La Rochelle's Road Read online

  La Rochelle’s Road

  Tanya Moir

  For my mother, the explorer.

  An old woman digs under a stone. She has sand in her red skirt, and between her knees a long view of the sea, which she has heard called cerulean and aumoana, but is too large for anyone to colour.

  They are all there, still, in her wooden box. The things she keeps. Their patterns. Lines cut in ink and memory and stone, whorls and flourishes of bright feathers and long-gone hands. Her weight rests lightly on bare toes.

  Behind her, the windows of the empty house stand open, once again, to the ocean. The dry boards shift in the sun.

  The light is strong today, up here. She can see the patterns inside pounamu and paper, like water, glowing. She can see the direction in which pen and chisel flowed, the way they cut and scratched the blankness until it was a thing.

  She can see the shades of white in a silk scarf and a piki-kotuku, the clipped yellow edges, the fading black, of the list of the lost. The smudged imprint of a line she has learned, though it is not hers. The ink-feathered shape that was Matoaka.

  They are small things, in this box. Iti-kahuraki. One by one she takes them out, and holds them to the sun.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Part Two

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Part Three

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Part Four

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Part Five

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Part

  One

  One

  The light hurts Hester Peterson’s eyes. She wishes, now, that she had set her chin less high, or chosen to look elsewhere. Below the tip of her nose she can just make out her father’s hand on the globe, and the blurry shape of her brother’s knee.

  ‘Five seconds more,’ Mr Gilberthorpe soothes, from behind the camera.

  The Petersons are arranged against a woodland backdrop, in which a classical temple decays prettily under the assault of Nature. Hester’s father had wanted a pastoral scene. But there had been no chance to change it.

  ‘Woodland this week,’ Gilberthorpe had said firmly. ‘If it’s fields you want, you’ll have to come back next Wednesday.’

  The Petersons had smiled at each other. ‘Can’t do that, I’m afraid,’ said Daniel. ‘We have another engagement.’

  Grandma Williams had sniffled a little, and Hester’s mother had squeezed her hand.

  ‘Woods it will have to be, then.’

  ‘Very good, sir. Now, if I might ask you not to move the Corinthian column.’

  Daniel had placed the globe on the papier-mâché ruin with obedient care. Gilberthorpe had considered it, head to one side. ‘And your books here in front, I’d say.’ He looked askance at the copy of Darwin, and slid it under the globe.

  Briskly, the photographer had composed Daniel’s other props: the seed-lip and scythe at Robbie’s feet, the seed-sower leaning on Grandpa Williams’ chair, and the ancient handplough behind them all, just in front of the temple background.

  ‘Excellent!’ he beamed, rearranging his lights a little. ‘Learning and Labour, eh sir? Very good.’

  Letitia had smiled up at her husband.

  ‘That’s it madam! Lovely. Now, just relax your faces … look to your left a little, miss … and hold your positions, please.’

  The final seconds pass. Hester grits her teeth.

  ‘There now!’ says Gilberthorpe at last. ‘All done. We have it.’

  Grandma Williams takes them out for tea afterwards, to Langham’s across the High Street. Daniel pauses outside St Mary’s to read the placard around the neck of an old man sitting on the steps. ‘Turned Out After 50 Years’, it says, ‘Replaced By A Machine’. Daniel pays the man a whole penny for a box of Lucifers, and Grandma Williams purses her lips but remains silent.

  They sit in the window of Langham’s and watch the buses rumble by while they eat fragile cakes with white icing and sugared violets. Daniel reads The Times, and shakes his head over a report on the Islington Demonstration.

  ‘“Absurd”, was it? This country will learn the hard way not to laugh at the Working Man.’

  Robbie nudges Hester. ‘Let them eat cake,’ he whispers.

  The afternoon remains sunny, and they walk home across the Common.

  Five weeks later, crossing the latitude of Rio, Hester considers the portrait in the hot shade of their cabin.

  Robbie sits on a cushion in the foreground. Her father stands behind him, with one hand on her mother’s shoulder, and the other spanning the South Pacific Ocean. Hester stands on her father’s left, behind the globe, On the Origin of Species and the collected works of Homer.

  Grandma and Grandpa Williams are behind her mother, very slightly out of
focus, already fading into the wooded English background. Hester fancies her grandmother’s blurry eyes to be touched with public pride and private disappointment.

  ‘It’s not forever,’ Letitia had told her, on the East India Docks. ‘You’ll come out and visit.’

  Daniel had been watching the gangway. ‘We’ll send you the tickets,’ he promised, ‘after our first crop.’

