The Voyage of the Morning Light

by Marina Endicott

  Thea said, “Of course!” and turned back to her cabin for gloves.

  For the heat of the day she also brought a sunshade. Kay did not want to stay in its irksome shade, and was told she would soon have a headache, and warned not to muss her good white muslin dress, laundered to a turn by Jiacheng. “The laundry is not suffering the lack of the Hubbards, at least,” Thea said. “That is good luck, or I should say God’s hand, although why God would use your foot in Lena Hubbard’s bottom end as His instrument I really cannot tell.”

  A soft giggle rose in her throat. Kay had not heard her laugh in ages.

  The tender tied up at a long wharf, with steps cut up one side. Kay’s spindly arms were elastic enough to haul her up a ladder quickly, and she had no fear of her good boots slipping through rusty rungs, but stairs were quicker, and meant Thea would not have to spoil her best white lawn on a ladder climb.

  First at the top, Kay looked about her, inspecting it for Mr. Brimner’s sake. Rubbishy kind of place, and hot in this late September afternoon.

  A gaggle of ragged young men loitered at the pier head, sitting for hire in brakes and open carts, none in good repair and some showing the road right through their floorboards. It was all a bit fly-blown and deserted, for the main town of a place.

  Then along came bowling a neater carriage, an open trap with a white horse pulling it. A clerical gentleman, small and dark, sprang out and came toward them, taking hands one at a time as if this was Sunday morning after church, his mouth making a polite pink triangle. He greeted Thea first, and Francis, and then found Mr. Brimner again and pumped his hands together over and over.

  “We had your telegram!” he cried, seeming more excited than was fitting. He turned to bow to Kay, lifting his old-fashioned hat. “And this young miss?”

  She was prepared to dislike him, or anyone else who stole Mr. Brimner away. With a very slight pressure Mr. Brimner put an arm along her shoulder and said, “May I present the Reverend Mr. Hill, incumbent here in Nuku‘alofa town. He is an old college mate of mine at Caius, and one of the reasons I entered the mission.”

  She yielded, since he wished it. “How do you do, Sir,” she said. At least polite.

  Bowing correctly, Mr. Brimner turned to Mr. Hill. “Let me introduce Miss Kay Ward, younger sister of Captain Grant’s wife. An apt pupil of classical tongues,” he said, giving her a dignified collegial nod, “and a sound maritime companion.”

  “Capital, capital! Do all of you come along. Mrs. Hill has got a luncheon ready, with tea as good as one may obtain on this benighted isle.”

  Francis took himself back to the ship, but the others climbed up into the trap and found a handhold as Mr. Hill shook up the reins and shouted at his poor thin horse. They wheeled off over dirt roads that soon yielded to grass tracks, a little crowded with a quiet jostling of traffic in the town. As they went, Mr. Hill pointed at a number of buildings, which all turned out to be churches.

  Not far from the wharf, a dog darted across the street before them, heavy dugs swinging below a starved-looking belly, and was caught—a terrible sound!—by the wheels of a heavy cart going the opposite way. The dog rolled and shook herself, whimpering, and limped off into an alley.

  Kay had left Pilot in Jacky Judge’s charge. She looked down the alley, but the dog had vanished. Perhaps it would live.

  Leaving the crowded market area, they turned corners very confusingly along empty, dusty alleys lined with whitewashed walls and scrap-wood fences in front of little ramshackle houses, and after some time pulled into a short gravel drive before a yellow bungalow with a roof of thatched straw. A woman waited on the porch, fair-haired and tired-looking.

  Mr. Hill announced, with endearing pride in this nondescript lady, “My wife!”

  “We are hoping you will stay to tea,” Mrs. Hill began, as they climbed down from the cart. “And maybe take a walk with us this afternoon, before Evensong . . .” Her voice was light and hesitant. A girl and a small boy clung to her sagging yellowed-muslin skirts, the boy peeping round and hiding his face again. He had pretty gold curls like bedsprings. The girl’s duller flaxen hair was pulled into taut triangles by braids at her temples.

