La Rochelle's Road Read online

  In this harsh new light, the weight of so much water soothes her eyes, like a compress against her forehead. The southerly wind throws up the boom of the surf. But from here, she cannot see the edge of the cliffs, and does not have to think about that giddy plunge down into blackness.

  It would be better still to sit inside, and look out, but Letitia is attempting to bake bread again, an operation that does not agree with her temper, and the kitchen is the only room to offer a view of the sea. It seems perverse to Hester that just one small window should be employed to frame the vastness of an ocean.

  The wind thumbs through her journal. She reads, again, the dedication on its frontispiece, in her governess’s professionally neat hand. To my dear Hester, on her eighteenth birthday — for recording her own Special Thoughts. Hester closes the cover. She sighs, and turns her pen at last to the letter she has been avoiding.

  My dearest Lucy,

  I promised I would write you a faithful account of our arrival at La Rochelle’s Road, so here it is;— though I fear that you, too, will find it somewhat other than expected.

  Hester looks up again, across rock and tussock, and stares for a time at the sea.

  First I shall give you what is good:

  The cottage itself is rather pretty, albeit strange to our London eyes;— the only bricks to be found in it are those which make the chimneys. Its walls are made entirely of wooden boards, which were once painted buff, but are now rather blackened and blistered.

  We have four rooms, with an attic above, reached by a ship’s ladder, which Robbie has taken for his bedroom. Below, Mother and Father have their room, with a window onto the verandah, and I mine, with a smaller pane looking east to some rather grand mountains (or hills, as we are learning we must call them). For the rest, we have a parlour at the front and a kitchen at the back, with a fine view of the sea, from which one enters a long, narrow space running half the width of the house and providing pantry, scullery &c. (You will be delighted to know that we do, after all, have a lavatory, albeit situated at a rather greater distance from the house than is customary in Clapham.)

  Though it was still furnished, as we were promised, it seems the cottage had been unoccupied for some time;— at least, by any human. Upon our arrival, Father and Rob had to evict a family of rats from the pantry, and several birds from the attic, and there was much tidying up to be done after our erstwhile tenants before Mother would allow us to unpack our things. Now, however, it is quite spick and span, and the last of the birds have been smoked from its chimneys without accident.

  I am sure we would be quite content in our new home, and prefer it greatly to our old Clapham terrace, were it not for the condition of the surrounding land. Where we had thought to find cleared pasture, there is only a dense covering of bushes, thorns and evil-looking nettles over the charred stumps of giant trees, and the rotten branches of smaller ones. I must tell you, Lucy, that it makes for a sad and dreary prospect;— furthermore, it must all be cleared before the grasses which are to be our living can begin to be sown, and who is to do it, and how long it will take, we have no way yet of knowing.

  But there! It must be only a matter of time, and patience. When next I write, no doubt all will have been resolved, and I shall have nothing to complain of but an overindulgence of fresh air, fine sea views, and sunshine;— and, of course, that you are not here to share them with me.

  Your loving friend in New Zealand,

  Hester

  Five

  The bullock cart pulls up with their things before they have finished breakfast.

  ‘Good morning.’ The driver does not bother to smile. ‘I am Delacroix.’

  On the verandah, the Petersons exchange cautious glances.

  ‘It is my house you pass, when you come here,’ he explains. ‘The last one, before you reach this road.’

  ‘Of course,’ says Daniel politely. ‘Monsieur … Delacroix? How nice to meet you.’

  Delacroix nods impatiently while Daniel completes the introductions, and the bullocks stamp their feet. In the flesh they are not very picturesque, and much larger than Hester expected. Their leader returns her gaze with an expression as perfectly brutish as it is sour.

  ‘I think perhaps you want something,’ says Delacroix, as soon as he is able. ‘My wife, she has hens.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, sir —’

  ‘Also potatoes. And milk. You want some things from Pigeon Bay, I bring them on my wagon.’

  Daniel and Letitia smile at each other. ‘Some fresh milk would be nice,’ she says. ‘And we didn’t think to buy potatoes.’

