Amber (20 page)

‘
Stop!
’ A soldier grabbed her arm and swung her around. ‘Stay inside!’ he yelled in her face. ‘Get back inside!’

Kitty ducked away from him, stumbled, then righted herself as he made another lunge for her, shouting at her not to panic but to go back inside.

But she slipped through the gate; then, pausing for only a second to find her bearings, raced along the side of the stockade in the direction she knew would take her into the hills. Rian would be up there somewhere watching, she knew he would.

Holding up her skirts so she could run faster, she dodged through someone’s vegetable garden and across a paddock in which a cow stood calmly chewing its cud despite the continual
crack of muskets. Suddenly the roar of the
Hazard
’s guns joined the din, and Kitty involuntarily ducked. When she encountered a fence, she stopped, bundled up her skirts around her thighs, set her foot on the middle rail and climbed it. There was a sharp ripping sound as she jumped down the other side, but she didn’t even stop to see what had torn.

She sped on, her hand clamped against her side now where a sharp stitch was forming. The grass was wet from early morning dew and she slipped and fell several times, but she refused to slow down. By the time she had reached the top of the first scrubby hill above Kororareka she was gasping for breath. She rested with her hands on her knees for several minutes, then straightened up and squinted down at the town.

There wasn’t much to see: most of the troops and settlers seemed to be under cover, although she glimpsed the odd flash of red as soldiers ran from one shelter to another, and she knew that the Maoris would be even more skilfully concealed. Puffs of smoke came from the guns on the
Hazard
, followed a few seconds later by the actual sound of the guns firing. She saw that, once again, there was no flagstaff on Maiki Hill.

When Kitty had regained her breath, she turned and half-ran, half-slid down the other side of the hill and into a patch of bush, dim and still damp from the night. Once in among the trees and low scrub, she had to slow down to avoid getting caught up in vines and fallen branches. She wondered if she should look for a track, then changed her mind; her progress would be faster, but then again she might just meet someone she didn’t want to meet. And the hill she was aiming for hadn’t seemed too far away. It seemed the most likely spot Rian would have chosen—directly above the town but not too close, and crowned with a stand of totora for concealment.

She stopped: that was, of course, providing Rian and the crew had actually left the town. What if they hadn’t been able to?
What if he had been shot and was lying down there somewhere, bleeding and in pain, wondering where she was? So far as he was aware she was still inside Polack’s Stockade, and surely if he had been wounded he would have sent Hawk or Ropata or someone to fetch her?

She turned back, then hesitated again and, in frustration, swore aloud. It seemed very unlikely in all the confusion of the fighting, or even under the cover of the mist during the night, that Rian and the crew would not have been able to slip away. No, he would be up the hills somewhere, she was sure of it.

Halfway along the ridge of the next hill, she stepped suddenly out of the bush onto a rough track and recoiled in fright when she saw that she wasn’t the only person on it. About twenty yards ahead stood a horse, and on its bare back sat a young Maori boy. He looked about eleven or twelve years old, was dressed only in a pair of ragged trousers, and was staring straight at her. There was a musket balanced across the horse’s withers.

For what seemed an age, neither of them moved. Then the horse’s ears twitched and the boy turned the horse away. He glanced briefly back at Kitty over his shoulder, then trotted around the corner of the track, his skinny frame bouncing loosely to the horse’s gait.

Her heart still thudding wildly, Kitty moved off the track and back under cover of the bush. If she were to meet a group of soldiers she could say she had panicked at the sound of musket fire, run away and become lost, but if she walked into a party of Heke’s or Kawiti’s men she could well be taken prisoner. She doubted that she would be harmed, however, as a Pakeha woman would be seen as extremely useful should the need arise to negotiate.

She pushed on, climbing over fallen branches and moss-covered logs, slipping in damp mulch, snagging her wretched skirt every few yards it seemed, and swearing in a manner that
would have made Sharkey proud. It wasn’t until she paused at the base of the next hill to take a drink from a small stream that she realised she could no longer hear the sounds of battle. Listening intently, she turned in a full circle, but there was only the burble of the stream and the clear, ringing call of a tui in the trees above her.