  Mr. Hill handed them down from the cart, stopping to display his imported British flowers (“Carefully packed, and of course hand-watered in this climate, shoots do survive!”), and ushered them in, all the bodies bustling round in a swirling of people and steps and light and shade.

  Kay stood still in the quiet garden, in the greyish-white light of Tonga, staring at palm-frond leaves and a ragged rooster ranging in the yard, and the horse still harnessed to the cart. In a foreign place.

  Mrs. Hill had brought out her wedding china. “Only coconut cake,” she apologized, setting down small, thick cakes arrayed on a platter of flow blue undoubtedly crated with them from England. Understanding the honour paid her, Thea said they looked delicious.

  Mr. Hill had gone into full clerical spate, informing Mr. Brimner of things he likely already knew: “Our small Anglican congregation in Tonga originated as a breakaway from Methodism. We might perhaps characterize our flock as Anglophile—it was at first named for Queen Victoria!” Mr. Hill chuckled at that. He amused himself too easily, Thea considered.

  Mr. Brimner sat quietly taking in the house: the open expanse of bare oilclothed floor, two chintz-draped chairs, a short row of books in rough shelves below the front window.

  “By the grace of Bishop Willis, our church has been attached to the new diocese under the higher jurisdiction of New Zealand,” said Mr. Hill. “We have a gentleman’s agreement, you know, not to seek converts from among those already baptized by the Methodists or the London Missionary Society, and we do respect that.”

  “Oh yes, yes,” Mr. Brimner said gravely, as if accepting vital dogma.

  Thea suspected that perhaps Mr. Hill, busy with his family and his garden, did not mind having a limit placed on his conversion labours. He had none of the uncomfortable religious zeal she remembered from missionaries they had known in the West. He reminded her more of Mr. Hinch, the finicky curate in Yarmouth, an authority on Gregorian chant who was happy to gossip in Aunt Queen’s parlour. Perhaps zeal was for missions in the wilderness. Tonga could not be called wilderness; its ancient people, its long history and the presence of quite so many churches all precluded that.

  The girl came out to the porch with her brother to call Kay in for tea and cakes. They were named Muriel and Peregrine—a silly name for a boy, but Kay did not say so. Inside, the house was stuffy and dark, with a smell of church over must. Thea and Mrs. Hill sat drinking tea at the table while Mr. Brimner and Mr. Hill talked at the other side of the room in the only other chairs. Mr. Hill had lit a pipe, another reek. Muriel took Kay to sit on a bolster against the wall with a plate of quite nice cakes, if you did not mind chewing.

  They sat silent; Kay was listening to the others talk, and Muriel seemed to have no conversation. She was twelve or thirteen, taller than Kay, but not by much. She kept watch over Peregrine and did not allow him to have another cake, after two. He looked as though he might pout but was distracted by a toy donkey cart he found under a cushion, and spent a long time going back and forth on the linoleum, murmuring clip-clop clip-clop to himself. Muriel said he was six, but the golden curls made him seem younger.

  The burden of going on and on like this, sitting in rooms listening to people talk, weighed down on Kay. The thought of living for perhaps eighty more years, or even fifty—or until she had a baby and died of it like her mama—when even one year or one day more was unbearable. More of this and then more, all of it tedium and irritation. The same feeling descended on her at the start of church, at the first Dearly beloved. This house was infested with churchiness. What was the use of going elsewhere in the world when you brought everything dull along with you?

  The ladies were rising. By the window, Mr. Hill and Mr. Brimner turned, staring as if they were surprised to see them still there.

  “Will you walk wit
h us toward the harbour?” Mrs. Hill asked Thea, which meant Kay would also have to go and walk in the heat. “I am going to call on Mrs. Rachel Tonga, a great lady of the town, and I believe she will be glad to meet you.”

  They left the men in the shadowy house and walked out into one dusty lane after another, and soon went diagonally across a long, scrubby promenade of grass, like a street but with no paving, and then along a withy fence toward the harbour once more.

  The great white house with red roofs they had seen from the harbour was the palace, Muriel said. It had not looked like a palace to Kay; it was not even as large as Aunt Lydia’s house at Lake Milo.

