by Sarah Lark
Te Whiti did not react. The Maori chieftain remained silent while his people indefatigably built fences, plowed, and worked the land.
In January 1881, Bryce resigned.
“The children won,” Lizzie said as she put down the Otago Daily Times. “Bryce is gone, but Parihaka is still there.”
Michael reached for the paper. “It’s just a question of what comes next,” he said. “Bryce was a loudmouth, but his successor, Rolleston, you know him.”
William Rolleston was a farmer in the Canterbury Plains—one of the legendary sheep barons who was not content with ruling over a few thousand sheep. In the course of his political career, he had represented several voting districts around Christchurch but usually lost them after only one term. For him, a nomination to Minister of Native Affairs was surely an unexpected promotion. Rolleston had a reputation as being quick to decide and combative. Diplomacy did not number among his strengths.
“But Arthur Gordon is governor,” Lizzie objected. “And there the Brits have finally made a good choice.”
The conservative farmers of Canterbury considered Arthur Gordon suspect. He showed clear sympathy for the Maori, and the Crown had sent him for that reason. Te Whiti’s actions had made for bad press, and it was not in the queen’s interest to have her model colony of New Zealand portrayed as a nest of racists.
Michael shrugged. “It’s not enough that Gordon’s a good fellow. He has to be able to keep Rolleston on a leash.”
Chapter 6
When Violet came to, she decided that nothing had happened with Eric. She had ended up in his hut and must have fallen asleep, and she was beaten and bloody all over when she awoke. And naked. Surely there was a good explanation if she only thought it over thoroughly, but for that she lacked the strength. And the time. She had to take care of Rosie, after all.
Violet quickly pulled her dress back on and dragged herself to the hut, where she found Rosie asleep and the red balloon tied to the bed. Her father was surely at the pub, and Fred and Eric were probably back, or rather—Violet reminded herself—still in the bar in Greymouth. Violet washed herself as best she could with the last of the precious water. Her father would curse her for that. Her dress also had to be washed. It reeked of Eric and his filthy shack. She would do that the next day before work; upriver of the Billers’ house, the water was clean and clear.
She snuggled next to Rosie and tried to turn off her thoughts. She did not wait for her father and brother’s homecoming that night. She had left the house unlocked. What could she be afraid of now? Violet pushed the thoughts away. Eventually, she fell asleep—and ignored her aching body when she got up in the morning. She needed to make breakfast and send her father and Fred to work. Both seemed very hungover, and what was more, Fred looked at her strangely. Violet ignored him.
“We need to bathe ourselves first,” she told Rosie who was grumpy because Violet got her out of bed earlier than usual. “We’re going to the river first before we visit Caleb.”
“Why?” asked Rosie, but then realized the answer. “Because it’s Caleb’s birthday today?”
Violet nodded. “Yes, that’s right, it’s his birthday, and all well-wishers have to be clean and properly dressed. Come, you can wear your good dress.”
In truth, she had wanted to leave Rosie at home that day. Mrs. Biller surely would not be happy to see a miner’s daughter mixing with the birthday guests, but there was too great a danger that the foreman would send Fred and Jim home early, and she couldn’t risk exposing Rosie to them after such rebuke. She put her hope in Mrs. McEnroe. If the cook did not have enough time, Mahuika and the gardener would surely watch Rosie. The Maori couple were always lovingly attentive to the child—at worst, Rosie might see things for which she was still too young at six. What did that matter? Violet almost amazed herself at her newfound apathy, but she pushed the thoughts away again.
At the Billers’ that morning, Caleb was staging one of his rare fits. Though the boy often had difficulties with his parents, he was at heart a patient child and usually bore the intellectual deficiencies of the people around him with dignity. With his birthday presents that year, however, Mrs. Biller had taken it too far. Instead of the microscope he had hoped for, Caleb received a children’s book, some crayons, and a pony.
