Song of the Spirits (In the Land of the Long White Cloud saga)

by Lark, Sarah

  She did not reach Rangiora that first day, as she had hoped to. The ensemble had given a guest performance there on the way to Blenheim several months before. At the time, they had traveled in comfortable coaches with fast teams, and the miles had simply disappeared under their hooves. Kura’s more easygoing bay only got her as far as Kaiapoi, a village that did not even boast a proper hotel—only a grimy brothel. As a result, Kura slept in the stables, curled up on the carriage seat, so as not to catch any fleas from the straw. The owner of the stables had helped her to hitch and unhitch her horse without acting put upon. He did, however, ask who she was and where she was going. Her answer, that she was a singer on tour, seemed to amuse him more than impress.

  It took Kura three days to reach Rangiora. At that rate, it would take her several years just to make it all the way around the South Island. By the last evening, she was both desperate and exhausted. The horse and carriage had been expensive, and she had not counted on so many nights’ lodging. So she gave in to the hotel proprietor’s request to entertain his guests with a few songs. Though the place was clean, Kura viewed it as a demotion to have to perform in a pub. Since the listeners undoubtedly had no idea how to appreciate operatic arias, Kura sang a few folk songs and gazed dourly, almost contemptuously, into the crowd as the men roared with excitement.

  Rangiora itself was also a disappointment. When the ensemble had sung and danced in the church hall, Kura had thought that the hall had been made available to them free of charge. However, it looked like rent had to be paid. In addition, the priest first had to be persuaded to hand the room over to the singer on her own.

  “You won’t be performing anything indecent, will you?” he asked skeptically, though he remembered Kura from the previous guest performance. “You didn’t sing much that night; you mostly stood by the others and looked pretty.”

  Kura assured the wary clergyman that she had just joined the singers at the time and hadn’t had much stage experience yet. To assure him that things were different now, she sang a rendition of the “Habanera,” which was enough to convince him. Still, she worried about whether she would have enough money left over after paying for her hotel, the stables, the church hall, and a boy to hang up her placards.

  Fortunately, almost all the seats for the first concert were filled. Rangiora was not exactly a bastion of high culture, and artists rarely performed there. But the audience proved less enthusiastic than they had been during Kura’s performances with the ensemble. Though no one had known much about music, the colorful costumes, the variety of the offerings, and most of all, the dance scenes that took place between the operatic arias had kept people chained to their seats. Kura, swinging her castanets in the middle of the chorus, had been a high point. But a girl who sat alone at the piano and sang? After a half hour, people were already getting restless and beginning to whisper and fidget in their seats. At the end, they applauded, but more politely than exuberantly.

  Only ten people attended the second performance. Kura canceled the third.

  “Perhaps if you were to sing something happier…” the priest advised. If nothing else, Kura had won him over: he was enthusiastic about her voice and her interpretations of the various arias. “The locals are simple people.”

  Kura did not deign to respond. She simply continued up the East Coast, headed for Waipara. With the ensemble, she hadn’t sung again until Kaikoura, but she could not afford such long stretches between performances; she was traveling too slowly. She surveyed every town along the way to assess whether it offered performance opportunities. She found it most pleasant when a reputable hotel put its rooms at her disposal. Then she usually did not have to worry about the cost of lodging, and the fees for performance space were lower than those of the church halls. Concerts increased drink sales after all. The hotel owners often tried, in fact, after her first evening to talk her into becoming part of the regular program.

  “No one here wants to hear that nonsense, missy!” the hotel proprietor in Kaikoura explained, although he had been thrilled by the ensemble’s performance. “Sing a few love songs, maybe something Irish. Those are always well received. There are a good number of Germans here too. You do sing in different languages…”

  Kura compromised a little and included a few Schubert songs in the program. A portion of the audience was deeply touched, which was not to the owner’s liking.

  “Child, you’re supposed to get them to drink, not wail. God, you’re pretty as a picture! Why don’t you dance a little too?”

  Kura angrily explained to him she was a singer, not a barmaid, and she continued onward the next day. Her tour was not going as smoothly as she had imagined it would. When she finally reached Blenheim three exhausting weeks later, she had still not made enough money for passage to the North Island.

  “What else can we do? We’ll stay and continue our way around the South Island,” she told her horse. Another fall from grace!

  She used to mock Elaine for talking to Banshee for hours and insisting that the mare understood every word. But Kura missed having someone to talk to—as long as he did not constantly contradict her, give her well-meant but impossible advice, or attempt to throw himself at her. In the past few weeks, she’d had to rebuff the advances of countless pub owners and ostensible “music lovers.” She had not experienced anything like that during the performances with the troupe. She had always been treated with the utmost respect.

  “Should we go to Picton or Havelock?” she asked her horse. “One is as good as the other.”

  When William finished his introductory training in Blenheim, he bought a brand-new sewing machine as a demonstration model. As a beginner, he could not expect to cover the most coveted sales regions, like Christchurch, Dunedin, or their environs. He was counting on a placement somewhere on the West Coast or in Otago. But then, to his great surprise, he learned that he had been posted to the North Island, to a region in the north around a town called Gisborne. Though he imagined it was probably a rather sparsely populated area, it was virgin soil in the realm of sewing-machines sales, as no representative from his company had ever been there.