Was she lost? She couldn’t be, surely? The hairs on her arms rose and a flutter of cold panic filled her belly. Then she told herself not to be so silly; she hadn’t even come that far yet. Or had she? She looked up to gauge the position of the sun, but couldn’t see it through the canopy above her. Well, that was easily fixed—she would climb again until she could.

She looked back at the precipitously steep hill she had just negotiated, noting the deep gouges in the leaf litter where she had slipped and slid her way down, and mentally shook her head. She crossed the stream, shivering slightly as the cold water seeped inside her boots, and set off across the small clearing beyond it, heading for the slope leading up to the next hill.

But she had gone only five yards when suddenly there was nothing beneath her feet and she was falling.

Chapter Eight

S
he landed heavily on her side, and lay motionless with her eyes squeezed shut until she was sure she wasn’t going to fall any further. Then she opened them to encounter an enormous weta only inches from her face, its eyes bulging from its revolting, shiny black head. Shrieking, she scrambled away.

But it wasn’t the weta that made her heart almost leap out of her throat—it was the human skull upon which it was squatting. She crawled as far from it as possible, then sat back on her haunches and breathed deeply until her pulse started to steady again.

When she felt a little more composed, she checked herself for damage. Pulling up her skirts she saw that she had a large purple graze on her left thigh, scratches on her calf, and a cut on her right knee that was bleeding quite heavily. Her left hip hurt and so did her elbow, but she didn’t think they were broken, and when she wiped her nose on the back of her hand there was blood. As soon as she saw it she realised she could taste it as well, in the back of her throat.

She gripped the hem of her petticoat and pulled, intending to tear off a strip to use as a bandage. But the stitching in the seam was a lot tougher than she expected, and after a lot of fruitless tugging and twisting she resorted to poking a piece of sharp stick through the fabric and ripping it, and even then it didn’t tear off neatly. She took what she had and tied it around her knee, where it immediately turned bright red. Watching the stain spread like
a lush red blossom, she noticed with a stab of dismay that her bangle had gone from her forearm.

Willing herself not to cry, she took a deep, wavering breath and made a thorough examination of her surroundings. She appeared to be at the bottom of a tomo, the word the Maoris gave to an underground cave. About twelve feet above her she could see a small patch of sky, partially obscured by the fallen branches and fronds of nikau that had concealed the opening. The hole she had fallen through wasn’t very wide, and a lot smaller than the cave itself. The ground beneath her was damp and scattered with rocks, and rotting leaves and debris that had fallen in over time. She was surprised she hadn’t hurt herself more when she’d landed. It was so quiet she could hear the blood pulsing in her ears, and from somewhere in the dark recesses of the cave she could hear the drip of water. The cave smelled wet, even there under the opening, and small ferns had taken hold between the rocks and in tiny fissures in the walls. The walls themselves sloped inward as they rose, and, with a sinking heart, Kitty could see that climbing them would be impossible. She was trapped like a crayfish in a pot.

Overwhelmed with sudden panic she screamed for someone to help her, and the echo of her voice bouncing off the cave walls almost deafened her so that she had to clap her hands over her ears. She closed her eyes for what felt like a very long time, but when she opened them again nothing had changed.

A second later she almost jumped out of her skin when she heard a sharp little scratching noise, but it was only the weta’s claws as it climbed ponderously off its perch. The skull looked weathered, with long yellow teeth that appeared too large for the jaws, and there was moss growing across the back of it, like fuzzy green hair. The skeleton was tall and seemed to be intact, except for a break in one of the thighs, the bones arranged more or less as nature had intended. There were shreds of rotted
fabric clinging to it, some little round things nearby that looked like metal buttons and the feet bones were still inside collapsed leather boots.

Then something inside the rib cage caught her eye and, moving slowly because her hip and elbow were beginning to throb now, she stepped gingerly across the slippery rocks and peered down.

The object was an ornate silver cross inlaid with ivory and it looked familiar, like the sort of thing a clergyman might wear. Where had she seen it before? Then, with a horrible jolt, she knew—it was the cross Uncle George had habitually worn. Tahi had been right: his father was under the ground. Her mouth opened in silent shock and she stared at the skeleton, realising that the mystery of her uncle’s disappearance had finally been solved.

