Amber (7 page)

Hawk said, ‘This is Leena, Mundawuy’s niece.’

Leena inclined her head, but said nothing.

‘She says Mundawuy will take us to the caves tomorrow night,’ Hawk added.

Leena spoke up then. ‘He say to meet him at the shore, like last time. When the moon is up. And to bring shovels.’ Her eyes darted around the pub again. ‘That is all. I have passed the message. I will go now,’ she said, and stood up.

As she slid out from behind the table, Kitty could see that she was tall and slender, and probably younger than she had first assumed. She also saw that Ropata was staring intently at her, watching every graceful movement of her limbs. He opened his mouth to say something but was too late, because a second later
she had slipped through the door and out into the night. When he realised he had missed his chance, his handsome face assumed such an expression of childish disappointment that Kitty almost laughed.

‘Will we all go?’ Mick asked.

‘No,’ Rian said. ‘Just me and Kitty. And you two?’ he asked Gideon and Ropata.

They both nodded.

Pierre let out an audible sigh of relief, as did Hawk and Mick. Pierre was the most superstitious person Kitty had ever met. Not only did he abide by the full quota of traditional sailors’ superstitions, he was also steeped in the codes of his personal religion, the
voudou
of his native Louisiana. Some days on board the
Katipo
, if the sun was shrouded in hazy cloud, or a particular bird had been seen wheeling in the sky two days before, or for no apparent reason the bread hadn’t risen in the galley oven the day before, Pierre could barely force himself to get out of his bunk without performing a wide range of rituals designed to ward off the evils he insisted that any one of those portents might evoke. So digging up the bones of a long-dead girl was not the sort of thing he relished at all.

Hawk also was very wary and reverent of death rituals—his own as well as those of others—and had made it clear that, although he would help in any other way required, he would not be visiting the Aborigines’ sacred burial ground. Mick, however, wasn’t particularly superstitious, just very keen on paying another visit to the whorehouse on Argyle Street.

Kitty sighed. She had a headache from crying and fully expected that by the time the following night was over, she would have shed even more tears.

Chapter Two

K
itty had the strangest sense of déjà vu. But then, they were doing exactly as they had the first time they’d landed on the little beach on Sydney Cove’s western shore, except that this time Gideon was rowing the boat instead of the taciturn waterman who had ferried them on their previous journey. And this night the moon was high and bright, which would help them negotiate the steep, narrow track that would lead them to the Aborigine burial caves.

Gideon guided the rowboat onto the beach, and Rian and Ropata jumped out and pulled the bow further up onto dry land. Then Kitty disembarked, holding her skirts up around her knees to avoid getting them wet, and waited while Gideon carefully lifted the box out of the boat.

It was a box, that was true, but it was also a waka taonga, as Ropata called it: a place to store treasures. It measured two feet long, one foot wide and one foot high, and had been made from a teak log Rian had had milled almost two years before in Batavia. Since then, they had each taken many hours to carve into it the symbols and scenes that held importance for them, a way of honouring Wai’s memory and easing her journey back to New Zealand. Hawk had carved the spiritual motifs of the Seneca people, Pierre those of Louisianan
voudou
, Ropata the whorls and lines of Ngati Kahungungu, and Rian and Mick the designs unique to those with Celtic blood. Sharkey had carved a scene on the lid that depicted Wai rising out of the ocean on the
back of a whale, and Gideon, who had been baptised as a young man, added an ornate cross. Kitty couldn’t carve, no matter how hard she tried, so her contribution had been the padded, flower-embroidered silk lining inside the box.

Gideon set the box down and they settled in to wait. It was eerily quiet on the small beach, the silence broken only by the hissing of small waves scurrying across the sand. The night air was warm and heavy, barely stirred by the breeze coming off the sea. Occasionally, one of Australia’s exotic and noisy birds gave voice, making Kitty jump.

Ropata spoke for them all when he said eventually, ‘It is scaring me, this place. When is he coming?’

‘Should be soon,’ Rian replied, squinting up at the full moon.

‘Too right,’ a voice said, then Mundawuy Lightfoot himself stepped into the moonlight. Like Biddy Doyle, he looked exactly as he had when they’d first met him; long-legged, lean, bearded and cocoa-skinned.

‘G’day, black man,’ Mundawuy said to Gideon, who had risen to his feet.

