Toward the Sea of Freedom

by Sarah Lark

  “Then you can ride on peacefully,” Lizzie spat.

  She moved slowly backward, noticing that the men were moving too. They were trying to corner her. She almost had to turn her back to the one to aim at the other.

  Lizzie fired once again, which was obviously not a good idea. The men noticed that she had not mastered the gun’s use. They approached briskly.

  “We don’t want any trouble, Miss Portland,” said the older one. “Give us the gun and let us do a little test digging on your land. It’d be a good deal for you, too, if we really found gold. What’s that anyway?”

  He pointed to the vines, distracting Lizzie a heartbeat too long. His companion leaped at her in the same moment. Lizzie struck him with the gun, but she didn’t hit him hard enough. She stumbled. The man would tear away the gun in a moment, and then . . .

  “What the hell is this?” Lizzie heard a loud, commanding voice she recognized immediately. “Rusty Hamilton? And Johnboy Simmons? It’s been a while.” Michael galloped toward them. “Could the two of you please tell me what the hell you’re doing to my girl?”

  The younger man—Johnboy Simmons—let Lizzie go and muttered an apology.

  “No offense, Michael,” said Rusty, “but the lady threatened us with the gun and—”

  “The lady, I’m sure, informed you that you are on her land,” said Michael. “This is Elizabeth Station, from our old claim all the way up to here. So pack up your gold pans and get going.”

  Michael dismounted from his gray, ran over to Lizzie, and gave her a fleeting kiss, winking at her inconspicuously. Lizzie played along, saying nothing.

  Rusty Hamilton approached him with upraised hands. “But Michael, there could be gold in the stream. What if you’re sitting on a gold mine?”

  Michael laughed uproariously. “Now that would be a dream, Rusty, sitting here on a gold mine. But believe me, the Maori aren’t fools enough to sell gold mines for pastureland. And how thick do you think I am? Do you think I didn’t try the stream?”

  “And?” asked the man greedily.

  Michael shook his head. “It carries a little gold, of course,” he replied. “But so do all the streams, even our old claim down there.”

  Rusty and Johnboy laughed contemptuously.

  “But this here isn’t Gabriel’s Gully.” Michael smiled. “I swear to you, boys, on my honor.”

  Lizzie looked at the ground.

  “Well.” Rusty Hamilton seemed disappointed but didn’t appear to be planning any more attempts. “And you’re not going to tell us where you found all that gold you bought this little sheep paradise with, are you? Elizabeth Station. Lovely. Congratulations, little lady.”

  Lizzie smiled. She was surprised that she managed to beam at these good-for-nothings as if they were the answer to her prayers.

  Michael grinned. “Of course I’ll tell you: from here, go east to my old claim, then southward to a lake that is shaped like . . . like a dead dog. That’s what the Maori called it. What was its name again, Lizzie?”

  Lizzie had to stop herself from laughing. She had never heard of such a lake.

  “Kuritemato,” she said, improvising.

  “There you have it,” said Michael seriously. “At the left front paw, turn westward, and then it’s just a few miles to a stream—a little hidden, lots of ferns around it. You might even find our old sluice box. I just have to warn you, boys. The gold flow ran out.”

  Rusty and Johnboy grinned like children on Christmas.

  “I don’t see it that way,” said Rusty. “If you ask me, you just found too much to keep looking properly. We’ll take a look anyway. So then, how far is it, Michael?”

  Michael considered. “Far,” he said, “about an eight days march. And it’s easy to get lost. There are loads of lakes there.”

  “We’ll find it,” said Johnboy, tipping the brim of his hat. “And once again: no harm meant, miss.”

  Michael and Lizzie waited in silence until the two men had saddled their mules again.

  Michael interrupted the silence with a short question. “What are those?” he, too, asked quietly, pointing to the grape vines.

  “Wine,” said Lizzie. “This is going to be a vineyard.”

  Michael furrowed his brow. “We’ll need to put a fence around it so the sheep don’t trample the vines.”

  “We?” asked Lizzie.

