Captive Wife, The

by Kidman, Fiona

  I would like a baby that colour, I said to Hine once, when we were watching the children at the water’s edge.

  She gave me an odd look. I don’t think you would, she replied.

  Perhaps it was on account of these women who had helped me that my way of looking at things began to change. Not that I mentioned this to Jacky, for I knew he wouldn’t understand. In particular, I didn’t like the way the whales were killed, nor did I feel easy about the way Jacky kept on the good side of Te Rauparaha, when all about me I saw how much damage he was doing to my friends. Jacky and I had fallen out for a while, and then he made it up to me, and was nicer to me than he had ever been before. He called me his little treasure, his finest possession and all manner of things like that. He’s my husband and there is much between us and I did not wish to hold a grudge in my heart. But there were times when I found myself strangely unmoved, as if I could not quite trust him again. Charley was right when he said that I was lonely, though that was not so much the case, now that Hine and her family were my friends. When I was not doing my tasks, young John and I spent much of our time with them. John was a merry baby and he spoke with the Maori children as he played, seeming to know their language better than ours. He reminded me of his father, for he was always the one who suggested mischief to the others, in the way of a little leader.

  But Jacky had not trusted me when I needed him most, and now I found myself more critical of him than at the beginning. His friendship with Te Rauparaha was something I couldn’t speak of, for I knew he would brush me aside. But I knew that trouble was brewing, for the women told me what was going on around the Strait.

  Then I didn’t see Hine for a little while.

  The whare she shared with her husband Dan had been moved several times, once because of flooding, another time because it was in the way of some storehouses that were being built. Later, Dan had gone to sea and not come back.

  I asked Jacky where he had gone, because I knew how badly Hine wanted to know. Then Jacky told me Dan’d picked up with a ship in Port Nick, and I wasn’t to tell Hine. The ship was heading for South America. That is probably the last she will see of him, he said. The girls in South America are prettier.

  I didn’t like that. I knew he could be wrong about things. Mind you, he could still make me feel guilty. I often wished I could have seen what was coming with Charley; sometimes I felt as if it had all been my fault. Because Jacky was older, and so much in charge, you understand.

  But it was on account of what he had told me about Dan that, for some time, I had been unable to bring myself to look for Hine. I was just a couple of months gone with Louisa when I took John on my hip for a walk to the next bay in search of her. I wanted to tell her about the new baby. But I couldn’t find her.

  What I did find round in the next bay stays with me still. Lying on the beach were some sixty half-cooked bodies of men and women, along with the body of a young child spitted over the remains of an open fire. You’re very pale, Adie. Don’t flinch. Remember, it was you who unlocked my tongue.

  Let me tell you how humans are cooked. A hole is dug in the earth, some two feet deep. A fire is lit with dry wood, and a quantity of round stones are added which are made red hot. These are removed, except for a few at the bottom, but by now the whole pit is like a furnace. Over the stones that are left, layers of leaves and flesh are built up, one after another, until there is as much above ground as below. Then water is thrown over this mixture, perhaps a bucketful, or two, in our measurements. All of this is covered with old mats and earth, so that the steam is trapped underneath and the cooking begins. By this method, the flesh is cooked very quickly.

  As well as the child on the spit, there was evidence of this cooking method all about me, on the beach and beyond.

  Straight away, I guessed this was again the work of Te Rauparaha. Later, I learnt that his men had taken a war party to Kaiapoi. After a victory, they captured hundreds of prisoners and brought them by canoe up to our island. They had been camped for nine days.

  I discovered Hine, cowering in bushes with Manu beside her. I would never have found her, except that she called out to me in a little voice.

  I turned to her, holding my hands palm up to the sky.

  Who has done this? I said. Was it him?

  Te Rauparaha had ordered an oven to be built on the beach, she told me, before sending off slaves to collect firewood. When they arrived back, he killed them with his tomahawk, while the rest were ordered to cook the bodies of their friends. They served their joints in flax baskets.

