Beneath the Kauri Tree (The Sea of Freedom Trilogy Book 2)

by Sarah Lark

  “Grateful?” Paisley frowned. “Well, who cares now, the baby’s in there. And Eric’s a good man, a proper miner. He’ll be able to feed you.”

  Violet thought briefly about an escape toward Dunedin, but she would not have made it over the mountains with Rosie, and she would not leave the child with their father and Fred.

  Rosie was the only condition Violet made to her bridegroom before the wedding. Her little sister had to be taken into their household. Eric did not put up a fight about it. He needed a wife, and he would not find a more beautiful one than Violet. She was a stroke of luck. Eric knew that better men with more savings had been interested in Violet. Perhaps he had even nursed the thought in a final calculating turn of his alcohol-addled brain when he forced her into his bed. Once she was no longer a virgin, his prospects improved. Most good men wanted an untouched bride. And then he had even landed a bull’s-eye in the act, as Fred noted with a smirk. Eric was more than ready to play the proud papa.

  Violet spent her arduously saved money on a dress she could wear for the wedding and then during the pregnancy. She hardly spoke a word to Eric during their engagement and did not look at him when she walked beside him through the church. The church service was well attended. Even Mr. and Mrs. Biller were there, and they gave the young couple timbered wood, with which to make furniture. Even if it only produced rough chairs, tables, and beds, it was better than the waste wood miners usually scrounged, and it helped Violet furnish her hut in Billertown. After Jim and Fred were fired, Eric left his shack for the Paisleys’ previous hut. At least Violet and Rosie had a roof over their heads.

  If only they could have sectioned off a small area for Rosie. Violet was afraid of the wedding night—not just for herself but for her little sister too. When the time did come and Eric, drunk again, jumped her, she tried to lie perfectly still and make as little noise as possible. Nevertheless, she occasionally moaned in pain, and Eric grunted like a wild animal. When he finally fell asleep, Violet was pinned underneath him. She did not get the opportunity to crawl back to Rosie and comfort her. Violet heard Rosie sobbing all night until she was able to convince the child the next morning that she was all right.

  “Nothing happened. At least nothing that doesn’t happen to other women,” she said to Rosie. “Those are strange noises, I know, but it’s normal when people are married.”

  Violet’s life as a married woman did not differ much from her life as Jim Paisley’s daughter. Eric, too, was thrifty with the household money and behaved as if he were giving alms whenever Violet asked for it. He also ordered Violet around like a slave.

  Violet wept bitter tears at Heather Coltrane’s first letter. She had not written to her friend about the rape and pregnancy as planned but only announced her engagement with brusque words. Heather sounded disappointed in her letter but politely congratulated Violet and sent a present—a practical set of cooking pots and very beautiful fabric.

  Violet thought bitterly that with these she would almost have been able to afford the abortion. As it was, however, she suffered Eric and the changes in her body. She hated becoming fat and inflexible. Pregnancy seemed to be causing the water in her body to gather, and Violet felt bloated and exhausted. That did not seem to bother Eric, however. Whenever he came back from the pub and was not too drunk, he jumped her, and he was really only too drunk on Saturday.

  Violet realized Eric drank less than her father and brother. He rarely stank of whiskey, just of beer, which was cheaper. Yet he spent more money in the Wild Rover than Jim or Fred, which irritated Violet. After three months of marriage, she finally dared to ask him about it. She still hated and feared him, but she had grown braver in her interactions with him. In contrast to her father, Eric had not beaten her since the night of the rape.

  Though he caused her pain with his nightly “visits,” once her panic at being used so mercilessly subsided, she ascribed her pain more to her tension and his lack of patience and skill than true cruelty. The pain subsided when Violet confided in Clarisse, who gave her advice to purposefully relax her muscles and to use oil as a lubricant. As her discomfort decreased, so did her fear, if not her disgust. She eventually spoke with Eric as with a halfway-normal person.

  Surprisingly, he wasn’t angry when she asked about the money he spent at the pub.

