The Colour (40 page)

This was the last time he saw her.

Dillane had promised him that ‘all will proceed exactly as though she were undergoing a bona fide miscarriage'.

‘And then she will be as she was before?'

‘Oh yes. She will be quite well.'

But Rebecca Millward never got well.

She bled for three days and died on the fourth of blood poisoning.

Perhaps the instrument with which Dillane had ruptured the wall of her womb had been insufficiently cleaned after one of his operations on an animal? Nobody would ever know. All they knew was that Rebecca Millward died of a violent, puerperal fever no doctor could alleviate.

Joseph Blackstone stood in the road and saw her coffin carried to the church in Parton and knew that there was no difference between him and a man who has committed murder.

The nightmares didn't end there.

The auction of the Shire horse never went as planned. Joseph had meant to bribe someone to stand in the crowd to talk up Dido's price. His father had sometimes used this method to sell animals and usually with good success and tankards of ale at the Plough and the Stars to celebrate afterwards. But so haunted was Joseph by the sight of Rebecca's coffin that this necessary part of the plan went clean out of his mind. And when the day of the auction came, the assembled bidders already seemed to know that Dido was a bad-tempered horse. Nobody wanted her. Joseph's gavel had to come down on a paltry sum.

And then he saw Merrick Dillane striding towards him. Dillane led him away beyond the crowd at the market. He jabbed a finger at his dusty black lapel. He told him he had performed his part of the bargain; now he wanted ‘a correct sum' for his horse.

‘Rebecca died . . .' was all Joseph could stammer. ‘You shouldn't have let her die.'

But Merrick Dillane began to walk away. He turned only to say that he would tell the whole village what Joseph had asked him to do.

So then Joseph knew that he had no idea how to escape from the darkness closing round him, unless it might be to engineer his own death, to pass the way she'd passed, in her oak box, towards Parton Magna's Church of the Redeemer, where among the ancient graves the primroses were shining.

He was helpless. He paid Dillane, but he knew it would not rest there. Dillane would ask for more. Joseph's money began to leach away. Even Lilian, from whom he withheld so much, understood that something was wrong. She tried to tempt him back to happiness with his favourite food and with small kindnesses. But nothing could tempt him back. Nothing under the sun until he met Harriet Salt and understood that this tall young woman was in need of a husband.

He burned all the small, illiterate notes Rebecca had written him. He put the curl she had given him into his fly box. He wooed Harriet with dreams of a life far away, of a life begun afresh in the Land of the Long White Cloud . . .

A simple story, thought Joseph, as he lay in the stink of his tent. So simple in its progression from one event to the next; so lethal in its outcome.

Damage growing, expanding, subdividing, multiplying, never ceasing
 . . .

But now the damage was going to cease. In his more lucid and optimistic moments, this was what Joseph tried to reassure himself. It was about to become finite.
Harriet had found the colour
.

And then Joseph would allow himself to remember that, although the winter was coming in at Kokatahi, the seasons in England would revert to what they had once been and that, perhaps, when he saw Parton again and arrived at the Millwards' door to unburden himself of his secret, a stray wasp of summer, half intoxicated with death but still alive, might yet be creeping along the garden path.

Between Two Worlds

I

Pare led Flinty Fairford and John-boy Shannon along a swampy track in the valley of the Arahura River, going towards the buried forest she'd heard the Maoris describe. The squashy ground was kind to her feet; the pain of walking was less than it had been.

For a while, they could feel the wind at their backs, blowing off the sea. Then, as the river divided and they began to follow its northerly course, the breeze faltered and Pare stopped and put down her bundle and looked around and sniffed the air. She'd heard that you could
smell
the ancient trees as they slowly petrified under the black soil, a smell like fungus, tangy and dark, and she felt that she was near it now.

They went a little further and they began to see signs that some excavation had taken place here and been abandoned.