  I screamed so loud it’s a wonder they didn’t hear me in Sydney. John began to cry too. I turned away from the scene, and quieted myself, hoping he was too young to understand what he had seen.

  Why didn’t you stop them? I asked Hine.

  She just looked at me as if I was daft in the head, which I suppose I was.

  When I told Jacky, he said that he knew about it.

  But you did not tell me, I said.

  I saw no need for it. I did not know you were going to go prowling around.

  Prowling around, I said. Forgive me but I only live here and I wish I did not.

  You don’t mean that, he said.

  I am in a good mind to stay in Sydney the next time we go back.

  Well then, I shall leave you here, he rejoined.

  And then I will be cooked and eaten too, and so will your son.

  At that, he gave me a long hard look. Even though he and I had been so careful with each other since the quarrel over Charley, I saw that deep down he, too, had misgivings about me. After the birth of John, Charley went to sea, and I hadn’t seen him in a long while. The silly part of it was, I had never had a fancy for Charley, only his conversation. From the beginning, it was Jacky I hungered for. Don’t look alarmed, Adie — however I tease you, I won’t embarrass you by explaining it all. There are some women who do what they must for duty and others who do it because their bodies will not allow them to do otherwise. My mother is one of the second kind, and I am somewhere in between. Or so I thought. I did not wish to sample others when I went with Jacky. Not that whalers are romantic. Their hands are meaty and raw from the cold water, and their clothes stink, always stiff with salt and oil. The smell of whale oil is almost impossible to describe, a cross between vinegar and vomit that seems to leave a stain on the skin. I could never produce enough hot water to keep Jacky clean and scrubbed. But that was the way of it. You didn’t think about it after a while.

  I have said too much, forgive me. Much has happened to me, much that is hard to forget. Jacky craved me, his eyes always following where I went, and his manner seemingly very kind. And when it was night I made him truly happy. That was enough.

  I didn’t want us to fall to quarrelling again. His silent rage was something I feared then, and still do. So I turned away without speaking further about what I had seen.

  I did not mean for you to find out about the bodies on the beach, he said more kindly. It is not something a woman should know about.

  But these things cannot be hidden from me, Jacky.

  What do you want me to do about it then?

  I want us to go and live at Cloudy Bay, as soon as we can. It feels safer than here.

  To my surprise, he agreed straight away. He had named the whole area Port Underwood, out of respect for Mr Underwood in Sydney who had given him his start. I wondered if he shouldn’t have called it after his benefactor, Mr Campbell, but as usual it was all decided before I was told. And I wasn’t going to argue with him then.

  I understood then how deeply concerned he was. Not only did he agree to us leaving Te Awaiti, he said he would go ahead and build us a house there and then, and that he would send for Charley to stay with me.

  I was very surprised by this. But you know what they say, blood is thicker than water, and when you think about it, who else could he trust? Going through his mind, perhaps, was the thought that if he didn’t send for Charley it would look as if he had not got ove
r what was supposed to be mended.

  At first I said, that is not what I want.

  He looked quite distracted, as if for once he didn’t know what to do. You are in the family way, Betty. There is John to consider.

  I could camp out, I said.

  You need a roof over your head and a bed at night and it will only be for a week or so.

  So I said yes. It occurred to me that this might actually put matters to rest for once and for all.

  This was how I got to know Charley well, and to live more or less in virtue alongside a man who was not my husband. I found myself laughing often at things he said. We would walk light-hearted along the beaches, skipping stones on the water with John, and racing each other to see who could pop the beads of seaweed on the crunchy sand first. Once, of an evening, he took some clothes out of his canvas bag, a cravat, a silk shirt and a little waistcoat, and dressed up as a dandy. I don’t know why he had these clothes with him, it was not as if we were about to go to a ball. But we laughed so hard, I thought I would break in two. I did a little curtsy and pretended to dance. Other evenings, we read his books together by candlelight. One night we pleasured each other, just for curiosity’s sake, but it did not feel like a sin. There had been a storm in Cook Strait all day, the sea lashed up into a frenzy, and he slipped in and out of me like an eel, gentle and not at all like his brother, who batters me with his body. Because I was already five months gone, I knew I could not catch a baby. In the morning, it was as if it hadn’t happened. The bay was humming with white spume, a reminder of the storm that had passed.

