Amber (21 page)

‘…a pale blue gown,’ Rian finished for him.

‘Yes, that was it!’

Pierre asked, ‘Did you see which way she go?’

The soldier pointed towards the stockade gate. ‘I tried to stop her there. It weren’t safe, you see. But she ran off, up the side of the fence there and round the back. And then I got fired on and I couldn’t go after her.’

Rian looked in the direction in which the soldier was pointing, but Daniel was already off and running.

Having rather tersely told Daniel to cool his heels and wait until he was given orders before he made a move of any sort, Rian led his crew through the handful of rough streets that made up Kororareka until they came to the last few cottages.

‘Spread out,’ he ordered. ‘It looks like she might have been heading for the hills.’ Where I said I would be, he thought angrily. This is my fault and if she’s been hurt I will
never
forgive myself.

It was Pierre who found the small piece of pale blue fabric caught on the fence rail.

‘Rian!’ he called. ‘She go this way!’

They drew together and stood scanning the hills above them, hoping to see a flash of blue or even the wave of a hand, but there was nothing.

They climbed through the scrub, calling out every few yards.

‘She would have been heading up and back slightly, wouldn’t she?’ Rian said, talking as much to himself as to Hawk. ‘I think she would have been looking for somewhere with a good view but out of sight. She knew what I was intending to do so she wouldn’t have gone too far into the bush. Would she?’

Hawk patted Rian’s arm as reassuringly as he could. ‘She is not a stupid woman, Rian. And she is not unfamiliar with this
sort of terrain. She will have been careful.’

Rian wiped the sweat off his face with his sleeve then stood with his hands on his hips, his shoulders slumped and his head down. Hawk thought he had never seen a man look so dejected.

‘Christ almighty, Hawk, I don’t know what I’ll do if—’

‘We will find her,’ Hawk interrupted, then set off again.

At the summit of the hill they heard a loud explosion and paused briefly to look back down at the town. Polack’s Stockade seemed to have blown up; black smoke poured out of the house, partly obscuring the miniature figures scurrying madly around the conflagration.

‘
Mon Dieu
, that is where the ammunition be,’ Pierre muttered.

‘Lucky they got the women and kids out, so it is,’ Mick observed.

As they watched, the house next door caught alight, then the one next to that. Soon, all Kororareka would be aflame.

They spread out again and descended into the bush. Once they had entered the dense undergrowth Rian’s heart began to grow cold. If she had become lost in bush like this, she might have wandered for miles. His voice was becoming hoarse from calling Kitty’s name, and he knew the others were having the same problem because there was a lot of throat-clearing and spitting going on.

At the summit of the next hill they discovered that a track ran along the ridge and Hawk squatted to scrutinise the leaf litter and soil for footprints.

He straightened up. ‘There are tracks here, small. They could be hers.’

‘How fresh are they?’ Rian asked.

Hawk shrugged. ‘Four, five hours? These tracks of the horse are the same, but with some more recent.’

Rian frowned. ‘She was on horseback?’ He moved over to Hawk and stared at the ground. ‘Was it shod?’

‘No.’

‘And it still isn’t,’ Mick said quietly.

They all looked up then and saw the boy on horseback a short distance down the track, a musket almost as tall as he was pointed directly at them. No one moved for a second. Then, slowly, they all drew their weapons. The boy remained motionless, the barrel of the musket unwavering.

Deliberately, Rian slid his pistol back into his belt. ‘Have you seen a Pakeha woman?’ he called in Maori, keeping his voice as neutral as possible.

The boy ignored the question and responded with one of his own. ‘Are you the Queen’s soldiers?’

‘No,’ Rian replied. Not trusting himself to get the words right, he said to Ropata, ‘Tell him who we are and what we want.’

Ropata responded in Maori, ‘No, we are not the Queen’s soldiers and we are not armed settlers. We take no sides. We are searching for a Pakeha woman. She has black hair and a blue gown. She is alone.’

The boy lowered his musket an inch and nodded. ‘I saw such a woman today. Up here.’

‘This morning?’ Rian asked, looking at Ropata for confirmation.

