The Colour (38 page)

‘The colour,' he repeated. ‘We found the colour.'

Already, he was estimating the value of what lay before him here. He thought there was enough to take him into the Bank of New Zealand and bring him out again with a smile on his face. But he needed to know that there was more, that this wouldn't be like the dust he'd found on the creek, a find to tease and tantalise him; he needed to know that this gold was just the beginning . . .

He made Harriet describe the site, the texture of the earth, the disposition of rocks and trees, and he learned that here, at a bend in the river, there was this wide curve of shingle and that the gold had lain there, in what had looked to her like a rich scattering among stones at the water's edge, and that the soft mud where the river lapped had a yellowish sheen. And so he recognised that this was that most precious of all finds, a surface claim, an easy beach-working, needing no shafts, but only a pan and a cradle, and he thought that after all he had suffered how strange it was that the colour had come up from the depths, come towards him, as though to say: Enough, you've endured enough.

Joseph lay down on his back and shut his eyes. Through the closed lids, he could see the dark shadow that was Harriet, kneeling by him. In the morning, he thought, he would leave Kokatahi, abandon everything here to peg out the new claim. He'd send Harriet back to Hokitika with money for a new licence, but the gold he wouldn't sell yet, in case he was seen at the Bank, in case questions were asked about where these beautiful grains had come from, in case the hordes from Kokatahi took it into their heads to follow him . . .

And this was when Joseph felt the first worm of agitation enter his mind. Though Harriet had said that the new site was two hours' walk from Kokatahi, it was nevertheless almost opposite the Chinaman's vegetable garden. And Joseph knew that the Chinaman – if he chose – could betray the find to all the diggers along the river, inform every miner from Kokatahi to Kaniere that Joseph Blackstone was dredging gold from a shingle beach. In days, or hours, perhaps even before he'd been able to survey the terrain and decide on his pegging, Joseph would be surrounded by the rabble and they would encroach on his plot, try to shoulder him away, pan close to his section of water and steal whatever they found. And then he'd end up with less – always so much less – than he might have had, if only the world had not been so crowded, if only it had not been so blighted by the sameness of people's longing . . .

At this moment, Harriet, as though she could read what was in Joseph's mind, began talking very quietly. She said: ‘I've devised a plan and you must tell me what you think of it. I know that if you move up-river and there is any sniff of gold there, you will be followed and all that squalor that has been created here would very quickly be re-created in the new place. So, we should surely buy ourselves a little time, shouldn't we? And I believe I see a way.'

Joseph said nothing. He only opened his eyes and looked at Harriet in the flickery light. He had always mistrusted her cleverness, as though it had been a hard rock on which he was fated to stumble and bruise his feet.

‘I will go upstream, Joseph,' she said. ‘
I
will go. And you will remain here. I will go secretly, at night – tomorrow night – taking just my tent and the dog and some supplies and a pan. And in the morning you will tell the other diggers that Kokatahi was too much for me to endure, that I hadn't the stomach for it, that I've gone back to Hokitika. And they will never suspect any other thing, for why should they? No one will see me, for I shall travel in the darkness and I shall walk down-river towards Kaniere and then cross to the other side and make my way along that bank and not cross over again till I come near to the Chinaman's garden.'

Joseph was silent for a moment. To think that he could outwit the other miners, stay ahead of them, even if only for a while . . . this was the very thing he'd longed for. But then he sighed and said: ‘The Chinaman is the flaw. He will betray the plan.'

Harriet sat very still. Then she said: ‘I do not think he is the flaw. I think there is no flaw.'

‘He is the flaw,' Joseph repeated. ‘He will see what you're doing. He travels up and down the river twice a week. The first part of your plan is cunning. But all its weakness lies in the nearness of the site to Chen.'

‘Is that his real name? Chen?'

‘I've heard him called that.'

‘Trust me. I do not think Chen will spread any word about what I am doing. For I saw his garden. I don't believe whoever made that garden longs for a hundred men to arrive and blight the land around him. Trust me, Joseph.'