  ‘You have not asked me why I’m here,’ Betty says, after a silence.

  Adie is cooling herself with a silk fan that had belonged until yesterday to Charlotte Pugh (who is possibly still unaware that it has changed hands). Betty has brought it as a gift. It is hand painted in the design of a peacock tail, so that it ripples with tunnels of blue light. Like the paua shell, the governess had exclaimed.

  ‘A passionate blue,’ Betty had murmured.

  The gift, of course, had been a perfect choice, both beautiful and practical. How could Adie not have been seduced by it?

  Now Adie feels overwrought, as if she is in some kind of slow swelling pain. ‘I’m sure you’ll tell me,’ she says. She feels her face burning and hopes that it is not obvious to the other woman. She is very shocked by what she has heard, and knows, at the same time, that she could sit listening to more all night. The pain is pleasurable; she cannot describe anything like it. Yes. Yes, if she thinks about it, it is like the pain she has felt when the lieutenant is very near to her.

  ‘It isn’t true,’ says Betty. ‘About Charley. Of course I didn’t do that. Jacky trusted me.’

  ‘Then why did you tell me it was so?’

  ‘To see what you would do. Whether you would throw me out.’

  ‘What do you want of me?’ asks Adie, agitated and angry. She does not know whether she has been tricked, and dare not press the question. Worse, she would like it to be true. For a moment, she has believed it. Perhaps it is.

  ‘I thought you would have worked that out. I need somewhere to stay until Jacky is no longer angry with me.’

  ‘Why is he angry with you?’

  ‘It’s too hard to explain.’

  ‘Has he found out about Charley?’

  Betty’s brow puckers. ‘Charley? This is not about Charley.’

  ‘I think you’re not in your right state of mind. You’ve recently lost your child for which I am most truly sorry and would have paid my respects had you allowed me.’

  Betty rests her head wearily on one hand. ‘Sometimes I think he is grieving for Louisa, as indeed I am. Other times it is as if I have died. In his eyes.’

  ‘And have you?’

  ‘Died? I don’t know. A part of me, perhaps, gone the way of the patupaiarehe. My head is away with the fairies.’

  ‘You may stay here tonight. It’s too late for you to return.’

  ‘And then what? I go back to his silence.’

  ‘How long has he been like this?’

  ‘Since the rescue. When the ships came to Taranaki and he took me back from Oaoiti, who is the chief who protected me while I was held by the Maoris.’

  ‘I see,’ says Adie. And somewhere, she thinks she does begin to see, that some key to the mystery has been turned. His name may be Charley. Or not.

  ‘I cannot bear silence,’ Betty says. ‘It is like a blunt axe and just as painful.’

  The cook has arrived with the evening meal on a tray, boiled fowl, cooled and sliced and served with a celery sauce, and small heads of broccoli; slices of rich fruitcake for dessert.

  ‘Tell Mr Malcolm that I will need a bed and some blankets for Mrs Guard.’

  ‘Well,’ says the cook, whose name is Susan, a woman with an oily forehead and quick eyes. Sometimes Adie thinks the world is ruled by cooks. ‘I don’t know what Mrs Malcolm will say about that for she has taken to her bed with a sick headache. She put off this afternoon’s guests.’

  ‘If she is in bed she need not know about it,’ says Adie, overtaken by a new reserve of energy. ‘Now do as I ask, or I will come up and tell your master myself.’

  ‘Why have you allowed them to put you here?’ says Betty, when Susan has gone.

  ‘I thought you would never ask me,’ says Adie, attacking the fowl. She lifts the meat looking for the slick of jelly that gathers under cooled poultry, and scoops what she finds onto her fork, letting it slowly dissolve on her tongue.