  As they walked, Mrs. Hill did most of the talking. She knew all the royal family, and all those who were related to royalty, in which exact degree, who had done what to whom many years ago, and what that second person had done about it—as if she had transferred an English interest in monarchy straight over to Tonga, with all the reverence attached. Kay found it impossible to fathom the story of the king’s second marriage, or its ramifications for Princess Salote, who had been sent away last year and was now “practically exiled” in New Zealand to attend what sounded like a very ordinary girls’ school, while the people waited for her father’s new wife to have a son, who would be the heir.

  Mrs. Hill told them that Mrs. Rachel Tonga (with whom Princess Salote had been lodged before her exile) lived with her sister Sela and Sela’s husband Sione Mateialona, who had once been the premier. Rachel and Sela, she said, were “real Tongan ladies—certainly the most intelligent and best-mannered I have seen.” She paused to chide Peregrine for jumping and creating dust that might coat the ladies’ muslin.

  Mrs. Rachel Tonga lived along the Beach Road in Kolomotu‘a, west of the palace. West also of the British consul and the Residency, which Thea told Mrs. Hill she was most interested to see, although when Kay wanted to know why, she could not say precisely.

  “Oh, because of Empire, I suppose,” she said, and laughed a little.

  Kay looked up at her sideways. She said nothing impertinent but allowed her gait to slow so that she walked behind Thea.

  “It is a handsome building, is all I meant,” Thea added.

  Then Kay wished she had not asked why. She did not intend to be a disagreeable person, even though it sometimes came out that way.

  “Mrs. Rachel Tonga keeps proper house, you’ll see,” Mrs. Hill promised as they came closer, on this hot and too-long walk. “Very grand and clean. They are fakapapalangi, living in the European style, unlike some of the locals.”

  “They have a little dog,” Muriel told Kay. “A pug dog.”

  “I have a dog,” Kay said, and went back to worrying about Pilot, and whether he might have slipped off the deck and drowned in the sea.

  The house was a low white bungalow with a handsome veranda decorated with angular gingerbread. Mrs. Rachel and Sela sat on the low stoop in their shirt sleeves.

  “You have caught us resting from our washtubs,” Mrs. Rachel told Mrs. Hill, laughing. She was a strongly built, warm-faced woman, bulky at first glance but graceful when she moved. A comfortable presence, calm in her own powerful good sense, and she spoke English perfectly well.

  Another woman, Miss Winifred Small, came as they were standing on the steps. She too was kindly welcoming when Thea and Kay were explained as connections of the new Anglican missionary.

  Kay liked Miss Winifred, who was youngish, and prettyish, although some might call her plain. While the ladies talked, she looked like she was thinking of interesting other ideas. Miss Winifred had lived in Tonga from childhood, among the Wesleyan people. She had with her a friend, Lisia Fifita, a round young woman in a straight blue dress, and Lisia’s little girl Eponie, all dark eyes and glowing skin, perhaps three or four. A lovely child, with a deep dimple that came and went, although she was shy to smile. She put a warm hand on Thea’s knee, patting gently in welcome, and soon Thea pulled her up to sit in her lap, where she settled in so comfortably that Kay could almost feel the tender weight herself.

  As the women talked, Kay took off her hat to let the little girl try it on. Liquid, velvet-brown eyes looked up from inside the brim, absurdly happy. When Kay asked for it back, Eponie took it off at once and held it out, but her eyes filled with great tears that spilled over and tracked down her darling cheeks. Thea shook her head. “That is Kay’s only hat,” she said. But she kissed the little girl’s soft cheek.

  In their height and strength the women were interesting to look at, but their conversation might have been ordinary lady-chat in Yarmouth, and Kay wished they were at least still with Mr. Brimner, rather than on this strange visit.

  When she glanced up and saw Peregrine toddling out over the lawn, she followed as if she was looking after him, although she did not intend to bother fetching him back.

  They wandered along the expanse of grass and sand, stopping when Peregrine wanted to. Muriel came after them, even though Kay was finished talking to her. She was an insipid girl, perhaps not a dolt, but not interested in anything of the mind. She talked about ribbons, what she had eaten for breakfast and what there would be for tea. Peregrine did not talk, he merely put a rock in his mouth from time to time, which Muriel would hasten to make him spit out. He was not clever either. Kay felt quite alone.