She'd said it twice:
Trust me
.

But Joseph thought: After all that's passed, knowing how separate we've become, why should either of us trust the other? For wasn't she – who had let him go from her heart, who preferred the company of her dog to him – wasn't she capable of taking the gold for herself and never returning? Might she not creep down to Hokitika, sell whatever she found, take a boat for Lyttelton, a boat for Australia or Shanghai? Might she not sail away and deprive him, finally, of all the future lives of which he dreamed?

Tired, in the cold, bleak hour of the early morning, Harriet lay down beside him. She wrapped herself tightly in her blanket and looked at him. She saw by his hard and lightless eyes that he was a man who had grown to doubt everything and everyone.

After a long silence, during which the candle began to burn very low, Harriet told him the last part of her plan. ‘Keep the gold I found today,' she said. ‘It's yours. In a few days, pretend you have found the colour here. Raise up a little stir. This way, you will keep all the diggers round you here at Kokatahi.'

The Power of Dreams

I

Harriet took with her as many possessions as she could carry, including the bulky canvas tent and her scarlet blanket and a dented pannikin. As Joseph helped her strap these things to her back, she found herself wishing that she had her horse with her, to let him shoulder the burden. Billy would have picked his dainty way round the wash-dirt and the shafts and the stones of the river. But Billy was far away, munching clover on the Orchard Run.

Harriet left the camp after midnight. She sensed that some of the Kokatahi diggers were still awake and heard her leave. One face peered out at her as she whispered goodbye to Joseph, touching his cheek with her hand, so she let this inquisitive man hear her say: ‘I'm sorry, Joseph. I'm sorry. You were right when you told me that this is not a woman's world.' And she knew that the man was still watching as she walked away, but she was walking away towards Kaniere, towards Hokitika and the sea. When she crossed the river and came back along the other side, she would take care to follow a path out of sight of the Kokatahi goldfield.

The night was cold, with a thin moon up, and silent. Only the river kept up its eternal conversation with the sky.

Harriet carried a staff in one hand, a limb of black beech, cut by Joseph, so that she wouldn't stumble or slip when she crossed the water, and in the other hand, she held on to Lady's leash. The dog seemed enthralled by the moonlight and the shadows, distracted by scents, biting the air, as though she, too, knew that she was leaving Kokatahi far behind and making her way into a green and soundless place, where there would be fish to lap at the river's edge and kingfishers to startle from the trees.

Though Harriet knew that what she was doing was daring, even dangerous, she had no other feeling, as she walked, than one of elation and she thought that to be moving forward, to be travelling in expectation, was the thing which – after twelve years of being a governess, yoked to a room, frozen behind a wooden desk as time kept passing and never stopping for her – she enjoyed beyond all other.

She felt buoyant and steady through the long trek towards the mountains on the north bank of the river. She didn't know what time it was when she crossed the water for the second time and came at last to the shingle where she'd found the grains of gold. She felt only that the night had begun its slow descent towards morning, and that she was tired now and her skirts were wet and her feet were aching with cold and she longed to wrap herself in her scarlet blanket and sleep.

But she walked on. She'd promised herself that she'd set up her tent out of sight of Chen's garden. The shingle bank ended at a turn in the river, but beyond this another small beach appeared, with low vegetation at its back, and though the moon was almost gone, Harriet could see, by the milky light on the water, that the ground was level here.

She set down her heavy bundle, heard the pan clank against a stone. Lady went in circles, shaking water from her coat.

‘Here,' said Harriet to the dog. ‘This is our camp.' The sound of the waterfall came distantly to their ears.

Harriet took some charred, fibrous k
Å«
mara from her knap-sack and she and Lady ate it, and then Harriet spread the canvas tent flat on the ground and they lay on this and Harriet held the dog to her as she might have held a child, with its warm back against her chest, and they slept until the light came.

By mid-day, her camp was set up.