  In good spirits, William boarded the ferry from Blenheim to Wellington. Though he fought heroically against seasickness on the stormy water, he buoyed his spirits with the thought that he would make it as a salesman. He had shone during his training, and some of his teachers had been quite enthusiastic about his creative sales strategies. None of the other participants had received as positive an assessment. William approached his new assignment optimistically. Whether it was coffins or sewing machines, if they made them, he could sell them!

  6

  Timothy Lambert was incensed, but at least he now understood why his father usually rode his horse the relatively short distance from their house to the mine. It clearly disgusted the mine owner to cross on foot the cesspool in which his men housed themselves. It was not that Timothy had never seen slums in Europe. Coal-mining camps were hardly oases of paradise in England or Wales either, but there was no comparing the filth his boots stomped around on in his father’s mines with anything he had seen abroad. The settlement had clearly not been laid out with any plan.

  The miners had simply placed one shelter right beside the other. The huts were made of waste wood and damaged formwork boards that had obviously been rejected from the mine. Most of the shelters lacked a chimney, with the result that if someone lit a fire inside, the smoke must have made it nearly unbearable. Toilets were so rare that the men simply went around the corner to answer nature’s call. The rain that fell almost daily in Greymouth then washed the excrement and waste into the muddy streets between the shelters. Those “streets” had turned into stinking streams, and it cost Timothy a great deal of effort to make it through with dry feet.

  At the moment, the settlement looked deserted. He could hear only some sniffing and coughing coming from a few huts—probably the “absences due to illness and laziness” that his father complained about. Among miners in gener
al, instances of black lung and consumption were on the rise, but the area around the Lambert Mine had been hit particularly hard, especially since it seemed that no one was caring for the sick. Clearly, there were few families living there and hardly any women to see to a minimum of order and cleanliness in the huts. The vast majority of the miners were single and preferred fleeing to the pub to making their quarters habitable. Not that Timothy could blame them. Anyone who had spent ten hours in a dark mining shaft digging coal was ready for a few beers in a friendly atmosphere. Besides, the men perhaps lacked the money for renovations.

  Timothy absolutely had to speak to his father about this. The mine could at least make the construction materials available. Ideally, the miners would tear it all down and rebuild it following sensible plans. The newly founded labor unions overseas were demanding more humane worker camps, although so far with little success.

  Timothy had reached the mining compound itself by this time. As he passed through the main gate, he noted that the roads improved immediately. The freight wagons in which the coal was transported could not be allowed to become stuck in the mud, after all. Timothy wondered why there was still no rail connection to the train tracks, enabling the coal transport to be executed more quickly and cheaply. Another subject he needed to bring up with his father.

  Timothy stomped his boots clean and entered the flat, ground-level office building that sat across from the mine entrance. His father’s office offered a good view of the headframe and the building complex, which had space for both a steam engine and a storehouse. He could likewise observe the men entering and exiting the mine, as well as the aboveground workers. Marvin Lambert liked to have his eyes on everything.

  There was a row of mines around Greymouth that belonged either to individual families or joint-stock companies. The Lambert Mine was the second-largest private company of this sort, and Marvin Lambert fought tooth and nail with his rival, Joshua Biller. Both men scrimped on labor and mine safety in whatever ways they could. In this matter, Marvin Lambert and his rival saw eye to eye. Both thought that coal miners were idle and greedy by nature, and modern mining techniques only captured their interest when they offered higher returns. But Timothy suspected that the mine owners might be judging their workers too hastily.

  To be fair, his father had already helped himself to the whiskey by the time Timothy had arrived late in the evening. Timothy had been home only since the day before, and after his long journey, he might have been a little tired and grumpy. Eight weeks by ship to Lyttelton followed by the train ride to Greymouth had left their mark. At least he had not had to take the train from the East Coast. The newly built rail line made the trip to the West Coast both faster and more comfortable.

  New Zealand had changed since his parents had sent Timothy to Europe ten years before. First to a private school, then to study mining techniques at various universities, and finally to tour the most important coalfields of the Old World. Marvin Lambert had financed all of that willingly. Timothy was his heir after all, and he was supposed to take over the mine for the family someday and increase its profits. Today was his first day of work—or at least that’s what he assumed. He planned to explore the town later.

  Greymouth had grown considerably since he’d left the area at the age of fourteen. Back then, the Lamberts’ villa had stood rather isolated on the river between town and the mine. Now the construction reached almost to their doorstep.

  The mine’s office revealed Marvin Lambert’s parsimonious nature. On the whole it was spartanly furnished, and bore no resemblance to the palaces that European mine owners built for themselves. Marvin raised his head from his papers and gave his son a cross look.

  “What are you doing here already?” he asked. “I thought you’d keep your mother company for a bit longer. After all that time she had to do without you.”

  Timothy rolled his eyes. In truth, his mother’s maudlin complaints had already gotten on his nerves. Although Nellie Lambert had wept with joy when he first arrived, she had soon begun hurling accusations at him because of his long absence. She seemed to feel that he had pursued his studies abroad only to worry her.

