Telegram Home

by Kirsten McKenzie

  Māori women and a handful of men surrounded Annabel, all of them armed.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  The woman with the baby stepped forward. ‘They found you in the bush after we heard rifle fire and they brought you back here. Are you with the English?’ the girl asked.

  ‘No, but… well I was travelling with them, sharing their camp, but I’m not… someone shot my companion…’

  Again they talked above her, in a language she couldn’t understand, and there was a quiet whispering between the girl and the man who claimed to know who she was.

  ‘Not by them,’ he translated.

  ‘Pardon?’ Annabel said.

  ‘The natives didn’t shoot your friend. Someone else shot him,’ Colin explained. ‘Not the natives,’ he reiterated.

  ‘Who shot him? Why?’

  ‘We don’t know. But they were using the soldier’s rifles because our warriors caught one,’ Aroha said.

  Annabel struggled to swallow her fear as she asked, ‘Did you find my… is he, dead?’

  ‘They’re dead,’ Colin mumbled. ‘There was no one alive at your campsite, only you, and only because you were so close to the fort’s defences.’

  ‘Everyone?’ she repeated.

  A sudden volley of rifle fire took everyone by surprise, followed by the shouts and screams of a hundred men. The room emptied, leaving just Annabel, Colin, and Aroha with the baby. The baby’s cries competed with whatever was happening outside of the building.

  ‘Get up,’ yelled Aroha. ‘Help me with her,’ she said to Colin as she tried to fit the squirming, crying baby into a woven basket which she slung over her shoulders.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Annabel asked. ‘Are they attacking here now?’

  ‘The English are,’ Aroha replied.

  ‘But we’re English,’ Annabel said, cringing at the rifle fire.

  A massive booming filled the air, as the three old ships guns fired.

  ‘We have to get out,’ Colin said. ‘To tell them to stop attacking.’

  ‘They won’t though,’ Annabel said, vague historical knowledge floating to the surface. ‘They’ll attack until everyone is dead, that’s what they always do.’

  The group hesitated at the doorway, the central courtyard area was awash with men and women — the women reloading the muskets for the warriors to fire. They watched as an English scaling party appeared atop of the defensive palisades, the red of their uniforms like a matador’s flag to a Spanish bull.

  In seconds, the Māori warriors had the ladder down and the screams of the English soldiers drowned out the booming canons of the three ships guns the natives had wheeled into position. A bevy of women were passing the improvised shells to the men.

  ‘They will die,’ Colin cried.

  ‘Or we will. We need to get out,’ Annabel said. ‘Which way?’

  ‘I can’t leave them, I have to help. Here, take the baby go round the back and follow the line of the palisades,’ Aroha said, sloughing the woven basket from her back and shoving it at Annabel.

  Annabel hugged the screaming infant to her chest.

  ‘There’s nothing you can do to help them. You’re outgunned and outnumbered,’ Colin screamed, grabbing at the Māori girl’s hand, but she wiggled from his grasp — an eel slithering free from a trap.

  ‘I can’t just leave them,’ Aroha said. ‘I’ll find you afterwards,’ and she raced over to the nearest group of women.

  Colin went to go after her, but Annabel seized him by his jacket and pulled him after her. ‘Leave her, there’s nothing we can do. She doesn’t want you being shot by accident. Come on.’

  They ducked around the back of the building, avoiding the slop of carnage around them. Not stopping to help tore at Annabel, but it was them or her. She’d been so close to giving up the will to live that her sudden desire to survive surprised her. And her companions, keeping them alive was a priority. She turned back for one last look towards the girl who reminded her so much of her own daughter, they’d be about the same age but Annabel couldn’t imagine her daughter having her own child, it was possible, but she’d ever know.

  ‘This way,’ Colin said, the urgency in his voice unmistakable.

  The human noise cascaded around them, but a dam of bodies stopped the tinkling flow of the stream. Annabel wanted to scream at them to stop. That fighting was futile, that the British Empire didn’t need to flex its might to subdue a smaller country, a people ill-equipped against a better armed foe. She wanted to yell at them that she was English, to appeal to their chivalrous side — how could they endanger the lives of the women and children? Was nothing sacred?