‘Good evening, friend Mundawuy,’ Gideon replied, warmly shaking hands with the Aborigine. ‘I believe you have met everyone except Ropata, who is Ngati Kahungungu of the East Coast of New Zealand.’

Mundawuy looked Ropata up and down, and said, ‘G’day, brown man.’

Ropata stepped forward and hongi-ed him. Mundawuy looked startled for a moment, then his face broke into a wide grin, his teeth gleaming in the moonlight. ‘That’s good, eh?’ he said.

Ropata smiled. ‘It is. From my people to yours.’

‘That is good,’ Mundawuy agreed, then shook hands with Rian and Kitty. ‘You got shovels?’

He waited while the others gathered together the box and
everything else they would need, then he turned away and padded silently off into the shadows.

This time the walk up through the great slabs of rock and in and out of clumps of hard, scratchy scrub seemed shorter, but journeys always did, Kitty knew, if you’d done them once before. It wasn’t long before they started going downhill again, and she knew they would soon be at the cave.

As they walked in through the shadowed entrance, the moonlight slowly faded until they were moving in complete blackness. Rian struck a flint, sharply reminding Kitty again of the first time they had been here, and lit an oil lamp. As they walked on in silence, their boots sinking into the soft, dry sand, she saw once again the ancient drawings that Mundawuy’s ancestors had scored and burned into the walls so long ago. She also heard the leathery flutter of bats’ wings, and felt rather than heard their high-pitched squeaks, glad that this time she had thought to wear a bonnet.

As they walked further and further into the cave, she began to worry that they might not be able to find the spot where they had buried Wai, but then, up ahead, Mundawuy came to an abrupt halt and held up his hand. He squatted down, spread out his fingers and repeated the strange sniffing that had so unnerved her when they had first come with Wai.

After a minute, Mundawuy stood, moved several yards further in, squatted again, then pointed. ‘She under here.’

They set down their tools and the box, and waited while Ropata said a short karakia to Hine-nui-o-te-po, the great goddess of death, asking for her permission to temporarily release Wai. Then they started digging, the sand whispering off the metal of their shovels as they worked.

It suddenly occurred to Kitty that, because the sand was so dry, there might be more left of Wai than they had been expecting. She shuddered, envisaging her friend’s mummified
head, the dried flesh shrunken onto her yellowed bones. She felt someone’s gaze on her and looked up.

‘No worry,’ Mundawuy said quietly. ‘This sand special. No meat left, no stink.’

Kitty stared at him, almost as alarmed by his reading of her mind as by the thought of finding Wai only partly decomposed. But she nodded and let her gaze slide back to the grave. When the digging stopped a moment later she stepped forward, feeling her heart thud rapidly in her chest.

She looked down.

In the flickering yellow light of Rian’s lamp, she could see that the shroud in which they had buried Wai had been reduced to dusty shreds, the remaining wisps draped over her bones, which were indeed bare and pearly white. Surrounded by lengths of long black hair, her pale skull gleamed softly, and between her ribs, where her heart would have been, lay the greenstone earring her father had left with her. The sand had sifted down through her delicate bones but it was obvious that she hadn’t been disturbed. She might have been lying here for a thousand years, Kitty thought, not for just four and a half. She moved back, her eyes filling with tears.

‘Little bird girl,’ Mundawuy said.

Gideon and Rian stepped carefully down into the grave while Kitty brought the box closer and opened it, resting the hinged lid on the sand. As they started to pass out Wai’s bones, Ropata began to intone another prayer. Suddenly not frightened any more, filled now with only an aching sadness for her lost friend, Kitty took each bone as it was handed up to her and laid it carefully in the silk-lined box. Last to go in was the greenstone earring. Kitty gently closed the lid and looked up at Rian.

‘All right?’ he asked.

She nodded, although there was still a lump the size and sharpness of a peach pit in her throat; then she gave in and
allowed herself to weep as Rian helped her to her feet. She leaned against him, grateful for his warmth, his strength and his understanding. Beside her Gideon was also weeping, although silently; the twin line of tears flowing down his wide, black cheeks reflected the lamplight, as though he were crying tiny threads of fire. Ropata had finished his karakia on a very wobbly note and was now intently studying the cave wall, blinking furiously.