  “I, it, well, it’s your money of course,” she said meekly, “but I do need to buy things. Things for the baby and food for us, and Rosie has outgrown her clothes again.” The last remark was daring, as she feared that it would prompt Eric to send Rosie back to their father. “I wonder, since you don’t drink that much, what do you spend the money on?”

  Aside from beer or whiskey, she could only imagine the money went to whores. But she knew from Clarisse that he was not one of her or her friends’ customers. Besides, Clarisse had told her that a man couldn’t usually manage sex more than once a night.

  “Aye, sweetie, wouldn’t you like to know?” Eric grinned. To Violet’s relief, he made no move to hit her. “But I didn’t really want to bring it up until it panned out. That’s to say that I’m spending the money for us, Violet, sweetheart. For you and me and our little one there.” He pointed to Violet’s stomach. “And for Rosie, too, for God’s sake.”

  Violet looked at him incredulously. “You’re saving?” she asked. “You’re taking it to the bank?”

  Eric laughed even louder. “Nah, sweetie, certainly not that. For what you get in interest, it’s not worth the effort. That’ll keep you poor your whole life. There’s something better. Ever heard of harness racing?”

  Violet sighed. Eric had always bet on horses. She remembered he had paid his passage to New Zealand with race winnings. However, she had not known that even here, at what seemed like the end of the world, there were races worth mentioning, let alone betting on.

  “But of course, sweetie,” he replied importantly when she said as much. “And the future, I’m telling you now, is harness racing. It’s just getting started, and your Eric, beautiful, he’s got an eye for it. I know who is going to race the others into the ground.”

  Pleased with himself, he waved around a red notebook, which Violet recalled seeing before. Eric had used it to look important to her father and Fred. He could read and write a bit, and he made notes about his winnings, though not the losses.

  Violet bit her lip. “Shouldn’t you then be winning more often?” she asked cautiously.

  Eric grimaced. “Yeah, and I would,” he explained, “but I don’t settle for small change, Vio. I don’t just bet on the winner or that a horse will place in the top three. I put my money where my mouth is: the trifecta.”

  It was not all that hard to understand. Eric tried to predict which three horses would achieve the first three places and in which order. One did not need to be a racing aficionado to know that this was difficult. Surely it was not easy even to recognize the three favorites, let alone to order them properly, so it was clear to Violet that one would almost need clairvoyant abilities. Or an exorbitant amount of luck. Eric certainly did not have the former, and as for luck, Violet did not believe that Fortuna could grace her braggart husband a second time.

  “I know what I’m doing,” Eric assured Violet when she didn’t reply. “I’ll pull us out of the mud here one day, Vio. Believe me.”

  Violet shrugged. There was not much she still believed.

  Chapter 9

  Colin Coltrane found the invasion of Parihaka unsatisfying, as did most of the other soldiers and armed constables. The men had expected a fight, or at least prepared for one. Yet now two thousand Maori enemies sat in front of their lodges, looking at the invaders accusatorily. The men formed a ring around the assembled villagers whom the girls and children had since joined, and felt like fools. No one intended to flee. The military force of the pakeha was unnecessary if not downright embarrassing.

  John Bryce was obviously trying to make the best of the situation—although Colin thought his appearance rather more comical than heroic. The Mini
ster of Native Affairs leaped on his white horse to read aloud to Te Whiti and the Maori the justification for the invasion. It overflowed with words like “rebellious,” “obstreperous,” “lawless,” and “disturbance of the peace.”

  “If there’s an opposite of a rebellion, then this is it,” whispered Colin to another sergeant. “The only sensible thing the man did today was to ban the press. Thank goodness he hasn’t made a fool of himself in front of reporters.”

  Te Whiti and the two other chieftains were arrested. Still there was no protest. Matariki and a few girls cried as Te Whiti strode slowly and evenly through the crowd of his supporters. He wore the valuable ceremonial cloak but left behind the other regalia of a chieftain.

  “We seek peace, and we find war.”

  No one commented on Te Whiti’s last words to his people. No one moved; no one left the gathering place until sundown.