  The wooden palisades were so tightly packed that squeezing through them was impossible.

  Colin got stuck halfway through, and wiggled backwards, ‘We have to find another route,’ he said looking behind them, but everyone was too busy fighting to worry that they were trying to leave.

  ‘What if they try killing us too?’ Annabel asked, panicking.

  ‘We’ll find another way out,’ Colin said, shoving her further along the protective fence-line.

  The boy was almost half her age, yet she followed him without question. Had life conditioned her to follow a man? And like pebbles in a maelstrom, they tumbled together through an unfortified gap in the palisades, landing in an untidy heap at the bottom.

  An angry shout turned them. A pair of tattooed warriors stood above, training their rifles trained on them.

  Annabel froze despite Colin’s desperate pleas to get up, which fell silent as he dropped his own hands in defeat. So many times she’d almost given up and now seemed the most opportune time to fall on the mercy of whoever held the guns. The two men tumbled down the ditch behind them, replaced by English soldiers — the morning sun reflecting off the polished brass buttons of the uniforms. The soldiers peered over the edge, sun spots distorting their vision.

  ‘Play dead,’ Colin hissed.

  Annabel slumped to the ground, playing the role of her life in the dirt. The stench of gunpowder and death washing away their fear and replacing it with a fatalistic stance of what will be, will be. And they waited.

  The soldiers vanished back into the fray, the murderous annihilation of a tribe who didn’t want to part with their lands so the English could extract gold from the quartz underground. For the want of gold, the English had slaughtered the people who’d rescued Annabel. She still had no idea who they had rescued her from. If it wasn’t the army, or the Māori who shot Price, who was it? And were they still out there?

  ‘Go back into the bush, it’s safer there,’ Colin said, scrambling up, and they ran pellmell towards the scrubby bush beyond the pā. Annabel’s lack of a boot no impediment to her ability to run.

  ‘Stop or I’ll shoot,’ yelled a soldier.

  Still they ran, the baby crying in Annabel’s arms, the wailing adding to the thunderous noise coming at them from all angles.

  ‘Stop,’ said a closer voice. A soldier emerged from one of the defensive pits, dug to protect the fort, and trained his long barrelled rifle on the group.

  ‘I’ve got them here, sir,’ he yelled back.

  ‘Keep them there,’ came the answer.

  Annabel looked at her Colin, and at the soldier, and weighed up her options. She could run or give up. She was English, so she should be okay, and nobody would hurt a baby. Colin was nothing more than a boy, his accent identifying him as Welsh, so they wouldn’t hurt him. There was no point challenging the army, it was best to surrender and let this nightmare be over.

  ‘We should have stayed put, don’t know why I was running. One of those soldiers could’ve been Warden Price. He’d have seen no harm come to us.’

  Annabel stared at him incredulously. ‘You know Warden Price?’

  ‘He saved my life at Port Chalmers when my ship sank,’ Colin said.

  ‘That was you?’

  ‘I guess so. He saved lots of other people too, but he swam out and dragged me back to shor
e. Visited me in the hospital too, until he disappeared. They told me he was trying to track down a girl abducted from Bruce Bay. Was that you?’

  Annabel shook her head. What a peculiar conversation to have at the end of a rifle. Colin’s name prickled at the back of her mind. There’d been a letter… but what had happened to it? That was a blur. Price had asked her to send it on but for the life of her she couldn’t recollect whether she had. Water under the bridge now.

  ‘Up you get,’ the soldier said, prodding Colin with his rifle.

  Colin helped Annabel up, who was limping now. ‘Where are we going?’ Colin asked.

  ‘If I had my way, I’d be back in Australia, back to my cushy little number in Melbourne. But I got shipped here, conscripted to hunt down them cannibals you were with.’

  ‘They aren’t cannibals,’ Annabel said.

  ‘Well you would say that wouldn’t you, lady. Living with them heathens.’