Ropata’s eyes never left the boy’s. ‘Today? How many hours after sunrise?’

The horse impatiently stamped a hoof. Eventually the boy said, ‘By the time the dew had dried.’

‘Probably around nine o’clock,’ Ropata relayed to Rian.

‘Ask him which way she went.’

Ropata did, and the boy pointed with his musket.

Rian raised his hand in a gesture of thanks and turned away, eager to get going. The others filed after him, but Ropata waited,
his eyes still on the rebel boy, for surely that was what he was, to make sure he didn’t put a musket ball in their backs.

Half an hour later they crested the next ridge.

‘She can’t be far away,’ Rian muttered yet again, his gaze following the slope of the hill down until it reached a small stream some distance below, barely visible between the trees.

‘Which way?’ Hawk asked, watching Rian carefully. He was becoming worried; the expression on his friend’s face was growing increasingly anxious as they climbed further into the hills, and Hawk understood why. If Kitty had indeed come this far, she could be anywhere within a five-mile radius of rugged terrain covered with bush, hidden ravines and deep gullies. They might already have gone past her, or she could be miles away in the opposite direction.

‘Will we go down for a drink? I’m gasping,’ Mick announced, and set off down the steep hill.

He evidently soon lost his footing and they heard him cursing as he slid and slithered his way down. Then came a long moment of silence during which they wondered if he had perhaps knocked himself out, then his disembodied voice came echoing back up the gully.

‘
Rian?
’

‘
What?
’ Rian shouted back.

‘
There’s something down here!
’

Rian hesitated only a moment before hurling himself down the slope, dodging around tree trunks and crashing through low branches and undergrowth. He was only part of the way down when he slid into Mick crouching over something on the ground.

Mick grunted as he was knocked forward onto his hands and knees. ‘It’s hers, isn’t it?’ he asked as Rian snatched up the blue bangle half-buried in the leaf litter.

‘
Kitty?
’ Rian shouted. ‘
Kitty!!
’

They heard the undergrowth thrashing as the others scrambled down to join them.

‘You’ve found her?’ Daniel demanded, scraps of nikau leaf stuck in his hair and his eyes wide.

Rian held up the bangle. ‘It’s hers.’

Daniel knew it was Kitty’s—he had noticed she was wearing it on the boat coming over from Paihia, just as he noticed every single thing about her every day.

‘Quiet!’ Hawk demanded.

Rian stared at him. ‘What is it?’

‘I hear something. Listen.’

They all strained to pick up whatever it was Hawk had heard, and it came again, a muffled, thin cry from somewhere below them.

Rian launched himself down the hill, shouting Kitty’s name repeatedly and coming to an abrupt halt when he slid into the stream at the bottom of the gully. The others clambered down after him, then stood motionless like a small flock of wading birds, waiting for the cry to come again.

It did, but down here it was much more difficult to pick up the direction from which it was coming.

Rian splashed across the stream and stood at the edge of the clearing on the other side with his head cocked, waiting. The sound came again and he recognised her voice immediately.

Looking wildly around, he cried, ‘Where the fuck is she?’

And then he saw it, a depression in the ground a few yards away. But he had taken only a few steps towards it when he found himself being forcefully tackled and knocked flat.

‘What the hell are you doing!’ he cried as he hit out at Ropata, whose arms were wrapped around his legs.

Ropata dodged the blow and sat up. ‘I think it is the entrance to a tomo. If you go too close it may fall in. On top of her.’

Rian stared at him for a second, then rolled onto his belly and started inching his way towards the depression. As he neared he saw that it was indeed a hole.

He thrust his head over the rim and there she was, standing in a pool of sunlight surrounded by darkness, gazing up at him. She had been crying and her face was dirty and there was blood on her lip, and she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

Fear and relief washing over him, he barked, ‘What the
hell
are you doing down there?’

‘Baking a cake,’ she shot back. ‘What do you think I’m doing?’ Then her face crumpled. ‘I’ve been stuck down here for hours, Rian. And I think I’ve found Uncle George.’

Part Two

The Found Child

Chapter Nine

Auckland, 13 March 1845

I
t’s more settled than I thought it would be. You know, for a new town,’ Kitty remarked to Simon, who was leaning on the ship’s rail beside her.