  Bryce finally withdrew. The soldiers stayed but did not know what to do. Colin and other soldiers organized guard shifts and pleaded to send the volunteers home. That, however, met with their commander’s protest. Clearly, he had hoped for more from the whole matter.

  “We can’t just have the whole force standing around here, sir,” Colin Coltrane said when the commander yelled at him rudely, insisting he keep his soldiers at their posts as well. “Otherwise it’ll get out of hand; there will be assaults if the men don’t have anything to do.”

  Already the volunteers were releasing their tension by plundering the more secluded buildings. The Armed Constabulary could keep them under control, but its members, too, felt their frustration and wanted something to do. The seated and still Maori were causing increasing annoyance, rage, and bloodlust among the soldiers and the volunteers.

  The commander shook his head. “What can you be thinking, Sergeant? We’re occupying this land. We’re not going to give it back to them. No, for once they need to have a taste of our resistance. For all I care, they can sit here until morning. We can wait.”

  Colin rolled his eyes but changed his orders. Instead of sending the men back to their camp, he commandeered two of the sleeping lodges and ordered his men to take turns resting.

  “You will not steal anything, and I had better not see any girls, willing or not. We’re still at war, men.”

  Colin Coltrane had taken command of his old unit after the quickly assembled cavalry brigade clearly served no additional purpose. He could only shake his head at his superiors—he was anything but an angel of peace, and he did not see himself as a diplomat. Still, what he saw in Parihaka defied all reason. Even the ultimatum had been a mistake.

  Colin had spent the first fifteen years of his life with his father, one of the country’s craftiest horse traders. He had learned to play with people’s ideas and sensitivities, to discover and exploit their pride and their longings—and most of all, never to do anything that put him in the wrong. Colin’s father had been able to sell his customers even the lamest nag, and he always had managed to make his deception unnoticeable or to appear as a mistake. Ian Coltrane had even mastered a form of blame reversal: sure, the horse could not be tamed, but hadn’t the buyer insisted on getting a particularly lively animal? And did not the buyer of the draft horse with four lame legs want an inexpensive animal? Ian Coltrane reminded the buyer he had offered him about ten more valuable and thus, naturally, healthier horses, but so be it.

  Colin had often made use of this tactic—in horse trading but also in rigging bets or card games, which had been forbidden in the cadet academy. When Colin got into mischief, he rarely carried out the deed himself, preferring to put others up to it. And that was precisely, in his opinion, what should have been done in Parihaka: no warnings, no threats, for which Te Whiti and his people could prepare. Instead, there had been the deliberate provocation of individuals, especially the field-workers. Colin was sure it would have been possible to enrage them. They could have turned fistfights into a rebellion, and by the first dead settler, people’s anger would have boiled over, and they would have stormed Parihaka without forewarning. Now, however, Colin saw no opportunity for the government to come out of this on the moral high ground.

  The Maori maintained their position the next day and the day after that. The men did not move. The women and girls only got up to retrieve prepared food from the marae. This ultimately offered the tense and frustrated officers of the Armed Constabulary an excuse to act.

  “It’s not acceptable that the people come and go as they please,” said the commander. “At least not when it could harm the occupying army. Men, search the houses.”

  Neither the armed constables nor the volunteers needed to be told twice. Before their superiors could organize their soldiers, they stormed the houses, where some women and children could still be found.

  The Maori hunters had not hidden their guns inside the houses, so the soldiers quickly found weapons. This quick success spurred on the men, who began to plunder. Soldiers ran out of the houses with weapons, hei-tiki, and jade amulets or figurines—and screams came from the cooking lodges. The men assaulted the girls preparing the food.

  Colin Coltrane, who was as blindsided by the commander as the other sergeants and corporals, wasn’t sure where to begin, which inspired him to take action. The first Maori men were already coming to the women’s aid, and the priests were agitated over the defacing of the statues of the gods. A few armed constables emptied their bladders on the marae. If this continued, there would be deaths, and not only among the Maori. Coltrane saw trouble ahead: investigative commissions, questions, reputations destroyed forever, and no opportunities for advancement for anyone involved—the last thing he needed.