  ‘The heathens rescued her from the bandits who attacked her camp. She’d only arrived moments before you unleashed your unholy hell on the natives,’ Colin blustered. ‘We’re both friends of Warden William Price,’ he tried.

  A second soldier joined them, his uniform denoting him as an officer. The starched cuffs of his sleeves had started the day a brilliant white, but were now the colour of rust-tainted water.

  The booming ships canons had fallen silent, replaced with the occasional crack of musket fire, instead of the whole symphony which had played moments earlier. Now men were shouting orders to surrender in English, which provided some hope that the English hadn’t slaughtered the whole tribe.

  ‘He says they’re friends of Warden Price,’ the solider relayed to the officer.

  ‘Does he now? That’s interesting because Warden Price never made to the Queens Redoubt, where he was to muster with his men. His men never made it either. Perhaps you can enlighten us about that?’

  ‘Now?’ Annabel asked. ‘When people are dying all around us?’

  The officer tugged at his bloodied cuffs, examining them as if he was seeing them for the first time. ‘Terrible business, completely unnecessary. We’d almost got them to agree access but Auckland gave us the hurry up. Damn the telegraph. If they’d delayed the connection a few more weeks… but orders are orders, so what could I do?’ He swivelled his head between Annabel and Colin, driving home his point, before noticing the baby. ‘What the devil is a baby doing out here? Harper, get them to back to the Queens Redoubt and get that baby out of the cold. Plenty of time to find out who they are back at HQ.’ And then he carried on, ‘Orders are orders. Had to attack, no choice. It’s us or them, the Governor said, and they still think an attack on Auckland is imminent. I was under orders.’

  The Reunion

  Despite Colin begging to search for Aroha, Harper marched them around the damaged defences of the pā by Harper, his finger never far from the trigger of his rifle. The man’s carrot-orange hair did nothing to enhance his tiny pig-like eyes set in his pasty face. The soldier was a jumbled up mishmash of anger and petulance and relief that he’d been let off the unsavoury task of sorting the living from the dead.

  ‘Move it, you two. I ain’t got all day. Should have shot you on the spot, bloody collaborators. The natives are moving to attack Auckland next. They’ll slit our necks in bed, you mark my words,’ Harper rambled.

  Colin and Annabel paid no attention to him, concerned more about the lethargic baby in Annabel’s grazed arms.

  ‘She’s hungry,’ Colin said.

  ‘I think it’s more than that, she needs a doctor,’ Annabel said.

  ‘Who needs a doctor? That mongrel you’ve got in your arms?’ Harper replied, squinting at the baby.

  ‘What did you say?’ Annabel asked, her face white.

  ‘Me? I said nothing.’

  ‘You called the baby a mongrel.’

  ‘Only said the truth,’ Harper replied.

  Annabel’s face changed from white to apocalyptic red, ‘This is a child-’

  ‘My child,’ Colin said, plucking the baby from Annabel. ‘And you murdered her mother. So who’s the mongrel now?’

  ‘Get a move on and shut up. No more talking from either of you,’ Harper said.

  By the time they reached the wagons, they were teeming with injured men and bodies, but they made room for the newcomers, and with Harper glaring at them the whole way, they travelled the bumpy road to the Queens Redoubt, the headquarters of the army’s defence of the imagined invasion of Auckland.

  Capable of housing four hundred and fifty men, the place was overflowing with the dead and dying, the conscripted and the volunteers, the professional soldier and his sadistic, opportunistic militia colleague — the sort of man who’d never make it in the real army, a man like Harper.

  Faced with housing a woman, a baby, and a potential collaborator, the commander of the garrison, a man they’d already met, billeted them with the doctor, asking Annabel to help where possible. Annabel agreed, on the proviso that the doctor first examine the baby, whose lethargy was even more pronounced.