Caleb did not think much of horses. He hated sport in any form, and he screamed bloody murder when his father lifted him onto the little horse. Violet was then supposed to lead the pony around with Caleb on it, which normally would not have bothered her. She had held her grandfather’s mare dear, and she had also liked to go with Heather Coltrane into the stables and had even sat, heart pounding, on her massive purebred. Now, however, just the smell of the horse made her sick and every step she took hurt. Usually this would not have escaped the extrasensitive Caleb, but that day he was preoccupied with his own irritation.
“I don’t want to learn to ride,” he declared angrily. “I wanted a microscope. I—”
“Sweetums, a gentleman must learn to sit dashingly on a horse,” his mother chided him with a smile. “Remember that you’ll be going to England soon, to boarding school. You’ll have to ride there. And a microscope is so bulky. You couldn’t even take it with you.”
This comment was a painful reminder to Violet that her beloved job at the Billers’ would soon come to an end, and Caleb made it clear that it would have been fine with him to begin his riding career in the motherland.
“Ignoring the fact that a horse is much bulkier than a microscope,” Caleb said when Violet took him to his room for his nap, “am I supposed to take the pony to England with me?”
That afternoon, Violet struggled together with Caleb through the festivities. When all the guests were absorbed in what he called “baby games,” she gave in to his insistence and retrieved the chessboard. They withdrew to the farthest corner of the garden, where he beat her in record time. The chessboard was for Caleb what barroom brawls were for Fred and Eric. He worked off his anger here, but of course, he did not hurt the chess pieces, and from his opponent he required respect rather than fear.
Finally, even this day ended, and Rosie came beaming from the kitchen.
“Without Rosie’s help, I wouldn’t have made it,” Mrs. McEnroe said with a wink. “She worked so hard, cooking all that food with me.”
Rosie was overjoyed by the praise and wanted to tell their father about her heroic deeds. Violet, however, could barely stand how tense she felt as they approached the hut. When they entered, Jim and Fred were sitting at the table.
“Daddy!” Violet could not stop Rosie from leaping happily onto her father, nor could she prevent the thump on the head he gave Rosie in return.
“Shut your mouth, Rosie. That noise’ll give a man a headache,” their father grumbled. “And you, pack your things tonight, Vio. But only after you make dinner. There’s time enough for that.”
Violet looked at her father uncomprehendingly—and felt vaguely guilty. Had he found out what she had done? But, then, she had not done anything. Nothing had happened.
Was he kicking her out?
“That son-of-a-bitch foreman let us go,” Jim blurted out angrily, giving Rosie, who was crying, another slap. “And wants us off the company land. We’re moving over to Lambert’s. I’ll be damned if they don’t need good men to swing a pick.”
The Lambert mine was the Biller mine’s competition, and Marvin Lambert was hiring miners. There was a constant lack of coal diggers, and the foremen talked among themselves about the miners. The Lambert mine foreman was clear with Jim and Fred from the start: “If you two don’t behave better here than you did for Biller, don’t make yourselves comfortable.”
The warning arrived, but as Violet already knew from Wales, every time a mine had let her father go, he pulled himself together a bit for the new post. Neither he nor Fred ever found it hard to make a good impression. Both were monstrously strong; they knew how to swing a hammer and pick, and they had a sixth sense for coal seams. On good days,
they dug twice as much coal as a weaker worker. On bad days, the foreman had to watch them.
Eventually, the bad days would win out again, and there would be trouble and inevitably another dismissal. Not bad for the boys—after all, they always found new work quickly, all mines paid roughly the same wage, and they did not care where they dug coal.
For Violet, the dismissal was a catastrophe, just as it had been for her mother. As a rule, being fired was tied up with the loss of their home in the miners’ housing, or, as now, the right to stay in Billertown. Usually, too, it took a bit of time to get housing through the new mine.