  ‘You would like some eggs too, no? One dozen?’

  ‘Well … if you’re quite sure.’ Letitia’s smile widens. ‘Half a dozen would be lovely. Thank you …’

  But Delacroix is already climbing back on his wagon. ‘My wife, she will bring them this afternoon,’ he calls, and applies his whip to the bullocks.

  ‘There. What did I tell you?’ Daniel squeezes Letitia’s hand, and they go back to their cooling black tea and damper.

  Sarah Delacroix arrives at four o’clock. She has a sack of potatoes slung across her shoulders, which appear accustomed to such work, and carries a basket of eggs and milk on a sunburnt forearm.

  ‘Ta,’ she says, as she takes the bread and tea Letitia has set out for her. ‘It’s hot out lugging this lot.’

  ‘It’s so terribly kind of you,’ Letitia begins, a catch in her throat, ‘to help us like this. We couldn’t have hoped for nicer neighbours.’

  ‘You’re welcome, luv.’ Sarah Delacroix sniffs, and helps herself to the milk she has brought. ‘That’ll be two-and-sixpence.’

  Six

  Daniel pauses to straighten his back. A wall of tree nettle confronts him. Behind it, scrub-heavy ridges mount towards the sky.

  He thinks of his final day of work in the office of Willis, Gann, remembers putting his pen away in his drawer, and getting the train with John and Bill for the last time. They stopped in at the Cock on their way home from the station. He can see it now, the small mist rising from the bathing pond and rolling out over Clapham Common, and himself, in the warmth of the bar, slightly drunk, and, as usual, quoting Massey:

  Unite ye now, a Brother-band,

  With dauntless will, and stalwart hand:

  We are but few, toil-tried, and true,

  Yet hearts beat high to dare and do:

  And who would not a Champion be

  In Labour’s Knightlier Chivalry?

  He watches himself drain the last of his pint and bang the glass, carefully, on the counter. Someone — Albie, perhaps, or John? — slaps him on the back and signals to the lad behind the bar. ‘You should put it to music, Dan!’

  ‘I shall, one day! A new anthem, for a new country!’

  Bill raises his glass. ‘To free our labour and our land!’

  ‘To Dan,’ says Albie, ‘the master of his labour and his land!’

  ‘No masters, please!’ Daniel hears himself say. ‘But a man no more nor less than his fellows, who will do his best to toil for them, as they toil for him, and together with all, shall reap the harvest of their endeavour.’

  His words skip easily across seas and time, to sink in the stillness of La Rochelle’s Road.

  To the Chivalry of Labour!

  Daniel bends his back to the scrub once more. The labour does not bring him grace. His muscles tire, but his mind will not stop working.

  He thinks of Fitzjohn. His ruddy, open face above the claret jug, eager to lend capital to Daniel’s brilliant scheme. It was to have made them equals, wealthy men, forgers of their own fortunes. Now, Fitzjohn must be told that little more than half of his investment may prove viable, one day. The rest is rock and precipice, acres that will never be made to yield.

  The arithmetic is all too easy for a clerk, even with the sun beating down on his head and stinging sweat in his eyes. They have paid two pounds for every acre on which a man can stand. This is the great opportu
nity for which Daniel has thrown away a life of caution, and considered himself free.

  He remembers the pride he felt in Fitzjohn’s slap on the back, in his own acumen and courage. To dare, and do. To leave behind rents and salaries, the measured climb, a lifetime’s careful accumulation of small comforts.

  Letitia was so excited.

  He can barely look at her now. This time last year, he promised her a life of luxury by the sea. He told her it would be the making of the children. She believed him, of course. She always did. He wipes his face, and thinks she should, this time, have listened to her mother.

  Two pounds an acre. For that sum, they might have had their pick of land anywhere in the colony. Flat land, which a machine might reap in a day. Land not bought, sight unseen, from strangers in shipping offices, brandishing bargain deeds.