  From one of the nearby buildings came women’s screams, a dog barking, and sounds of a struggle. A giant, tattooed young Maori warrior approached the lavishly decorated building. No doubt, his orders had been to remain peaceful in the gathering place. Colin saw him disappear between the figures of the gods at the entrance of the building. A wharenui, Colin remembered, a gathering lodge—surely weapons were stored in there, if only for religious purposes. Ceremonial weapons could still be sharp.

  Colin leveled his gun and followed the warrior. The building was large and sparsely furnished. A few statues of gods cast ghostly shadows on the two girls who opposed four soldiers. One of the girls was armed with a spear, the other with a war club of jade. The men laughed, threatening them with their bare hands.

  Colin felt burning anger rise in him when he recognized the girls. One of them was the stout girl the officer had struggled to move out of his way two days ago. The other was Matariki. And at her side was her dog, which had the courage of a lion. The mutt barked, growled, and snapped at the attackers. Matariki held her club but froze when the men disarmed Pai of her spear. It took two of them to throw Pai to the ground, but they managed it, and Matariki saw no way of coming to her friend’s aid.

  Pai kicked and bit at her attackers. And then she saw the Maori man who had entered the building moments before Colin had. So far, he hadn’t even started to intervene.

  “Kupe!”

  Pai called for the warrior, but he had eyes for Matariki alone. Without looking at Pai, he moved to hit one of Matariki’s attackers in the temple with the butt of a rifle. He must have found the soldiers’ weapons.

  “Kupe, no.”

  Matariki seemed to be more afraid for the boy than herself. Or had she already seen Colin in the building’s entrance?

  When the young Maori hesitated, Colin swung his weapon, thereby knocking the man aside. When Kupe tried to aim the gun, Colin stepped on his hand, and the warrior screamed. Colin had likely broken a few bones. All the better.

  “You’re under arrest,” Colin said to him. “Resistance, insurrection, breach of the peace, take your pick. And you . . .” Colin Coltrane stepped over to the men with Pai. “You will stand up this instant and behave like soldiers.” He glared at them until the chastened soldiers got up. “Private Jones, Private McDougal, there will be consequences. Now
, get out of here. Everything all right, miss?”

  Colin held out his hand to the girl lying on the ground, but she did not take it. Instead, she scrambled to her feet on her own and went over to the Maori warrior who sat dazed and holding his hand.

  “Kupe, Kupe, I called to you.”

  Pai’s face was expressionless, but in her eyes shone a combination of incomprehension, shattered hope, and naked hate.

  “Pai.” The boy seemed only now to recognize the girl. “I—”

  “I was fighting with two men,” Pai continued. “I was on the ground. You didn’t even see me. You’ve shared my bed for two years, Kupe, but you still only had eyes for her.” She gestured with her chin to Matariki. “I don’t hold it against you, Matariki. I know you didn’t encourage him. You don’t even want him now.” The girl spat the words out. “May the gods curse you, Kupe Atuhati. May you go to hell; may your worst nightmares come true.” The girl let her gaze pass over those gathered there as if she were mad, and as she fled, a gust of wind seemed to sweep through the marae. “May the spirit of Parihaka leave you, Kupe, as long as you bear the name she gave you.”

  With that, she pointed at Matariki and ran out of the wharenui. Shocked, Kupe and Matariki watched her go.

  “She doesn’t really mean it,” Matariki murmured.

  Colin squared himself. “Regardless of who meant what,” he said, “your friend, miss, is under arrest. Assault with a deadly weapon on an unarmed man.”

  “Who was only unarmed because you can’t hold a gun and hold a girl down on the ground at the same time,” Matariki shouted.

  Colin shrugged. “A judge will decide that. But it may well be that he ends up on the gallows, your little boyfriend—or is he your friend’s?” He smirked. “And here I thought, in the uncommonly peace-loving wonderland of Parihaka, no one knew jealousy. I seem to have been mistaken.”

  “You can’t accuse him of that. It was self-defense. He only wanted—” Matariki looked at Kupe, who was still too shocked to defend himself.