Mundawuy started speaking then in his own tongue, and Kitty saw that he was directing his words to a spot in the air above Wai’s empty grave. She looked away, not wanting to intrude: she knew enough now about native peoples to accept and respect the fact that most had their own ways of appeasing gods, thanking ancestors and soothing spirits.

Gideon bent down and hoisted the box onto his wide shoulders, although Kitty thought that even she could have managed to carry it. Wai’s bones could hardly weigh much; it was her memory that lay heavily on them all.

The day before the
Katipo
set sail for New Zealand, Kitty and Enya went shopping. Kitty bought slippers to go with her new dress, some rather fine bed linen, and several pair of men’s trousers, which she would tailor to her own shape as the trews she had been wearing over the past year were almost threadbare and coming apart at the seams. She also bought a boy’s cap, to keep her hair out of the way while she was working on deck. She had been using a head scarf but it tended to slide off, especially when her hair was freshly washed.

After that, she found herself being steered by Enya into a pharmacy.

‘Why are we in here?’ she asked, mystified.

‘Because you can’t keep sailing about on the high seas the way you are and expect your complexion to remain as lovely
it is,’ Enya replied. ‘And you’re not exactly a girl any more, are you?’

Kitty knew Enya’s comments were meant affectionately, but she still felt somewhat put out. ‘What’s wrong with my complexion?’ she asked, a tad grumpily.

‘Nothing yet. Apart from those tiny crow’s feet starting at the corners of your eyes. That’s probably from squinting into the sun.’

Kitty went over to a mirror mounted on the pharmacy wall and glared into it with her eyes wide open. ‘I can’t see any crow’s feet.’

‘That’s because you’re pulling a face. How old are you now?’

‘Twenty-five. But I only had my birthday last month.’

‘Then it’s time to start doing something before it’s too late.’ Enya took Kitty firmly by the elbow and led her over to the counter, behind which the pharmacist, a small man with neatly trimmed whiskers, stood patiently waiting.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Turvey,’ Enya said.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Mason,’ he replied genially.

‘I buy all of my beauty preparations from Mr Turvey,’ Enya explained to Kitty. ‘He’s very skilled.’

He must be, Kitty thought grudgingly, because her sister-in-law certainly had a flawless complexion, all smooth cream and pink. She was beginning to feel like an old hag now.

‘So what I think we’ll start with, Mr Turvey,’ Enya said, ‘is some of your best cold cream, the one with the lanolin base. That’s to use at night,’ she explained to Kitty. ‘It can be a bit greasy, so don’t use too much. Then perhaps we’ll try an oatmeal-and-buttermilk face mask, though you’ll have to use that quickly or it will go off. It leaves the face feeling marvellously clean and firm. And some witch-hazel eyewash for that puffiness we get when we’re tired.’

We? Kitty thought: she had
never
seen Enya with puffy eyes. She knew hers were puffy, though, mostly from sitting in the hot, smoky public room of the Bird-in-Hand until after midnight the night before. But it had been worth it, because they’d caught up on the latest gossip about Walter Kinghazel’s murder. Apparently, so the farrier sitting at the next table had informed them—and he should know, he insisted, because he was on very friendly terms with one of the local constabulary—a new suspect had been identified, a man who had been seen in the same drinking establishment as Mr Kinghazel on the night of his murder, then a little later in the immediate vicinity of his house. Now all of Sydney was busy speculating about who the suspect might be.

Enya leaned in close to Kitty’s face, studied it for a moment, then said, ‘Hmm.’

Kitty steeled herself for more bad news.

‘You’re developing a few freckles,’ Enya declared. ‘We’ll take a large pot of your elderflower-and-zinc-sulphate cream, too, thank you, Mr Turvey. And is that a hint of ruddiness in your cheeks? We’d better have some of the white castile, cuttlefish and orris root soap as well.’

‘It’s not ruddiness, I’m just hot,’ Kitty insisted, but Enya ignored her.

‘Show me your hands.’

Kitty reluctantly presented her hands for inspection.

‘Oh dear,’ Enya said. ‘And a large tub of almond-oil hand-cream. Now, have you started using cosmetics yet, Kitty?’

Kitty was surprised to discover that she was faintly shocked, because everyone knew that only whores wore face paint. ‘No, I haven’t!’