  He might have paced the boundaries of competing sections, judged their soil and shelter, their proximity to water, their openness to wind. Any sensible man would have done so. An experienced, landowning man, whose father and grandfather did not end their days in the same tied cottage where they were born; the sort of man to whose fingers fortune sticks, and in whose judgement governments place their trust.

  Daniel attacks the scrub with greater force. It does not improve his skill.

  Seven

  Letitia is hanging out washing. She is tired, but not fatally so. She is able to enjoy the dry ground beneath her feet, and the view of the ocean, blue and calm and distant, like holidays in Devon. She can almost smell strawberry ice and Shetland ponies on the healthful ozone breeze. The land below her, curving like a shaggy brown belly to meet the sea, is warm and placid, asking nothing.

  In the washhouse the copper shines clean again, first scrubbed, now boiled. It has been hard work, but not as hard as three months of shipboard queues and tempers and salty water gathered from dirty sails. Next Monday will be easier. Each week, she tells the sheets and petticoats, it will be easier. There will come a day for the planting of flowers and a night for the sewing of curtains.

  Letitia thinks this as hard as she can, not looking back at the cottage, as hygienic now as soap and lye and sweat can make it. Behind it, the land, her land, is an ugly sprawl of thorn and nettle as far as she can see. High above in the cloudless sky, a wood pigeon stalls and dives. With the aid of the stiffening breeze, it deposits a jet of berry-bright excrement across a clean white sheet.

  Eight

  Jean Delacroix dumps his sack of potatoes at the kitchen door. He leans, sweating, in the shade of the wall and watches Daniel’s digging.

  ‘She is hard work, that clay.’

  Daniel rests on his spade until he gets his breath back. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What will you put there?’

  The sweat runs down Daniel’s forehead and into his eyes. ‘A garden.’

  ‘There?’ Delacroix snorts with amusement. ‘What will you grow? Oranges? Bananas? Roses, for your lady?’

  Daniel does not like to say that he will grow potatoes. He smiles tightly, and is silent.

  ‘It is a hedge you should plant. Give you some shelter’ — Delacroix narrows his eyes at the ocean — ‘from all that.’

  Daniel nods politely.

  ‘I can sell you good trees, ones that do not die in the wind. Tell me how many, and I bring them.’

  ‘Perhaps later. When we have ourselves established.’

  ‘I would not wait that long.’ Delacroix looks around, his eyebrows raised. ‘They will grow slow here.’

  Beside him, Letitia throws open the kitchen window. ‘Daniel? Are you stopping? We’ve made tea. Oh.’ She bites her lip. ‘Hello, Mr Delacroix. I didn’t see you.’

  He gives her a nod and taps the window frame. ‘You will want to board this up before the winter. We all told him, when he built the place.’ He glances, briefly, at the limitless stretch of the horizon. ‘La Rochelle. He was a fool.’

  Nine

  The scrape of furniture above her head is grating on Hester’s nerves. It is followed by a hollow bang and a ‘hullo!’ from Robbie. For a moment, she has silence.

  ‘Hester! Come and look at this.’

  There is no need to shout. Robbie’s voice falls all too easily into her room. She sighs, and puts down Lucy’s letter. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Come and see,’ he repeats. ‘You’ll like it, promise.’

  ‘It had better not,’ she warns him, manoeuvring her skirts into the attic, ‘be another of those disgusting flying beetle-things.’

  He grins at her from the corner, where he has an old dresser pulled out from the wall. ‘Look!’

  Hester approaches cautiously. The back of the dresser, she sees, has been patched with a piece of board, now dislodged by Robbie’s explorations.

  ‘Now, what d’you think is on the other side?’

  He turns it over proudly.

  ‘A painting?’ Hester crouches in the dust beside her brother to get a better look. ‘Who would do such a thing to it?’

  ‘I suppose they didn’t like it.’

  She tilts her head. ‘I think it’s rather good.’

  ‘Remind you of anything?’

  She considers the little white house, its bold imposition upon black forest. Above it rise predatory crags, an explosion of savage brushwork, to which a fine fur of dust now clings.

  Robbie rolls his eyes, impatient. ‘Come on!’