  In the photograph, no one is smiling. They all look a little disconcerted, with their farm implements and their Sunday best, while behind them flattened Nature tears apart a Grecian folly. Hester tucks the portrait back into her journal.

  In a few months more, her latest composition reads, we shall have all the space and land we desire. The air shall be fresh, the sunshine kind, and the sea breeze shall move through the cocksfoot. In the cool of the New Zealand evening, we farmers of grass shall sit, and watch our fields grow.

  She gets up. Her petticoat is stuck to the back of her legs; the air in the tiny cabin is so close and wet it is exhausting just to breathe it.

  They have lost the last of the robins this morning. Its dusty-red body bobbed for a time in their wake, until a striped shark rose and took it. Hester thinks that perhaps it is just as well, for who would wish to disembark alone in a strange new world, the only one left of one’s kind?

  ‘Hester, quick!’ Robbie throws open the door. ‘Come and see! The fish — they’re fiying!’

  Two

  They make land three days after their first sight of Stewart’s Island, the dead heat of the tropics long forgotten, and the icebergs of the Southern Ocean still chilling their dreams.

  ‘Arrived—January 10th, ship Matoaka, 1092 tons, Stevens, from London. Ninety-four days land to land. 110 passengers; Births 1, Deaths 0,’ the Lyttelton Times will report of them next morning, taking no account of the trail of feathered corpses left in their wake.

  It seems right to Daniel that they should celebrate. In a hotel on the quay, still swaying from the passage, he watches his family eat ham sandwiches, and cannot help but count the cost in cocksfoot seed of each and every mouthful. Around them, the first-cabin passengers drink champagne and complain, in loud voices, of prices worse than Brighton.

  ‘It’s nothing at all like Brighton,’ says Hester in a low, accusing whisper. Daniel looks out through salty glass at the brown mountains, their surly slouch into the oddly coloured sea. His daughter takes another sip of tea. ‘It’s more like Broadstairs,’ she continues.

  Below, the Matoaka’s freight lies on the raw timbers of the new dock. A party of officials moves along it, pausing to inspect what remains of the Acclimatisation Society’s ordered birds. The surviving thrushes and skylarks hide in their baskets, too stunned to sing; a chaffinch closes its eyes and burrows deeper into its English rush, while above the brown gulls brawl.

  ‘Such a shame,’ says Letitia, ‘about all of the poor robins.’

  The Petersons leave straight after breakfast the next morning, the wasted sacks of cocksfoot piling higher in Daniel’s mind. Courtesy of the shipping firm Willis, Gann & Co., they have four tickets on the paddle steamer, and so are saved the three-day walk, which they have read is the worst in all New Zealand. This is the last favour Daniel can claim of his old employer, and he lands at Pigeon Bay owed nothing by any man.

  The wharf is stacked high with sawn timber. Beyond it is a wide, haphazard scatter of houses and huts, their construction varying in ambition and completeness. The effect is rather flat; there is no church spire.

  Daniel looks around. There seems to be only one way out of the bay, a track cutting almost straight up the mountain range ahead, to craggy peaks and a hard blue sky. He glances, quickly, at his wife, to see if she has noticed.

  Letitia’s attention is elsewhere. ‘Look!’ She nudges Hester’s arm, and nods at a house across the road. ‘Palm trees.’

  Daniel looks back at the mountains. A heavy silence flows down from them and hangs over the valley. He feels the quiet, despite the industry of the mills and boatbuilders’ yards and the cries of the sheep on the headland. He leads his family up, away from the sea, their footsteps echoing under the wharf, rolling on thick green water.

  Letitia and Hester tick off their list in the little store. Daniel goes to the inn, and agrees a fee for cartage. The price makes his stomach lurch. He looks out at their boxes piled up on the wharf, and the publican shakes his head, as if to apologise for Daniel’s lack of choices. Daniel hands over his money, thankful they did not bring the piano. They carry what they can.

  The climb is gentle at first. Letitia remarks on how nice it is to be walking again, after so long at sea. The morning sun is mild, and the fields a luxuriant green. They pause often, looking back to admire the view of the ocean, or the rampant growth of a strange new tree.

  Daniel is moved more than once to quote his old favourite, Gerald Massey. ‘Come let us worship Beauty,’ he declaims to the freshening breeze, ‘with the Knightly faith of old …’

  ‘O Chivalry of Labour,’ Robbie continues, rather too theatrically, ‘toiling for the Age of Gold!’

