Song of the Spirits (79 page)

Kura noted with amusement that Caleb actually enjoyed it when Florence flirtatiously asked for his advice about wallpaper colors and seat covers. Caleb was an aesthete. He could find something to enjoy in every artistic endeavor, though his first love was music.

For her part, Florence studied the sheet music with a serious expression, though Kura doubted the girl could read the notes. Being of a rather practical nature, however, she soon made a habit of accompanying Caleb to his practice sessions.

Naturally, that ignited the town gossip, which vexed Caleb to no end. Kura observed it all calmly. Her new partner needed to get used to playing in front of an audience one way or another. He might as well start with the most difficult test. And that was Florence Weber, without question. She criticized them without compunction. Even if
her critiques were meant more unkindly than constructively, she was right more often than not and Kura adopted many of her suggestions.

“Shouldn’t you accompany this song with a few… how should I put it… descriptive gestures?” she inquired about the love song given to them by Kura’s friends at the Pancake Rocks.

It had become both Kura and Caleb’s favorite piece. Caleb’s arrangements sounded artful and playful, in stark contrast to the straightforward lyrics. Caleb had eventually learned what the words meant but had never translated them for Florence. Yet Kura’s expressive voice and Caleb’s ebullient and occasionally provocative accompaniment gave Florence a good sense of what they were about. Caleb blushed deeply when Florence asked questions about the songs with apparent innocence, but Kura merely smiled. When she sang the song again, Kura started swinging and thrusting her hips so enticingly that Paddy Holloway’s eyes nearly fell out of his head. And Florence Weber’s even more so.

“I’ll hold myself back a little in front of the pastor, of course,” Kura said to Caleb afterward when Florence had disappeared—for once—with a beet-red face.

They had already arranged to perform their first concert in Greymouth at the church picnic. The proceeds would benefit the families of the victims of the Lambert Mine accident. In addition, thanks to Mrs. Biller’s assistance, they had a performance planned in one of the hotels on the quay. Though Kura was looking forward to the concerts, Caleb was anxious.

“Now, don’t be like that. You’re an artist,” Kura teased him. “Think of the beautiful body of our Maori friend and how nice it would be if he were here now and could dance to your song. Just don’t start thrusting your hips when you do or you’ll knock the piano over.”

William Martyn ignored the bigger towns on the West Coast for the time being. He assumed that Carl Latimer would already have sold a sewing machine to any remotely interested woman who could pay for
one in those urban areas. That left only the miners’ wives, and he was not likely to do much business with them. Instead, William concentrated on the single-family settlements; he also enjoyed unexpected success in the Maori villages. Gwyneira had once told him that the Maori tended to adopt the customs of the
pakeha
very quickly. Most Maori wore Western clothing, so why shouldn’t the women learn to use sewing machines too? Naturally, money was an issue. However, the tribes had come into some money by selling land, and that money was usually administered by the chief.

William quickly developed a way of explaining to the tribal leaders that they would rise in the Maori ladies’ graces and could, moreover, acquire the
pakeha
’s respect by no longer shutting out the blessings of the modern world. When he demonstrated his Singer sewing machines, the entire tribe usually stood around him enthralled, watching with wide eyes as William sewed the child’s dress together and then staring at him as though he had conjured it out of thin air. The women quickly mastered the machine, and it wasn’t long before owning a Singer became a status symbol. It was rare for William to leave a tribe without a sales contract. In addition, the Maori being as hospitable as they were, he had no room-and-board expenses.

William occasionally cursed his poor knowledge of the language, however, as he would have liked to ask about Kura and pick up her trail, which had gone cold after Gwyneira’s search among the Maori of Blenheim. As it was, he had to make do with English. Most of the Maori spoke some broken form of the language of the
pakeha
, and they understood almost everything. William often got the impression that the people were not telling him everything, becoming distrustful that a stranger was asking about a member of their tribe.

This was especially noticeable with a tribe located between Greymouth and Westport. People there withdrew almost immediately when William asked in his poor Maori about a girl who had run away from her
pakeha
husband and was now making music. Whereas other tribes had simply laughed loudly as soon as he mentioned Kura’s escape from the marriage, these people became nervous and quiet. The chieftain’s wife finally cleared up the situation.

“He does not want anything from the flame-haired girl. He’s asking about the
tohunga
,” she explained to her tribe. “You’re looking for Kura? Kura-maro-tini? Has she leave the husband who no like…”

The tribe let out a roar of laughter at her explanatory gesture. William, alone, looked confused, as well as a little insulted.

“Is that what she said?” he inquired. “But we—”

“She was here. With tall blond man. Very smart, makes music too. Also
tohunga
. But shy.”

The others chuckled again but evidently did not want to reveal anything more about Kura’s visit. William had his own ideas about that. So Kura was with another man, again! Though not with Roderick Barrister. She had replaced him, just as quickly as she had left him, William, for the opera stage. And now for a shy blond musician.

