Merita who’d grown steadily more beautiful in maturity.
Andrew would be there to greet him too. A strange, quiet little boy, healthy enough, always willing to murmur a curious “hello” to his “Uncle” Robert. It would continue to be, would have to remain “uncle” until Holly passed away. But though his wife had abandoned her spirit, her body continued on.
He didn’t hate Holly. Despite everything it had never come to hate because he understood the reason for her withdrawal. He still loved her, too, though not as he’d loved her in those earlier, happier days. That time seemed little more than a dream now.
“Robert?” It was Angus, prodding him gently. Coffin was aware of nervous murmurings around him. This time he pushed back his chair and sat up straight. Damned if he was going to let them think the grand old man of colony commerce was entering into early senility!
“I don’t know what we’re going to do. There’s nothing we can do. This I do know: our bankers in London aren’t going to extend us any more money because we’re such nice chaps. They want something tangible, and we don’t have it to give them. All we can do is hang on.”
“Hang on?” said Rushton contemptuously. “How! We have no credit, we have no money beyond what Otago brings in, and as we all know that is running dry.” He looked at his colleagues. “I have four warehouses full of wool that no one wants at any price. I would let the Maoris burn it but I can’t get insurance because of the war.”
That set off the debate all over again. Coffin had had enough, he realized. Didn’t they see that arguing and fighting among themselves wasn’t going to produce any solutions? Destitution was a concept alien to most of them, and it had them panicked.
He was in better shape than some. By selling off his tangible assets he could survive. The servants would have to go, of course, and much of the jewelry and the paintings. All the accoutrements of wealth Holly had accumulated over the years. Not the house. In the midst of depression there would be no one with enough money to buy it anyway.
It was clear nothing was going to be solved at this meeting. The only alternatives were kin to those proposed by Rushton. That amounted to total surrender. It might well come to that, but not today, not today.
McQuade saw him leaving when no one else did. He left his chair and came over to help Coffin on with his cape.
“Where are you off to, Robert?”
“Not home.”
“No, I dinna think that.” McQuade was a bit taken aback by the vehemence of his friend’s response. “Where then? To the Club?”
“No. I think I’ll take a walk. Good day for a walk. City’s pretty on a day like today.” He took a deep breath. “At least it’s still here.”
“Auckland’ll always be here, Robert.” McQuade smiled. “Remember the day I first brought you here and showed you the harbor?”
“There was nothing here then. Trees and water.”
“Aye.” There weren’t many ships in that wonderful harbor these days, McQuade knew. Those that called stayed just long enough to provision themselves before continuing down the coast and on through Cook Strait to the gold fields of Otago. Gold, which had given the colony a false sense of security. If they were going to survive without returning to a subsistence economy it was going to have to be on a far firmer foundation than that provided by gold dust.
“It may shrink, may become a fishing village, but it’ll never disappear,” he told Coffin as his friend lumbered out the door. Coffin waved briefly without turning, a hasty and casual farewell.
Though you and I might, McQuade thought, if something remarkable doesn’t happen soon. He turned and reentered the noise-filled room.
2
Coffin had gone only a few blocks when a sudden thought made him turn off up a side street. It wound through and into a part of town he rarely visited.
The church was still there. He remembered it well and ought to, having paid for much of the construction including the big stained-glass windows which were the silent stone structure’s sole adornment. As expected, the front door stood ajar.
No crowds shuffled about on a mid-week morning. The few worshippers present implored their savior in silence and did not look up as the tall stranger entered. Each was immersed in private grief or contemplation. Coffin did not disturb them. He’d come to find not salvation but a man.
The Vicar smiled when he saw his visitor. “Well, Robert. It’s been a long time.”
“It has.” Coffin smiled back at the other man as he doffed his hat and cape. While most men put weight on, Methune had grown thinner over the years. The result of an ascetic life as much as work and worry.
“Come into my office, Robert. It’s good to see you.”
“You too, Vicar.” Coffin allowed himself to be led.
“Orere, we will have tea, please. With sugar and cream.”
The Maori servant bowed slightly, turned and left the room. It was a measure of Methune�
��s stature that he allowed a Maori into his confidence in these times.
“I heard about the meeting this morning,” Methune was saying.
Coffin nodded. “Just came from there.”
“Was anything decided?” Methune was as grizzled and worn as an old sailor, but his voice still rang out clear and telling from the pulpit.
“What would you expect?” Coffin stirred sugar into his tea. “A great deal of noise. Not a joyful one, either.” Methune nodded solemnly. “The younger ones like Rushton see the writing on the wall and they don’t like what they’re reading. Most of them don’t know whether to put their pants on first or last in the morning. Wallingford’s the best of the newcomers and he just sits there like a Buddha. If he has any brilliant ideas he hasn’t chosen to share them with the rest of us.
“McQuade and myself and a few of the long established will hang on somehow, but as to the future of the colony itself,” he shook his head, “I don’t know. It’s going to be rough. There are times when I think it was simpler in the old days, when all a man had to worry about was selling flax and pine and rum.”
“I would agree they were simpler, but not better, I’m afraid.”
“You and your soul-saving, Vicar.” Coffin smiled.
The servant brought fresh-baked scones with butter and jam. Coffin bit into one hungrily. “Nice day but some rough weather coming. Not all the chill’s in the air. How are you doing?”
“Well enough. Collections are way down, of course, but my concern is not money.” He lowered his teacup from his lips. “It distresses a number of my colleagues, though.”
“I’ll bet. You never cared much for comforts, as I recall.”
“I would go back to working out of a Maori hut if God required it of me. That is not what troubles me these days.” For the first time the vicar looked distressed. “It’s strange, you see, but many of the Maori converted to Christianity because they believed Christ was aiding us, the pakehas. They thought he would aid them as well, but their conversion hasn’t done anything to improve their fortunes. As a result many who converted are abandoning their new faith and returning to the worship of heathen deities. But that is not the saddest part.
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