  As the road narrows and begins to rise, they come across a gang of men working to shore up a slip above it. One of the men leans on his shovel to watch them pass, and Daniel smiles and tips his hat to his fellow Knight of Labour. The man stares at him for a moment, and goes back to his digging.

  Soon the road dwindles to a track, a steep gash of clay through stands of timber and charred fields. After three months of disuse, the muscles in Daniel’s legs are beginning to shake, and he thinks that the ropes of the box he has tied to his back might cut right through him. He pauses only for breath, and to wait for Letitia and Hester, who are falling behind.

  ‘Nearly there,’ he tells them.

  Hester glares up at him. She is bent over, her breathing ragged, her hands on her knees. Daniel gives her a confident smile. But he has lost all track of time, and distance; he does not know how far they have to go, or how many hours of light remain in this foreign sky. As they climb out of the shelter of the valley, the sun cools and a strong wind begins to blow.

  ‘Oh!’ says Letitia, as they sight the top of the ridge. ‘Thank goodness!’

  At the summit, Hester drops the box from her back and sits down on it. The wind knocks her bonnet from her head. Before them, a long harbour lies blue and unruffled, its little bays dotted with homesteads and hedgerows and tidy, square green fields. A good road runs down towards it. Daniel looks up at the sky. The sun is still high, and bright.

  He takes a deep breath, and waves his hand at a track rising into the rocks to their left. ‘This way!’ he says. They see the turning to La Rochelle’s Road in the late afternoon, the nor’west wind making sails of skirts and coats, and a fine dust all about them. For some miles the track has lain almost flat across the top of the ridge, with the sea to east and west far below, and a hint of white peaks in the distance. The view has been fine, and the going easy.

  Daniel has them singing an Arthur Sullivan tune from the last show they saw in London. ‘Hush a bye bacon, on the coal top … till I awaken, there will you stop.’ He holds the deed of sale rolled tight in his hand, waving it like a baton.

  They look down, at last, on the forty acres he has purchased; the first land, to his knowledge, owned by any of his name. The sight of it knocks the wind from Daniel’s lungs.

  ‘There must be some mistake,’ Letitia says into the silence.

  The Petersons look around. But there is no other road.

  To either side of La Rochelle’s Road is a wilderness, straggling down to meet the sea. At its end, they can see the iron roof of a cottage rising from the scrub. Beyond that, the land stops abruptly, cut off by the vast blue wall of the Pacific Ocean.

  Robbie puts down his case of books. ‘Where are the fields?’ he says.

  Three

  A grey light is growing on Hester’s pillow. It is filled with the wash of the sea, and for a moment she imagines herself back in her bunk on the Matoaka. She rolls
over and looks out of the bare window. She sees strange hills, resolving slowly out of darkness.

  Closer, the weedy forest is stirring. It sways with the chatter and whistle of birds, warming with the morning. Out of the racket comes a single call, the notes clear and delicate, like the refrain from The Magic Flute. Hester tries to replay them, fingers seeking the final chord among the roses of her quilt. She thinks she will write them down for Lucy. A rude honk disturbs her concentration. She wonders if the Matoaka’s English birds will find their way here, and if so, what they will make of such riotous manners.

  She finds her boots and begins the long walk up to the lavatory. Green birds flash and whirr about her ears. One pauses, hanging upside down from a creeper above her head. The bird and Hester study one another cautiously. It is pretty, but its curved beak and hooded eyes look cruel, and she worries for the little finches.

  From the path back down, she can see over most of their land. She is surprised at how narrow it seems. On the title deed, it had looked much wider. A trick of scale, perhaps; there is so much water, and sky.

  The ocean is far below, but all around her, in the fizz of the sea-bleached air. Sunlight touches the top of the chimney, and the grey smoke sinks, beaten back by a rising breeze off the horizon. Hester watches the light spread along the front of the cottage. The pale boards flare like a struck match against the shadows of the headland, and the sea glows silver-blue.

  In the kitchen, Letitia is struggling with the stove. ‘But what are we to do until then?’ she asks, on her knees, of the sooty firebox.

  Hester pauses in the doorway, waiting.

  Daniel sits with his back to her, looking out at a square of sea. His long white hands are spread on the table. ‘I don’t know,’ he says.

  Four

  Our house has its back to the sea, writes Hester in her journal. Below us, the ocean spreads to the sky, twitching wide and blue and hungry. One would think it to be infinite. But we, of course, know better.

  She has set up her folding chair in the shade behind the kitchen wall, where she can look out across the ocean. She is drawn to this wide and windy view, its promise of forever.