‘I'm not digging where some other perisher has tried and failed,' announced Flinty. ‘If I'm going to fail, I'm going to fail in a new spot.'

John-boy and Pare went on walking. She could hear frogs gurgling in the reeds. She knew that eels, too, lived in this swamp, camouflaged amid the black limbs of the buried trees, and that the flesh of these eels was so dense and oily and nourishing, it was difficult to swallow, but that it could keep away hunger for a long time. And Pare thought she would try to snare eels and kill them with her shark-toothed knife.

Pare did not know what she was going to do. She had begun to hope that, if she led the men to where the gold was, she would somehow get her share. When she went to dig for eels, what was there to prevent her from searching for the colour in the ground and, if she found it, from hiding it in her bundle? And then eventually she would barter gold for greenstone, and she thought this might be easy because the only thing the p
ā
keh
ā
longed for was gold.

She was weary of this long walk. She felt her feet begin to bleed again, but the blood left no trace and was absorbed into the mire and she was aware of how few traces her life would leave on the earth when she died, and that although she had walked from the p
ā
near Kaiapoi to the Orchard Run more times than she could count, no footstep of hers would remain on the miles and miles of tussock, nor any imprint of her body in the toi-toi thicket.

We fly away, she thought: Even while we're alive, we slowly fade, because for fewer and fewer of the living are we solid and important and bright. And so she realised that here lay the real reason for her long and arduous journey: Edwin Orchard was the one and only person for whom she was
necessary
.

She found the dead forest at dusk.

She saw white shadows flitting over it and believed them to be patupaiarehe, pale sprites who lived in the misty hills but who were insatiably curious about humans and coveted their treasures and were able to carve palaces and cradles out of greenstone. And she saw that the patupaiarehe were angry with her because, as yet, she had found nothing.

To try to protect herself from the patupaiarehe, Pare took out her phial of red ochre and smeared her forehead with this and neither of the men noticed because the light was almost gone.

But they, too, could smell the mushroom scent of the buried trees. Flinty took up his shovel and began digging down through the bog and sure enough he found them: arching limbs and stems, black as charcoal, hard as his own name, and he and John-boy stared at them and were struck dumb. Flinty swore.

John-boy said: ‘I'd like to show my mam this. I'd like to see her flabbergasted face.'

In the fading light, the men were eager to pitch a tent, but all the ground in this part of the Arahura Valley was wet-flat swamp and no surface was stable or solid, so Pare suggested that they stretch blankets from the trees, like hammocks, and sleep suspended here, where they would be dry. Flinty complained that he couldn't sleep in a hammock, that he had to lie face down, with his nose pointing into the earth in order to get any rest ‘from the purgatory of consciousness', but Pare told him that the Maori could sleep standing up if they sang a certain song to themselves and that she would teach him that song.

‘What song?' he asked belligerently. ‘Don't tell me it's a lullaby?'

‘No,' said Pare. But the English word ‘lullaby', which she hadn't heard for a number of years, reminded her of the days when she used to sing baby Edwin to sleep with Maori lullabies and his small fingers would reach up and clutch a hank of her dark hair and often he went to sleep still holding on to it and she would have to unclench his hands and lay his arms by his sides before tiptoeing out of his room. And she thought how frightening it was that her life had brought her here, to this swamp, all because, on a certain afternoon, she'd offended the spirit of Tane in the garden of Orchard House.

‘So?' continued Flinty. ‘What song is it? I don't want any witchcraft worked on me.'

‘No witchcraft,' said Pare. ‘But if you don't want to hear it, I shall sing it to John-boy.'

‘My mam used to sing to me,' said John-boy. ‘I can remember the words:

‘Baby and I

Were baked in a pie

The gravy was wonderful hot.

We had nothing to pay

To the baker that day

And so we crept out of the pot.'

‘Baked in a pie?' said Flinty. ‘What kind of nonsense is that?'

‘Shut up, Flinty,' said John-boy.