  “I can go home early, of course,” Timothy said, untroubled. “But I wanted to see the mine. What’s changed, what needs changing. You have an idle mining engineer standing before you, Father. I’m dying to make myself useful.” He smiled almost conspiratorially.

  Marvin Lambert cast a glance at the clock.

  “In that case, you’ve arrived rather late,” he grumbled. “We start at nine here.”

  Timothy nodded. “I underestimated the trip—above all, its condition. Something absolutely must be done about that. At the very least, we have to clean up the streets in the camp.”

  His father nodded grimly. “The whole cesspit has to be demolished. How does it make us look? And right next to the mine! Someday I’ll have those ‘houses’ torn down and the area closed off. Nobody gave those fellows permission to put those huts up there.”

  “Where are they supposed to go?” Timothy asked, astonished. Since the mine’s compound had been painstakingly wrested from the fern forests, the men would have to clear new land if they wanted to build a settlement outside of the compound. And if they were to do that, they would be a good distance from the mine. That was why workers were typically housed in the immediate vicinity of the mine’s entrance.

  “I couldn’t care less. Anyway, I’ve had enough of those shit holes they call houses. Unbelievable that they can live like that. I’ll just come out and say it—they’re scum. They send us everything from England and Wales they can’t find a use for.”

  Timothy had already heard all this the night before and had heartily reproved his father. He had, after all, just returned from England and knew that emigration from the European coal mines to New Zealand was viewed as a way to a better life. The men hoped to earn a better living there, and only the best and most entrepreneurial managed to save up for several months for the passage. They did not deserve that hell outside.

  Timothy held his peace for now, however. Having that discussion again just then would not change anything. It would have to wait until his father was in a better mood.

  “If it’s all right with you, I’d like to go down in the mine and have a look around,” he said in order to avoid addressing Marvin’s grumbling. It had to be done, though one look out the window was sufficient to rob Timothy of any desire to do so. The mine entrance itself did not make a trustworthy impression. His father had not even bothered to put a roof over the washhouse, and the headframe looked rudimentary and outdated. What would it look like inside?

  Marvin Lambert shrugged. “As you like. Although I remain of the opinion that you’ll be needed more in distribution and logistics than underground.”

  Timothy sighed. “I’m a mining engineer, Father. I don’t know much about business.”

  “You’ll learn that here real quick.” That, too, had already been discussed. Marvin thought the skills that Timothy had acquired in Europe were of limited value. He did not want an engineer as much as a capable salesman and crafty businessman. Timothy wondered why his father hadn’t had him study business instead of mining techniques. Either way, he would have refused to work as a salesman. He knew he had no natural talent for that.

  Timothy tried again to make his role and his intentions clear to his father. “My job is to oversee the work in the mine and to optimize the excavation methods.”

  His father frowned. “Oh?” he said, apparently taken aback. “Have they found some newfangled way to swing a pick and hammer better?”

  Timothy remained calm. “There’ll be machines doing it soon enough, Father. And there are already more effective ways to ship coal and spoils now. There are more modern ways to reinforce the shafts and drill air shafts, and the whole mine drainage—”

  “And in the end, that will all cost more than it brings in,” Marvin broke in. “But fine, if it makes you happy. Go have a look. Breathe in a little coal
dust. You’ll have had your fill of it soon enough.”

  He turned back to his papers.

  Timothy said a few words in parting and left the office.

  Though he was greatly interested in geology and engineering, he didn’t actually like much about the coal-mining industry. Left to his own devices, he would probably have chosen a different profession. The work underground and the many dangers associated with it distressed him. Timothy loved to spend his time out in nature and would have preferred building houses to digging tunnels. Railroad engineering, too, appealed to him, particularly in New Zealand. But because he would someday be inheriting a mine, he had buried all personal predilections and pursued an education in mining; he’d even received a certain degree of recognition in Europe as a specialist in matters of safety. Given his great fear of mine collapses and gas explosions, his primary interest had always been in figuring out how to prevent such catastrophes. But it was the nascent, still-loose associations of coal miners who sought his expertise rather than the mine operators. The latter generally invested in the safety of their miners only after some accident had occurred, and probably more than one of those operators had breathed a sigh of relief when a scaremonger as pushy as Timothy Lambert had left their office. Let him drive up his father’s costs. Certainly none of them shed a tear when he left England.

  Timothy asked the two gloomy men at the shaft winder to have the foreman sent up. He did not want to enter the shaft without a guide, and so he waited patiently until the message had been delivered. As the winder was finally set in motion, creaking and rattling, Timothy wondered, with a mild case of goose bumps, how often the cable was changed. A rather young man who spoke with a Welsh accent, the foreman appeared to be somewhat hostile toward the mine owner’s son.

  “If it’s about the delivery rate again, I’ve already told your father that it can’t be increased the way we’re currently operating. I can’t work the men any faster, and it won’t do much good to get more men down there, either. They’re already stepping on each other’s feet as it is. Sometimes I’m afraid we’re going to run out of air.”