Before them lay the short sweep of Commercial Bay, the principal water frontage to the town of Auckland. The bay itself was very picturesque, though the buildings that lined it had all the scruffy and untidy hallmarks of a rapidly established settlement, and the beach was crowded with ships’ boats, waka, barrels, crates and stacks of timber. Behind the town rose a series of rolling, fern- and bush-covered hills, and in the middle distance, a range of low mountains that were curiously flat across their tops. Puia, Haunui had said they were called—volcanoes. Kitty sincerely hoped that they were all extinct.

Simon agreed. ‘And it’s growing by the day, it seems. I was here only last October, and I can see already that more buildings have gone up since then. Still, it is the capital, I suppose.’

‘It’s a pretty spot, isn’t it?’

Simon pulled a doubtful face. ‘From here it is, yes. It’s not quite so pretty close up.’

They were aboard the government brig
Victoria
, along with approximately a hundred refugees from the sacked town of Kororareka. Behind them at various points in the Waitemata Harbour were four more ships carrying the remainder of Kororareka’s evacuated residents—almost five hundred in
total—and the imperial troops who had fought there.

When the powder magazine had exploded in the basement of Polack’s Stockade and it became clear that almost all the ammunition available for the town’s defence had gone up with one very loud bang, Lieutenant Phillpotts had decided, to the anger of most of its inhabitants, to evacuate the whole settlement. In the end, though, they grudgingly consented to board the waiting ships; several buildings were already ablaze and everyone assumed that Heke and his followers would soon enter the town itself.

Indeed, Rian, Kitty and the crew only just made it back to the
Katipo
’s rowboat before the Maoris swept down from the hills. By the time they had rowed out to the middle of the harbour, Kororareka was completely ablaze, black smoke curling into the sky and drifting across the hills behind and to the south of the town. They sat and watched; then, when there was little left to see, they continued across to Paihia in the wake of the ships carrying the evacuees.

At Paihia the beach bustled with activity as the missionaries, together with their colleagues from Waimate, worked to sort the seriously injured from the merely frightened and exhausted, and administer spiritual succour and what medical care they could. The overriding sentiment was one of stunned disbelief: now that Heke’s attack had actually happened, and with such utter destruction, the residents of Kororareka were overwhelmed. Many had lost their homes and their possessions, and all had lost any sense of security they might have once had. The only slightly cheerful person was Sarah, when Kitty presented her with the cross she had taken from the skeleton in the tomo.

‘I’m truly sorry, Aunt Sarah,’ Kitty said, ‘but I really do think it was Uncle George.’

‘Lying there all this time?’ Sarah marvelled as she slipped the cross into the pocket of her apron and tried to arrange her features into an expression suggestive of someone who had just
received terrible news. ‘So close and we had no idea. He must have been running away.’

Kitty thought so, too, and for a moment imagined her uncle stumbling through the bush, gasping for breath, terrified that Tupehu would catch up with him, only to plunge into what would become his own grave. He must have lain there for days, perhaps crying out in fear and pain, perhaps waiting in silence for death to claim him.

‘I wonder how he got across to Kororareka?’ she said, but Sarah had already turned away and was tending to a woman with a toddler wailing monotonously with exhaustion.

That evening Kitty and Rian had the worst argument of their married lives when Rian ordered Kitty to go to Auckland for the duration of the war that he was convinced would follow the sacking of Kororareka. They had argued upstairs in their bedroom at Sarah’s house, downstairs in the parlour (to the horrified fascination of Ngahuia and Rangimarie), and outside on the verandah—from where they could see across the bay the orange glow that was Kororareka still burning—until Kitty finally, and very reluctantly, agreed.

So at ten o’clock that night, Rian arranged for Kitty’s passage to Auckland on one of the evacuee ships, and also for Simon’s, whom he had coerced into accompanying her, insisting that it wasn’t seemly for a woman to travel alone aboard a ship also carrying soldiers. Kitty thought that was a lot of rubbish, but she suspected Simon badly needed a break from the stress of the past few months, so she had agreed.