  “Let’s talk about it later. We shouldn’t argue until these fellows are gone.” Michael waved at the prospectors.

  “Who wants to argue?” inquired Lizzie.

  She turned around and went up the hill a ways, back to her vines. One last vine had to be put in place. Carefully, she planted it.

  “Admit it: you need me,” said Michael, once the men had finally ridden away. He let his gaze wander over the vineyard and down to Lawrence. The view was breathtaking.

  Lizzie arched her brows. “On account of those rats? The Ngai Tahu are already on their way. They heard the gunshots at the village. Soon this place will be crawling with warriors. And I’m going to learn how to aim that thing.” She pointed to the gun. “You couldn’t do it yourself anyway. Or why else all that with the dead dog lake?”

  Michael laughed. “I’m increasing my mana,” he explained. “Whaikorero, the art of talking beautifully.”

  “I’d work on my spear throwing first,” said Lizzie, piling earth around her final cutting. “Those two won’t be in such a good mood when they come back.”

  “Oh, they won’t be back. With a little luck, they’ll find some gold somewhere on the way. And if not, I sent them in the direction of Queenstown. It would be madness to turn back around instead of working the new finds.”

  “And what was with swearing on your honor to them?” For the moment, there was nothing more for Lizzie to do in her vineyard.

  “Well, there’s not much you can redeem it for anyway. If I understand you and Kathleen correctly, my mana won’t take me very far.”

  Lizzie grinned. “But you could always live piously,” she said, “and raise your child with dignity.”

  “Does that mean you’ll still have me?” he asked quietly.

  Lizzie sighed and changed the subject. “How did you know I’d be here?”

  Michael gestured at the land around them. “It’s your mountain, Lizzie. Your maunga.”

  She smiled. “And you want to let sheep graze on it?”

  Michael bit his lip. “It’s not about the sheep, Lizzie. We can make wine—or distill whiskey. I just want to be with you. Because you and the baby—you’re my maunga.”

  “What about Sean?” she asked.

  “Sean is almost grown. He doesn’t need me anymore. And he has the reverend.”

  This last sentence almost sounded bitter. Michael accepted that Peter Burton had done a worthy job in his place.

  “Is that what Kathleen said?” Lizzie smiled. “Peter will be happy. It’s just a question of who will marry the two of them, the future Anglican bishop or that awful Father Parrish.”

  “Don’t dodge, Lizzie,” Michael said. “This isn’t about Kathleen.”

  Lizzie turned her face to the heavens in a gesture of gratitude. “That I lived to see this day . . .” she said, somewhat sarcastically.

  Michael forced himself to be patient. “It’s about us Lizzie. And about him in there.” He shyly laid his hand on her stomach.

  “It could be a girl.” Lizzie pushed his hand away. “One like me.”

  “All the better,” said Michael. “I don’t care either way. I’ll take a boy or a girl or both. As long as it comes from you.”

  Kahu Heke came to Lizzie’s mind, but she shooed the thought away quickly.

  “And I’d like to watch him grow. I’d like to be with the two of you, build a house for you.”

  To Lizzie it sounded as if Michael was pleading. She couldn’t be unfeeling.

  “And tell him about Ireland,” she teased him. “About his grandpa who made moonshine, and his grandma who prayed grandpa wouldn’t get cau
ght. And how they sent Daddy to Australia because of something to do with Trevallion’s grain.”

  Michael nodded seriously. “Exactly,” he said. “Isn’t that what the Maori call pepeha?”

  Lizzie laughed. “More like whakapapa, lineage. But the way you tell it, it’s more like moteatea, fairy tales.”

  Michael’s face took on its guilty grin. “So, will you let me?” he asked with growing hope. “May I stay with you? May I love you? May I sing the baby to sleep with good old Irish whaikorero?”

  Lizzie turned and looked into his shining blue eyes. “As long as you never hold against our child what her mother was—or is.”

  Michael pulled her close. “You mean a woman with lots of mana,” he whispered to her. “It will realize that itself soon.” He kissed her, and she returned his kiss, very slowly, very tenderly: a seal on a promise.