William’s desire to find his wife again and give her a piece of his mind—before wrapping his arms about her and convincing her of his own incontestable advantages—grew with each passing day.

Elaine was worried about Timothy, who looked more haggard and exhausted each time she visited. The laugh lines around his mouth had turned into deep gouges, the kind that testified to the constant overexertion and weariness of many miners. Of course, he was still always happy to see Elaine, but he had greater difficulty joking and laughing with her. That might also have had to do with a certain estrangement—the old familiarity between the two diminished with every day they did not see each other. And those days had become more frequent, though it was not for lack of effort on Elaine’s part. The distance was not the problem; the Lamberts’ house lay only two miles from the center of town, and Banshee or Fellow could trot that distance in twenty minutes. But then Elaine had to get past Nellie Lambert, and that was proving to be a much more difficult hurdle.

Sometimes Nellie would not open up at all when Elaine knocked with the heavy copper door knocker. Roly and Timothy did not hear it, as the sound only reached to the parlor, or at best the salon. A maid
or Nellie herself should always have been within earshot, but Elaine believed that they were simply pretending not to hear. If Elaine did manage to cross the threshold, Nellie found a thousand excuses to keep her son’s “friend”—the word “fiancée” never crossed her lips, even though Timothy made no secret of his intentions—from him. Timothy was sleeping, Timothy did not feel well, Timothy was out being pushed by Roly and she had no idea when they would come back. Once she nearly scared Elaine to death when she declared that Timothy could not receive her because he was lying in bed with a heavy cough. Elaine had rushed back to town and emptied her heart out to Berta Leroy in a panic.

Berta, however, had allayed Elaine’s fears.

“Nonsense, Lainie, your Tim’s not going to catch a lung infection any faster than you or I. True, he was in more danger as long as he was lying in bed, but from what I understand, he’s moving around today more than the rest of us combined. We’ll hear about it firsthand in a moment, since Christopher is at the Lamberts’ right now. Nellie is driving him crazy too. Supposedly, Timothy felt some pain while he was coughing, so of course Christopher had to rush off to see about it. I hope he doesn’t catch his own death in this rain.”

It was storming heavily outside, and after her fast ride, Elaine, too, was completely soaked. Berta rubbed her hair dry and pointed her to a seat by the fire while she made tea. However, Elaine was still shivering when Dr. Leroy finally came home in a furious state.

“I’m charging that woman double from now on, Berta, you’d better believe it!” he blustered, pouring a touch of brandy into his tea. “Four miles through this storm for a mild cold.”

“But…” Elaine wanted to object, but Dr. Leroy shook his head.

“If it hurts when the boy coughs, it’s because his muscles are overworked by his excessive training regime. When I arrived, he was lifting weights.”

“What for?” Elaine asked. “I thought he wanted to learn how to walk again.”

“Do you know what those leg splints weigh, which he has to lift with every step?” Dr. Leroy poured himself another cup of tea and
poured a spot of brandy in Elaine’s cup as well. “In all seriousness, girl, I’ve never seen a man work as hard and with as much discipline as Timothy Lambert. I no longer have any doubt that he will meet you at the altar on his own legs. What I saw today—despite all the coughing and sniffing—you’ve got to respect that. Nevertheless, I gave him two days of bed rest to recover from the cold and the worst of his muscle cramps. Whether he sticks to it is a different matter. Nonetheless, I told him you would come by tomorrow to check on him. And I said it in the presence of that dragon he calls a mother—so she can hardly turn you away.”

Nellie Lambert would have preferred that Elaine come to the Lambert household only on special occasions and at her personal invitation. Roughly every two weeks, she received the girl for tea. These were miserably stuffy events that Elaine loathed—in part because the Lamberts bombarded her with questions. About her supposed childhood in Auckland, about her relatives, about her ancestry in England. Elaine entrapped herself in an increasingly complex web of lies, whose details she kept forgetting. Then she would have to improvise, squirming not only under Nellie Lambert’s merciless gaze but likewise at Timothy’s amused winking.

Timothy clearly saw through her fibs, and Elaine feared that he viewed them as a sign of a lack of trust in him. She was always expecting him to bring them up, which made her anxious and tense when she was alone with him.

For his part, Timothy hated to sit across from Elaine in a wheelchair or to have her push him around. His barbell exercises were bearing fruit, and he could now move his monstrosity of a wheelchair a few yards on his own, but turning, and even the simplest maneuvering around furniture, was still exceptionally difficult. Timothy hated more than anything for people to view him as a “cripple.” Whenever Elaine visited him in his own rooms, Roly usually helped him into an armchair. However, the chairs around the dinner table in the dining
room were uncomfortable, and the sofas and armchairs in the salon too low. So Timothy sat there in his wheelchair, so discouraged and tense that he could not manage a normal conversation.