Here in Greymouth, no one managed the mining settlements. Although the foreman expelled the fired workers from the mine property, surely nothing would have happened if the Paisleys had stayed until they found new lodging. Jim rejected that in favor of his pride and his own comfort. The Lambert mine lay on the opposite end of Greymouth. He would have to walk four miles to work, and that was too difficult for both him and Fred.
In the new settlement, which was just as filthy and disorderly as Billertown, they found a shack that had been abandoned by its previous occupants. Surprisingly, the previous owners had swept it out before moving away. The new hut’s roof wasn’t well sealed and would hardly keep out the rain or keep in the warmth, though Violet could no longer complain about the fireplace smoke, which dissipated through the drafty roof.
“You need to seal it,” Violet implored Fred and Jim, “before we move in the furniture.”
The furniture—the primitive beds, a table, and four chairs—was not valuable, true, but the rain would completely ruin it.
“This weekend,” Jim promised.
Violet hoped to speed that up by placing her father’s bed where the rain leaked through the worst. She no longer worried about the linens, which were gray and ruined.
Luckily, for a few days, it was fairly dry, and on the weekend, Violet borrowed a hammer and ax from the neighbors, chopped wood scraps into little pieces, and bought nails to mend the roof. One of the neighbors even helped. Mr. O’Toole was a square-set Irishman who shared his shack with his wife and a gaggle of children; it seemed they had added one every year. The family was friendlier than any of the Billertown neighbors had been.
Eric had not been fired and still worked for Biller, so Violet no longer had to see him every day. Two of the new miners had been seriously injured in the brawl, and they were looking for the perpetrators. Greymouth’s police officer didn’t exert himself on such matters, but Fred and Eric thought it was safer not to go to the pub as often or to appear together in town.
Violet also went to Greymouth more rarely, although it was easier to get there from Lamberttown. The path was shorter and only led a quarter mile through sparse forest. Still, Violet avoided the path as much as possible and tried to get by with the groceries Mrs. McEnroe gave her. On Saturday, she made her purchases during the day and wondered why she always felt completely exhausted after the short trip. Until then, after all, she had managed the stretch effortlessly, even after work, but now Violet was struggling against an omnipresent tiredness. She also increasingly felt disgusted by this or that stench, which once she could have easily ignored.
Fortunately, neither her father’s dismissal nor feeling sick had any effect on her as Caleb’s nanny. On the contrary, Mrs. Biller seemed overjoyed that Violet still had a good relationship with her son, who was growing more difficult by the day. Caleb did not forgive the matter of the microscope easily, and he hated his daily riding lessons for which Joshua Biller had hired the local police officer. He had once been in the cavalry and colorfully related his adventures in India. At times, Officer Leary boasted shamelessly, and this was especially true when Violet was among his listeners.
As a riding instructor, Officer Leary was strict and unrelenting. He didn’t explain technique well, so Caleb quickly came to dread his riding lessons. Worse still, the boy often fell off, which Leary greeted with mockery instead of concern. The relationship between student and teacher was soon completely frayed. Caleb didn’t get any help from his parents either. Instead, his father felt confirmed in his judgment that his son was a weakling, and his mother feared for his future as a gentleman.
“Can’t you try at least a little?” asked Violet somewhat angrily when Caleb once more complained to her. “If you keep on like this, they’ll send you to England on the next ship. I’m serious. Mrs. McEnroe heard something to that effect.”
Violet did not want to rebuff her little friend, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to have patience with his moods, although Caleb was not the only one who got under her skin. Even when Rosie whined or misbehaved a little, Violet had to hold herself back from screaming at her. She fought more often with her father and Fred, which was not smart since the arguments inevitably ended with a beating. Violet could not stop herself; her nerves were raw.
“I wish they would,” Caleb said angrily. “Perhaps school in England would not be nearly as bad. The teachers have to be better than the pastor; they couldn’t be stupider.”
Violet sighed. This disrespectful behavior of Caleb’s was also new, even though it was true that the reverend had reached his limits with Caleb’s thirst for knowledge. Since the little boy had discovered Darwin, teacher and pupil had been in open conflict.