  “I’ll get to work on that fence,” Michael said as their lips parted. “For, for the sheep.”

  Lizzie rubbed her temples and smiled indulgently.

  “The house first, Michael,” she said gently.

  Afterword

  As always, I have striven for the greatest possible historical authenticity in this novel. My readers can picture the situation in Ireland during the potato blight, as well as the conditions in Wicklow Jail and on British prison ships, knowing they were as I have described them. The Asia truly did sail from Woolwich to Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, at the given time, with 169 female prisoners on board. I did, however, stow the twelve men away, and in other respects, my depiction is not quite historically correct: there were no deaths on board—the death rate on deportation ships was considerably lower than one often reads. Statistically speaking, one would actually have traveled much more safely on a convict ship to Australia than on a regular passenger ship to New Zealand or even America. Naturally, the British Crown only deported healthy, mostly young men and women, whereas the old, the sick, and many children would otherwise be on board a normal passenger ship. Though a medical examination did indeed occur, it was only cursory, and no one inspected the hygienic conditions on board. No wonder the weak quickly succumbed to outbreaks. Prison ships were considerably better overseen, by contrast, so illnesses were more quickly brought under control.

  My depictions of the conditions in Australian prisons are also historically accurate, especially the female factories. The bizarre marriage markets for female convicts I described really did exist. And a prisoner really did once try to escape the prison in Hobart disguised as a kangaroo. He was caught, but that no ever escaped from Van Diemen’s Land back then can certainly be doubted. On New Zealand’s West Coast, at any rate, there were so many refugees from Australia that extraditions were negotiated between the two countries.

  A few historical New Zealand personalities play a role in this book: James Busby, Robert Fyfe, and Robert’s cousin George with the three Fs in his name. The story of the whaling station Waiopuka is as authentic as that of the settling of Port Cooper, later called Lyttelton, and Tuapeka, near the present-day town of Lawrence. The old whaler Johnny Jones really did donate the building site for the Anglican church in Dunedin, and he also resettled emigrants disappointed with Australia in Waikouaiti, New Zealand.

  My Reverend Peter Burton is, however, fiction, just like all the other main characters. Also fictitious are the names and dates of the immigration ships and the ferries between New Zealand and Australia. I’ve fudged a bit with Reverend Burton’s fatal attraction to Darwinism: Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was first published in 1859, so it is unlikely that a figure like Peter Burton would have read it by the beginning of the gold rush in Dunedin. This epochal work of science did not yet consider the evolution of humans; Darwin put forth his theories of human evolution in 1871 with The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. However, passionate discussions were already taking place in scientific and intellectual circles before the publication of On the Origin of Species, a text directed at interested laypeople above all. So Peter could already have heard of it and drawn his own conclusions. In any case, I ask my readers to forgive me if he is perhaps a little too far ahead of his time.

  The authenticity of the all the descriptions of Maori customs and traditions is a harder question. Maori culture is very unlike my own. It is difficult to incorporate here, since it is no longer alive in the same sense. The Maori keep up their traditions, and over the last few decades they have received more and more support from the New Zealand government and tourist board. Yet the whites, their culture, and their diseases were thorough: of the original Maori population, only a fraction survived, particularly on the North Island, and their lifestyle was so incompatible with pakeha culture that, more or less under pressure, it largely disappeared. The Ngai Tahu on the South Island separated themselves quite willingly from the traditions and tapu, which they had never treated as strictly anyway. For them, the whites’ lifestyle offered such a higher quality of life that they quickly assimilated.

  One expression of my Kahu Heke in this book cannot be denied: the climate on New Zealand’s South Island has more in common with Scotland and Wales than with Hawaiki in Polynesia. The plants and animals brought by the British immigrants thrived more, and the culture, house construction, and lifestyle of the pakeha were more compatible with the land than were those of the earlier immigrants from Polynesia. In my view, it speaks to the intelligence and flexibility of the Ngai Tahu that they assimilated instead of fighting the new arrivals. That they were often cheated in the process is a story for another time. In part, the courts today are still busy with restitution for tribal claims regarding deception in land sales.