  ‘Well, tell me,’ Betty says.

  ‘I like it here. I like to listen to the gum trees.’

  ‘I used to listen to them too when I was a girl.’

  ‘They are like papyrus whispering together, leaf on leaf. Like the ancient scrolls.’

  ‘But you have not told me. Was it to do with me?’

  ‘It is no matter. My position in Lieutenant Roddick’s house has ended. I will shortly return to England.’

  ‘You must tell me if I have harmed you in some way. I was not myself when you last saw me.’

  ‘My dear child, I understand that.’

  ‘I am not your dear child. You don’t know what it is to have a dear child.’

  Adie is silent then.

  ‘I’m sorry, Adie,’ says Betty, ‘I didn’t mean to give offence. My husband so wanted his son. My daughter, well, I had learnt what it was like to be lonely. I wanted a little girl in my image. I cherished her more than my mother or sister or aunt. All of them have shown indifference towards me.’

  ‘Like my sister-in-law,’ says Adie, with a rueful smile.

  ‘Just so. But to have a daughter, that’s different. Louisa was my little flower from the moment Hine gave her into my arms. I touched the tip of her perfect nose, and stroked back the surprisingly pale hair, for we are given to darkness in our family, though Jacky said he remembered his mother as being light in colouring, and Charley is fairer than him, and I said, Darling girl, my precious little pea pod, I will love you forever with every inch of my breath. And now she’s dead and I have both love and hate for those who held us in New Zealand. For in spite of being shown many kindnesses, I believe Louisa would yet have been here, had it not been for our capture.’

  ‘I am so sorry,’ Adie murmurs. She thinks of young Austen who is probably wondering now why he has not had a bedtime story, and of Mathilde, who will be settling down in a matter of fact way, making the best of things, but missing her all the same. It does not seem the moment to speak of them.

  ‘It’s true,’ she says at last, ‘that I’ve become drawn to your story. And that a woman of my age who has lived her life on the fringe of experience is wont to behave extravagantly when she thinks she has come across the real thing at last.’

  ‘I suppose that’s not so bad,’ says Betty, ‘though it tells me how I’m seen by others. The world isn’t judging me very kindly. Nor is my husband.’

  ‘He has no right,’ says the governess hotly.

  ‘Right.
What is right? It’s almost impossible to tell. I’m a practical woman, Adie. I’ve had no choice to be anything else. My husband would say that he, too, is a man who knows how to make the best of a bad job.’

  Chapter 23

  I never went back to Te Awaiti. When I stood in front of our house at Kakapo Bay, I believed I was home. The bay is a small sheltered haven. A hill rises in a gentle slope up a narrow valley towards easy rolling hills. Jacky had built me the best house yet. It was much like those that had gone before, only longer and the rooms more nicely in proportion with each other. It looked like a real house, like one of the houses in the top end of George Street, only the water was lapping just beneath my feet. I find it hard to describe the colours of the sea and the sky in that place. Some days when the sky is angry, the light will be green, and the sea boiling. Other days it will be so blue that you cannot tell where heaven and the sea leave off from one another, much like a man and a woman when they have been together. In the Maori world it is said that Rangi is the sky father and Papa, the mother, is the earth, and they were separated only so that light could enter the world, and so people would have space to move around. They are never really apart. On other days, I would stand at the water’s edge and pinpricks of fog would appear like blue sand flung in the air, and when it passed the sky might have darkened, or it might simply melt away, leaving the air clear again.

  It is ours for all time, Jacky said, placing his arms around my waist, a gesture that was not like him. I placed my hands over his, so that we were joined together, his hands and mine, over Louisa, soon to be born.

  All of a sudden, I was so happy, as if we really had made a new beginning.

  Hine had agreed to come with us, for the time being, and it felt as if she was part of our family too, and soon my brother David would be here, for Jacky had made the arrangements with him the last time we were in Sydney, that he would come and do carpentry for us, rather than put to sea. He had been doing some work for John Deaves and was becoming handy with wood and tools.