Though the river flowed only yards from the place where her tent was pitched, the spot was dry and the ground yielded to the tent pegs. Harriet collected brushwood and dry branches and set a new fire in a circle of stones. In the earth covered by the tent she dug a deep hole and filled this, too, with stones. This would be the place where she would keep her gold.

Fantails and silver-eyes arrived at sunrise and caught insects hovering in the white mist that spread itself over the water. The bush creaked and clattered as the light grew bright.

Harriet took out the gun Joseph had given her at D'Erlanger's Hotel and examined its workings and loaded it with two bullets and laid it by the place where she would sleep, with its barrel pointing away from her into the scrub. Then, she made coffee and fried bacon on the fire and wondered whether the gardener, Chen, would see smoke rising and cross the river to investigate, or whether, before the next night came, she would pay a visit to him. She thought that she would give him money for a head of cabbage and onions to fry with the bacon and carrots and leeks to make a vegetable broth that would keep her fed for a long while.

And this ‘long while' displayed itself before her, a slow feast of solitary days, each one like the one before, except that the dark would arrive a little earlier, except that the niche she'd crammed with stones would quietly fill with gold.

She knew that every miner on this river was in a race with the coming winter, that her survival here depended upon the temperature of the air, but she felt, on this first morning, that time and she were walking in step, that she had a little space – to rinse gold out of the river, to travel to the waterfall in search of Pare, to stare at the stars – and that when the snows came in, to drive her away and obliterate her camp, she, who had dreamed for so long about the mountains, would have travelled far without moving: she would have framed a question about her life and all that remained then would be to try to answer it.

Harriet panned for gold all through the warm afternoon on the shingle opposite Chen's garden. There was no wind or bite in the air and Harriet felt hot and excited and alive. She collected a fistful of golden grains in a tin cup, and washed and rinsed them until they shone. And the ease with which she had gathered them, so that the little beach was barely disturbed, struck her as miraculous. She also felt the unfairness of it. Only two hours away were the deep shafts and excavations and all the squalor and disappointed hopes of Kokatahi. Here, a child could have sat down on the mud and picked up the little bright nuggets, like shells from a Norfolk strand.

There was no sign of Chen until the sun started its decline and then Lady began barking and Harriet looked up and saw the Chinese man standing on the edge of his garden, watching her. She hadn't seen him arrive; he must have crossed the river lower down. Now, perhaps he had been going to check his fishing net and then he had caught sight of her – a stranger in his isolated world – and he stood there without moving. He wore his fur hat, but his clothes looked as though they were made of thin material, like cotton. He was holding the scarlet-handled hoe. It seemed to Harriet that he wasn't looking directly at her, but at the ground on which she was standing.

Harriet stood up. She let the tin cup lie where it was on the shingle. She wiped her hands on her pinafore. Then she called out: ‘I have money to buy vegetables.'

She waited. Chen stood perfectly still. And she thought now that perhaps he was a man who never spoke, never entered into any transaction with the people of this country, except to sell them his produce in some way that required no words?

And what came into her mind, as the silence between herself and Chen accumulated and spread itself out along the water, was all the loud and monotonous babble Joseph had spent his life intoning at the livestock auctions. And she found herself wondering: did he dream about this old, chivvying language? Did he long for a life that would be more transparent in its gestures and have less need for words?

Harriet reached into the pocket of her pinafore and gathered up a few pence and she held the money out and said again: ‘May I buy vegetables?'

For a moment more, Chen remained perfectly silent. Then he said: ‘Yes.'

He put down the hoe and walked to where the rope lay under the water and Harriet wondered whether he'd strung ropes across the river in several places, so that he could wade across the water wherever it was quietest.

He held the rope taut for her, as she crossed the river, holding on to her boots. Lady bounded and splashed at her side. When she arrived on the further bank, Chen held out his hand for her to take, but she didn't take it because her balance was good and she wanted to show him that she was strong and independent and free.