But only if she found a way out of the tomo herself. She glanced up at the opening, then at the skeleton, then back up again.

Then, finally, she started to cry. Not for her lost bangle or for miserable, dead Uncle George, but for herself.

At midday, acting commander Lieutenant Phillpotts made the decision to evacuate all women and children from Kororareka to HMS
Hazard
and to the other ships anchored just off shore; the fighting had died down for the time being and the Maoris had not yet invaded the town, but it seemed inevitable.

Observing from a hillside above Kororareka as women and children filed out of Polack’s Stockade, Rian began to grow more and more uneasy as Kitty’s familiar figure failed to appear.

‘I can’t see her,’ he said to Hawk, and passed him the spyglass. ‘You have a look.’

Hawk raised the glass to his eye, but half a minute later said, ‘No, I cannot see her either.’

‘Are they all out yet?’ Mick asked, watching the scene below. ‘Maybe there are more to come.’

They waited until it seemed that the last woman and child had emerged, but there was still no sign of Kitty.

Rian snapped shut the spyglass. ‘Right, we’re going down.’

They had been up in the hills since just after the fighting had begun at Matuawhi Pass earlier that morning. It had been a simple task to slip away from the town under cover of the sea mist, and they had been able to watch almost everything as it unfolded below them. It had been clear to them that Heke’s men positioned on Maiki Hill had lost their enthusiasm once they had felled the flagstaff, as there had been only sporadic activity from them since. The sounds of battle from Matuawhi Pass had ended hours ago and the British troops involved had returned to the town. The Kapotai firing from the heights behind Kororareka also seemed to have quietened, so Rian wondered whether the fight was in fact over. But if it was, why had the order been given to evacuate the women and children?

At the gate to the stockade he grabbed the arm of a jittery-looking soldier.

‘Have you seen a woman named Kitty Farrell?’ he demanded. ‘Tallish with black hair? Very pretty. Are the women all out?’

The young soldier, his eyes darting about as though expecting a horde of marauding Maoris to appear at any moment, jerked away from Rian and shook his head.

Exasperated, Rian snapped, ‘No you haven’t seen her, or no they’re not all out yet?’

Sensing his impatience, the soldier replied quickly, ‘The women and kids are all out, they’re going out to the ships. Didn’t you hear the order? You civilians are supposed to be going as well.’ And then he darted off.

Hawk said to Rian, ‘Why are the men also being evacuated?’ But Rian was already walking away, through the stockade gate.

They checked every room in Joel Polack’s house, but Kitty was nowhere to be seen.

‘What about the women?’ Pierre suggested as they came out. ‘Ask the women. They might know where she be.’

On the beach, among the throng of wounded soldiers, and women and children surrounded by piles of belongings, waiting to be collected by ships’ boats, Rian finally found someone with news of Kitty.

‘Yes,’ said Martha Geddes, eyeing Gideon with poorly disguised alarm, ‘I spent some time talking with her. She was in the house until just after dawn and then she ran out like a thing possessed. I tried to stop her but I couldn’t, I’m afraid. Are you her husband?’

‘Yes. And she didn’t say where she was going?’

‘No, all she said was something about “I have to find him”. You don’t have a son, do you? She seemed very upset. Mind you, we all were. The noise of the battle was terrific.’

They hurried back to Kororareka’s main street, where Rian reluctantly admitted to Hawk, ‘Oh, Christ, I think she might have gone out to look for me.’

Hawk nodded.

‘Rian? I think that redcoat might be wantin’ to talk to you,’ Mick warned.

They all turned and stared at the soldier trotting towards them. He looked exhausted, the knees of his trousers were caked with dirt and there was a large tear in the sleeve of his jacket.

‘I hear you’re looking for someone, a woman?’ the soldier said, panting.

‘Yes, my wife,’ Rian replied eagerly. ‘Tall with black hair. Have you seen her?’

‘A lady of that description left the stockade at about six this morning. In a hell of a hurry, she was. I couldn’t stop her. She was wearing…’ He screwed up his face as he tried to remember.