Song of the Spirits (5 page)

While Gwyneira and James enjoyed a few peaceful hours, Heather Witherspoon repaired to Kura’s room. She found the girl at the piano—and now had to tell her of her grandmother’s decision about the trip to Queenstown. Kura took the news with surprising composure.

“Oh, we won’t be gone long anyway,” she remarked. “What are we supposed to do out in the backwoods? It would be one thing if we were going to Dunedin. But that hick mining town? Besides, I’m hardly related to those people. Fleurette is something like a half aunt, and Stephen, Elaine, and George must be fourth cousins, I think. What do they have to do with me?”

Kura turned her pretty face back to her music. Fortunately, there was a piano in Queenstown; she had made sure of that. And maybe this Mrs. O’Keefe really did know something about music, perhaps even more than Miss Witherspoon. Either way, she would not miss Tiare. Naturally, it was nice to let him worship, kiss, and caress her, but she had no intention of risking becoming pregnant. Her grandmother might think she was stupid, and Miss Witherspoon reddened whenever the subject turned to anything “sexual.” But Kura’s mother, Marama, was not such a prude, so the girl was well aware of where babies came from. And she was quite sure of one thing: she did not want one of Tiare’s. In truth, she only clung to the relationship to irritate her grandmother.

If she really thought about it, Kura did not want children at all. She could not have cared less about the inheritance of Kiward Station. She was ready to leave everyone and everything behind if, in so doing, it meant coming closer to her goal. Kura wanted to make music, to sing. And no matter how many times Gwyneira said the word “impossible,” Kura-maro-tini would hold onto her dream.

W
illiam Martyn had until that moment thought of panning for gold as a quiet, even contemplative act. You held a sieve in a stream, shook it a bit—and gold nuggets would get caught in it. Maybe not right away or every time but often enough that he would become a millionaire in the long run. Now that he was in Queenstown, the reality looked quite different. To be precise, William had not discovered any gold at all before joining Joey Teaser—even after selecting the most expensive tools in the O’Kay Warehouse, where he’d had the pleasure of chatting once again with Elaine O’Keefe. She had hardly been able to contain her excitement at the sight of him, and as his first day of gold prospecting wore on, William found himself wondering whether the true vein of gold did not rest in knowing this girl. That is, whenever he managed to wonder anything. Joey, an experienced gold prospector of fifty—who looked sixty, however, and who had already tried his luck in Australia and on New Zealand’s West Coast—took one good look at William’s freshly staked claim, declared it full of potential, and went straight to work chopping wood to build a sluice box. William had looked on a little confused at all this, at which point Joey shoved a saw in his hand and gave him the order to cut the logs into boards.

“Can’t we… can’t we just buy the boards?” William asked glumly after he had failed miserably at his first attempt. If they were really going to build the twenty-yard-long sluice that Joey seemed to have in mind, it would take at least two weeks before they struck their first bits of gold.

Joey rolled his eyes. “You can buy anything, boy, when you’ve got money. But do we have any? I don’t, in any case. And you should
hold onto yours. You’re already living like a lord in your hotel and all that junk you bought.”

In addition to purchasing all the essential gold-mining tools, William had also invested in a proper camping set and a few hunting rifles. After all, he might need to spend the night at the claim—definitely when there was gold to be guarded. And William did not want to sleep without something over his head when that time came.

“We have trees, an ax, and a saw here anyway. So we might as well build the sluice box ourselves. Grab that ax. You can’t mess up chopping down a tree. I’ll take the saw and do the skilled work.”

After that, William felled trees, if not particularly quickly. He had managed to bring down two middle-sized southern beech trees, but it was sweaty work. Though the men had shivered that morning as they paddled out to their claim, they were already, at ten o’clock, toiling with their shirts off. William could hardly believe that the day was not even half-over.

“It would be better to try something that really suits you.” The banker’s remark bounced around inside William’s head. At first, he had waved it away as the phrasemongering of a risk-averse office lackey, but the life of a gold miner no longer seemed so appealing. Of course, he was out in the fresh air—and the landscape around Queenstown was fantastic. After William had gotten over his initial ill humor, he could not help but recognize that. The majestic mountains surrounding Lake Wakatipu that seemed to embrace the countryside were alone a sight to behold, as was the play of colors that now, particularly in autumn, blended the lush vegetation into a kaleidoscope of red, purple, and brown. Some of the plants seemed exotic, like the cabbage trees that looked like palms, and some strangely alien, like the violet lupines that gave the area around Queenstown its distinctive look. The air was clear as crystal, as were the streams. But after a few more days of working with Joey, he would undoubtedly begin to hate the trees and waterfalls.

Over the course of the day, Joey proved himself to be a real slave driver. First, William was too slow for his taste, then he was taking too many breaks, and finally, he called William away from chopping
down trees to help with the sawing. In addition, he cursed in the foulest way whenever something went wrong—which unfortunately happened most often when William took the saw.

“But you’ll get it yet, boy,” the old man finally said encouragingly after calming himself down. “I guess you didn’t do much with your hands back home.”

At first, William wanted to contradict him, but then he realized that the old man was not entirely wrong. True, he had worked in the fields with the tenant farmers in the last few years, after the blatant injustice with which his father administered his lands had gotten to him. Frederic Martyn gave little and demanded much—the farmers could hardly make their rent, and though it was bad enough that they had barely anything left over to live off in good years, they could expect no help if the harvest was bad. The families were still recovering from the great famine of the sixties, and practically all of them had victims to lament. In addition, nearly a whole generation was absent, as hardly a single farmer’s child of William’s age had survived the years of the potato blight. So the work in the fields now lay primarily in the hands of the very young and very old; nearly everyone was overexerted, and there was no hope of relief in sight.