  ‘Mr Turner?’ she suggests, though she thinks it is less a painting of light than of darkness.

  ‘You dolt! It’s here! This house. Just look at the hills — can’t you see it?’

  ‘No!’ Hester tilts her head the other way. ‘It’s the wrong way round. Our house faces the hills. And it doesn’t have French windows.’ But Robbie is right, the peaks do look familiar.

  He sighs. ‘It’s not the front of the house! It’s looking up at the back, from the cliffs. It must’ve been done before they built the lean-to.’

  They carry the painting down to the kitchen, where Letitia declares it frightful; the dark hills make her shiver. ‘It’s all dirty and broken,’ she tells them. ‘Put it back where you found it. I’m not having it downstairs.’

  In the parlour, Daniel does not look up from his ledger. ‘Not now,’ he says. ‘You heard your mother. Put it away somewhere.’

  Robbie and Hester look at each other in silence. They carry the painting back upstairs. Robbie leans it up against the rafters, where the ceiling slopes down to the floor. They stand back. Hester thinks it is like looking out through another window.

  She does not find the hills behind the cottage gloomy; she thinks they are painted with something like joy, a reckless, exultant abandon. Beneath them, the cottage shines. She stares at all the panes of glass, and imagines looking out through those elegant, delicate doors, bright with the light of the ocean. This was the house built by La Rochelle, the fool, who wanted to see the sea.

  He is long gone back across it, she writes in her journal that night. Now his blinded house looks into the sun, and we see nothing.

  Ten

  Daniel’s headache is getting worse. He can feel it kick against the bones of his skull. His vision is narrowing, and it is hard to keep his right eye open. He feels his stomach turn. He shivers.

  Letitia’s hand is cold and heavy on his forehead. It presses out the lumps of pain. ‘You’ve had too much sun,’ she tells him.

  It is finding him still, the evening sun, through the curtainless bedroom windows. Letitia hangs a blanket, and makes it dark. ‘Did you not have your hat on?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Lettie,’ he tells her.

  There’s so much to do. She strokes his head until it’s time to make the children’s supper.

  When she goes, he finds a sort of sleep, in which he swings his billhook over and over again, like the repetition of a penance. He wills himself to stop, but cannot, and all the while the land around him grows no clearer.

  It is a relief to wake to real darkness. He can hear Lettie breathing beside him. He moves into the c
urve of her back, the known world of her neck and shoulder. Now the pressure of pain has gone, his head is left light, a blown egg, fragile, empty. He slides his arm under hers, shields himself in the weight of her, breathes it in, until he grows heavy.

  Eleven

  January 30th, 1867

  Dear Lucy,

  After almost three weeks in New Zealand, we have our first day of rain! We awoke this morning to find our sea-views gone, replaced by great blank walls of cloud. Our garden hangs alone in this shifting whiteness, at once insulated and exposed;— for all we know we may have been taken off in the night, cottage and all, down to a Faerie realm.

  We found ourselves unable to cut much scrub in the wet, for the ground is so slippery it is impossible to keep one’s feet (not a good thing, with an axe in one’s hand, I may tell you). What’s more, though it is high summer here, once one is drenched to the skin, one becomes cold very quickly.

  You might think we should relish a holiday, but with so much to be done we cannot enjoy it. We work every day, but make little progress;— except, perhaps, towards a more precise understanding of our situation.

  There is scant prospect, we are informed, of our employing any help. Father has proposed taking a position, so that his salary might pay for clearing a few acres. But labour here is in short supply, and its price is high;— we are no longer, as our French neighbour delights to point out to us, in England!

  Monsieur Delacroix has been very generous in advising Father as to what he should not do, and cautioning him against the pitfalls inherent in every course towards which he tends. In the usual way of doing things, the good man tells us, the labour of cutting away the undergrowth from the forest, and afterward removing the stumps of the felled trees, is paid for by their timber;— but here, as he points out, we have no standing trees. Our timber is gone, sold long ago. Only the stumps remain, and the valueless scrub, which has grown back over all.