  If one wants to reconstruct the lives of the Maori tribes 150 years ago, there are two paths to take. One is through publications of Maori themselves, which I prefer at heart. I draw a great deal of information from official Maori sources. But Maori, too, are human: they tend to present themselves as positively as possible. Thus, Maori representatives do not like to give information about strange customs like the tapu around the chieftains and their families, for instance, while one can draw from them very precise accounts of harmless activities like greeting rituals, dances, fishing, and the like.

  The second path is to study the publications of contemporary white ethnologists. These sources often offer more information but have their own perils. The modern studies of history and sociology were still in their infancy in the nineteenth century, particularly in the area of ethnology; the research and data gathering often fell to interested laypersons. Though they often made detailed descriptions, fundamental perceptions escaped them—for instance, that there was no Maori culture in the sense that we mean the term. Today, many emphasize the commonalities between the tribes, but back then, every iwi and hapu had its own customs, commandments, and tapu. Pakeha researchers of the day tended incorrectly toward generalization, so that, about the historical accuracy of my research, I can only say the following:

  Doubtless, all the tikanga and tapu in this book existed—only, no one knows in which tribe, in which region, or just how characteristic it was. On the other hand, one can reliably say what tribe lived when and in which region. Often, even the names of the chieftains have been passed down.

  For me as an author, this presented a dilemma. Kahu Heke’s tribe must be an iwi of the Ngapuhi whose great chieftain Hongi Hika signed the Treaty of Waitangi. But could I simply impress any customs and tapu on the Ngapuhi just because they fit so nicely into Lizzie and Kahu’s story? After thinking long and hard, I decided against it, replacing the Ngapuhi with the fictive tribe Ngati Pau. I hope they do not hold it against me, should this ever get to them. I did it out of respect for their actual history, which I did not wish to falsify: Kia tu tika ai te whare tapu o Nha Puhi—may the sacred house of the Ngapuhi stand forever.

  In closing, one last note for purists who love to check even the smallest detail in historical novels—and thus, to my eyes, perform a benefit, since they hold an author to careful research
: Claire refers to Stratford-upon-Avon in the naming of her farm in Canterbury. She is convinced that the Avon River is named after Shakespeare’s place of birth. This is not true, however. The river received its name from John Deans, a Scotsman who named it as a reminder of the River Avon in Falkirk, Scotland.

  Acknowledgments

  A book such as this cannot be made alone.

  And so, I thank everyone who has helped out, especially my editor, Melanie Blank-Schröder; my copyeditor, Margit von Cossart; and my miracle-working agent, Bastian Schlück. But also the graphic artists who designed the jacket and drew the maps, the inventive marketing department—and, of course, the sales department and all the booksellers who finally brought the book to market. As ever, Klara Decker earned her keep as a test reader, finding answers on the web when I could get no further with my research. It never wore out the horses when, while riding, I drifted off to New Zealand in my mind. And the dogs always fetched me back—at least by feeding time.

  Thanks also to the AmazonCrossing team that prepared the book for my English readers, especially Rebecca Friedman and Dustin Lovett. Thank you, Gabi and Bryn—it is always nice to work with you!

  With Jacky and Grizabella, Pocas and Nena on my mind,

  Sarah Lark

  May 2015

  About the Author

  Photo © 2011 Gonzalo Perez

  Sarah Lark’s series of “landscape novels” have made her a bestselling author in Germany, her native country, as well as in Spain and the United States. She was born in Germany’s Ruhr region, where she discovered a love of animals—especially horses—early in life. She has worked as an elementary-school teacher, a travel guide, and a commercial writer. She has also written numerous award-winning books about horses for adults and children, one of which was nominated for the Deutsche Jugendbuchpreis, Germany’s distinguished prize for best children’s book. Sarah currently lives with four dogs and a cat on her farm in Almería, Spain, where she cares for retired horses, plays guitar, and sings in her spare time.