None of that touched Frederic Martyn—and William’s mother, too, although Irish herself, made no move to advocate for the people. So William had begun helping the tenants with the work in the fields. Later he had joined the Irish Land League, which was striving to help the farmers achieve fair rents.

At first, Frederic Martyn had found his younger son’s attitude more entertaining than disconcerting. William would never have much say about the lands anyway, and his older son, Frederic Jr., displayed no humanitarian leanings. However, after the Land League cited its first successes, his joking and teasing about William’s involvement with the league grew increasingly cruel, driving the young man ever deeper toward the opposition.

When William ended up supporting—if not inciting—a revolt among the tenants, the old man couldn’t forgive him. William was sent to Dublin. He was to study a little, law if nothing else, so that he
could one day stand up for his beloved tenants in word and deed. In that respect, the elder Martyn had been generous. The main thing was to avoid keeping the boy around to instigate his farmers any further.

At first, William had launched himself into his work with enthusiasm, but it was not long before struggling through the finer points of English law began to bore him, especially when an Irish constitution was to be proposed soon anyway. He attentively followed the debates over the Home Rule Bill, which promised to give the Irish considerably more say in the issues that affected their island. But then when the upper house rejected it again…

William did not want to mull all that over again. The affair had been too mortifying and the consequences fatal. He could have come to a much worse end than living in peaceful Queenstown’s lovely environs.

“What did you do for a living anyway, over in Ireland?” Joey now asked. They had finally finished their work for the day and were tiredly paddling homeward. The bathhouse and a catered evening meal at Mrs. O’Keefe’s hotel awaited William—while Joey had a whiskey-heavy evening at the fire of Skipper’s gold-mining camp ahead of him.

William shrugged. “Worked on a sheep farm.”

That was mostly true. The Martyns’ extensive land holdings included first-class meadowland. Frederic Martyn had hardly suffered any loss from the potato blight for that reason. It had affected only his tenants and farmhands, who grew their own food on small patches of land.

“Wouldn’t you rather be in the Canterbury Plains then?” Joey asked jovially. “There’s millions o’ sheep there.”

William had heard that too. But his role in the farmwork had consisted more of managerial duties than actual labor. Though he knew theoretically how to shear a sheep, he had yet to actually do it—and certainly couldn’t have done it in record time like the men who worked for the Canterbury Plains shearing companies. The best were supposed to be able to divest eight hundred sheep of their wool in a single day. That was not much less than the Martyns’ entire herd.
On the other hand, some farmers in the east might have need of an able manager or foreman—a job William thought himself to be well suited for. But a man could hardly get rich that way—and William did not intend to make permanent reductions in his quality of life.

“Maybe I’ll buy myself a farm when we’ve found enough gold here,” William mused. “In one or two years.”

Joey laughed. “At least you’ve got fighting spirit! All right, you can get out here.” He steered the boat toward the shore. The river wound to the east past Queenstown before flowing into the lake south of the city below the gold-miners’ camp. “I’ll pick you up here again tomorrow at six in the morning, bright and early.”

Joey waved to his new partner happily as William made his way wearily back to town. After resting in the boat, all of his bones hurt. He did not dare think about another day of chopping wood.

Nevertheless, something pleasant crossed his path on Main Street. Elaine O’Keefe stepped out of the Chinese laundry with a basket of clothes. She was headed toward Mrs. O’Keefe’s hotel.

William smiled at her. “Miss O’Keefe! A prettier sight than a nugget of gold. Can I take that for you?”

Despite his sore muscles, ever the gentleman, he reached for the basket. Elaine did not play coy. She handed her load over to him happily and strolled along beside him with lightened step—to the limited degree that one could move both lightly and in a ladylike manner at the same time. It would hardly have been possible with the heavy basket on her arm. How had the heretical Miss O’Rourke once put it? “To be a lady, you need all your resources.”

“Have you already found many nuggets today, then?” Elaine inquired. William considered whether she was simply naïve or if she meant that ironically. He decided to take it as flirting. Elaine had spent her whole life in Queenstown. She had to know that you did not become rich that quickly by mining.

“The gold in your hair is the first today,” he admitted, combining the admission with a bit of flattery. “But, alas, that already has an owner. You are rich, Miss O’Keefe!”

“And you should introduce yourself to the Maori. They’d declare you
tohunga
straightaway. A master of
whaikorero
.” Elaine giggled.

“Of
what
?” William asked. He had hardly met any Maori, the natives of New Zealand, up to that point. There were tribes at Wakatipu, as there were throughout the Otago region, but the fast-growing gold-mining town of Queenstown was too hectic for the Maori. Though a few Maori men had joined the gold miners’ ranks, others only rarely ventured into the city. Most of them had not chosen to leave their villages and families. They were lost or had gone astray—like the majority of the white men seeking their fortune there. As a result, their behavior hardly differed from that of the whites, and none of them used such strange words.

“
Whaikorero
. It’s the art of beautiful speech. And
tohunga
means ‘master’ or ‘expert.’ My father is one, according to the Maori. They love his court opinions.” Elaine opened the hotel door for William. He declined, however, to go in before her and skillfully held the door open for Elaine with his foot. The girl beamed.

William remembered that her father was the justice of the peace and that her brother Stephen was studying law. Maybe he should mention his own efforts in that field sometime.

“I never got that far with my legal studies,” he commented, as though in passing. “And do you speak Maori, Miss O’Keefe?”