  The doctor pronounced the baby dehydrated, directing Colin to dip a rag in a bowl of boiled water, for the baby to suck. So with Colin ensconced at the end of the doctor’s cot, cooing and clucking to the infant, the harried doctor tasked Annabel with redressing wounds and seeing to the lesser injuries. No one asked if she knew what she was doing. Her mere existence as a woman was enough for them to assume she had a wealth of healing knowledge. Like all mothers, she could remove a splinter from a finger, or dress a graze. She wasn’t much good at bandaging up broken fingers or plugging wounds caused by musket fire, but she did her best.

  The pace was frenetic, providing no chance to dwell on her own problems. She gave no thought to the future — with no past, no present and no future, she was a ghost walking through time. She fell asleep across the doctor’s cot, breathing in the sweet scent of the baby. Annabel’s last thoughts before she slept, were of her own baby girl, Sarah.

  A military camp is no place for a woman and a baby, so the commander decreed that they go to Auckland for questioning. The army transported Annabel, the baby, and Colin - who they’d accepted as the baby’s father, up Great South Road, to a town prepping for invasion.

  Deposited at the Albert Barracks, the soldiers didn’t know what to do with them. Although Harper had volunteered to escort them, the commanding officer ordered him to stay at the Queens Redoubt, otherwise their fate might have been quite different given the way the arrogant red-haired soldier leered at Annabel whenever she went near him in the course of her duties.

  The duty sergeant deduced that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that they were lucky to escape with their lives. He reiterated that the army was preparing for the native invasion and no one wanted to waste any time on them. He all but shoved them outside.

  The army had returned Annabel’s belongings, together with Warden Prices’, from the campsite after they gave the dead decent Christian burials. Rumours were rife about the culprits, but as far as Colin knew, only Aroha had any idea who they were. And she couldn’t tell anyone. He prayed her death had been quick, that she’d died trying to save her people. Colin couldn’t stop thinking about how he’d abandoned Aroha; how he’d failed to find his brother; how he’d runaway from his mother and his other brothers. But he was adamant he wouldn’t fail the baby. He didn’t know what he needed to adopt her, but that was a problem for another day. For now their first task was to secure lodgings until they decided what to do next. He thought about them as a group, as an extended family. Annabel’s husband died long ago, she’d said, leaving her no family in New Zealand, and Aroha had perished in the attack on the fort. He’d heard that there were few survivors, and those who hadn’t perished, vanished into the bush. But first they needed a room — a bed, and a bath, and then they could plan. Fate had decided he shouldn’t be a gold miner, that was clear.

  He secured them both rooms at Sheehan’s Hotel, using the cash from Wa
rden Price’s bags. Annabel assuring him it was fine to use the Warden’s money, that he’d understand their need. After arranging for someone to bring a bath up to the room, he left Annabel to her ablutions and descended to the public bar.

  The bar was awash with men — miners, gum-diggers, loggers, merchants. It was obvious who wasn’t there — not a single native was on the premises, but the subject of the natives were on the tongue of every man there. A wave of discontent festering. Colin chose a quiet spot by the door to swallow his ale, already regretting his naïve decision to come downstairs. What did he think he would achieve? That luck would smile upon him and he’d find Warden Price sharing a drink with Aroha?

  No, Colin kept his eyes downcast, content to listen to the babble of voices around him, the accents as familiar as the beat of his own heart.

  ‘Room for us at this table?’

  Colin looked up from his drink and blinked, convinced there was a problem with his eyesight. The image didn’t change, there were two identical men standing in front of him, just as filthy and road-weary as he was, but older, and fit the narrative of the place better than he did.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Yes sorry I…’ but he didn’t finish, a flash in the eyes of one twin giving him pause. ‘Sorry, you surprised me,’ he finished. ‘Please join me.’

  ‘You get the drinks,’ the man said to his twin, and the giant brute lumbered off. It was clear to Colin that one wasn’t as smart as the other. That was the way of things sometimes. Nature didn’t always get everything right.

  ‘You look lost, friend,’ Colin’s companion commented.

  ‘It hasn’t been the easiest of times,’ Colin admitted. ‘Colin Lloyd,’ he said, sticking his hand out.

  ‘Nice to share a table with you, Mr Lloyd. My names Joe, and that’s my brother, Jimmy, getting the drinks.’