Violet did not entirely comprehend why. How life had developed on earth in the past was of no interest to her—she would have rather changed the future. She was still following the passionate actions of the teetotalers in the newspaper and kept her fingers crossed for the right to vote. Although Violet was counting on results soon, Heather wrote her that probably years of struggle lay ahead of Femina, Harriet Morison, and all their fellows in arms. There were naturally male comrades as well.
Violet’s face glowed when one day she read an article by Sean Coltrane on the right of women to vote. When she found the paper in the trash the next day, she pulled it out and put the page with Sean’s article in her pocket. At home, she stored it carefully in a hole in the ground she had dug beneath her bed where she hid her meager savings. Violet still thought of Sean’s deep voice and his friendly eyes, his politeness and his patience. Sometimes she tried to imagine his face before she fell asleep, and when she did, she felt strangely comforted.
“What will happen to me when they send you to England?” she yelled at Caleb. “Would you think of me too?”
Caleb grimaced. “I have to go to England sooner or later. You’ll have to look for a new job then. Or a husband.”
Caleb was not far off. She was now sixteen. Many girls her age were already married and had children.
However, Violet did not want to think about any changes, and least of all about men and love. She was happy when she made it through the day. And although she was constantly sick and she could hardly eat anything, she did not lose weight. On the contrary, her breasts grew, and they sometimes hurt. Violet was increasingly worried and considered seeking out the doctor, or at least Mrs. Travers. If only that did not cost money.
She wanted to see Clarisse and the girls again. However, she would not just show up at their door. It had to be a coincidence. So, the next Sunday, she headed toward Billertown—presumably to fish in the stream or gather kindling—while Rosie frolicked around her.
It was no secret in Billertown that the prostitutes bathed in the stream on Sunday. After all, their boisterous voices carried far enough to tempt the adolescent boys to creep up and risk a peek at the women’s naked bodies.
Clarisse had laughed when Violet had once revealed to her that Fred and Eric, too, sat among the thick ferns and watched the whores.
“It doesn’t matter, my dear. Looking doesn’t hurt. On the contrary, if it gets them going, they’re more eager to save up so they can take a bite of the fruit they can only see from afar.”
Violet pressed closer and saw the three women as naked as God had made them. They sat on the banks, drying themselves in the sun and combing one another’s freshly washed hair
. Violet cast an embarrassed glance at their breasts. They were soft, and Clarisse’s even hung a little low. None looked as swollen and hard as Violet’s.
She rustled around a bit to avoid startling the women. Clarisse spotted her immediately.
“Little Miss Curtsy,” she said, laughing. “What’s going on, need another job? You won’t have any luck here. We don’t have any children to watch.”
“Thank God,” said Lisa, theatrically making the sign of the cross.
“I’m still at the Billers’,” Violet said, “but . . .”
Clarisse looked at her. “But something’s up,” Clarisse said. “You’re not just here to visit. And you’re, well, something’s different about you. Did you grow some?”
Violet shook her head. She also blushed. So, people could see it on her. Soon, everyone would know she was sick.
“I don’t know. I’m not feeling well. I—” She gave Clarisse a pleading look.
The older woman understood. “I’m going to take a walk with Violet,” she said to her friends as she put her dress on and wound a towel around her still-wet hair. “In the meantime, play with her little sister. It’s a good warning to experience children. This way you take the vinegar washes on the crucial days seriously.”
The women laughed and received Rosie amiably. Violet suppressed her concern that Rosie was seeing other people naked. It would not kill her. Nothing killed a person that easily.
Clarisse and Violet wandered along the stream with Violet choosing the difficult, rocky way. She had to pay attention in order not to stumble, so she did not have to look at Clarisse as she reported her troubles.
“You’re not sick; you’re pregnant,” Clarisse said plainly. “Why didn’t you come by and ask how to prevent this before sleeping with the lad?”
Violet glared at her. “I didn’t—” She stopped herself.