  They wandered for some little time over the gentle swell of grassy park, until they were far out of sight of the women. The landscape was not empty, but the few men scattered about seemed to be taking rest, sitting under trees with their arms folded on their knees, gazing into the middle distance.

  Seeing some landmark, Muriel stopped, and said that they had got into the palace grounds, where they should not be. She pulled Peregrine back, but he did not want to go, his attention was fixed forward. Ahead of them on a shadowed path lay a shadowy shape. As they looked, the shape began to move. A rock or boulder moving—how strange. Oh! It was an enormous turtle, quite a yard high.

  “It is the Tu‘i Malila,” Muriel said. “The oldest tortoise in the world.”

  Kay took a step toward it.

  The turtle’s head lifted, pointed and tiny. Its narrow eye regarded her.

  After a moment, it blinked. One wrinkled stump of a leg lifted, and it took a step toward them.

  “It is hurt! Look, the marks on its back?”

  “No, that is very old. Captain Cook carved his initials on it, they say, when he gave it to the Tu‘i Tonga—No, no, Peregrine, come away!” Muriel caught at Peregrine’s hand and pulled.

  Kay expected the boy to complain, but he did not. It was a very strange tortoise. Perhaps it frightened him a little, as it did her.

  Muriel came back and plucked at Kay’s sleeve. “Come, come away, I am sure you will see him again, he is the king of Malila, the oldest tortoise in the world. He was given to the king very long ago. When you go to the palace later, you will hear all about him.”

  As Kay lingered, wishing to go closer, the tortoise took another step. It was a moving hill, red and black, a bulge in the fabric of the earth. As old as the stones at the edge of the sea.

  Francis was busy aboard ship, taking advantage of their stop for painting and refurbishing, mending sails torn in the great storm, and all the domestic duties that had been waiting his attention. Kay was glad Thea did not decide it was time to turn out the saloon as well, so they could come ashore every morning and spend the last days with Mr. Brimner; except that they did not see enough of him, because Mr. Hill commandeered him.

  On their last day, Mr. Hill arranged an excursion out to a famous landmark, a standing stone like Stonehenge, but (Mr. Hill said) “not so ancient, but still very old for this part of the world.” They drove out two carts; Kay went with Miss Winifred and Lisia in their cart.

  It was a relief to Kay to be alone with them. Not only because she had tired of Mr. Hill, who was a tedious gabster, but because—because Thea walked everywhere, in every company, as the most superior person in the room. It was not egotistical of her, it was simply h
er perception of the reality of things, her calm understanding of the strength of her character and education and the protection of her religion. Kay thought it odd that she herself had not received that same certainty from Father, spending so much time in his company. Her sense of her own position in the world seemed to come out as—not lower than other people, precisely, but off to one side.

  Kay had once or twice seen Thea’s sense of superiority registering with Miss Winifred, kind as she was and accommodating to the foreigner’s odd opinions. Travelling alone with them, Kay could enjoy Miss Winifred and Lisia, could talk to them and listen to them talk together of people they knew and new babies and the king and other interesting matters.

  They drove past groups of drowsy men sleeping on the side of the road or anywhere a little shade could be found, out some distance to the village of Niutoua. At last, there it was: a great lintel and doorway standing in a field.

  It was very large, certainly. They all got out of the carts.

  Mr. Hill had the facts at his fingertips. Thea did not seem to mind listening to him, though most likely he had been talking ceaselessly during the whole journey.

  “Ha‘amonga ‘a Maui—the Burden of Maui! Constructed from three limestone slabs, nearly twenty feet high,” he told them. “Built at the beginning of the thirteenth century under the eleventh Tu‘i Tonga Tu‘itātui, for some purpose of determining or celebrating the solstice, or as the gateway to his royal compound.”

  Kay wished he would be quiet.

  The thing was large, fine. Made of spongy stone, like a lintel for a temple—mainly interesting because the lines of the interior were so straight, after all those centuries. What she liked better was the strange slab stuck into the ground farther down the slope, in a little grove. The throne.