He began unfolding a blanket and his eyes scanned the straggly beech trees for a limb to hang it from. He wished he hadn't mentioned his mam and her lullaby. It felt to him like a betrayal of a secret which had existed between her and him for more than twenty years and now it was let loose upon the mangling, love-denying world. ‘I want to hear Pare's song,' he said.

Pare saw that John-boy was upset. She moistened her mouth, which was dry from walking on and on through the Arahura swamp, and began to sing:

Then, she stopped and said: ‘Not many words, but when you repeat them and repeat them, then sleep will come.'

‘What do they mean?' asked John-boy.

‘Could be a spell,' said Flinty. ‘An incantation.'

This was the true meaning of the words, but Pare knew that to Flinty Fairford and John-boy Shannon they could have no resonance.

‘“Where is the path to the land of sleep?”' she said. ‘That's all the song asks. But if you keep asking, then you find an answer.'

‘Sounds all right to me,' said John-boy.

Cutting through the buried forest barely resembled mining. Sometimes, there was a long, vertical ooze of black mud between the trunks of the trees and this could be shovelled out and then something like a shaft would suddenly appear, going down towards a bottom which glittered like coal. But this bottom appeared unreachable. Flinty would crouch over these shafts, try to narrow his eyes, as though he were looking through a telescope, to discover what was hidden there. He had to admit, with the glimmer or sheen it sometimes showed, that these shafts looked auriferous and his mind began working on some cutting device, operated from above, to bring the coal to the surface and see what it contained.

He started on a series of drawings (made in a notebook so old and dirty that some of the pages were still stuck together with the rancid fish scales of Dover herrings), first of a simple borer to cut the shimmering rock and then of a narrow bucket, like a tin coffee pot on a long, rigid handle, to bring the chunks to the surface. In his mind's eye, Flinty could see how these devices would work, and he showed them, not without pride, to John-boy.

‘What are you going to make all this from?' asked John-boy. ‘Beech twigs?'

‘Iron,' snapped Flinty.

‘Oh, a fine idea!' laughed John-boy. ‘I suppose you see iron girders growing out of the reeds? I suppose you can feel the heat of a smelting furnace just over that rise?'

Flinty turned his back on John-boy, put his notebook away, and saw with a new and dispassionate eye the black tracery of the tree-tops their excavations had revealed.

He stared at this tracery and thought it like nothing he'd ever seen in fifty-four years. There was something about it which he found beautiful, something which made him proud of it, and he tried to understand what this was, but he couldn't understand it. And he thought then that he had come to a place where he was lost: not lost in the way that he and John-boy had been lost in the dark of the Hurunui Gorge, but lost as to the meaning of things and he stood for a long time, looking at the forest coming out of the earth and wondering what it signified.

It was as though he expected Pare to explain this new existence to him. Whenever Flinty looked at her – the Maori woman whose life they had almost certainly saved – she seemed to him to be engaged on some task or other and she worked at these things as though she were in her own home, as though she'd done them a hundred times before. And yet what she was doing struck Flinty as extraordinary: she was plaiting reeds to make snares for weka; she was catching frogs with her hands; she was wading barefoot in the tea-coloured slime brandishing a knife, with which she killed eels as thick as a man's arm; she was dragging a flat stone, on which to make her fires, half a mile from the Arahura River; she was killing rats by breaking their necks with one snap of her wrist.

Pare roasted whatever she caught and Flinty ate it and never asked what it was after the first few days because he felt himself getting stronger on the food Pare found and cooked. Bush food. Flinty thought about his body, which had lived for so long on the flotsam of the salt seas of the English Channel, ingesting mussels, clams, winkles, sea urchins, limpets and oysters, and never once sitting down to any real feast or banquet, nor even knowing what a banquet might consist of or how the table might be set for it; and he understood this much, among all that confused him: that he'd always been and always would be a creature on the edge of the known world, a scavenger, and a beachcomber, and that it was too late to alter this destiny now.